The Rich Roll Podcast - An Uncomfortable Conversation With Josh Szeps: Media Silos, Disagreeing With Grace, Protecting Liberal Democracy, & What The 2024 Election Was Really About

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

Josh Szeps is a renowned broadcaster, host of Uncomfortable Conversations, and a former voice of Australia’s public radio who brings discernment to our most difficult dialogues. This conversation explores why genuine dialogue matters in an age of tribal certainties. We discuss the derangement of our information landscape, the erosion of shared truth, and how to navigate today’s most contentious issues with grace and humor. Josh is a rare voice who can untangle complex issues without amplifying division. Our exchange is both timely and necessary. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors:  Aura Frames: Exclusive $35-off Carver Mat 👉AuraFrames.com Use code RICHROLL at checkout to save! Bon Charge: Use code RICHROLL to save 25% OFF 👉 boncharge.com LMNT: Get a FREE Sample Pack with any drink mix purchase👉drinkLMNT.com/RICHROLL Eight Sleep: Use code RICHROLL to get $600 OFF your Pod 4 Ultra purchase when bundled 👉eightsleep.com/richroll Momentous: 20% OFF all of my favorite products  👉livemomentous.com/richroll Roka: Unlock 20% OFF your order with code RICHROLL  👉ROKA.com/RICHROLL Birch: For 20% off ALL mattresses and 2 free eco-rest pillows 👉 BirchLiving.com/richroll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange

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of protein or creatine. And if you don't want to subscribe, you can still get 20% off all my favorite products. That's livemomentous.com slash richroll. Thank you. going through an information revolution as profound as the discovery of fire or the industrial revolution was, the gatekeepers have been bypassed and you get a splintering of reality. In an age where outrage is currency and division is what's profitable, Josh Epps has charted a very different course. As the host of Uncomfortable Conversations,

he creates space for genuine dialogue in a landscape that's kind of engineered for conflict. He's what you might call a principled provocateur, somebody who challenges both sides of our increasingly polarized culture, not to inflame, but actually to illuminate. I mean, I think the problem is us. In reality, we're ruining this country because we aren't talking to each other. This is why I spend most of my time looking at how we have conversations rather than taking a position about things. Turn the dial down, people. But Josh's most valuable contribution isn't sparking controversy. It's maintaining ethical standards in an attention economy that rewards their abandonment. So while others exploit chaos, Josh is a guy who seeks clarity.

And his story is about bridging divides and pursuing truth in an era where both seem increasingly rare. Today, we explore our fractured landscape. We talk about the role of new media in democracy and how we might find our way back to common ground. Nothing less than the sort of fate of the 21st century hangs on whether or not we can figure out a way to sustain liberal democracies, combat climate chaos, combat misinformation, maintain free speech, all in an environment in which we actually sound like we're talking with each other and collaborating on things instead of taking cheap shots at each other. So how do we solve this problem, Josh? It's great to have you here. I'm a longtime fan, first time caller.

Long time listener, first time caller. Whatever you say in radio parlance. Yeah. It's funny when I started hosting radio properly and people would call up and actually say that. I'd be like, oh, people actually say that. They do say that. Callers actually say that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Long time listener, first time caller. And I'm like, what do you say to that?

I don't know. Yeah, I guess, right? Well, welcome. Thank you. Welcome. You are here in Los Angeles at a very interesting moment in time that I think makes the potential for this conversation all the more interesting as a result. And I think of you as somebody who maybe I don't agree with all the time, but somebody who I appreciate for the level of intentionality that you bring to difficult conversations. You're wicked smart.

And not only are you kind of willing to have these challenging, quote unquote, uncomfortable conversations. You're wicked smart. And not only are you kind of willing to have these challenging, quote unquote, uncomfortable conversations, that's the name of your podcast, but to conduct them with grace and wit and humor and intelligence and most importantly, like journalistic principles.

So, I mean, how do you think about your approach to what you do? Well, thank you. That's very kind. I agree with all of that, especially the good bits. The idea is basically that there are things that we have lost the ability to talk honestly about and that we're getting worse and worse at talking in a bullshit-free way with one another, especially across political and cultural divides. I think everyone can sort of sense that. And so uncomfortable conversations is not so much about like creating an uncomfortable atmosphere in the studio. In fact, quite the reverse. You sort

of want to have a comfortable sense of comedy in order to tease out ideas that might be uncomfortable. So like the idea is get fascinating people to talk about some of the things that would make people uncomfortable if someone was to express a strident opinion about them at work or at a cocktail party or at the pub. battered around by algorithms. Obviously, we all know that we are being presented with a vision of the world that is really just a mirror onto our own preconceptions. Social media looks like a window, as they say, but it's actually a mirror that amplifies your own biases, that reinforces things you already believe, that demonizes things you don't believe. And so I see my role as just sort of trying to help nudge people 10% out of their bubble and talk in ways that are maximally sort of intellectually empathic, so to speak, and try to take the most generous version of my opponent's arguments seriously rather than to caricature them. I mean, I think nothing less than the sort

of fate of the 21st century hangs on whether or not we can figure out a way to sustain liberal democracies, combat climate chaos, combat misinformation, maintain free speech, all in an environment in which we actually sound like we're talking with each other and collaborating on things instead of taking cheap shots at each other.

Yeah. Conversation matters. You know, I really think that it is the tool to kind of, you know, maintain the integrity of not just, you know, liberal democracy, but problem solving in general. But we are in this very deranging kind of media ecosystem

where we are in these silos. And yet we all believe we're the only ones that actually like are seeing outside of our silos. Like the more siloed we are, the more we believe that we are not siloed, right? Like, and intelligence doesn't seem to have any valence when it comes to that. Some of the smartest people.

