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

Episode Date: April 6, 2024

Josh Szeps is a journalist and the host of "Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps". 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... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a 1-month of Brain.fm for free by going to https://Brain.fm/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 5.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 60% off an annual plan of Incogni at https://incogni.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Uncomfortable Conversations on Substack: https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/ Uncomfortable Conversations on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@JoshSzeps_ Uncomfortable Conversations on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/327Ydka Uncomfortable Conversations on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3T9KGAh Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Josh Zeps. He's 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 the 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 J.K. Rowling

has been up to, what happened to the Indigenous Australian People apology trend, and much more. This Monday Monday the first cinema shoot from our video wall podcast that we shot here in Austin Texas with Dr. K goes live and it's fantastic and it looks beautiful and you shouldn't miss it so make sure that you've hit the subscribe button or you will miss episodes when they go up and it helps to support the show and it makes me very happy so navigate to Spotify or Apple podcasts and press the follow button. A thank you.

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Are you? No. All right, I'm going to read it out to you fully. Great. This is the culture wars shiny object cycle. Number one, some woke news story hits the press. Cats suffer from racial discrimination or screwinging in lightbulbs needs to be recognised as a valid sexual kink or something.

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 TikTok society. 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 left-wing 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 too. 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 blue-haired 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 every single stage. We find ourselves at each different one. 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 going? Josh is married to a dude. Is he also getting stuff on the side? Let's find out coming up 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 an extremely successful adult performer. She's an Aussie, but she's huge in the States as well,

has like one of the biggest only 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 got massive, massive legs, huge legs.

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 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 you were saying that really the tricky thing in that industry is the guys, because it's hard. I mean, there's sometimes it isn't replete with sometimes it isn't, which is the issue

times 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, but the guy has to genuinely perform. But I think sex stuff aside, that cycle, which I've been thinking about for quite a while, is 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, the cycle is banal, 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 pushback. 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 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. 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. It's familiar. There's enough novelty to keep it interesting, but not so much novelty that you don't go, oh, I know, this is exciting. I know how to respond to this outrage. I've seen it before. Yeah. Yeah. I know the role that I have to play in this thing. Well, this is what Douglas was talking about that that 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 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 banal, 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'd said, I've been each one of those six people, you know, I've been the signal booster, I've been the like meta touch grass reactionary, I've been the original outraged person, you know, I've been the signal booster, I've been the like meta touch grass reactionary, I've been the original outraged person, I've been, you know, I've been all of those different people. Um, 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 shit, 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, the potentially toxic conversation that we could have, I think everyone will 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. 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 – 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 macabre way, maybe it's possible that young, effete gay guys, under certain circumstances, get more cache

from their peers and are higher in the social hierarchy if they come out as trans girls, then they would being pussy fat. Yeah. 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. And when you try to ask questions, even if you're a professional psychiatrist,

I mean, I had a conversation where I just got fired from or left, or it's a bit ambiguous what 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 broadcaster. You were fully in the mainstream cycle. And 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, alternative media, and I was a sleeper agent. 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. 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 them. Yes, exactly. So you were transphobic. No, can't we kind of have the nuance to be able to separate one case from the other. So I don't necessarily regard all conversations about things like trans as being obviously subject to 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 bullshit free a way as possible that is not subjected to that kind of reflexive to and fro, right? Just to interject there, Andrew Doyle, Andrew, I don't know personally, but I love him. I really enjoy his writing. He's a good friend. He uses 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 let's say, a eight-year-old trans girl, used to be a boy, and 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 homophobia. I mean, just let that land for a second. Yeah. That is like I have chills on my spine.

I mean, I'm a gay guy, right? And I have perhaps the good fortune of not having a particular way of talking, and 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. I don't want those concerns to overwhelm the conversation and to occlude our compassion for people who are transgender.

And I think that sometimes- There's way more gay people than there are trans people. Well, 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. And I hate it when this conversation gets used by right-wing blowhards 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 part of that. But I feel like it's harder to attack that nonsense on the right if you're not also fair dinkum as we say in Australia, which means a straight shooter or free of bullshit or just kind of 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. 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, as a stealth. You used to be mainstream media. I thought you was 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 struggling.

So yeah, exactly. That's right. And many, many different respects. Um, and look, I started out, uh, as a journalist, basically, as a journalist who became a political satirist 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, which was a kind of a smart assy look at science and tech news. So I'm a bit of a science nerd and a politics wonk and you know, a cheeky little pixie. And that fell apart and Huffington Post was launching

a big 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 2010s and the mid 2010s. And it was great. That was like the tech boom years in the 2010s and the mid 2010s. And it was awesome. Got to interview tons of people, live streaming video, like three or four segments of 30-minute conversation just like this every day.

And that was the hybrid between mainstream and alternative, right? I mean, HuffPost 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 fuck you wanted and they sort of encouraged it because the click bait, you know, algorithms sort of demanded it. And then I got married to a guy. We had kids moved back to Australia about five years ago and I went into full mainstream.

I was like, I'm a grown up now. None of this, none of this, none of this farting around on the internet. I got a great offer from the public broadcaster in Australia, which is sort of like the BBC in Australia. And I hosted the weekend morning show on television for a year and got a radio show three hours a day, talk radio, politics, culture.

There must be tons of exposure. Huge exposure. Huge exposure. You're like the Piers Morgan of Australia. Well no, because- The gay Piers Morgan. Are you just outing Piers Morgan this guy? Well no, I mean the thing is 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, you cannot set 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 mouthpieces to 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. Well, I do. 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're a host on a mainstream network, that network has the right to say yes or no to all external work requests as well. What network was it? It was the ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Is that the BBC? That's the BBC of Australia, which is an absolute national treasure, 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. It's fundamental to Australian democracy. Like I'm not shitting 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 Tavistock closed down. There was a huge national inquiry, massive news in the UK. There was basically a suggestion

they weren't dealing with transgender you know, transgender, juvenile issues as well as they might. For anyone that wants to learn more about that Time to Think, fantastic book. Also had the author on. Really just phenomenal, dispassionate breakdown of everything that happened with the GIDS and the Tavistock Clinic and all of that. Very, very good. Fabulous.

So there was, so this raised questions in Australia about whether or not, so they call it gender affirming care, which basically means that whoever comes to you saying that they have gender dysphoria and they're in the wrong body, you cannot question that. To do so is almost like, it's treated like gay conversion therapy of old, where you used to try to persuade people, pray the gay away or something. But it's not exactly that, is it? Because this is, transgenderism is a much more malleable and seemingly flexible thing than sexuality seems to be.

And 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 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. Now, I don't want to buy into a scare campaign that that suddenly means that she's going to go into on operation and she's going to have surgery and 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's what came out of Time to Think. Yes. Puberty block, Time to Think is what it's supposed to be.

Right. To give them time to think. You have time to think. Right. It's just putting a pause on puberty. Yes. No, it's a very reliable set of train tracks. Yeah.

