Is It Time For Gay Pride To Go Away? – Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps is a broadcaster, podcast host, and a journalist.

What are the things you can’t criticise? What about Gay Pride in Australia? What if you’re a gay man? What about criticising the cringe of the anti-woke Right? Everyone is getting the heat today, including Josh’s ex-employer the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Expect to learn what the difference is between getting cancelled by the left and right, why we feel the need to forensically pick through public figures’ lives, why so many people believe the world is ruined, the problem with the anti-anti woke, what JK Rowling has been up to, what happened to the indigenous Australian people apology trend and much more…

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00:00 We Need to Move on From the Culture War
04:58 Why the Trans Debate is So Captivating
11:47 Josh’s Journey Through Mainstream Media
19:30 The Landscape of Social Justice in Australia
25:23 What Do Gay People Think About Pride?
30:59 Why Josh Had to Leave Broadcasting
34:37 Is the Media Trying to Make Everyone Trans?
37:58 The Culture Wars in Australia
41:17 Why the UK & Australia Love Order
46:58 Well-Meaning Disagreements on the Internet
56:43 Why the Equality Movement is Patronising
1:00:45 The Problem With the Anti-Woke Right
1:07:47 Getting Live Shows Cancelled
1:13:10 Why Taboo Opinions Are Labelled as Hate
1:17:43 The Difficulty of Unreliable Allies
1:28:19 Should People Pick Their Battles?
1:35:08 Is There Hope for the Next 5 Years?
1:40:12 The Untold Danger of Your Phone
1:47:41 Are We Paying the Costs for Future Generations?
1:55:21 Where to Find Josh

Josh Szeps is a journalist and the host of “Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps”. Find it on Substack and YouTube
https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com
http://youtube.com/@JoshSzeps_

Apple https://apple.co/327Ydka
Spotify https://spoti.fi/3T9KGAh

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this is why you need to subscribe to my uh to my newsletter how dare you suggest that I’m not subscribed to your newsletter uh are you no knew it all right I’m going to read it out to you Folly great this is the culture wars shiny object cycle number one some woke news story hits the Press cats suffer from racial discrimination or screwing in light bulbs needs to be recognized as a valid sexual Kink or something number two the right-wing antibody response activates look at how insane these people are Matt Walsh quote tweets the article and calls it obnoxious this is the problem with our convenient decadent Tik Tok Society number three this reaction causes the story to gain infinitely more traction than it ever would have done by signal boosting the original Fringe scenario into a much bigger event number four the leftwing counter response activates right- Wingers lose their minds over one woman with a particularly dark cat the daily wire has a meltdown over an insignificant troll article in times when the story is less insane this includes a defense of the original Article 2 Cats actually can experience trauma minimizing this is the real problem number five the right-wing re reaction kicks into gear apparently I’m insane for pushing back against cat trauma see this is the problem if we don’t stand our ground these bluehead idiots will take over the country number six finally the touch grass meta reactionary steam in the real issue is people talking about this issue look at how silly this whole thing is it’s time to check out of the culture War we should reconnect with what really matters you should move to a ranch next to Ryan holiday and Hammer fence posts into the ground for the rest of time I sometimes participate in in every single stage that find ourselves different however I’m particular however my reptile brain happens to be activated on that morning but that’s why I don’t look at Twitter anymore I don’t do it I just did a speaking of being banged by 45 guys where’s this going ladies and gents where’s this gone Josh is married to a dude is he also getting stuff on the side let’s find out coming up uh on Modern wisdom no I just interviewed on my podcast uncomfortable conversations Angela White who I don’t know if you’re familiar with her she’s extremely successful ful adult performer she’s an Aussie but she’s huge in the states as well has like one of the biggest on fans in the world and she was actually super interesting and super smart in like she would dismantle every single person in that cycle who you were just talking about in terms of the kind of hypocrisy of people who criticize that form of sexual Liberation the kind of condescension towards like women’s interests basically and like she’s like she’s got massive massive uh legs huge Chris and then that she’s just basically of the opinion that you know what you’re all a bunch of Hypocrites I mean everybody sort of likes this and I’m curious I’m I’m still fascinated by why people would like not just having sex but having sex like while the craft Services guy is right next to you with a bunch of sandwiches for the crew and what like why there’s a while there’s a lighting guy and a grip and a sound guy standing right next to you but she was saying that really the tricky thing in that industry is the guys because it’s hard I mean there repete with PS sometimes it isn’t which is the issue sometimes it isn’t exactly and sometimes it might be hard but you might not get the money shot yeah so there’s like a real craft to it the lady just sort of has to look pretty and go woo but the guy has to genuinely perform but I think it sex stuff aside that cycle which I’ve been thinking about for quite a while is uh mostly evident in the sort of right versus left talking points and I know that you’re about to go on tour with Douglas Murray yes and it was Douglas at the O2 Arena in London that actually sort of really gave me this so just to round that out uh the Cycle’s Bal it’s excruciatingly repetitive so why does it sustain our attention if basically every discussion follows the same cycle because each story is sprinkled with just enough novelty to give it the illusion that this is a new event you know it it legitimates the push back we haven’t seen this trans flag which now includes people who’ve got a gluten intolerance before right so it’s like the 20th season of lost where they’re back on the island for the seventh time but this time it’s winter right people sometimes make the mistake of thinking that human beings like novelty but we only like novelty up to a certain point we like novelty that still reinforces things that we’re used to and things that we’re familiar with it’s like the you know the idea of there being a hero story right that every movie tells the same story look at the number of Marvel movies and the number of DC movies movies they’re telling the same story in slightly different ways and that’s an interesting point that you make I hadn’t really thought about that but the cycle of social media is essentially functioning the same way here’s the Arc of a story here’s the evolution of how this thing is going to take place each beat is different and yet exactly the same so we’re in the same cycle there’s enough novelty to keep it interesting but not so much novelty that you don’t go o I know this is exciting I know how to respond to this out yeah yeah I know the role that I have to play in this thing well this is what Douglas was talking about that you know some of the smartest minds of our time and a lot of the Dumber ones too have had their attention captured arguing about whether men are men and women are women or not over the last however many years yeah and uh that like explaining why is this cycle so predictable and so repetitive and also why does it continue if it is predictable and repetitive and bile why does it continue to capture our attention and the argument basically being is there not something more that we can argue about and yet I find myself and I know that you do too you know you said I’ve been each one of those six people you know I’ve been the signal booster I’ve been the like metatouch grass reactionary I’ve been the original outraged person I’ve been you know I’ve been all of those different people um and yeah it’s just I mean now I’m all just I mean and I think you might be as well just pretty much exclusively on the touch grass like let’s talk about big um phenomenon and like I don’t want to necessarily dismiss all of the things that some of the culture Warriors are talking about like I wouldn’t necessarily put discussions about trans people into the same cycle as that like there may be instances of Cycles like that but on that issue just to just jump straight into the most you know potentially toxic uh conversation that we could have I think everyone would concede who’s not a bigot I believe that there are some people some tiny minority of people who are born who from a very very early age have a persistent sense that they’re in the wrong sex and the only way to deal with that is for those people to transition and for us to Accord them all of the respect that they deserve and for them not to be discriminated against um what you have now is a scenario in which many of my friends who are a generation or half a generation older than me who have children who are 14 or 15 in the kind of progressive enclaves that people like me live in in places like Sydney and London and New York will you know their two-thirds of their classmates will be gender queer in some way or non-binary or they’ll be playing around with gender and anyone who asks questions about whether or not there’s a phenomenon of social contagion or whether there’s a phenomenon of some kind of fashion here or whether in a more kind of MB way maybe it’s possible that young a gay guys under certain circumstances get more cach a from their peers and are higher in the social hierarchy if they come out as trans girls than they would being fat similarly is it possible that there are some girls who feel awkward who are on the outside of the group who may be suffering from anxiety or depression who may be on the autism spectrum somewhere and who are lesbians who are like you know what I’m actually cooler if I’m a trans guy yeah and when you try to ask questions even if you’re a professional psychiatrist I mean I I had a conversation I just got fired from or left or is a bit ambiguous what a a Daily Talk Radio Show in Australia that I had on the public broadcaster which was a big show but nobody was touching this topic on the entire public broadcast you were fully in the main cycle and I I only know you from substack and your podcast which I really like and your writing and Twitter so