Our ability to kind of objectively perceive our own kind of perceptual limitations is a very strange kind of human quality. Yes, that's right. And I mean, I'm not immune to that, obviously. I mean, obviously, I have my own preconceptions and I have my own biases. But I think just being, as Aussies say, fair dinkum, which means like a straight shooter about the blind spots that you know you must have, is the key out of this. Like, you don't have to actually understand why a person would believe something that you regard as being beyond the pale in order to know that they do believe that just as fervently as you believe the things that you do. And in

order to sustain a thriving democracy and in order to grope our way towards, you know, some kind of next phase of civilization, we're all going to have to be communicating with each other in, I mean, we basically, we don't have a choice, right? Like we're not going to, we're not going to secede. Like, so there has to be a way for Elon Musk and AOC to live in the same country and not spend all of their time just shouting at each other. I mean, you can do that. You can have a world where you basically have a low grade civil war humming along culturally in the background constantly, and nobody collaborates on anything. And it's a winner-take-all kind of Machiavellian sort of world where whoever wins 50.1% of the vote just gets to be as tyrannical as they want to and shits all over the other side. You can do that. It's all over the other side. You can do that.

But why would you choose that over a world of understanding and collaboration? And like every time I talk like this, I understand there'll be a certain cohort of people who think, well, that's all very good. But like, I mean, if we'd spoken this way in the 1930s in Germany, then, you know, you would have been collaborating with Nazis. And like there is no place for hate. And like, you know, what are you just going to allow the transphobes to steamroll everybody on Twitter? Or like, this is a moment of intense peril, Josh. Don't you understand that the fascists in the Trump administration are about to take us back to the 13th century? Listen, at every stage in human history and every place, there have been high stakes, mostly. Maybe not like the 1990s in America, right? But at most times, there have been reasons to man the barricades. But you have to be extremely judicious about when you choose to do so. And you

have to make sure that in doing so, you're not further inflaming and alienating the other side. I mean, one of the great tragedies, I think, of what's happened to the left in the past five or 10 years as it's taken its eye off the ball, and I regard myself as broadly on the left in terms of economic justice and, you know, remedying disadvantage. But what's happened to the left in taking its eye off the ball of bread and butter sort of working class issues and becoming much more focused on elevating traditionally marginalized groups and turning the volume up on identity is that I think it has actually inflamed the right. Like it sees itself as the defender against the far right, but in being faintly ludicrous, it has pushed more people into the arms of the right.

And I don't think you'd get a second Trump term if you hadn't had the Great Awakening, for example, although I'm not going to be reductive and say that's the only thing going on. So you're never going to be able to win over the extremes on either side, but to regard those extremes as being fixed in place and implacable, and to regard the middle as being unwinnable, is to be too defeatist. I believe that there's a silent majority of people who are fundamentally reasonable, who if you came together on some of the most hot button issues, the ones that I touch

on uncomfortable conversations all the time, that are tricky to talk about, whether that's immigration, whether that's gender rights, whether that's the Me Too movement, whether that's transgender bathrooms, whether that's, you know, pick your, you know, hot-button issue that if someone started talking about it, you know, in a bar, everyone's anuses would tighten up a little bit. On all of those issues, there's got to be at least 50% of people who are willing to hear you out if they feel like they're being heard. Like someone the other day was just talking to me, a friend of mine who's very into like LGBTQIA plus activism. And he was saying, like, I don't care if you think that the extremes of sort of like woke social justice activism were a contributing factor to Trump's election. I'm not going to betray my own values. If I believe that a trans girl has a right to use a girl's bathroom, I'm not going to throw her under the bus because you don't want Donald Trump to be elected. And I was like, okay, but

you would probably have been able to achieve more for the actual reality of trans rights on the ground if we had met people who had reasonable concerns, not the crazy transphobes, the soccer mums in the Midwest who have concerns about whether or not there's going to continue to be a safe space for their cisgender daughters to be able to go and go to the bathroom, right? If you just met them and said, I hear you, I understand that you have concerns about this, let's hash out some kind of thing that suits both sides. Maybe we have a third bathroom, maybe like, you know, let's just talk, but do so from a position of respect for other people's concerns and a fundamental willingness to believe in a position of respect for other people's concerns and a fundamental

willingness to believe in the capacity of conversation to change people's minds and to make progress, and things would be far better. You wouldn't have anti-trans bills being passed in states in this country if there hadn't been a hunkering down and an antagonism on both sides and this kind of ratcheting up where it's like a war of attrition and everyone's lobbing, you know, as much arsenal as they possibly can. And that just inflames things. It doesn't lead anywhere good. Yeah. I mean, politics are reactionary by nature now, and all of the, you know, kind of amity that used to kind of exist between parties has been replaced with enmity. And it is a situation of when it all costs. And I'm often left thinking like, how do you create that bridge back towards a situation in which you're not so focused on winning the battle at the cost of losing the war? And it

requires like reaching across the aisle. Like I had Cory Booker here and he was, he gave example after example about how he's tried to work in a bipartisan way to like solve real problems. And that's really the only way that you can get things done. And as somebody who grew, you know, I grew up in Washington and was, you know, around like an inside the beltway kind of like environment growing up and you go to a cocktail

party that your parents, you know, your parents' friends or whatever, and there's Republicans and Democrats and like, they're all kind of like, they may have differences of opinion on policy, but they could like, you know, kind of cohere as a collective in a community sense. And that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. I was talking about this with a friend recently who also grew up in Washington, who's my age. And he said, you know what changed at all was when they passed the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978. Because prior to that, airline travel was so expensive

that all the representatives, Congress, they all lived in Washington. So they were there having to like be around each other and, you know, all the time. But once airline prices went down, everybody just commuted. So nobody actually lives in Washington anymore. It's a very kind of Malcolm Gladwell-y and Thomas Friedman-like reductionist. Like if you actually, let's do a whole podcast episode. They're not actually like hanging out anymore together, right?