The number of children that are put on puberty blockers that end up transitioning is unbelievably high. Right. It's not something that supports. And it's also not reversible. It's like the changes that are supposed to occur, it's not like you just shift the entire puberty window a little bit later. You're completely correct. Completely correct with what you say.

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 pro trans side, 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 foisted even on communities who don't necessarily agree with it.

Latinx being foisted on Latino communities or a particular- I think people, at least a lot of the Americans listening 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, just by the way, the show is bigger per capita in Australia than anywhere else on the planet. Oh, is that right?

There's more Australian. Get it, Aussies. We did it. Go, go for it. That's great. So there's a lot of Australian people listening. Yeah, excellent. So if you're listening in Australia

or you're outside of Sydney, I was on ABC Radio Sydney. And the, so 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 radio said, this is such a relief. I've felt like I'm the girl at the ball or at the formal, the radio said, this is such a relief. I've 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 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 his take on the Tavistock 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 clique of 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. 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 question our orthodoxy. And that way you'll scare off enough journalists who will go, you know what, it's not worth the blame. 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?

It's a bullying threat in a way. Exactly. It's kind of a heckler's veto or a terrorist veto or something. So I was cleared and they said 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 pushback whatsoever from management about doing that story. They thought it was totally fine and 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 shit about process. On my show, on uncomfortable conversations, we don't have to give a shit about process. On uncomfortable conversations, we don't have to give a shit about process. Sometimes we'll get things wrong, we'll try to correct it. And then, you know, the audience can judge whether or not we're telling the truth.

And another thing happened last year where- When was that first incident? That was, so when was Tavistock? It was probably about maybe 14 months ago, I'd be guessing, probably, yeah, probably before last. Then last year, I wanted to write a piece for the, well, I didn't, the main broadsheet newspaper in Sydney hit me up and invited me to write a piece about World Pride,

which is a giant gay pride, which is like for the whole world. Apparently every two years there's a pride in a city. I mean, I didn't even know that until Sydney hosted it, right? But there's a, there's a pride in there like, oh, okay, this isn't just a pride. Sydney's pretty gay, Sydney's gay. Sydney has the biggest gay and lesbian festival in the world anyway, which is the Mardi Gras, but they had world pride to coincide with this.

And the editor 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 one, 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. Yeah, and again, one of Douglas's best insights on this, you know when you've reached full

equality when you have to put up with the same level of shit that everybody else does. Mm-hmm. Exactly. It's not special treatment. It's unspecial treatment that is the genuine mark of true equality. Right, exactly. And 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 go to school,

you know, I make sandwiches in the morning. 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 twenties, I found it difficult to understand who I was, not because of homophobia, but because the images of gayness around me were so conformist that I was like, well, I'm obviously not one of them, the priceless letter chats.

Why don't I dance well enough? Yeah, I don't, I don't like the dumb dancer. And I don't, I don't, you know, so, you know, so if, if you're a 15 year old lad 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 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 assless chaps sitting astride giant inflatable penises

going through, going on along a parade route. You know, what does, what does, I know that you're, you don't speak for the entirety of the gay community, but as a pie, how does the gay community overall think about pride now? Like do most of your gay friends kind of go a bit like, ugh. No, I think most of them are still on board. 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 sourpuss. 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 rights struggle that has as its raison d'etre the picking of old scabs and the picking of old wounds

and the perpetuation of a sense of divisiveness of us and them, of join a team, such that if you wanna have a same sex d'alliance, that's gonna open up a Pandora's box of so many identity questions that you cease to even be you, right? Let's 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 doesn't, you don't have to tick a box on your checkbox. So world pride day comes along and I write a piece for the newspaper articulating these ideas, just saying like, will ever, will there ever come a time at which we don't have to make such a big deal out of this. Now at this moment in time, the public broadcaster is the official sponsor. The official broadcast partner of the festival and I can see where this is going. So I send the article up the chain and they decline, they've declined 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 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 in

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 fish who are the yet to two young fish who are swimming along in the ocean and an older fish swims past and says, how's the water today guys? And the two young fish swim on and after 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 wouldn't you want to be on the side of gay people? Like why are you being mean? Why are you always trying to kick a hornet's nest and cause trouble? Like it's a party, let's just be cool, let's be cool with everything.

So there's a kind of ideological conformism that doesn't even realize that it has political positions because those political positions just land as so commonsensical that it's just like an opposition to being mean or something like that. So don't touch the trans issue. Plus as the, as you primed it earlier on, the fucking Josh, he's going to write this thing and then the complaints are going to come in and 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 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. 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 master. Give me some tips. And now we're doing live. So there are sort of three legs to the stool. The podcast and the sub stack where you can subscribe and get additional bonus content. And then there's the YouTube channel and then there's live touring. So Douglas is our first live tour.

Luckily, I had started doing the podcast before I signed my contract. And so they weren't able to meddle in that. So I could do whatever I wanted to on the podcast. You kind of got grandfathered in. Yeah. This is part of what I do. Exactly.

Yes, so you can't touch it. Cause you've been, I mean, you're in an 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 unspeakable in line with the code of conduct of the public broadcaster. But yeah, the wheels fell off and it became an untenable situation. I think there was... What was the actual flashpoint? What was the thing that they got you for? Like everything it was banal. It was they didn't get me for anything. It was just like

a contract was up. So it's time to renegotiate contracts, you know, just letting you know, there might be some, you know, the game of musical chairs where, you know, there might not be another there might not be availability of a chair for you. So you might want to, you know, think about that. Look at other options. When was this? When did you bring, when, when was this?

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, which is that my final, so I resigned on air and then there were still going to be five or six weeks left of broadcasting. You're like that guy at the sex party that just won't leave. Just hanging around like a bad smell.

And then in the final moments when I was doing some publicity for the podcast, October 7th had happened, there was a lot of heat about Israel and Gaza, and I went on a television show to talk about anti-Semitism in Australia. I hadn't been at work that day, so I hadn't been able to fill out the external work request form. Now, you're supposed to fill out the external work request form, even if it's not work and you're not getting paid for it, but if you're going to appear on any other outlet and to do this show. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. I would have to fill out an

external work request form, which is normally just a piece of paperwork and it's a formality. But I wasn't at my computer, would enable to log into the internal intranet where I have to submit the form to go to the blah, blah, blah. So I did this show and it was on a conservative network. It was on Sky News in Australia, which is a, you know, not friendly necessarily to the public broadcaster. But I wasn't, I explicitly, I was absolutely inundated with requests to talk about my departure and to talk about the public broadcaster and to throw them under the bus after this all happened. and when I made my statements on the air, I declined everything. I didn't want to be a bad loser.