for me you were just another one of us sort of alternative media degenerates so tell me you would tell me who you were and then what happens now yes so let me just close the loop on the trans thing um anytime you raise questions about you know this phenomenon of there being quite a lot of people more people than you might expect statistically to be playing with their gender in their teens you get accused of denying the first point that I made which is that there are definitely transgender people who have known yes exactly so you a trans fob no can’t we kind of have the Nuance to be able to separate one case from the other so I I don’t necessarily regard all conversations about things like trans as being obviously subject to the the kind of toxic cycle of of course it’s going on on social media but there has to be a space in which we can also have that conversation in a as free a way as possible that is not subjected to that kind of reflexive two and fro right just to interject that Andrew Doyle Andre don’t know him personally but I love guy yeah I really enjoy his writing a good friend he um is this really great example and it’s quite old now you know there’s a there’s an interview being done with a father of let’s say a a 8-year-old trans girl used to be a boy and um they’re talking about you know how does it feel now that little Jimmy is little Jane or whatever he says honestly I’m just so happy to not see my son mincing around the garden anymore right so much of what I think is the trans movement is rehabilitated home I mean just let that land for a second yeah that is like I have chills I’m I mean I’m a gay guy right and and I have perhaps The Good Fortune of not having a particular way of talking in a particular way of dressing and a particular way of voting and a particular way of thinking and a particular way of dancing that immediately codes as gay and I have friends who do and who are pretty sure that if instead of growing up in the 80s and 90s they were growing up in the 2020s they would be transitioning um I don’t want those concerns to overwhelm the conversation and to olude our compassion for people who are transgender and I think way more gay people than there are trans people well that’s that’s right yes but I mean I don’t think the majority of gay people are necessarily susceptible to that phenomenon but some minority are I I hate it when this conversation gets used by right-wing blo hards to justify laws that are genuinely discriminatory against transgender people or the kind of rhetoric that is demeaning and dehumanizing to transgender people I don’t want any any part of that but I feel like it’s harder to attack that um nonsense on the right if you’re not also faired income as we say in Australia which means the straight shooter or free of or just kind of you know straight down the line honest about the complexity of the actual issue we’re not going to get anywhere by just holding up flags and saying trans women are women right I mean that you know it doesn’t it doesn’t solve anything it doesn’t address the legitimate concerns of people who are seeing two-thirds of a of a school class being gender queer so yeah so my story as a tell me Ste you used to be mainstream media I thought you were alternative media degenerate yes you have this ambiguous departure from your old life into this one what happened I have a foot in both camps and always so yeah exactly that’s right in many many different respects um and look I started out uh as a journalist basically as a journalist who became a political saturnist on radio and doing like I was good at doing voices and I was good at writing comedy and so I was interested in and I did a lot of improv I moved to New York straight out of college in Australia and went to UCB Theater which is a big improv school and trained at improv and got a TV show on Discovery Science Channel uh which was uh a kind of a smart assy look at uh at Science and Tech news so I’m a bit of a science nerd and a politics wonk uh and uh you know a cheeky little pixie and and that fell apart and Huffington Post was launching a big uh online streaming Network at the time called HuffPost Live and I became a host of that in New York that was great that was like the tech boom years in the in the 2010s uh and uh in the mid-2010s and it was awesome got to interview tons of people live streaming video like three or four segments of 30-minute conversations just like this every day and that was the hybrid between mainstream and alternative right it’s I mean huff poost at the time was the most read online only news site in the world it was massive it had tons of money behind it so in that sense it was legit but in another sense you could say whatever the you wanted and they sort of encouraged it cuz the clickbait uh you know algorithm sort of demanded it and uh then I got married to a guy we had kids moved back to Australia about 5 years ago and I went into full mainstream I was like I’m a grownup now you know none of this none of this fting around on the internet uh I got a great offer from the public broadcaster in Australia which is sort of like the BBC in Australia and um I I hosted the the weekend morning show on television for a year and uh got a radio show 3 hours a day radio politics T of exposure huge exposure huge exposure you’re like the P Morgan of of Australia well no the gay P Morgan are you just outing Pi Morgan this game I mean the thing is that that gig is you can’t be Piers Morgan on that gig you have to be it’s more like NPR or the BBC right I mean you have to be perfectly maybe not fluffy but straight down the line you cannot take a a you cannot foot into intellectual territory yeah where you’re wrestling with things in a way that might seem like you’re having an opinion or might alienate a certain number of people it’s like just to interject there as someone who has opinions who your podcast is literally called uncomfortable uncomfortable conversations yeah how does it feel to mouthpiece is too derogatory but to kind of Be The Vessel through which something is pushed and you’re kind of they’re more performing than you are engaging did you ever feel this no I didn’t do I felt pressure and I didn’t do it and that’s why I don’t have a job anymore right okay I’ve jumped ahead in the story please continue so it became pretty clear like when you a host on a mainstream uh Network that network has the right to to say yes or no to all external work requests as well it was the ABC the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that’s the BBC of Australia which is an absolute National Treasure and I have to say like I mean from the heart this is a much like the BBC and much like I think many people feel towards well there isn’t really an American equivalent um it’s fundamental to Australian democracy like you I’m not on the ABC as a corporation here at all there are just different mandates for different positions and different things that you can get away with in different environments right and like one of the first situations was the transgender issue there was a moment where the biggest trans clinic in the UK the Tavo uh closed down there was a huge National inquiry massive news in the UK uh there was uh basically a suggestion they weren’t dealing with um you know transgender juvenile issues as well as they might that wants to learn more about that time to think fantastic book had the author on really just phen Al dispassionate breakdown of everything that happened with the gids and the Tavis stock clinic and all of that very very good fabulous um so there was so this raised questions in Australia about whether or not so what they they call it gender affirming care which basically means that whoever comes to you saying that they have a they have gender dysphoria and they’re in the wrong body you cannot question that to to do so is almost like you know it’s treated like gay conversion therapy of old where you used to you know try to persuade people you know pray the gay away or something um but it’s it’s not exactly that is it because this transgenderism is a much more malleable and seemingly flexible thing than sexuality seems to be and um what happened was that no one at the broadcaster was covering the fact that this bombshell had just taken place in the UK one might have thought that perhaps it could teach us something about the way that we’re doing transgender medicine in Australia as well the Psychiatric Association of Australia had long been saying that gender affirming care ties their hands and that if a 13-year-old girl comes to you and says that she’s a boy the current practice was you can’t ask questions about whether or not there’s anything else going on psychologically for her you’re not supposed to ask about anxiety you’re not supposed to ask about depression you’re not supposed to ask about her friendship group you’re not supposed to ask about autism you’re supposed to follow the protocol of affirming that her claim is unquestionably true um now I don’t want to buy into a scare campaign that that suddenly means that she’s going to go into an operation and she’s going to have surgery and you know everything’s going to run off the rails that’s not how it happens there is a certain level of caution but nonetheless there’s an incentive to enter a pipeline that frequently usually ends with transition that’s correct that’s what came out of time to think yes puberty block time to think is what it’s supposed to be that you have to give them time to think you have time to think it’s we’re just putting a pause on puberty yes no it a very reliable set of train tracks the number of children that are put on puberty blockers that end up transitioning is unbelievably High it is not something that’s a p and it’s also not reversible it’s like the the changes that are supposed to occur it’s not like you just shift the entire uh puberty window a little bit later all you’re completely correct completely correct with what you said so I was a bit curious about why no one was covering this and of course we all knew why no one was covering this is It’s because it’s a it’s incredibly toxic and people who care very passionately about it on the protr side who many of whom are not trans by the way and this is something that I want to get to in this conversation there is an Orthodoxy of social justice at the moment which is a largely white largely University educated largely upper middle class Pursuit where there’s a Dogma that is being fored even on communities who don’t necessarily agree with it uh Latin X being fored on you know Latino communities or you know particular people are at least a lot of the Americans listening um and a lot of the Brits will think that this is largely a American phenomenon what is the