I'm skeptical of single industry, of single explanations. I mean, I, you know, I decline the temptation to be reductive about this, but I think there is something to be said for that when you think of like the lack of kind of interest in reaching across the aisle in any kind of way. So there is that. I mean, there are lots of interesting, quirky, anecdotal reasons why politicians are awful at the moment. I'm sure that if you spend all your time hanging out at like steakhouses in Washington, D.C. with members from across the aisle, then you're more likely to collaborate on legislation. But I actually think that's just too reductionist. I think that politicians are fundamentally, I don't blame politicians as much as most peopleist. I think that politicians are fundamentally, I don't blame politicians as much as most people do. I think they're mostly trying to do a good job and they're mostly reactive to public sentiment in a democracy. I mean, I think the

problem is us. The problem is actually not them. We spend a lot of time on both sides, on Fox News and MSNBC, talking about how the other side's politicians are, you know, trying to ruin this country. In reality, we're ruining this country because we aren't talking to each other in a fearless, like, I don't want to be mistaken for calling for phony amity, right, or papering over differences. The point is to actually talk about the differences in ways that are real and that are fearless. And some of those differences sometimes aren't even across the political aisle. Sometimes those differences are within the political aisle. I mean, look at the civil war that's taken place on the left in the past 10 years over social justice

issues and so on. So the struggle for the soul of what it means to be a progressive in America has been a kind of a tortured and highly, I think, censorious and judgmental and poorly carried out battle over the past five or ten years. It's been, you know, this shift that I was articulating of the left going from a place that cares about, you know, helping working people against the elites to an essentially elite university educated set of ideologies about social justice. That was carried out not really through persuasion. It was carried out through threats.

It was carried out through censorship. It was carried out through exclusion. There's a sense that the left is a bunch of scolds. A little bit. And there's a condescension. We know what's best. We're going to create these programs that are going to make your life better. The parties have been flipped upside down. So the right sort of held domain over kind of moral rectitude for a long time. And they were sort of the scolds around what you can and can't say or should or shouldn't say. I mean, this is one of the great hypocrisies of the

right at the moment, that as Tucker Carlson bangs on about cancel culture, McCarthyism was cancel culture. And then the moral majority. The moral majority was cancel culture. The concern about violent video games was cancel culture. The right pioneered cancel culture. The Crusades were cancel culture. What's happened recently is that the left, which was previously the side that cared about smaller liberal ideals and having the largest tent possible and letting your freak flag fly a little bit and sort of tolerating a diversity of opinion, has become quite puritanical, quite censorious, quite schoolmarmish, quite finger-waggy. become quite puritanical, quite censorious, quite schoolmarmish, quite finger-waggy. There's a theory that in politics, the side that wins is the side that seems to be having fun.

And it used to be the case that the left was the side that had fun. If you were a rebellious young person in the 60s, you were on the left. You were at Woodstock, man. And now, if you're a rebellious young person, you're probably on the MAGA train. Yeah, at the left. You were at Woodstock, man. And now, if you're a rebellious young person, you're probably on the MAGA train. Yeah, at the UFC. Yeah, you're probably UFC, right? So, what's happened? So, the left has gone from being this kind of rebellious, rambunctious place where a whole lot of people could think a lot of crazy ideas, and the right was this very 1950s sort of buttoned up defender of conservative institutions to now the left being a defender of elite small C conservative institutions. And the right being this bonkers clown car, which frankly, if you're a kind of disenfranchised young person or someone who feels left behind by the system, seems kind of fun. Seems kind of fun. You're less interested in incremental change.

If you're a young male and, you know, perhaps not as well educated as you might be, and you're looking around and you're not seeing a lot of opportunity and, you know, a lot of people who are struggling and your job prospects are limited, and you're not hearing anything from the left that is really speaking to addressing those problems other than this idea that inflation is going down and the job market is improving. But when you look around, you're not really seeing that. And then you have this chaos agent on the other side who wants to blow the whole thing up. There's like a dopamine hit with that. Let's just see what's going to happen. Yes. There should be leftist ways of countering that dopamine hit with more dopamine hits. Like if we were the party of, of love and sex and like money for everybody and let

it rain cash and like a fun version of progressivism, then maybe there'd be dopamine in that. But there's no dopamine in being told that we live in an irredeemably racist society that, you know, you have to watch what you say and be careful what you think because your words can be violence against people who have been traditionally disenfranchised and make sure that you acknowledge the traditional owners of the land before you hold a meeting and make sure that you don't misgender someone. In fact, go further than that. You should be putting pronouns in your email signature now. And like, you can feel somewhat swept along by this, like, okay, okay, I get it.

Like, stop fucking telling me what to do every second of the day. Can I just be an independent human being bumping into other people in a sort of a democratic cacophony? Do we all have to be singing from the same hymn sheet? And yes, ma'am, yeah, this is okay. I'll do it this way. I'll do it that way. There's something very kind of institutionalized about the way that the left has become. And young people don't want that.