We left on good terms. I love the place. I love the people I worked with there. I think that it's being run well. This is just a fundamental sort of difference of opinion and priorities. So I didn't take anything. In fact, I declined a number of media requests that would have been really, really useful to me, big profiles in newspapers and stuff, because I just knew that they'd end up skewing

it in a way that was unfavorable to my former employers and I didn't want to do that. But I did this thing about antisemitism 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 were 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 weight lifted off my shoulders. I mean, my sub stack subscribers doubled instantly when I left and then doubled again the week and the month after. And so financially, I was very happy to hear. I was happy. And now I get to just have, roll around and have conversations with people like you. In the mud, in the mud with the rest of us. So I learned this thing from Andrew Schultz, not someone that you might immediately think

is like an insight into like philosophical wisdom of mainstream media, but he's a smart guy. And he said, I came up with basically Schultz's razor. It's not coordination, it's cowardice. So from the outside, it looks like a coordinated attempt to try and trans the kids or to deny some particular narrative. From the inside, it just looks like people that are terrified of losing their jobs.

Yeah, and it may not even be cowardice. It may be something more insidious, which is the water thing, which is a form of groupthink or echo chamberification of like our minds, right? It's, so on some instances 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. Showful blindness in some way. It's yeah, it's like, like I spoke to when I obviously received a bunch of pushback before doing the trans interview and the producers who would articulate their pushback 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 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. Yeah, right. I mean, stage two or stage four at the shiny object cycle. That's right. And even if you don't engage in this shiny object cycle, there are also so many more media outlets now that it's not like everyone is reading the New York Times anymore. Every person has their own kind of collection, their own mosaic of different places that they're getting information from and throw into that the algorithm, which is designed to elicit some kind of reaction, right?

It's designed to favor content that is going to get you to either like it or comment on it or share it or something. And the kind of content that does that is not neutral, nuanced content. The kind of content that does that is content that reinforces what you already believe or demonizes what you don't. So I think a lot of these people will be like, you know what, this is just not landing, this issue is not landing for me in my media ecosystem as something that is worth paying attention to whether that's the criticism of, you know, aggressive gay pride or the criticism of pediatric transgender issues or you can go on and on

with diversity, equity and inclusion, or Black Lives Matter, or feminism, or the Me Too movement, or something like that. When you feel like the world is actually, that the bubble that you live in is actually the entire world, it's very difficult to understand why anyone would want to puncture that bubble if they're not just an asshole. Can you describe for the non-Australians amongst us what the current sort of cultural landscape is like with regards to culture wars stuff in Australia? Because from the outside, it looks like utes and bogans and good day for a beer and streakers on cricket pitches and barbecues.

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. Yeah. I mean, there is not, I would say 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. When you see clips from things like Sky News, that has a vanishingly small audience. It has nothing like the power of Fox News. It's a little bit of a Rupert Murdoch hobby horse, like let's just sort of keep this thing going. And it is not shaping. Of course, there are people who are very plugged into Twitter and there are people who are very plugged into podcaster stan and who are very riled up. But a lot of it's inherited, I think.

A lot of it is kind of like, 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 London now a no-go zone because of Muslim, you know, fascism? And, you know, I go to London and I'm like, well, no, it's not. So you actually go to Australia, it's quite reasonable. The culture war is not hot. There are people who cynically want to manipulate things like the transgender issue in order to sort of express a little bit of latent bigotry probably. But what it is is a highly conformist society.

Like Aussies have sold the world this crocodile Dundee, Steve Irwin image that we're all rugged outdoorsmen You know who who buck conformism and where individuals are quite compliant and orderly on the inside Actually, the you know, the vast majority of the population live in just a handful of big cosmopolitan multicultural cities It was if anyone wants to look at the heat map Little red dot yeah old middle of it's just a waste totally totally and Australia. It's basically. 95% live in these little red dots. Yeah. And the whole middle of it's just a waste. Totally, totally.

And so, you know, these are places where latte sipping, Chardonnay swilling middle classes ride their, you know, their kangaroos to work down the street. Now, 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 an ethos called she'll be right, which is, it's gonna be okay.

Like no dramas, you know what? Like don't worry too much. Is that similar to stiff up a lip? No, stiff up a 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. Yeah. It's like, that's the, that's the like crap version.

Yeah, exactly. That's right. Yeah. It's stiff upper lip if you take Churchill out and you put Chamberlain in. The nerfed, the nerfed version of that. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, it's interesting that looking at,

especially COVID is a good flash point for this. I think first dose uptake in the UK for adults was like 93%. I think 93% of people, maybe even more, ended up getting their first dose. And then it was in the eighties for both second and third. I'm gonna guess it's probably something similar. Oh yeah, it's massive in Australia. In Australia.

Well, we were in prison until we got vaccinated. It's true. You had more of an incentive to do it. So maybe the UK is even more worldly, but I find myself doing that. I come over to the US and I spend time around here and like the inbuilt, The inbuilt, I call it like, like cue desire, 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 broader, quite orderly. And we know our place and we don't want to ruffle any feathers.

And whereas, you know, America was built genetically. It is the progeny of people from Ireland that said, yeah, fuck it. I'll go on that boat for six weeks. Let's see what happens. Yeah. So you just have that pioneer spirit here. I don't think we do. Well, 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 we certainly don't have the British sense of, we don't line up as well as the Brits do, I gotta say. But there's a thing where there's just like, there is a sense of, so there's a thing that sociologists talk about, which is horizontal trust versus vertical trust in a society. Some societies have very strong horizontal trust, meaning

that you have trust in your peers, you have trust in strangers, you have trust in other people and vertical trust is trust in a hierarchy or trust in authority or 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, you know, will have, they'll, you can leave your door open and expect that you're not going to get robbed. But the moment authority is involved, you don't, you know,

you don't have any trust whatsoever. What would be the opposite? The opposite would be an East Asian country, like maybe China, where 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, study government. Yes, study government.

Exactly. And what was weird during COVID is you sort of noticed that Australia and New Zealand have kind of inherited a bit of an East Asian outlook. I don't know how that happens exactly. I mean, we're in that neck of the woods. Chinese style. We have a lot of, yeah, right. We're susceptible to the Chinese style.

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 COVID. The people might vaguely recognize me from a moment on Joe Rogan, if they don't already know me. It was a big 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 was a big 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. I did a show seven times. I was, when I was on HuffPost Live, he saw something that I did, which was a funny sort of, like social justice run in 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 white. What are you talking about? Talk to me like I'm a rational human being and talk to me as if I'm a cardboard cut out

of some identity. And she hung up on- You don't have enough intersectional points, right? White gay men are the straight men of the LGBT world. Exactly, that's right. Yeah. 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, I 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 see you. Yeah, sickening. And they're like, hang on, we were just arguing about politics. And I'm like, I see you.

So Joe saw that back in 2014, 2015, and invited me on a show. And then I basically had an open invitation while I was in the States and went on seven times. But the last time that I was on was during the heat of COVID. And it was right at that moment when there was a spot, 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 a point, an article of faith, essentially among the anti-vaccine community, which was not true in the way that it was being presented. And so we looked it up and it turned out that I was right on that thing and that went viral. And then of course, you know, CNN and other media organizations cynically manipulate. A football that they kick around.

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 guys that get on and have spoken for like 50 hours. And people were like, people would hit It's just two, 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 in his own lair.

And I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? I mean, we're friends. My attitude towards friendship is I'm going to call you on your bullshit. 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 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 person 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 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 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 fucking hate. I very much just want to say the thing as it is. The club promoted 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 guests list. It's because we're full.