landscape of social justice like in Australia this show is bigger but just by the way this show is bigger per capita in Australia than anywhere else there’s more Australians get Aussies we did it go go for it that’s great so there’s a lot of Australian people listening yeah excellent um so if you’re listening Australian you’re outside of Sydney I was on ABC radio um and the the so there’s this there was this blow up right and to be clear the ABC did nothing wrong at all here in fact they let me do I was the only person who did a story interviewing the head of the Psychiatric association who the moment I got him on the on the radio said this is such a relief I felt like I’m the girl at the ball or at the formal the school dance who has never been who’s never being asked to to dance by any of the media and you’re the first person with except for the conservative media and you’re the first person on the public broadcaster who’s invited me to dance so thank you we had a conversation for half an hour about um his take on the Tav stock closure and his sense that there should be a little more conservatism in the way that we deal with pediatric transgender care and needless to say the complaints came in mostly not from trans people mostly from people who are part of this kind of Click of um social justice Warriors white Knights white Knights and they’re very good at they don’t send rants they’re not idiots they’ll go through the transcript and they’ll pick out every single thing that you said off the cuff and they’ll fact check that and they’ll find some reason to claim that it’s untrue and they’ll basically just flood the Zone with so many complaints that they know even if they know that the complaint’s not going to be upheld they know that it’s going to waste a half day of my time responding to it so the strategy is just impose a massive tax of attention and a tax of time on anyone who dares to qu our Orthodoxy and that way you’ll scare off enough journalists who will go you know what it’s not worth the blood headache why am I going to bother do I really want to spend the rest of the week talking to my manager and talking to the director and having the complaints department come back and forensically analyze every single thing I said bullying threat in a way exactly it’s kind of a heckers veto or a terrorist veto or something um so I was cleared and they said there was that I didn’t do anything wrong there but it was one of those moments where I thought gee there’s a cost to being in the mainstream media and again all credit to the ABC they let me do that story there was no push back whatsoever from management about doing that story um they thought it was totally fine and it was it was cleared this is just about the phenomenon of what happens when you speak up in an institution that cares about process right on this show we don’t have to give a about process on my on uncomfortable conversations we don’t have to give a about process sometimes we get things wrong we’ll try to correct it and then you know the audience can judge whether or not we’re uh we’re telling the truth um and another thing happened last year where when was that first incident that was so when was tavar it was probably about maybe 14 months ago I’d be guessing probably yeah probably year before last then last year uh I wanted to write a piece for the well I didn’t the main broad sheet newspaper in Sydney hit me up and invited me to write a piece about World Pride which is a giant gay pride which is is like for the whole world apparently every 2 years there’s a pride in a city I mean I didn’t even know about it until Sydney hosted it right but there’s a there’s a pride and they’re like oh okay this isn’t just gay City Sydney’s gay Sydney has the biggest Gay and Lesbian Festival in the world anyway which is the marra but they had World Pride to coincide with this and uh the editor of the of one of the big broadsheet newspapers knew that I was a little bit heterodox on gay pride like I just sort of feel like haven’t we sort of won like will there ever come a point at which we don’t have to make such a big deal out of it like will there ever come a point at which it’s actually more constructive to turn the volume down instead of up on our difference on our identity one of uh Douglas’s best insights on this uh you know when you’ve reached full equality when you have to put up with the same level of that everybody else does exactly it’s not special treatment it’s unsp special treatment that is the genuine Mark of true equality right exactly and I look I live the most boring life imaginable in the sense I have a spouse I have a mortgage I have a couple of six-year-old twins who who go to school you know I make sandwiches in the morning I like that is that was what the gay Pioneers were fighting for that was what Stonewall was all about right total and complete inclusion into the community no legal discrimination whatsoever and so I just feel like if I when I was in my teens and 20s I found it difficult to understand who I was not because of homophobia but because the images of gayus around me were so conformist that I was like well I’m obviously not one of them the don’t dance well enough I don’t I don’t enough dancer and I I have I don’t you know so you know so if uh if you’re a 15-year-old lad and and you you don’t code as gay but you fall in love or you have a crush on another guy but you had a girlfriend before and now you’re kind of want to experiment with that does it help you or does it impede you to have this annual celebration which is all about guys in assess chaps sitting as stride giant inflatable penises going through a going along a parade route what does what does I know that you you don’t speak for the entirety of the gay community but a as a pie H how does the gay community overall think about Pride now like do most of your gay friends kind of go a bit like no I think most of them are still on board but but is that because it’s an opportunity to just have like a really good party yes right yes probably I think a lot of people think I’m just a sour pus like just let us have fun go and have fun that’s fine that’s great but don’t make it about like the continuation and the perpetuation of a civil right struggle that has as its rais on Detra the picking of old scabs and the picking of Old Wounds and the perpetuation of a Divi of a sense of divisiveness of Us and Them of join a team such that if you want to have a same-sex diance that’s going to open up a Pandora’s box of so many identity questions that you cease to even be you right let’s just just let your freak flag fly however you want to is my attitude however you want to live your life live your life that’s fine it you don’t have to tick a box check so World Pride day comes along Y and uh I write a piece for the newspaper articulating these ideas just saying like will ever will there ever come a time 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 it 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 uh opinions about controversial cultural events okay that’s legit 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 on World Pride you can hear it on the station so 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 the fish who are the the 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 a while one of 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 censor my political opinions not at all what they wanted to do was prevent the dissemination of hate prevent unnecessary controversy why would 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 plus there’s the uh as you primed it earlier on the go Josh he’s gonna write this thing and then the complaints are going to come in it’s going to be an administrative burden yes exactly well that’s true yeah yeah so that was those were a couple of things where it just became apparent that it wasn’t necessarily going to be as easy for me to maintain my integrity and autonomy and authenticity uh 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 yes exactly I’m here with the with the master give me some tips uh and now we’re doing live so there are sort of three legs to the stool there the podcast and the substack where you can subscribe and get additional bonus content and then there’s um the YouTube channel and then there’s uh live touring so Douglas is our first live tour luckily I had started doing the before I signed my contract and so they weren’t able to meddle in that so they so I could do whatever I wanted to on the podfather this is part of exact yes so you can’t touch very because you’ve been I mean you’re in episode like 150 or something now yeah 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 in line 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 what was what was the actual flash point what was the thing that they got you for it like everything it was banal it was uh they didn’t get me for anything it was just like uh contract was up uh 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 uh you know there it might not be another there might not be availability of a a chair for you so you might want to you know think about the 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 well that’s another interesting thing uh which is that my final so I I resigned on air and then there were still going to be five or six weeks left of broadcasting and um you’re like that guy at the sex party that just want leave just just hanging around like a bad smell and then um in the final uh in the final moments when I was doing some publicity for uh the podast um October 7th had happened there was a lot of heat about Israel and Gaza and uh I went on a r 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 um a a technical the external work request form uh 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 and like if you 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 um but I wasn’t at my computer Ena to to log into the internal intrnet where you have to submit the form to go to the blah blah blah um so I did this show on it was on a conservative Network it was on Sky News in Australia which is a um you know not friendly necessarily the public broadcaster uh but I was I I explicitly I was absolutely inundated with requests to talk about my departure and to talk about the public broadcas and to throw them under the bus after this this all happened and when I made the 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 you know I think that you know it’s being run well this is a just a fundamental sort of difference of opinion and priorities so I didn’t I didn’t take anything in fact you know I declined a number of uh media requests that would have been really really useful uh 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 I 