Nobody really wants that. I mean, people of color don't want that. You know, minorities don't want that. Well, the election was certainly like a reactionary referendum on that. Yes. Loud and clear, I think. I mean, but I don't know whether we're going to be able to take the lesson because I don't know whether our conversational institutions are up to the task, which is kind of brings us back to the purpose of my podcast. So I had a radio show on conventional radio in Australia. It was a daily three hour talkback radio show on the public broadcaster, which in Australia is a lot more popular than NPR is here. It's more like what the BBC is in the UK. And it gave me a front row seat to the challenges that legacy media face in both bringing in a diversity of views, because you don't want it to just be a bunch of straight white males, you know, as it was in the past, but at the same time, not allowing the sort

of diversity mandate, the kind of institutionalized HR bureaucratic instantiation of diversity to be a way to chill different ideas. And it has become that. I mean, I think we sort of sense that there's a sameness to mainstream media at the moment. There's been a sort of compliance with what seem like edicts issued from, I don't know where. I mean, it's not like it's coming from the top down. It's more like a self-reinforcing kind of pool of like, we've all just agreed that we only talk about things in this very respectful way that has been handed down to us by progressive activist groups. Well, it's mirrored on the right also with Sinclair Broadcasting and Fox and there's a version of that that mimics the other side. partisan news broadcasts was something that, you know, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes perfected.

And the left is not as bad. It still doesn't have an equivalent that is as shameless, I don't think, as the misinformation on the right. But we do have to check ourselves a little bit and confess that although we don't operate in as flagrantly and shamelessly a way in terms of like carrying water for our side of politics. We inhabit these kind of groupthink echo chambers where because we regard ourselves as being on the right side of history, we will elide, you know, whether it's different ideas about lockdowns during COVID, different ideas about transgender pediatric treatment for kids, different ideas about the complexion of immigration or the rate of immigration, different ideas about how to integrate multicultural groups into society, different ideas about what should constitute inappropriate behavior between the sexes at the workplace and whether or not people should be able to date, you know, or hit on their colleagues. Like all of these things, it felt like as those hot button issues came up, people in the legacy media, people in my milieu, all kind of agreed on what the correct side was tacitly, and then just sort of continued inhabiting that side.

And I think that alienated a lot of people. A lot of people were just like, continued inhabiting that side. And I think that alienated a lot of people. A lot of people were just like, where is the interesting, unexpected voice here? And that's why I left the legacy media and started doing uncomfortable conversations. Cause there is obviously an appetite from people for the interesting, unexpected angle where it's like, oh, okay. You know, like people shouldn't tune into my show and be able to, if they, if they read what the subject is, they should not be able to jot down on a napkin in advance what my take on it is going to be. It's sort of crazy that we've come up, that we live in a world in which if you tell me what you think about climate change, I can with some accuracy predict what you're going to think about corporate tax rates. Like what the hell do the two have to do with each other?

And I can probably predict what you think about transgender bathrooms and I can probably predict what you think about corporate tax rates. Like, what the hell do the two have to do with each other? And I can probably predict what you think about transgender bathrooms, and I can probably predict what you think about immigration. It's like we've been handed a checklist of ideas, and we're supposed to hang our brains up at the door and go down the checklist and go, all right, yeah, okay, so if you're on the right, then you have to believe this, this, this, this, and this, and if you're on the left, you have to believe this, this, this, this, and this. By definition, it's almost certain, unless you believe that we live in the first time ever in human history anywhere where one side is right about everything, you're obviously going to be wrong about some things if you agree with

everybody else in your thought bubble. Right. And the institutions just don't make room for any of that kind of nuance. Like, I get that. And I think it's at the root of the distrust in legacy media institutions and why, you know, they're on the decline right now. And, you know, viewership is now fractured across. We were talking about the atomization of media. I mean, basically, we have this new media landscape that's quickly becoming the new institution of media, right? And within that, obviously there's a vast spectrum of voices and levels of journalistic integrity, but there is something to be said for the integrity of the fourth estate. And when we have the kind of decline in journalistic trust, like where does that leave us? You know, when you talk about like how we're in our silos and, you know, we rarely venture outside of them to have difficult conversations with people who don't see the

world the same way, within that like is a bigger issue, which is it's degrading not only our ability to communicate, but it's enhancing this idea that, that like we live in different realities. Like if we, if we can't even agree on like what's real, then how are we actually supposed to even have a productive conversation within that? Totally. And, and so I'm glad you raised that because there's both a conversational sort of cultural element to this division, which is the one that I've been whatever it is that you want to listen to and how you want to consume your news, and when a majority of people get the majority of their news from social media algorithms, whose only mandate is to keep them engaged, you know, and to maximize time on site, and therefore to feed them things that they're likeliest to comment on or like or share,

then the gatekeepers have been bypassed and you get a splintering of reality. I mean, my criticisms of legacy media and of public broadcasting are made in a spirit of wanting to bolster it and make it sort of infectious and ubiquitous. Like, I really believe that the only, I think public broadcasting in particular is indispensable, and I wish America would invest more in it. I mean, just to articulate for a second the wonky sort of philosophical justification for it, Habermas, who's this German philosopher, came up with the idea of publicly funding broadcasting and the news, because his idea was there are two big ways in which the information you receive can be biased. One is it could be government information, in which case it's obviously biased towards the