It's because the ticket, you bought the ticket for the wrong evening. That's not my problem. I'm sorry. That's yours. Whatever it might be. But online, it's all about trying to, I'm cooler than you with my funny little comment. Here's a quote tweet about something that you said, this you question mark.

It's all about that. It's dunking. So this sort of dunk porn doesn't have any room in it for people who disagree on certain things to be friends on others. It doesn't have any latitude at all for people to disagree in a way that they could get on afterward, uh, or to disagree in an earnest manner. It's like earnestness 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 every. Yeah, that's interesting. And then you add on top of that, this other thing of like, you don't have standing to talk about this because you're not from the community, also adds onto that if you're talking about the social justice left, right? So I think the right is very good at this kind of sardonic nod nod, wink wink shit posting kind of like

dunking on everything, like not taking anything seriously, which I agree is actually really dangerous. It's not just annoying, it's actually dangerous. David Pakman does that from the left a lot. His entire tenor on his show is a very sort of passive aggressive, just one second, I've got a thing to do. And it's like 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.

He did it. He did a number of times. I've seen it. That may be because he doesn't see you as activating his antibody response in the same way. He certainly did it with the guys from Trigonometry. He did it when he came on my show. And for instance, one of the examples was I referred to the BLM riots as the BLM riots. And he said, right, sorry, sorry, right. Is that accurate? I haven't heard anybody outside of Newsmax or OANN call it that. And I was like, are we talking about the same- Cars were burning.

Are we talking about the same mostly peaceful protest? Shop fronts were smashed. Yeah, David lost. And then he did a couple of shitty moves after the trigonometry interview. That's unfortunate. It was like just slimy shit. I kind of thought he was better than.

Maybe he's 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. He's 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, I want to be one of the leaders of the tribe of the tribalists. Like people who just feel like, I mean, just Kavanaugh is going to come for you.

It's something that too much. Exactly. I know. Yeah. That's an in joke aboutoke about Chris Kavanaugh. Hello, Chris, love you. 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, 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. Yes. It's not a time for you to be speaking. Yes. Right.

I mean, the other day I was talking about, it just happened to be Gay Pride, Mardi Gras 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.

I like this. For the past quarter of a century, the uniformed police in Sydney have had a float in the Mardi Gras. So gay and lesbian police officers have had their own float in the Mardi Gras as a way of- Are they on the float? What's that?

Are they gay in- Yeah, they're on it. Right. What are they wearing? The uniforms. The normal uniforms or some bastardized gay version? No, no, no. Regular police uniforms.

And in the late 90s, this was a watershed moment because it was a way of taking gay rights and gay pride from being a fringe group that only freaks and perverts were into for the state to say, yeah, exactly. This is legit. This is now a part of a kind of a community celebration that involves everybody. This is universal. Even the people who had previously been beating gays and lesbians in the riots of the 1960s and 70s are now, well not the individual people, but the people who represent the institution that was prejudiced towards gays and lesbians, they now march. Then in the 2010s, the police force officially

apologised to the LGBTQIA+, what am I supposed to say, community, for the historical wrongs, for the harms that have been done by police against gays and lesbians. So everyone had kissed and made up. And then at the recent Gay Pride, which we call Mardi Gras, a week or two prior, a gay couple who were reasonably prominent socialites in Sydney were killed, allegedly, murdered, allegedly, by someone who they knew, who was a young guy who was either an ex or just a stalker, but had known one of them. This was a tragic,

tragic domestic violence situation, essentially, where allegedly, I mean, they've disappeared. The guy then handed himself in to the police. The wrinkle is he was a cop. He only had a firearm because he was a cop. He wasn't on duty. It wasn't a case of police brutality. It was a case of domestic violence where one individual went rogue. And as a result, the organizers of Gay Pride, the Mardi Gras board, convened an emergency meeting and uninvited the police from holding their float because it would be too hurtful

and triggering to other participants to see police officers involved in Mardi Gras. 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 penis or whatever it is, they are triggering. I knew they weren't dressed normally.

is they are triggering. I knew they weren't dressed normally. So this caused 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, I suppose, obsessed with a narrative of victimization instead of pride in the community's power.

Do you feel like Cassandra when you read this? A little bit. So my phone lit up with phone calls from the opinion editors of all the big newspapers saying, what do you think? And do you want to write something for this? And so I wrote something 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. And my basic argument was like, why are we sort of leaning into a narrative of our own fragility and victimization? Like as if

we're incapable, we're going to be triggered and traumatized and it's going to make us feel unsafe to witness this stuff when the original virtue of civil rights in the 1960s and 70s, not just for gays, but for black people as well and all other minorities and women and feminism, the idea was an idea of universalism. It was an idea that all people should be treated equally, regardless of their sex or gender or job or uniform. And that seems to have been replaced now by an ethos of identitarianism and tribalism where we're sort of picking goodies and baddies on the basis of

whether they're in our in-group or out-group. So I was basically writing a piece arguing, can't we reclaim the universalism, the optimism and the sense of power? Can't we take pride in powerfulness instead of powerlessness and stop scratching at the wounds of the past and be inclusive and try to embrace universalism? Of course, that got me a huge amount of shit. I'm sure it did. Yeah. If I was a gay Australian person, the last thing that I would want is

this like gay fragility, right? Like I don't want, you know, this like white fragility. It's like, it's almost being transplanted onto, well, we must tiptoe around and we must... Yeah. onto, well, we must tiptoe around and we must. Yeah. Coleman Hughes new book, the end of race politics. Really good. Is he coming on? Yeah.

Actually, I just sat down with Coleman yesterday in New York and this is to record. Yes, we recorded for my podcast. We 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 cars getting coffee

and to have us walk around. Oh, naturalistic. Very cool. Yeah, so I don't know if you know Thomas Chatterton Williams, who's another really interesting guy. Kind of, yes. 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 shit. And then Coleman Hughes and Jesse Singal. I don't know if you know Jesse. Yeah, I met Jesse at a heterodox thingy thingy. Yeah, right. So the three of us hung out. And so that video will all be, it's not up yet, but that's all coming to YouTube.

It'll be up before this one does. But with Coleman's new thing, you know, he, he kind of highlights the patronizing nature of assuming that black people are very fragile and that we must sort of step on eggshells around them, which is a kind of soft bigotry in a way. And it's the same thing with, again, true equality is when you have to put up with the same level of shit that everybody else does. Yep. And in terms of, 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 newspaper editors called me is because I identify as gay. But the arguments that I was making really have nothing to do with my own gayness. I have a special pedestal because I happen to be married to a man. And I was in a room talking to another bunch of people and they were all sharing my 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 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. We all live in this fucking society. This is a demos. We're in a democracy.