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 oh what a bitter ending so every opportunity there was for I guess conciliation and for us both to be the bigger parties was sort of squandered and the reality is I get it you know people are going to be cautious people are going to be risk averse people are going to cover their asses people don’t want trouble not everybody has to be a troublemaker I am and it’s so much better now I feel like there’s a a weight lifted off my shoulders I mean my substack subscribers doubled instantly when I left and then doubled again the week the month after and so financially I you know it was I was I was happy and now I get to just have roll around and have conversations with people like you the mud in the mud with the rest of us so I I learned this thing from Andrew Schultz not someone that you might immediately think as like an insight into uh like philosophical wisdom of mainstream media but he’s a smart guy and he said um 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 trans the kids or to um 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 a form of group think or Echo chamber ification of like our minds right 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 willful blindness in some way it’s yeah it’s like like i’ I spoke to when I obviously received a bunch of push back before doing the trans interview and the producers who would articulate their push back would say things like I mean it’s just not that very it’s not that interesting it’s like it’s one of these kind of Fringe things that some people like to scratch at but like it’s it affects so few people it’s like a culture War thing people love to bang on about it all the time but like there are so many more you know 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 going to 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 sort of caricature what we don’t believe right stage stage two or stage four at that shiny object cycle that’s right and even if you don’t engage in the shiny object cycle there are also so many more media outlets now that you know it’s not like everyone is reading the New York Times anymore every person has you know 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 gets designed to favor content that is going to get you to either like it or comment on it or share it or or something and the kind of content that does that is not neutral nuanced content the 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 e EOS system 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 you can go on and on with diversity equity and inclusion or black lives matter or feminism or the meoo movement or something like that when you feel like the the world is actually that the you know 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 can 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 Utes and bogans and and and good day for a beer and and streakers on Cricket pitches and and barbecues um 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 like quite heavily anti-woke I guess the only reason that there would be a market for that is if there is a narrative to push up against in Australia 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 um when you see clips from things like Sky News that is that has a vanishingly small audience um it has nothing like the power of Fox new news it’s a little bit of a r Murdoch hobby horse like let’s just sort of keep this thing going um and it is not shaping like of course there are people who are very plugged into Twitter and there are people who are very plugged into podcaster stand and who like 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 and it’s very selective as well like you know it’s a bit like people have asked me you know is is London now a noo Zone because of Muslim you know Fascism and you know I go to London I’m like well no it’s not um um so you actually go to Australia it’s it’s quite reasonable the culture war is not hot there are people who cynically want to manipulate things like the transgender uh issue in order to sort of Express a little bit of latent bigotry probably but the what it is is a highly conformist Society like Aussies have sold the world this Crocodile Dundee Ste VN image that were all rugged outdoorsmen uh you know who who buck conformism and were individuals you’re quite compliant and orderly on the Inside Yes actually the you know 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 of Australia basically 95% live in these little red dots the whole middle of it just a waste totally totally and um so you know these are places where lat sipping chardonay swi middle classes ride their you know their kangaroos to to to work down the street no and and so that breeds a certain kind of I don’t know Aussies love a rule we love to follow a rule we love to there’s a an ethos called sh’ll be right which is it’s going to be okay like no dramas you know what like don’t worry too much is that similar to stiff upper lip no stiff upper lip is has more backbone to it she’ll be right is more like an appreciation of mediocrity in the interests of not not ruffling any feathers that sounds yeah it’s like just that’s the that’s the like crap version EXA stiff up stiff uper lip if you take Churchill out and you put chamber the nerfed the nerfed version of that yeah so um it’s interesting that uh looking at especially Co is a good flash point for this I think um first dose uh uptake in the UK for adults was like 93% 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 I’m going to guess it’s probably something similar oh yeah it’s massive in Australia in Australia well we were in prison until we got vaccinated so you you had more of an incentive to do it um but so maybe the the UK is even more orderly but I find myself doing that you know I come over to to the US and I spend time around here and like the inbuilt I call it like um like Q desire the the British want to stand in a queue it’s so strong it’s such a compulsion that we have but it you know it speaks to a a broader quite orderly and we know our place and we don’t want to ruffle any feathers and and whereas you know America was built genetically it is the progeny of people from Ireland that said yeah it I’ll go on that boat for 6 weeks happens yeah so you just have that Pioneer Spirit here I don’t think we do whereas I’m not sure 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 and we certainly don’t have the British sense of like we don’t line up as well as the Brits do I 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 is horizontal trust versus vertical trust in a society some 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 trust in the government and institutions yeah 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 uh you know will have they’ll you can leave your door open and expect that you you’re not going to get robbed but the moment Authority is involved you don’t you know you don’t have any trust whatsoever that the syst opp the opposite would be an East Asian country uh like maybe China where uh you wouldn’t trust another person on the street as far as you could throw them but you absolutely trust in the hierarchy of authority yes daddy government yes daddy government exactly and what was weird during Co 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 exact I mean we’re in that neck of the woods we have a lot of yeah right we’re we’re susceptible to the Chinese s so yeah we did we were extremely obedient I mean there was a whole thing about I don’t want to go I don’t have to revisit the entire history of Co the people might vaguely recognize me from a moment on Joe Rogan if they don’t already know me where kick off that one we had a you know I’ve been I love Joe I’ve done Joe’s show Joe loves you as well thank you yes I’m glad uh I did a show seven times I was when I was on Huff Post Live he saw something that I did which was a funny sort of w like social justice runin with a very woke person where I was just like basically saying like 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 and 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 what 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 cutout of some identity and she hung up on but you don’t have enough intersectional points right like right white gay men are the straight men of the LGBT World exactly that’s right and black straight men are the white men of the black world yeah yeah it’s true it’s true but I do like to if people use the pull the identity card I can always just at least I’ve got that at least I can say like I find your homophobia sickening and they’re like hang on we were just arguing about politics and I’m like I I see through I see I see you but uh 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 while I was in the states and went on seven times but the last time that I was on was during the heat of Co and it was right at that moment when there was a spot where 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 uh a a point an Article of Faith essentially among the antivaccine community which um was not true in the way 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 CNN and other media organizations Cally manipulate a football that 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 guys 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 and his own Lair and I’m like what the are you talking about I mean we’re friends my attitude towards friendship is I’m going to call you on your it was perfectly 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 let’s figure this out I’m going to sit there it just it shows how little balls everybody else has if they think that a conversation means with a a person in a in a higher position of power in that context means that you have to sit there and shut up and agree with everything they say it’s nonsense don’t forget as well that there is no such thing as a well-meaning disagreement on the internet yeah every disagreement on especially Twitter as ground zero but pretty much anywhere no one ever says hey man I I think that you’re wrong on this point let me just 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 sardonic cutting passive aggressive I’m cooler than you nothing can get to me yeah I I that tenor on on online I hate I very much just want to say the thing as it is as a club promoter for 15 years someone wasn’t coming in the nightclub it’s because you’re too drunk mate right it’s because you don’t have guest 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 a quote tweet about something that you said this you question mark it’s all it’s all about that so this yeah so this sort of dunk Pawn um 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 uh or to disagree in an Earnest manner it’s