government. Or if you leave it up to the market and say, okay, free speech, government doesn't get to tell us what to say, then it'll be biased by the corporate incentives that powerful people want it to say, right? Because someone's going to own those news organs, someone's going to want to make money from them, and it's going to be perverted in other ways. I mean, just look at the way that so much of the media is captured by the pharmaceutical lobby or by the oil industry and so on. So his idea was, get the government to fund it and then build a firewall that prevents the government from having any control over it. So you've carved out this kind of liminal space for a media organization to have total editorial freedom and also total corporate freedom. It's not going to

be influenced by big money and it's not going to be influenced by politics. That was the idea behind the BBC or the Canadian or Australian or European equivalents. Theoretically, it's the idea behind NPR and PBS, but they're so underfunded that they have to rely on sponsors anyway, and they can't produce content that people really want to watch or listen to on a widespread basis in the United States. But I think we need to like bolster and reinforce those places as playgrounds for a whole range of different ideas, because what's happened in places that have, and also at NPR and PBS here as well, but I was going to say in places that have really powerful public broadcasters, they've become a little bit cute with their own sort of base of mostly white

university educated social justice types, which means that they're no longer kind of brave, courageous playgrounds where the whole nation can come together and wrestle with ideas in provocative, controversial ways. They've now become ways to decide what's true, decide what's not true, decide who's good, decide who's bad, decide what's hate speech and what's not hate speech. I've created, ruffled a lot of feathers in Australia recently because Australia is trying to figure out what to do with online misinformation. And Australia has, for example, has appointed an actual role in the Australian government to oversee the internet and communications. Elon Musk calls this person-

There's something going on in the UK like that as well, I think. That's right. Yeah. So I was recently on a panel show in Australia, which is their big weekly television show that discusses the news. And I was on with the person who's in charge of all this stuff. And I was sort of making the free speech case, so to speak. Elon Musk calls this person Australia's censorship commissar because he's always one with a good turn of phrase.

But the idea is try to figure out how to manage the explosion of bullshit online. And how do you do that in a way that doesn't tamp down on people's freedom of speech and doesn't sort of reinterpret every dissident idea as being beyond the pale? This came up when the London riots were on. There were race riots in the middle of 2024. And you had some people tweeting things like, civil war is inevitable, is something that Elon Musk tweeted. And Douglas Murray was sort of saying, I've been warning about this for years. And as a result, you had London police being encouraged to actually investigate and prosecute some of the people who were saying that they'd been warning about this because it was interpreted that the warning was itself an incitement, right? An incitement to violence. Now, that basically frames the problem of online misinformation and hate speech as being one in which it's impossible to warn about controversial things that might come to pass because in the warning of it, you're perceived as being like a participant to it.

So then it basically means that there's a thought police who are preventing you from being able to articulate your concerns. I mean, similarly during COVID, it was like, we all saw this sort of ideological crackdown against provocative or left field ideas where initially we were being told that it wasn't airborne and that you didn't need masks, but then of course you did need masks. And I think that if there had been a greater tolerance for diversity of viewpoints earlier on, you wouldn't have had the subsequent backlash of bullshit that's come about with ivermectin and vaccine scepticism. Now, it may be that there's a trade-off there

in terms of public health and you need to sort of tell necessary lies at some stages, but that's a job for government. That's not a job for the media. Like the media and broadcasters should be much more willing to have much more courageous conversations than they are. We're brought to you today by Bonn Charge. It's holiday season, everybody. That means we're all thinking about gifts.

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But I think that, you know, there was a lot of fear and it was a quickly evolving thing. And, you know, science was trying to get their hands on it. And public health initiatives and talking points, you know, kind of came down as mandates, but this thing was always shifting. And I think it left people with a, you know, a real distaste for being told what to do when it turned out that things might, you know, weren't exactly as they originally were conceived. So like one specific example on that, I know more than four people just in my friendship group of 50 people who in America left the left and have, you know, didn't vote for Kamala Harris because of the trauma that they endured opposing school

shutdowns during COVID. These are left-wing people who felt that schools were being closed too readily and for too long, and for speaking out on that, were totally pilloried about how they were complicit in killing grandma and that they were, you know, COVID denialists or something because they wanted to see the balance of school closures. I mean, many Americans may not understand just how radical the school closures in some American states were by international standards. You know, people think about Australia as being like a poster child for lockdowns. Schools staying open were always a priority in Australia. I mean, there were only a few weeks when schools were closed in most of Australia. Here, you know, it went on for months or years. And was that purely because of

epidemiology? Or was that also because teachers unions are powerful and fat 55-year-old teachers who might be at high risk of dying from COVID didn't want to go into a classroom, even though it would have been in the children's best interest to do so? I think there's a higher level of compliance in Australia also. Yes. Like just the sensibility around these sort of things is very different than it is in America. America is unique in the way it kind of values personal liberty. Definitely. that we lose sight of the fact that personal liberty can only exist when there is a collective responsibility to the commons.