We get to hash it out. We get to have conversations. We get to wrestle with this shit. I want a capacious public square that is 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 global pride day, but presumably a sufficiently smart while reasoned person could have got pretty close to that without having to. Of course they could. I mean, they could look, if you're, if what you're investigating is what it feels like to be in the closet or come out of the closet or what it feels like to walk through the world as a Pakistani woman or what it feels like, you know, to be a five year old transgender person with one leg, then you need to talk to those people to get a sense of what it feels like.

But if what you're talking about is like how society should respond and think about the way that it structures itself, the way that it talks to itself and the way that it deals with grievances, then that's something in which we all have a say, including straight white males. Talk to me about the problem with the anti-woke because, you know, again, being a part of your tribeless tribe, presumably you've got problems with both step number four, which is like the left- wing re-response, but also step number two.

Definitely. Yeah. So there is this cynical industry of anti-woke right wing shit wads really, who will use the specter of cancel culture as an excuse to push beliefs that they've always had in the first place. Cancel culture is something that really began with the right, was perfected by the right. McCarthyism was cancel culture. The censoriousness of the religious right against pornography and, you know, the

hysteria of the war on drugs. Like these were all right wing things. Harry Potter, when Harry Potter first came out? Harry Potter, yes, exactly. Because it was demonic or, you know. The most banned book, the most banned book of the 21st century, Harry Potter, and not banned by the left. No, not yet.

But that's why that lady's thing, the witch trials of J.K. Rowling, was so clever. How good is she? Actually, people should listen to that episode of Uncomfortable Conversations with Megan Phelps-Roper. They've already heard Modern Wisdom conversation with Megan Phelps-Roper. Yeah, already heard the modern wisdom conversation with Megan Phelps-Roper. Yeah, but mine's even better. Right. Mine's even better.

She's great. She's great. She's fantastic. She's so good. But so, where was I just going with that? The anti-woke industry. Right. The anti-woke industry.

There's a cynicism to it. There's a kind of a, like, I can't remember what got you into, what did you just say? We've got the sort of left-wing story goes out, the right-wing response to that, what it causes downstream is for the shit wads industry to spin up. Right. And then the sensoriousness, well, cancel culture was perfected by- Yes, 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 looting their shit. They've got their tits in a tangle because it's satirizing Christianity. And so the right perfected cancel culture and what's happened recently is that the left has lost its focus on the bread and butter of the left, which is uplifting working people and striving for equality and caring about class essentially and wanting economic justice to becoming obsessed with the narcissism of small differences between our tribes and the color of your skin and who you want to sleep

with and what your gender identity is and so 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 McCarthyism, right?

And you know, the, the sorry history. I don't know what that is. Oh, sorry. So in the 1950s, the, in, in the, in 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 in a witch hunt of communists. It was devastating.

It was sort of Soviet style, it was Stalinist, it was incredibly intrusive, and the right loved it because they thought communism was an existential threat and you couldn't express any really progressive ideas without potentially being considered an enemy of the state. That was a sorry chapter in American history and many people who would have been champions of that would now be complaining about the woke cancel culture people. You even see it in real time where you'll have some conservative publications who are

champions of free speech supposedly and they're anti-woke and they're anti-cancel culture. The moment somebody says, 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 fucking 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 am deeply uncomfortable with the extremities of some of the anti-Zionist rhetoric which I think is bordering on anti-Semitism. 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, by talking to each other and wrestling through these things. So don't give me this bullshit if you're on the right by saying that, you know, 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 TikTok phenomenon where, Oh my God, look at this ridiculous protest on some random university campus in the United States. This is the most important thing that we have to focus on every hour of the day. And then the moment someone gets censured for having a position that you disagree with, you pile on as well and you participate in a cancel culture from the other side. Just stop it. 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 offices with kind of metaphorical pitchforks to try to ruin people's lives. And I've come out, you know, 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 trading on eggshells, unable to say what they think, worried about triggering trip wires, worried about the mob coming for them. And we, I mean, it's going to come for you.

You'll reap the whirlwind. You will reap the fucking whirlwind. And even if you don't reap it personally, you will reap having to live in a world in which people feel stifled and suppressed and afraid. Speaking of protests at live talks, did you see Constantine Kissin is in Australia at the moment? It's a shame I'm just missing him,

but I'm actually catching up with him next week. Students tried to break the door down. What? Have you not seen this video? Haven't seen it. I've been traveling for the past week, but I'm actually catching up with him next week. Students tried to break the door down? What? Have you not seen this video? Haven't seen it. I've been traveling for the past week, so I haven't seen anything. You should be locked into the mainframe. It should be directly IV.

So Constantine is at what looks like some prestigious university, big vaulted halls, and he's giving some sort of a talk up on stage. There's these big wooden doors, huge arched motherfuckers and 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 because maybe there's a bit of gap or whatever, puts a little bit of thing, Constance and say something and everything continues, but Douglas Murray as well. There's going to be a lot.

There already is. Yeah. So talk to me, you've got Constantine, Russian immigrant living in the UK and you've got Douglas going over to Australia. What is the, what's happened with your tours so far? Is there petitions for 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 are you in favor of Douglas spreading his hate? Douglas and Josh spreading their spreading hate in Australia. Um, I don't know, man. It's something's happening. Something's happening in the world.

I think since COVID, friends and colleagues of mine who were on the heterodox side of things have careened completely off the rails into far right conspiracy land, and on the left, friends and colleagues of mine have careened off the rails into, if you disagree with us, then by definition, you're peddling ideas that are so bad that you shouldn't be allowed to say them. And yet we live at a time when everybody has more ability to counter ideas than they've ever had, right? Everybody, sure, not everybody can write an opinion piece for the newspaper or have bazillions of podcast listeners

as we have the good fortune to do, but we didn't get there from, because I was born there, right? I mean, we earned it and anybody can earn it now. You have the capacity to push back against bad ideas, but there's something on the left at the moment, which is. Sensorious, hysterical. It's a group think, and it has 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 Stuart Mill and are not aware of the idea that the best way to progress as a society is to have a maximally large conversation about things so that together you can weed out what's 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. That's what the Enlightenment was. That's why we're surrounded by the prosperity that we are, basically, because a few Scots, mostly, came up with the idea that human beings should be maximally tolerant of other ideas and respectful of each other's property,

including intellectual property, and engage with them rationally on the basis of science and reason instead of on the basis of superstition and prejudice. That's why the West has achieved what the West has achieved essentially along with the industrial revolution, which was largely generated by those same principles. And yet there's now a push that is almost messianic in like its self-certainty. It's like people who are like, we don't need all this troublesome talking. We already have the answers. We know that Douglas Murray is a fascist Zionist.

We know that he says intolerable things about Muslims. He's an 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 you, unless you hear him? And when you do hear him, push back, tell him he's wrong. I mean, and then the counter argument always ends up being, well, what if it was a Nazi?

Would you platform a Nazi? What if it was someone saying that we should kill all the Jews? No, I wouldn't platform such a person because that's not an interesting point of view and it's likely to get lots and lots of people immediately hurt. But let's set the bar a little higher than a rather afeat intellectual Englishman who has accurately predicted some of the roiling social issues and cultural schisms that have emerged over the past 20 years. There's an idea from my friend Gwenda 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. Right, right. Yep. And when you called the BLM riots, riots, you were also engaging in hate in a sense, right? It's like the bubble is inescapable. And I mean, this is something I'm also cautious about in, 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...