like earnest is what’s very very absent from all of this it’s all sardonic sarcastic it’s like the worst British comedy right just permanently back and forth between everything 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 posting kind of dunking on everything like not taking anything seriously which I agree is actually really dangerous it’s not just annoying it’s actually dangerous like David Pacman does that from the left a lot like his entire tenor on his show is a very sort of passive aggressive just one just one second I’ve got to think to and it’s like a people get backed into Corners with questions that are purposefully done to try and make them look sick David doesn’t land that way for me that’s interesting um he did it he did a number of time I’ve seen it that maybe because he doesn’t see you as activating his antibody response in the same way but he certainly did it with the guys from trigonometry he he did it when when he came on my show um and for instance one of the examples was I referred to the BLM riots as the BLM riots and he said riots sorry sorry riots I is is that accurate I haven’t heard anybody outside of Newsmax or oann call it that and I was like are we yeah talking about the same cars were burning are we talking mostly peaceful protest um so shop fronts were smashed yeah David David lost and then he he did a a couple of shitty moves after the trigonometry interview and uh that’s unfortunate he it was like just slimy that I kind of thought he was better than maybe he was having an off day maybe had a couple of off days maybe I mean I generally like David but he’s just I listened to his content for a while like not on my 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 kav’s going to come for you start saying that too much exactly I know uh yeah um it’s an in joke about about Chris Kavanaugh yeah um hello Chris love you um but I mean I just yeah where were we before we talked about Pacman oh yeah that’s right so in addition to the snarkiness there’s a on the left there’s a highly censorious kind of hysterical attitude about you don’t have standing to talk like shut like read the room read the room bro yeah like you know you don’t 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 right I mean the other day I was talking about it just happened to be gay pride Marty GR 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 oh well so this is what also happened so this is a funny story you’ll like this for the B qu of a century the um uniformed police in Sydney have have had a float in the mph so gay and lesbian police officers have had their own float in the Mig as a they on the float what’s that are they are they gay and yeah they’re on it right what are they wearing the uniforms for the normal uniforms normal uniforms they’re normal norce normal police no no no regular police uniforms and in the late 90s this was a watershed moment because it was a way of taking the G taking G rights and gay pride from being a fringe group that only freaks and perverts were into for the state yeah exactly this is legit you know this is now a part of a kind of a 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 and70s 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 2010 the police force officially apologized to the lgbtqia plus what you supposed to say community uh for the historical wrongs for the hard the harms that have been done by police uh against gays and lesbians so everyone had kissed and made up and then at the recent gay pride which we call Marty gr a week or two prior um a gay couple who were reasonably prominent socialites in Sydney were killed alleged L murdered allegedly by someone who they knew who was a young guy who was either an ex or just a stalker but had known one of them um this was a tragic tragic domestic violence situation essentially where um allegedly I mean they’ve disappeared uh the guy the guy then handed himself into the police the wrinkle is he was a cop um he he had a firearm because he was a cop he wasn’t on duty uh it wasn’t a case of police brutality it was a case of domestic violence where uh one individual went rogue and as a result the organizers of Gay Pride the mighty gr board uh convened an emergency meeting and uninvited the police from holding their float because it would be too hurtful and triggering to partic to other participants to see Poli police officers involved in migrat now there will be police officers there I mean they’re going to be right they’re going to be like it’s a huge event so there will be uniformed 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 on the giant penis or whatever it is are they are they are knew they weren’t dressed normally so this caused a a furor essentially and 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 um I suppose obsessed with a narrative of victimization instead of pride in the community Sandra when you read this a little bit um so my phone lit up with uh phone calls from the opinion editors of all the big newspapers saying what do you think do you want to write something for this and so I wrote something um basically saying the cops should be allowed to participate uh this person wasn’t you know functioning in his capacity as a police officer not 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 um and I 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 and70s not just for gays but for black people as well and all other minorities and women and feminist M the idea was an idea of universalism it was an idea that all people should be treat 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 ingroup or out group so I was basically writing a piece arguing can’t we reclaim the universalism the optimism and the sense of power can’t we take pride in powerfulness instead of powerlessness uh and stop scratching at the wounds of the past and be inclusive and try to embrace universalism of course that got me a huge amount of I’m sure it did yeah if if I was a gay Australian person the last thing that I would want is this like gay fragility right like I don’t want you know this like white fragility it’s like this is that’s it’s almost being transplanted onto or well we must tiptoe around and we must you yeah um Coleman Hugh’s new book uh the end of race politics uh really good is you coming on yeah actually I just sat down with Coleman yesterday in New York and uh this is yes we recorded for my podcast we’re also recorded it for my YouTube so 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 car getting coffee and to have us walk around yeah I don’t know if you know Thomas chatton Williams who’s another really interesting guy uh he and I caught up and we just went to Riverside Park and just sat outside and chatted and walked around Grant’s Tomb and talked uh and then colan Hughes and Jesse single I don’t know if you know Jesse I met Jesse at heterodox thingy thing yeah right so the three of us hung out and so that that video will all be it’s not up yet but that’s all coming to YouTube before this one does um but with Coleman’s new thing um you know he he kind of highlights the like patronizing nature of assuming that uh black people are very fragile um and that we must you know we must sort of step on eggshells around them uh which is a a kind of soft bigotry in a way uh and it’s the same thing with you know again true equality is when you have to put up with the same level of that everybody else does yeah uh and in terms and 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 when I when I wrote that of course the reason why the three uh 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 happened 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 they were kind of agreeing with me and one of the guys said well thank God you can say it and I was like you know you actually can say it 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 and 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 you know like we all live in this 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 I want a a capacious Public Square that is rambunctious 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 sorry well your lived experience will have informed some of the insights that you have about pride and and Global Pride day but presumably a sufficiently smart well-reasoned person could have got pretty close to that without having to of course they could I mean they could look if you if what you 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 you know to be a 5-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 uh 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 sake including straight white males talk to peace be on Allah talk to me about the uh problem with the anti-woke because you know again being a part of your tribalist tribe uh presumably you’ve got problems with both uh step number four which is like the leftwing re resonse but also step number two definely yeah so what there is this cynical industry of anti-woke right-wing wads really who will use uh the Spectre of cancel culture as an excuse to push um 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 uh McCarthyism was cancel culture um the censoriousness of the religious right against pornography and you know the hysteria of the war on drugs like these were all right-wing Harry Potter when Harry Potter first came Harry Potter were yes exactly because it was demonic or you the most banned book The the most banned book of the 21st century Harry Potter and not banned by the left no by the that’s why that’s why um that lady’s thing that the Witch Trials of J R was so she actually people should listen to that episode of uncomfortable conversations with Megan Phelps rer already heard modern wisdom conversation with mine’s even better mine’s even better she’s great she’s great she’s fantastic she’s so good um but the so um uh where was I just going with that the anti woke antiw right the antiwork industry um there’s a cynicism to it there’s a kind of a like um I can’t remember what got you into what did you just say there was um we’ve got the sort of leftwing story goes out the right-wing response to that what it causes Downstream yeah is for the wad industry to spin up right and then the censoriousness well Cel culture was perfected by that’s right there was something the particular thing that I was thinking of there was Monty Python right so Monty Python comes out with the Life of Brian and of course it’s the right wing that doesn’t want you know they’re absolutely losing their they’ve got got their tits in a tangle because uh it’s satirizing Christianity and you know so the the right perfected cancel culture and what’s happened in 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 and so on and in so doing they’ve become as censorious