Like that's what makes personal liberty possible. And that sort of gets lost in that equation. Well, it's a very narrow conception of personal liberty. So it's personal liberty as defined as freedom from the government imposing a rule on me. It's not personal liberty defined as freedom and capacity to achieve the things I want and to live a flourishing life in general. It's a narrow libertarian government-oriented conception of liberty. I recently had on my show, Uncomfortable Conversations, an economist who's just written a book about COVID and about Australia's response and the international response. And he's really interesting because

he's not carrying water for anybody. He's an economist, so he's very data-oriented. It's sort of like the Freakonomics of the cost-benefit, how do you balance people's lives against the monetary cost, against the imposition on people's freedoms. And it's absolutely fascinating. Your American listeners should go back and listen to that episode if they're interested at all in sort of, you know, what the hell happened in Australia. Because his basic take was, early on in the pandemic, there was the opportunity to shut Australia's borders completely and launch a massive contact tracing effort to eliminate community spread of the virus altogether. And we did. Within nine weeks of March of 2020, after the borders had been closed, every single person coming into the country was being

housed in a quarantine hotel. Those were only returning Australians, obviously. No foreigners were allowed to come in at all from anywhere. And everyone stayed at home, huge contact tracing effort, and the virus was quashed. Then you look at the subsequent 18 months when most of Australia was completely free. I mean, I remember in February of 2021, I posted on Instagram of me, I was at Hamilton, you know, sitting with 1,500 other people,

no social distancing. We were all wearing masks. February of 2021, the Northern Hemisphere was, this was Delta, right? No, it was, what was the one before Delta, whatever that was. I mean, it was horrendous. I mean, you know, there was no freedom. There was no freedom of action in most big metropolises in the United States and Europe in February of 2021 because there was a raging pandemic and nobody is stupid enough to want to go out to a bar if they know that they might get really sick for two weeks,

that it's not worth it. So how do you define freedom? I was with 1,500 other people watching Hamilton and the comments on my Instagram were hilarious. I mean, all these Americans going like, this is literally giving me a panic attack, just looking at being sitting around that sheer number of people. Then Australia dropped the ball completely by not getting vaccines quickly enough.

But the whole illusion of the massive Australian lockdown happened because once the vaccines were already arriving, then Delta, that was when Delta hit. All of the epidemiological assumptions that public health officials had made went out the window with the infectiousness of Delta. And suddenly, it escaped into the community. And so then Australia was faced with the question of, like, nobody in Australia has been exposed to this disease yet. So we're basically in the position that the rest of the world was in, in March of 2020. But at that time, if you wanted to travel to Australia, you had to quarantine in a hotel for like two weeks before you could then. Totally. Well, yeah. But I mean, so what basically happened was we had to decide, do we do a hard lockdown while we all get vaccinated? And so that's going to be like a three month long process to vaccinate 25 million people.

And that was the decision that was made. And what was the reason why Fox News was going crazy and that's going to be like a, you know, a three month long process to vaccinate 25 million people. And that was the decision that was made. And what was the reason why Fox News was going crazy and why people might have some vague memory of like, you know, wasn't Australia really, really harsh is because long after the horse had bolted from the barn in the Northern Hemisphere, when everyone sort of thought, well, we just have to get on with our lives again, because we're already almost two years into this thing. Australia was just experiencing it for the very first time and had these very harsh lockdowns while we were all getting vaccinated. But it's more a time shift thing than an actual duration of lockdown thing. And if you actually look at the, quite apart from the fact that we had 90% fewer COVID deaths than the United States did per capita, if you look at just

in terms of the actual lockdowns and the duration of school closures and things, it was actually not severe in most of Australia. So I say all of that just to say like, this is an extremely complicated issue. A lot of misconceptions can happen about it, but the best way to sort of figure out what's true about it is to look at the data, to be respectful of other people's ideas and to arrive at a conclusion that's sort of based on mutual empathy rather than alienating other people by insisting that if they question school closures, they must be, you know, I don't know, on the side of misinformation or something. Well, I think most people have a perspective on what happened, what went wrong, how it could have been different. And then they sort of seek out information sources that kind of confirm that perspective. And then they sort of seek out information sources that

kind of confirm that perspective. And there's plenty of those people out there. So true. I was just listening to a podcast about Israel and Gaza and talk about an issue on which people will find whatever they want to find. Like this, you know, this Israeli, left-wing Israeli sort of pacifist analyst was saying like, so much of the commentary in the West is someone just Googling Palestinian leadership Nazism. And you know what? You'll get eight pages of results about how Palestinian leaders have said things that were pretty Nazi. And if you Google Israeli leader, you know, Zionism, Judea and Samaria, then you'll find lots of quotes from senior Israelis that make it sound like Israel is never going to leave the West Bank and Gaza

and has always been a colonial occupying power. You get what you look for. I mean, there is enough stuff out there now. The world is complicated. Like, you know, the reason why the Israelis and the Palestinians have not been able to reach a peace settlement is not because they didn't listen to Western progressives closely enough. It's because they know a lot more about the situation than Western progressives do. There is no way for us to appreciate the complexity of the world simply by cherry-picking sources of information that are going to reinforce our pre-existing prejudices. I had a, you've all know Harari in here, and he's talking about like, you know, the fact that we have all of this information, access to information, this sort of implicit idea that we had that this would make the world better, right, is actually, you know, proven to be false.

Like the truth sinks to the bottom when you have that situation. The truth sinks to the bottom when you have that situation. And that creates a real problem in terms of creating a shared sense of reality. And for the average person to just figure out what's real, what's true, what's not true, and to kind of make sense of their own environments. I mean, I also love his point that democracy is predicated on us all sharing a truth. Right. If you can't agree upon a shared truth, you can't cohere as a collective. You are no longer a demos if you cannot cohere around a central thesis and a central set of ideas and then debate those ideas with each other in a way that is kind of respectful and, you know, free from partisan nonsense.