It's very difficult. Yeah. There's this phenomenon of audience capture where you think that the audience wants something and so you keep on feeding it to them. I'm very wary of that. It's very hard, man. I mean, you know, you are... You want to make things that add value to the world.

You want to embrace your own curiosity, right? That's what you do. You're following your instincts. That's something that's super, super important. It's your best competitive advantage. It's the way that you can stay ahead of trends. It's the way that you come across as unique. And it's also the most enjoyable thing for you to do

because it's just natural outpouring of whatever you're interested in. But you also want to do things like, it's not just your pet project. This isn't a fucking hobby. It's somewhere between a business enterprise, an environmental impact movement, way to nudge the world and leave behind

some sort of legacy that you think is, well, at least one tiny fucking microscopic 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 opposite side, being like some dude yelling about whatever he's interested in in his basement that no one listens to. Like on that spectrum, there is a middle ground that you want to try and achieve. 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 with some of the most intriguing intellects in the world in ways that are considered taboo and in ways that could get you in trouble in a mainstream institution has an appeal. In order to maintain the integrity of that, actually the best sort of lodestar, the best light on the hill is still my own sense of integrity, interest and authenticity.

Because the problem with listening too much to your audience is that the tiny fraction of your audience who actually reaches out to you and tells you what they like and don't like do tend to be the most invested and it's a self-selecting group. I learned this in talk radio. I started as a talk radio producer when I was just starting out and the host of the radio show would sometimes do something and he'd say, look at this, the board's lighting up, everyone's calling in. And I'd be like, well, yeah, but the board has eight lines on it and there are 300,000 people listening, right?

So the measurement of how many people are calling in is just a measurement of is there a sufficiently invested minority of people who are willing to pick up the phone and talk to me? It 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're throwing red meat to because they're super, super ultra fans, that's fabulous. God bless them. I love you. Don't unsubscribe. But nonetheless, at the end of the day, I'm not going to give you exactly what you want because I think there's a bigger pool of people, a kind of a reasonable center. And I should add here, when I say center, some people misunderstand that and they think, oh, Josh is just a kind of person who positions himself between two poles and whatever the left

does and whatever the right does, Josh is going gonna 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, I sometimes call it the radical center. What I mean is a position where I try to evaluate what the most reasonable position is, regardless of whether or not the left or the right happen to agree with that thing.

Sometimes they'll put me on the left, sometimes they'll put me on the right. The average is gonna 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 fealty to your side or the other. And what people see in someone that they can't predict

is an unreliable ally. This is why- I am an unreliable ally. Well, but that's a huge problem. You know, if we know, no need to worry about Josh. He's on board with the trans stuff. He's on board with the gay stuff. He's on board with the abortion stuff.

He's on board with the immigration stuff. He's on board with the gun control and the taxation and all the rest of it. If I know one of your views and from it, I can accurately predict everything else, then we don't need to worry about him. And this is, you know, people have got lots of problems with Sam Harris, but one of the biggest ones that no one really ever talks about is that he's one of the most unreliable allies that you're ever going to have. 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 deranged in some way or whatever thing it is. Because for Sam to arrive at a lot of the positions that he holds, he pays like a pretty high price for them. He regularly loses huge swaths of his audience. He regularly gets made fun of online and Twitter and stuff like that. It'd be way easier for him to either not comment or to comply, you know, what's the like onesie

outfit that I'm a part of and I'll just sort of slot this next view in on the end of that. So the incentive to do something that pisses off any group and this is the same for it doesn't matter if you're not going to podcast or anything, like you're at work and someone brings up something and you just find yourself the compulsion to just go, yeah, yeah, I know, isn't it, isn't it awful? And you go, I don't think that. I don't think that. I don't think, isn't it awful?

I think I completely understand why that thing happened 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 Ben Shapiro or whatever who just like effortlessly sit in toe-curling cringe debate and seem to revel in it like pigs in mud. Cool. That's not, I think most people, and for the, you know, the silent majority of people pleases out there.

Yeah. Understanding there are these poles, there are these sort of compulsions and desires that your inner state has to just, we'll just smooth the water out. But Chris, do you feel comfortable in that state? No, no. Being disagreeable both in personal life and on the show is something I'm actively having to work unbelievably harder. Disagreeable in a personal exchange like

we're having now or disagreeable about an abstract idea when you're publishing it on social media or elsewhere? First one. Right. First one. If you know, that position that I had about like the fucking shiny object cycle, that I think sits somewhere in the middle of a bunch of things, but it's going to piss off a lot of people because they say, no, no, no, it is righteous.

We do need to be able to be pushed back against this stuff. 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, I don't think Sam has that either. And I don't think I have that either, but he and I both share, and I think you do as well if I want to psychoanalyze you a desire to scratch behind the surface of what's really going on in a way that you know is going to piss people off just to get to the intellectual juice of what's actually happening.

I think it's largely a fight between your discomfort at upsetting people on one side and your desire for intellectual satisfaction on the other. Yes. Like curiosity is what pulls you through. Yeah. And it's interesting that you say that it would be easier for Sam Harris to strategically pander 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 to do is the thing that he is doing, which is to be true to himself and to have credibility in his own eyes and to get up in the morning and look in the mirror and respect himself. 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 social justice left, but you are an ally to people who value integrity. And I suspect there's a lot of those people actually. People will disagree with me on particular issues. My gamble here is that they will always value the fact that I'm free from bullshit, that I'm authentic and that I have integrity, right?

I'm an ally on that. So yeah, I'm not going to be an ally on your fucking pet issue. You know, don't come at me because I said the wrong thing about X, Y, or Z, 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 gonna be demonizing them. I'm not gonna be straw manning them.

I'm gonna be trying to articulate things that I disagree with in as generous a way as possible. I'm gonna be epistemologically humble. I'm going to try and understand the limitations of my own knowledge and always hedge a little bit and say, on the other hand, I do understand that other people, other reasonable people can disagree on this particular issue. And I'm an ally on that. I'm an ally. Richard Dawkins once said something about people who get offended when he criticises 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 offended because of what I'm saying. It's a sign of respect to you to believe that you are capable of hearing what I'm articulating. And if it's wrong, tell me why. Don't try to get me fired. Tell me why it's wrong. And I will respect your position. I mean, if it's a really stupid position, then I won't, of course I won't respect it. But I will use the yardsticks of reason and rationality to try to understand you and I will always have 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. If you tell me what you think about corporate tax rates, I can predict with some certainty what you think about climate change. They're two completely fucking different ideas. Why can I make that prediction? Because you've gone down a bloody checklist of yes,

all right, this is what my tribe tells me to believe. You know, on something, take immigration. I think part of, I think one of the reasons why I was initially successful in the United States to the extent that I was, was because Americans are actually quite open to hearing, and I wonder if this is your experience as well, 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. I love migrants. I love living in Sydney, which is incredibly one of the most multi-ethnic cities in the world. I'm a huge fan of immigration and Australia picks its people very, very specifically. In fact, after the Second World War, Australia made a conscious decision that the price to pay to increase the population massively and have one of the highest per capita immigration rates in the world, and I think it's number one on refugee resettlement, one or two Australia, the price that you have to pay to get the populace to agree with that is to have a bloody brutal border policy, which is obviously a lot easier if you're in an island than if

you have a physical border. But you have to make this Faustian pact where you go, if the people feel that they are in total control, then you give them the freedom to be generous towards foreigners and you can have a high immigration rate and a highly multicultural society with very little push back. The reason why you have anti-immigration sentiment as high as it is in the United States and in the 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. 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's, so people would find it hard to peg when I got here. And I think Americans kind of appreciated that. I like, he's a foreigner. I mean, I remember I went on the air, one of the first times I went on the air on HuffPost