and hysterical as the right always used to be and that has now triggered some Bad actors many Bad actors on the right to take the moral High ground and you know complain constantly about cancel culture a cancel culture that they themselves have been complicit in or their movement has been complicit in for bloody decades I mean talk let’s talk about mcarthism right and you know the the sorry history of I don’t know what that is oh sorry so in the 1950s the an in in the in the 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 and basically blacklisted half of Hollywood and half of the creative arts in this country uh in a Witch Hunt of Communists um 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 you know really Progressive ideas without potentially being considered um An Enemy of the State um that was a sorry chapter in American history and many people who would have been um who would have been champions of that would now be complaining about uh the woke cancel culture people you even see it in real time where you’ll have some conservative Publications you know who who are champions of free speech supposedly and they’re anti-work and their anti- cancel culture and the moment somebody says uh you know some I don’t know anti-zionist says something Pro Palestinian all of a sudden they’re in favor of that person losing their job well hang on a second excuse me like my parents were Holocaust Survivors I’m a conflicted you know sometimes anti-zionist sometimes Zionist definitely think the Palestinians should have a state think it’s absolutely tragic that the Palestinians are in the situation that they’re in but also um deeply uncomfortable with the extremities of some of the anti- Zionist rhetoric which I think is bordering on anti-Semitism I’m comp it’s complicated if 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 so don’t give me this if you’re on the right by saying saying that you know oh cancel culture is coming for us and endlessly amplifying sort of cherry-picked examples of the extremism of the left the kind of Libs of Tik Tok 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 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 like 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 you know whipping up a mob on social media to try to take them down storming corporate officers with kind of metaphorical pitchforks to try try to ruin people’s lives and I’ve come out you know in F in support of my enemies my ideological enemies to say that they shouldn’t have there have 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 cancelled or to pressure behind the scenes for them to lose a podcast or other and 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 treading on eggshells unable to say what they think worried about triggering trip wires worried about the mob coming for them and where I mean it’s going to come for you you’ll reap the Whirlwind you will reap the 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 Constantin kissen is in Australia at the moment and it’s a shame I’m just missing him C break the door down what have you not seen this video I haven’t seen I’ve been traveling for the past week so I haven’t seen anything you should be on TW you should be locked into the main frame it should be directly Ivy uh so uh Constantine is at what looks like some prestigious University big vaulted holes and he’s giving some sort of a talk up on stage there’s these big wooden doors huge arched and uh they’re banging and chanting and like and they’re obviously trying to break in and this woman goes over with a blanket puts a blanket at the bottom of the door to like just drown out a little bit more of the sound CU maybe there’s a bit of Gap or whatever puts a little bit of thing Constantine says fix it yeah Constantine says something and uh and and and everything continues but uh Douglas Murray as well and there’s going to be a lot you’ve got there already is so talk to me you know you’ve got uh Constantine Russian immigrant living in the UK and you’ve got uh Douglas going over to Australia what is the what what’s happened with your tours so far is there petitions for yes live shows to we don’t want this to happen not in our city yes no hate man no hate Chris why are you in favor of hate why you in favor of Douglas spreading his hate Douglas and Josh spreading that spreading hate in Australia um I don’t know man it’s something’s happening something’s happening in the world um I think since Co friends and colleagues of mine who were on the heterodox side of things have Corin completely off the rails into far right conspiracy land um and on the left friends and colleagues of mine have kened off the rails into if you disagree with us then by definition you’re pedaling 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 because I was born there right I mean we earned it and anybody can earn it now um you have the capacity to push back against bad ideas but there’s something on the left at the moment which is censorious hysterical it’s a group think and it has bought 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 Stewart 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 true and what’s not true what’s useful and not useful what’s hateful and not hateful and communally collectively you can sort of arrive at better and better ideas 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 you know generated by those same principles and yet yet there’s now a 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 islamophobe let’s March in the streets go and get Josh and Douglas no hate no hate in Sydney 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 unless you hear him and when you do hear him push back tell him he’s wrong I mean and then the counterargument 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 a rather aat intellectual Englishman who has accurately predicted some of the uh the some of the roiling social issues and cultural schisms that have emerged over the past 20 years there’s an idea from my friend ginda Bogle called a semantic stop sign one way people end 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 semantic 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 the bubble is inescapable and I mean this is something I’m also cautious about in you know expanding uncomfortable conversations from podcast into YouTube into live events that I too don’t get caught in a bubble you 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 part very hard man I mean you know you you are you want to make things that add value to the world you want to embrace your own curiosity right that’s what you do you’re following your instincts that’s something that’s super super important yes it’s your best compe of Advantage uh 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 an natural outpouring of whatever you’re interested in but you also want to do things like it’s not just your pet project this isn’t a hobby it’s it’s somewhere between business Enterprise an environmental impact movement way to nudge the world and leave behind some sort of Legacy that you think is oh at least you know one tiny microscopic mov movement of culture was done maybe by one conversation for one family of people that I had so I can see you know 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 opp 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 there is a middle ground that you want to try and Achieve yes 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 uh in ways that are considered taboo and in ways that could you know 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 kinds of 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 and 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 uh when I was just starting out and the 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 the 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 and similarly it’s important to know that the people who really really really you know you’re throwing red meat to cuz they’re super super ultra fans that’s fabulous God bless them I love you 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 uh kind of a reasonable Center 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 going to sit sit comfortably in the middle and Shout at both of them that’s not what I mean by the center what I mean by and maybe Center is the wrong term 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 they put me on the left sometimes 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 falty to your side or the other and what people see in someone that they can’t predict is an unreliable Ally yeah this is what I am an unreliable Ally well that’s the but 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 imigration stuff he’s on board with the gun control and the the 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 uh and 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 deranged in some way or 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 what’s the like onesie outfit that I’m a part of and I’ll just sort of slot this next view in on the end of that um so the incentive to do something that pisses off any group and this is the same for it doesn’t matter if you’ve not got a podcast or anything like you’re at work and someone brings up something and you just find yourself compulsion to just go yeah yeah I know isn’t it isn’t it awful 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 or the reverse the human compulsion for compliance in many people I’m one of them is unbelievably strong and I understand that we’ve got guys like Douglas or a Ben airo or whatever who just like effortlessly sit in toe curling cringe debate and and seem to reel in it like pigs in mud cool that’s not I I think most people uh and for the you know the silent majority of people Pleasers out there yeah um understanding there there are these polls there are these sort of uh uh compulsions and and desires that your inner state has to just will just smooth the water do you feel comfortable in that state no no I being disagreeable uh both in personal life and uh on the show is something I’m actively having to work unbelievably hard at disagreeable in a personal uh exchange like we’re having now or disagreeable about an abstract idea when you’re publishing it on social media or elsewhere first one right first one if if if you know the that um position that I had about like the this shiny object cycle um that I think sits somewhere in the middle of a bunch of things but it’s going to 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 um I’m fine to do that it’s more so interpersonal yeah uh so for me to you know if I was around the Water Co I 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 int ual juice I think it’s largely a