So how do we solve this problem, Josh? You know what I mean? It doesn't seem to be moving in the right direction. No. Does it? I mean, parallel conundrum to the one that uval is pointing out is we invented social media with the objective of creating connection that was zuckerberg's original conceit create connection it's still facebook's mantra meta's mantra creating connection anytime you create connection rich between two people, you're increasing harmony in the world. You know, we're increasing the thriving of human civilization by creating connections. It has turned out to be fatuous nonsense. Creating connection between a Russian troll farm and a low information voter in the Midwest is not a good connection

to be making. You know, creating a connection between a vaccine conspiracy theorist and the mother of a newborn child is not a good connection to be making. There are all kinds of connections that are terrible. Creating connections between terrorists is not a good connections to be making. What has ended up happening is, because it's very hard to measure good connection, social media companies use proxies for good connections, which is, you know, engagement. As long as you're on the site, you know, writing things, sharing things, liking things, commenting on things, that is by definition in the eyes of the social media companies, a valuable thing. Now it's valuable

in a literal sense to their advertisers and to their bottom line, which is why they refuse to see that it might not be valuable in cultural ways. It's very difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it, as the old adage goes. So they seem to be clueless about the possible downsides of this. But we need a new way to measure what connectedness is, because it's obvious that this tool that was supposedly going to build bridges, this tool that in the 1990s, when the internet was coming about, people thought was going to be a way to democratize information and bring people together. You know, no longer would people be divided by geography.

No longer would people be divided by ideology because we'd all be on this platform together. Has actually just led to a fracturing and a splintering of all of us. And as we hunker down into our, you know, subcommittees and subgroups and thought silos, how do you break out of that? I mean, on an individual basis, I think people just have to stop having their information diet processed through algorithms. I mean, anything that is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that shows you what it knows that you want to see, or you really, really don't want to see, which is sort of the same thing,

is odious and is contrary to forming a basis for a civilized society. But on a civilizational and cultural and societal level, I think we need a radical reform of the way that social media companies do business. I mean, I think you need to rewrite the algorithms and you probably have to do that either through regulation or by just an exodus en masse away from social media companies that are using algorithms. A lot of interesting people have a lot of interesting ideas about how you would do this. Like I was talking to one tech advisor who was saying,

you could measure, for example, instead of just measuring time on site and engagement, you could measure has a post been engaged with by a collection of people who otherwise have nothing in common? So you would elevate posts that actually create connection between people who are outside, who are from different thought silos and different echo chambers. There are ways that you could build algorithms that actually enhance genuine communication outside of echo chambers, but we're not doing that because there's no incentive to. Yeah, there's no incentives. It's an incentive problem fundamentally. There's no incentive for any of these gigantic tech conglomerates to move in that direction short of being forced to through legislation and regulation, at a minimum, it feels like the algorithm itself should be like an opt-in

thing. Like you should be able to see your timeline by default, like in the order in which the posts come as opposed to being fed to you. I mean, it's amazing, isn't it? That's the way it used to be. That's the way it used to be. When everyone talks about like, oh, wasn't it great in the beginning? Well, that's because there wasn't an algorithm making a decision about what we're going to see. You know, the idea that like, we're going to police the algorithms when we don't actually even understand how they work and the people that created them don't really understand how they're making those decisions. Right. But I'm skeptical of that phony pushback. I'm not saying

it's phony from you doing it, but I'm saying there's a lot of disingenuous pushback from the industry about that. Like, how could we possibly trust the government to make up rules about this? The way to do it would be you don't appoint the government to rewrite the algorithm. You would write a law that says that the social media companies have to make data about the algorithms available to independent researchers. and you would entrust academics at universities and so on who are digital and tech experts and at human rights organizations and things like that to be able to get under the hood and look at the algorithm, understand how it's prioritizing things and how it's not prioritizing things. Because at the moment, it's a total black box. We don't know anything. And then you might have, so this is what Australia has been trying to do with great difficulty because it gets great pushback from the tech companies and from free speech activists, sometimes rightly so. But it's been trying to force tech companies to reveal to, not to the government, but to independent researchers how the algorithms

are working so that those independent researchers can then make advisory recommendations back to the tech companies about ways in which they might enhance the algorithms to be able to combat, you know, whatever it is, misinformation or disinformation or, you know, election interference or whatever it might be. And then if the tech companies don't come up with adequate guidelines, then governments could, then as a last resort, governments might be able to step in. But your first resort would not be some government poobah trying to write an algorithm. Like there's a long way between the total wild west that we live in at the moment and a big brother state governing all the tech companies. Yeah. Well, over the next four years, that doesn't

seem like it's likely on the horizon. We're about to enter an era of deregulation. We have, you know, the Silicon Valley's most powerful elites, you know, kind of lining up. Not to mention, I mean, not to mention the first lady, Alonia Trump, you know. Yeah. It's going to be interesting to see that relationship play out. Like, is there room for two megalomaniacs? Do you think that's going to detonate? Is there room for two megalomaniacs? Do you think that's gonna detonate? I don't know. I mean, historically, you know, in this sort of dynamic, a clash would be, you know, sort of predictably imminent

because you have two very large personalities who both wanna kind of occupy the top spot and both are very interested in how much attention they're getting. So at some point, it feels like there'll be, you know, something that will occur where there might be a conflict. I don't know. I mean, a lot of people are talking about that. It's such a shame in a way, because there's a missed opportunity to do smart regulation. I mean,

I don't even want, I mean, regulation should be a last, last, last resort. I'm, you know, I'm deeply skeptical of the capacity of the state to solve problems. Yeah, I see that. But I also think the idea that, hey, we're just platforms and we have no culpability for anything that gets published on there isn't the answer either. Bullshit. If you've got an algorithm, like I did a show at the Melbourne Comedy Festival just before the pandemic, which is a one-man show about what was called why social media is ruining everything. And I went back and looked at like the genesis of Facebook and what it was when it first went big. Like Facebook used to be, as you say, a reverse chronological list of all of the posts that people you follow have with no algorithmic tweaking at all.