Live, we were talking about voter ID laws in the United States, which for people who don't know if they're outside the states, some states introduce the requirement to show ID when you vote at 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 demographics who

they want to vote. But the fundamental principle, everybody else at HuffPost 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 up-to- date, they move more. They basically, 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 racist. Yeah, it's a racist policy, essentially.

But they're blind to class problems and economic problems, unless they're race problems. Unless they're race problems, exactly. 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 plane. Like who are these people who are, now I'm sure this is a very privileged thing. I'm sure lots of people don't have 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 it for the same reasons 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 Grande? Yeah. But isn't it interesting that the only way you've been able to get away with saying that is by not having the left or right presupposition requirement of somebody that was born in this country.

Right. 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 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 a land acknowledgement or an acknowledgement of country before you do anything. This has become part of the culture. So this is 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. It's a way of signaling it. Look, it started out a bit virtue signally. I think in the U S 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. It sounds silly. It does. It sounds really fucking silly. I'll tell you what's really silly is when you're like in a Zoom meeting with

four white middle-aged ladies who are from HR and they all try to do it. Like then it's like, what do we do? Is this a mutual masturbation club? We're all just telegraphing to each other that we're on the correct page. Like it's a virtue 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. Does 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 be, 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 asshole who tries to call everyone out. I understand the compulsion on that. You know, I see, um, I explained this on a Q and a recently about how 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 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 tenor to them.

A lot of them sort of converge onto a few broad buckets of whatever they're talking about. Yeah. But as the channel grows, because you remember the insults, not the compliments, any increase in channel size doesn't feel like an increase in support, it just feels like an increase in hate. Right. Because you start to accumulate more of these outlier events whereby people find a thing

that they think is reprehensible. And I started to notice maybe in the last six months, at least the beginning of why people of whatever Jordan size or whoever size, um, could be motivated to like see conflict everywhere because they are so used to just this barrage of bullshit online. And the problem with a barrage of bullshit is that there is probably some streaks of piss that you could have paid attention to in that bullshit.

And the whole thing is just washed to one side. So what do you do? You see everything is an attack. Everything is something that you can go for. You should go up against. Picking your battles when you're in the middle of a war is unbelievably difficult. It is. 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

fucking champagne problems. Yeah, I get it. Like this is the job you chose. This is the platform. Like, oh, boo hoo. 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 a 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 bullshit from people who would regard themselves as being on my side. Therefore we're both trapped in mirror image echo chambers of, that are extreme-ifying us. The algorithms are also, you know, load that on,

plus load on the fracturing of the media landscape, plus load on the cowardice and group think of mainstream media institutions that are failing to wrestle adequately with some of the issues that you wanna talk about. And you have a recipe for a self-reflexive feedback loop of ever greater polarization, which is only going to lead to ultimately, I do fear,

tearing society apart into some kind of low-grade cultural, genuine civil war, which could mean, you know, at least the temporary collapse of civilization in the 21st century. 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 us 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 about shit crazy, can sort of understand that we're being fairly reasonable about. Talk me through what you see for the next five or 10 years when it comes to culture and the landscape of conversation and stuff like that. I fundamentally disagree with the doomerism, the world is ruined, everything's going to hell in a handbasket perspective. I fundamentally disagree with it because I think that people are super agentic

and the ability for people, both individually and collectively, to adapt and to come together in different ways is essentially unpredictable, 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 sort of... 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 gonna be fine, in fact, great, ultimately. And the next 20 or 30 years are going to be really rough. What a time to be alive. Until we figure out what's going on. And I say that because, I mean, you're a good example of the potential

of the agentic person, right? Transformation, self-reliance, kind of, you know, putting in place, and anyone who's had this experience is aware that it is available to us. You know, in the first year of the pandemic, I put on about 10 kilos, like more than 20 pounds, eating ice cream and watching Netflix. And then in the second year of the pandemic,

I lost like 50 pounds, like 20 kilos. Right? And I've maintained that. Screw you weight gain. Since, yeah. And I started working out and I started eating properly and I started giving a shit. And anyone who's had that experience of sort of reasonably radical and fast transformation. I can change myself, I can change my world.

Yes, that's absolutely possible. And that is available to us in every single second of the day. And I think it's a wonderful thing that you do. And I think it's a wonderful thing that you do. And I think it's a wonderful thing that Joe does to the extent that his content is about that as well. I mean, Joe was 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 doing with these dumb dumbs at Huff Post?

You know, 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 a person who deserved it.

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 microseconds, milliseconds that the engineers know are likeliest to coincide with when you're most vulnerable and susceptible to responding to that notification, to looking at it and to therefore grabbing your attention and dragging you back into their multiverse of madness. Those temptations are very hard to counter.

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

We were just like, hey, we invented the Kalashnikov. Let's all have one. And at some point in the future, I mean, I'm leery about governments regulating things because they're usually so bad at doing it, but there has to be some kind of break on the way that artificial intelligence is gonna intersect with algorithms to be able to devise maximally addictive

and maximally deranging content. And I can't see how the average person is going to be able to resist it regardless of the self actualization that we might want them to appreciate. What's happened in Australia, what's happened in the UK with vapes, you know, with smoking, or these sort of laws that are coming in. And basically 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 feet in the air. It's ridiculous. It's a compulsion. It's so hard. And it's the biggest, still for me now, so many, I think episode 10 I had with Kai Wei, who was the guy that created the Lite Phone, which is now in its second or third generation. I was thinking, 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 variable schedule reward and how the human psychology gets limbically hijacked to stay on time, screen time and stuff like that. All of this stuff, six years later, I'm still only marginally better with my phone use than I was back then.

It is a- Do you have the apps on your phone? You know, social media? I have two phones. So I have one cocaine phone and a kale phone. Cocaine phone has got all of the stuff on. What you really need is three. You really need a third phone.

So you need one, which is, that's my take about phone. That is people that really need me have got that number and it's got Uber and Kindle and Audible and maybe YouTube if you want. And it means I can get about and do whatever. Second one, which is messaging for most people. That's the number that almost everybody has. That's your Instagram, that's whatever.