fight between uh your discomfort at upsetting people on one side and your desire for intellectual satisfaction on the other like curiosity is what pulls you through and it’s interesting you say that it would be easier for Sam Harris to sort of strategically uh you know 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 because he’s a man of immense integrity and authenticity so the easiest thing for him 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 to get up in the morning and look in the mirror and respect himself and so the anti- Ally thing is interesting yes of course you’re not an ally to the tribes as they’re currently constructed in society you’re not an ally to the right and you’re not an ally to the 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 age with me on particular issues my gamble here is that they will always value the fact that I’m free from 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 pet issue you know don’t come at me because I said the wrong thing about about x y o Zed but 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 strawmanning 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 I’m going to try understand the limitations of my own knowledge and always hedge a little bit and say on the other hand I do understand that you know other people other reasonable people can disagree on this particular issue and I’m an ally on that I’m an Al you know Richard Dawkins once said something about people who get offended when he criticizes their religion he said I respect you too much to pretend to respect your stupid beliefs that’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 well then I won of course I won’t respect it but I will use the yard sticks of reason and rationality to try to understand you and I will always have your back on that I will always be an ally of people who do that I just won’t be part of your tribe I 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 different ideas why can’t I make that prediction because you’ve gone down a bloody checklist of of yes all right I’m 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 hearing 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’m I love migrants I love living in Sydney which is incredibly multi one of the most 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 capit immigration rates in the world and I think it’s number one on Refugee resettlement one or two Australia in order the price you have to pay to get the populist to agree with that is to have a bloody brutal border policy which is a lot obviously lot easier if you’re in an island than if you have a have a physical border but you have to make this fasty impact 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 societ with very little push back the reason why you have anti-immigration sentiment as high as it is in the United States and in the UK 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 of control they felt like there was demographic change that they couldn’t handle that nobody was in control of there 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 like here’s a foreigner I remember I went on the air one of the first times I went on the air on hu Post Live we were talking about uh voter ID laws in the United States which for people who don’t know if they’re outside the states some states introduce uh identific the requirement to show ID when you vote at the voting poll normally 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 huff poost and all my left-wing colleagues were like this is a way of suppressing people of color because people of color tend not to have have you know up toate they move more there basically poor the idea is that poorer people move more and are less likely to have IDs and poorer people are black of course they never say the poor bit they just claim that it’s it’s racist yeah it’s a racist policy essentially well they’re blind to class problems and economic problems unless they’re race problem unless they’re race problems exactly uh so I just went on the air and I was like I mean sorry for not Towing 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 plain like who 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 IDs but the fact that I could say that and and make that makes me an enemy to the left right but I’m also an enemy to the right because I’m not saying for the same reason that they are I want to secure the border and I want to take a lot more people I want a lot more bangladeshis in America why do bangladeshis get discriminated against just because they can’t walk across the Rio Grand yeah but isn’t it interesting that the only way you’ve been able to get away with saying that is by not not having the uh left or right presupposition requirement of somebody that was born in this country so oh he’s able to ask that question because he doesn’t know it’s like you know he’s able to ask that question because he’s just interested yes and it’s a rational question to ask but I do it in Australia as well even where I am you know a native on the and just sorry lastly 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 it’s a big thing in Australia now as a bit of background to do uh a land e ment 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 it look it started out a bit virtue signally I think in the US it’s still highly virtue signally because it hasn’t 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 um now that can get a bit ridiculous sounds silly it does sounds I’ll tell you what I tell you what’s silly I 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 are we doing 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 signaling thing 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 so Jordan Peterson tweets out stop this virtual signaling nonsense you’re a communist you know blah blah blah I don’t want to have this shoved down my throat and I’m like bro love you pick your battles pick your battles you don’t have to you don’t have to be so you’re not going to win it and it sounds Petty not everything is an existential fight so I would say like don’t become the who tries to call everyone out I I understand the the compulsion on that you know I see um I I explained this on a Q&A recently about how I I really enjoy the fact that I have this unreasonably reasonable audience for the most part but 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 tenner to them a lot of them sort of converge onto a few broad buckets of whatever they’re talking about um but as the channel grows because you remember the insults not the compliments uh 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 M um and I started to I’ve started to notice maybe in the last 6 months at least the uh beginning of why people of whatever Jordan’s size or whoever’s size um could be motivated to like see conflict everywhere because they are so used to just this barrage yeah of online some and and the problem of the with a barrage of is that there is probably some streaks of piss that you could have paid attention to in that 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 uh you should go up against pick picking your battles when you’re in the middle of a war is unbelievably difficult it is it is but it’s so necessary it’s actually so necessary because you’re deranged by your experience of the world you become everybody it’s so and you know champagne problems yeah I get it like this is the job you chose this is the platform like oh boohoo 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 right but you have to just you have to be cognizant enough to take the 30,000 foot View and go that Dynamic is also taking place on the other side so people on the other side of politics are you know my opponents are also receiving the same kind of crazy from people who would regard themselves as being on my side therefore we’re both trapped in Mirror Image Echo chambers of of hate that are rat that are extrem aying us the algorithms are are also you know load that on plus load on the fracturing of the media landscape plus load on the cowardice and group think of mainstream media institutions that are failing to wrestle adequately with some of the issues that 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 lowgrade cultural genuine Civil War which could mean you know at least the temporary collapse of civilization and the 21st century so you can’t participate in it you’ve got to find a way I sometimes regard my job as I’m not going to necessarily you’re not necessarily going to 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 it pulling me 10% further away they’re trying to make they’re trying to radicalize this it’s our job to resist them it’s our job to make sure that we are as generous as possible towards people who disagree with us we don’t exaggerate minor slights we 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 B crazy can sort of understand that we’re being we’re being fairly reasonable about talk me through what you see for the next five or 10 years when it comes to culture and and the the landscape of of conversation and stuff like that you know I fundamentally disagree with the dumer ism the world is ruined everything’s going to hell in a hand basket uh perspective i i 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 the tribal this is the you know classic cycle of shiny object syndrome that we’re going to see what do you think run me through your prediction for the next 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 time to be alive until we figure out what’s going on and I I say that because I mean you’re a good example of the potential of the agentic person right transformation self uh 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 lbs uh eating ice cream and watching Netflix and then in the second year of the pandemic I lost like 50b like 20 kilos right and I’ve maintained that screw you weight gain since yeah you know and I started working out and I started eating properly and I started giving a um and anyone who’s had that experience of sort of reasonably radical and fast transformation 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 cont 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 you know he was like what are you dealing with these dumb Dums at you know huff post you do a podcast and I was like all right I’ll give it a shot he’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 the person who deserved it um well maybe I deserved it but I didn’t had no 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 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 microsc milliseconds that the engineers know are likest to coincide with when you’re most vulnerable and susceptible to responding to that notification and to looking at it and to therefore grabbing your attention and dragging you back into their Multiverse of Madness those Temptations are very very hard to uh 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 the you know when it is when there is no barrier to disseminating yeah 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 and but we didn’t regulate kalashnikovs we were just like hey we invented the Kalashnikov Let’s uh 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 uh some kind of break on the way that artificial intelligence is going to intersect with algorithms to be able to devise Maxim uh addictive and maximally deranging uh content and I can’t see how the average person is going to be able to resist yeah resist it regardless of the self-actualization that we might want them what’s happened in Australia what’s happened in the UK with Vapes you know smoking you know all the these sort of uh laws that are coming in and basically what what it’s been deemed is that even though this isn’t illegal 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 vape is right 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 ft in the air it’s ridiculous compulsion it’s so hard and you know to the biggest still for me now so many I think episode 10 I had with Kai way who was the guy that created the light phone which is now in its second or third generation this is 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 how the variable schedule reward and how how the human psychology gets Olympic 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 it is a do you have the apps on your phone you know social media uh I have two phones so I have one cocaine phone and a kale phone uh 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 takeout 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 uh 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 like a landline in the house and then the optional third phone which is uh meditation timer uh you the stuff that you do if you have a morning routine where you need a and where does Twitter go on the tethered phone Twitter goes on the tethered phone Twitter goes on phone number yeah I mean I took the apps off my phone uh about a year ago and it’s been dram it’s dramatically improved my life I mean I don’t yes if I really want to I can open a browser and I can go 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 you know if you tell it not to go there it doesn’t go there opal which is like a bit bit more of a schedulable intense screen time uh thing and uh opal’s fantastic I’ve been using that for about six months now and um me and all of my friends we used to do a series on the show called life hacks like 25 episodes maybe of this is life hacks we’ve only done 750 signicant por of this show is based on these life accs 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 and you need to get the 450 not the 400 because the 400 has like a the drip tray doesn’t work or this is a new meditation app that we’re using or this is I once found I still do find I think it’s a gate 35d in Amsterdam schipol 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 they often get tagged in photos from people like at 35d dude I’m so glad that you T me about this there’s a website as well sleeping in airports which I sometimes look at which will tell you travel exactly I use all my like I acquire miles cheaply and then spend them on expensive things so I’m always flying in you know Singapore airlin first class and stuff using the rule that we have is um 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 6mon mark it doesn’t count as being a viable hack so it’s like still waiting for the six Monon window but opal’s passed the six-month window so that opal just is a practical thing for people and then the second one is Cold Turkey um which is the equivalent essentially for uh Mac so you download cold turkey and you set up schedules throughout the day you can block any website you want you can also block apps uh and for me it’s like Twitter Instagram blocked uh and the only way if you want you can set it to the only way you can get around it is to donate money to charity so if you donate a dollar to charity it’s just linked to your carard um donate 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 um it’s a uh deranging time where people have basically got a hacker a human system human OS hacker sat in their pocket and I I do one of my smartest friends has a question that says um what will be studied by historians but is ignored by the media right and I think that the proliferation of dopamine hacking limic 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 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 as best we can as it’s going on and so that’s why a lot of my guests like 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 a majority of my time doing that I’ll also I mean you know I recently had on this indigenous academic who is this wonderful guy who’s skeptical about like all of these kind of virtue signal kind of you know white savior type uh 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 he is very much a spiritual person who draws a lot of meaning from the traditions and spirituality of this ancient culture so like the it’s not about for me it’s not about dunking and and like oh why is everything going crazy it’s about like let’s 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 to see you know to to observe conflict where there isn’t any you know you you can very much uh downregulate whatever another person even the most sort of aggressive egregious and we saw this in in NTI like a drunk person that can’t get into a club with their friends there’s you know there’s that and then only above that is a mother protecting her children like that’s that’s the level of intensity that you have and um you know so much of the deescalation involves just like getting the other person to mostly through questions understand where you’re at so you know if someone says something like um uh it’s been looking at how many episodes you’ve done this year and there’s only been x% 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 a suggestion and immediately almost without fail people go oh uh actually yeah this person’s thank you for the suggestion I genuinely appreciate the suggestion it really deescalate it the problem is it’s so rare the reason it de escalates so well is that people are waiting for the cutting sardonic dunkfest yeah throwback um but yeah man I don’t know I think I really hope that I hope that our lives that my lifespan your lifespan everyone listening isn’t some bizarre like Prelude to an idilic future where we are forced to pay the costs like those women that were making watches with radium and you know we did 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 limic hijacked world and then we die and then two generations from now it’s like ah 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 you know the entire first 20 years of her life being hunted by Nazis and almost being sent to aitz and all the rest of her family were wiped out and at that moment it was the the stakes were high enough that reasonable people got their together and they built a ton of bombs and a ton of bombers and they blew the Nazis out of the water and you know decent societies like Australia and America and you know the UK and Canada welcomed in people like my grandmother I mean my grandmother my grandmother when after the war she went to the port in France where uh they were loading refugees onto boats to go to the new world and the person who was signing people in to get on to allocate people to particular ships said uh you you can go to the United States or Canada or Australia which one do you want to go to and 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 are 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 the saxophone and then retire Rich after the biggest property boom in the history of the world um and it I suspect that our fate or maybe our children’s fate will be trickier I 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 uh 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 bush fires 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 of more thunderstorms you know it’s just going to be enormously expensive and annoying and you add that stress to the stresses of the hijacking of the lyic 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 like when AI has the ability to move markets which it already does by producing some 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 a 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 we need to not worry too much if an airline you know gives a nod to indigenous people when it lands there are 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 the 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 uh they’re 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 computer in your pocket which is tugging at your attention it’s also that you’re being encouraged to curate your own life in real time so it’s like there’s a 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 uh you know sufficiently pretty that you should be posting it on Instagram or is that thought that you just had suff sufficiently witty to post it on to post it to Twitter so you’re in the process of like kind of there’s this funny thing where like and and of course there’s predate social media I mean I was backpacking around India and we were in nor we were in like Kashmir 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 and 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 it was and how surreal it was and my two friends are amate photographers and so they had their whizbang cameras and they’re scrambling all over the mountain scrambling all over the temple and they’re getting the right photo and the inter and after the sun’s risen we climb all the way back down down and they’re comparing their cameras like oh look at this one oh that’s a great one oh that’s going to come up really great and I’m standing there going you missed it you 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 the 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 slaps ladies and gentlemen Josh I appreciate you I’m really really glad that you came through we managed to find time to do this me too me too it’s an honor thanks for talking to me it’s great where should people go they want to keep up to date with all conversations uh the substack is probably the easiest place to start uncomfortable conversations. substack docomo I mean there are 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 hell yeah than M thanks Josh cheers thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode so there is something else you will absolutely love right here go on give it a tap