That's just tethered in, that should be on a string. Like a fucking landline in a house. And then the optional third phone, which is meditation, timer, the stuff that you do if you have a morning routine where you need a- And where does Twitter go on the tethered phone? Twitter goes on the tethered phone.

Twitter goes on phone number two. I mean, I took the apps off my phone about a year ago and it's been dramatic. 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 and 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. It's a great app called Opal, which is like a bit more of a schedulable, intense screen time thing. And Opal's fantastic. I've been using that for about six months now. And me

and all of my friends, we used to do a series on the show called Life Hacks. It's like 25 episodes maybe of this is fucking Life Hacks. We only done 750. So a significant portion of this show is based on these life hacks. And it's like, dude, I got this new recipe for making a toasted sandwich, but this is the very particular sandwich maker that you need. And you need to get the 450, not the 400, because the 400 has like 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 Schiphol Airport is the only set of benches in all of Amsterdam Airport that doesn't have handrails between them. So if you need to have a nap at some point, now you often get tagged in photos from people like,

at 35D dude, I'm so glad that you told me about this. There's a website as well, Sleeping in Airports, which I sometimes look at. Oh, phenomenal. Which will tell you, they'll look at it. You're a big like, frequent flyer. Exactly, I use all my, like I acquire miles at, which will tell you. Oh, yeah, you look like a travel hacker. Exactly. I use all my, like I acquire miles cheaply and then spend them on expensive things. So I'm always flying and, you know, Singapore Airlines first class and stuff and using the

rule that we have is we can tell the guys about it. We can say, look, here's a new thing that I'm using, but until it's past the six month mark, it doesn't count as being a viable hack. So it takes a little waiting for the six month window, but Opal's past the six month mark, it doesn't count as being a viable hack. So it takes a little waiting for the six month window, but 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, which is the equivalent essentially for Mac. So you download cold turkey and you set up schedules throughout the day and you can block any website you want.

You can also block apps. And for me, it's like Twitter, Instagram blocked. And the only way if you want, you can set it to, the only way that you can get around is to donate money to charity. So if you donate a dollar to charity, and it's just linked to your car, 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 been part of my solution, but no, I don't disagree. It's a deranging time where people have basically got a hacker, a human system, human OS hacker sat in their pocket. And I do one of my smartest friends has a question that says, what will

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

we can as it's going on. 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 signally kind of you know white savior type practices that have emerged around the wisdom of the native truths and everything and yet as an indigenous bloke himself he's not like 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 it's not about, for me, it's not about dunking and shitting and like, well, why is everything going crazy? It's about like, let's understand as best we can where everybody is coming from. Quite apart from anything, it's just really interesting. I mean, it's just more, a more interesting

way to live than to constantly be sniping and being snarky. Also to see, you know, to observe conflict where there isn't any. You know, you can very much down regulate whatever another person, even the most sort of aggressive, egregious. And we saw this in nightlife. 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. That's the level of intensity that you have. And so much of the de-escalation involves just like getting the other person to, mostly through questions, understand where you're at. So if someone says something like, it's been looking at how many episodes you've done this year

and there's only been X percent of them are women or something like that. And I'm like, oh, that's okay. Which women would you like to see on the show? Please send me suggestions. And immediately, almost without fail, people go, oh, actually, yeah, this person's, thank you for the suggestion. I genuinely appreciate the suggestion. It really deescalates it. The problem is it's so rare. The reason it deescalates so well is that people are waiting for the cutting sardonic dunk fest throwback. 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 idyllic future, where we are forced to pay the costs, like those women that were making watches with fucking radium. And, you know, we just didn't know the side effects. We just didn't know them back then. And that all of us are going to live in this weird, mentally deranged, tribalistic, limbically hijacked world. And then we die.

And then two generations from now, it's like, 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 in, you know, the entire first 20 years of her life being hunted by Nazis and almost being sent to Auschwitz and all the rest of her family were wiped out.

And at that moment, it was the stakes were high enough that reasonable people got their shit together and they built a fuck ton of bombs, a fuck ton of bombers, and they blew the Nazis out of the water. And, you know, decent societies like Australia and America and, you know, you know, decent societies like Australia and America and, you know, the UK and Canada welcomed in people like my grandmother. My grandmother, my grandmother, when after the war, she went to the port in France where they were loading refugees onto boats to go to the New World. And the person who was signing people in to get on, to allocate people to particular ships said, 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 were just blessed generations. The boomers got lucky. You know, they were born at a time where nothing really happened. They got to watch Seinfeld and watch Bill Clinton play the saxophone and then retire rich after the biggest property boom in the history of the world. I suspect that our fate or maybe our children's fate will be trickier. I mean, quite apart from anything, even if you're sceptical about climate chaos, it is a near certainty that the world is going to get a lot more chaotic,

is going to get a lot more unpredictable. Storms are getting more intense, droughts are getting more intense, hurricanes are getting more intense, bushfires are getting more intense. Droughts are getting more intense. Hurricanes are getting more intense. Bushfires are getting more intense. At the very least, even if you don't regard it as an existential threat, it's gonna be a pain in the ass. It's gonna be an enormously expensive pain in the ass. We're gonna have to rebuild constantly. Your flights are constantly gonna be delayed

because of more thunderstorms. You know, it's just gonna be enormously expensive and annoying. And you add that stress to the stresses of the hijacking of the limbic system and to the stresses of society not knowing what's true and what's false, because anybody can generate an image of President Biden being assassinated and it's completely convincing and it can be disseminated online. Like when AI has the ability to move markets, which it already does by producing some bullshit, like if it can manufacture a convincing example of an

aeroplane 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, the extremes of both sides are flying off the rails. They're in echo chambers of their own. They're victims essentially, I think, to echo chambers. We need to remain even keeled.

I mean, and the last thing I would say about the challenge of this moment, which still relates to algorithms, is that it's not just that you've got an addictive supercomputer in your pocket, which is tugging at your attention. It's also that you're being encouraged to curate your own life in real time.

So it's like, there's a constant sort of demon on your shoulder that is whispering in your ear to say like, is this meal that you're having sufficiently pretty that you should be posting it on Instagram? Or is that thought that you just had sufficiently witty to post it on, to post it to Twitter. So you're in the process of like, kind of, there's this funny thing where like, and of course this predates social media. I mean, I was backpacking around India and we were in, 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, they're amateur photographers and so they had their whiz bang cameras and they're scrambling all over the mountain, scrambling all over the temple and they're getting the right photo and after the sun's risen, we climb all the way back down and they're comparing their cameras and I would 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 supercomputers 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 shiny object. Live, man, live. Josh Slapps, ladies and gentlemen, Josh, I appreciate you. I'm really, really glad that you came through and we managed to find time to do this. Me too, me too. It's an honor.

Thanks for talking to me. It's great. Why should people go? They want to keep up to date with all the things you're doing. Uncomfortable Conversations, the Substack is probably the easiest place to start. UncomfortableConversations.substack.com. You can subscribe there for free.

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. Thanks, mate.

Thanks, Josh. Cheers.