It was just chronological. And there was no like button. You couldn't engage with it in any way. You just looked at it. And when you scroll to the bottom of the page, it ended. Right. Yeah, there was no, there was no, Matt, remember when there was no infinite scroll? You could get to the end. You could literally finish Facebook. I mean, it sounds weird now, but you could just finish. You'd be like, all right, I've just done Facebook. And then you could put it away. What's entered the picture is, in addition to infinite scroll and the like button and

everything, is the algorithm. And once you've got the algorithm, then as far as I'm concerned, you are a publisher because the algorithm is making editorial choices. And you do have some responsibility and culpability for what goes up there. Now, they say, we can't possibly be held responsible for all the things that people are saying on our platforms. I mean, there are billions and billions of things that are said. Well, okay. But imagine we lived in a world in which McDonald's was not liable for each of its franchise outlets around the world. And people were occasionally getting sick from McDonald's

hamburgers. And you said, we really need to regulate this company. And McDonald's said, how can we possibly regulate? You know how many burgers are made by McDonald's franchises every single day? We don't even own these franchises. We just license the Golden Archers to them and give them the recipe. We can't be held responsible for what a McDonald's in regional Sri Lanka is doing. And that would sound perfectly plausible. But you know what?

They make absolutely fucking sure that every single burger is good to go. Nobody's getting sick from a hamburger. But it's an easier test. Is this burger safe for human consumption versus the infinite gray that is like content moderation? That sounds like the worst job in the world. I mean, it's a harder logistical thing to do to make sure that a hamburger in regional Sri Lanka is good. Because, I mean, that's actually, that exists on the ground out there in the real world and needs someone to check it. Everything that is in cyberspace is presumably checkable by people who live anywhere. I understand what you're saying about it being a grey area.

But this is why we shouldn't be really playing in the space of, like, what exactly is hate speech and what is incitement. this is why we shouldn't be really playing in the space of like, what exactly is hate speech and what is incitement? I'm talking about clear bullshit lies. Like, you know, let's just start with the really obvious stuff of like, oh, the election isn't being held this Tuesday. It's actually next week. Or your polling place is not actually here. It's actually here. Can we all agree that there's no utility, there's no free speech utility in a platform maximizing an algorithm amplifying a demonstrably false claim that interferes with an election? We can agree on that. The pushback would be, well, that's a slippery slope, Josh. If you're going to say that, then what about like, you know, the next, like, well,

the polling place is opening in an hour later, or, you know, the next, like, well, the polling place is opening in an hour later, or, you know, there's a lot of traffic on the way to the polling place, or, you know, you start to very quickly get into the gray areas. You do. And that's why it needs to be treated carefully and judiciously. But this comes back to a little bit about what I was saying about the American conception of freedom being this very narrow anti-government conception rather than a positive conception of what best amplifies the flourishing of human beings in a society. Yes, the downside is that there's a risk that edge cases will be difficult to adjudicate and that in some instances, someone who was making an honest claim about there being a lot of traffic or made

an honest mistake about the day or place of the election might have their post de-amplified. Remember, we're not talking about locking anyone up or criminalizing speech. That would be against the Constitution of the United States anyway. We're talking about whether an algorithm amplifies or demotes particular content, right? And whether a social media company has a duty to at least reveal the ways in which its algorithms are amplifying or demoting such content. The downside of allowing a free-for-all in which Elon Musk is able to ramp up and amplify election misinformation, just as an example, or if you love Elon Musk and you want me to take another example, we could say that blue sky chooses to demote some true thing that the right is saying. The downside is that you end up living in a society which is

completely chaotic and riven by a low-grade civil war where nobody can collaborate on anything or communicate on anything or solve any major problems because nobody sees eye to eye on anything and we're in a bunch of warring factions in perpetuity. That's not great either. I feel like that's where we're at right now. And that's, well, it's going to get worse, isn't it? I mean, with artificial intelligence. So unless we are willing to tolerate and push back on to some degree the American narrow conception of freedom as being just sort of freedom from regulation of any kind from the government. We're not going to be able to turn up the dial on the freedom of informed citizens to be able to collaborate on things that lead to a flourishing life.

Yeah, we're just at the starting gate. of fractured reality, introducing AI and the rapid advancement of these tools that are going to just, you know, exponentially derange ourselves, you know, in terms of like what's real and what isn't. Like it's, it gets dystopic pretty quickly. What's your long-term feeling about AI? Is it dystopic or utopian or neither? utopian or neither? It's tricky. You sit with Yuval Noah Harari and it looks pretty dystopic pretty quickly. And that's while acknowledging that, you know, it's going to solve a lot of problems and be very helpful. And we already use it here in the studio for a variety of purposes that's been very helpful, but it's almost like it's, that's like luring us in, you know, like it's sort of like hypnotizing us into it and acclimating us to it in a way that maybe is blinding us to where it's leading us. I think there are real concerns. And I think

that the rapid advance, like the gestalt with which we're kind of like developing these tools doesn't have an adequate amount of kind of cautionary research going into it. We give lip service to like, hey, we got to slow this down. We need to really think about the ramifications, but like, are we really doing that? I know there's smart people that are, but it seems like there's too much money, too much excitement, too much possibility and potential. It's only going to accelerate. But then I go to a conference with the Google people and it's like, I wouldn't say it's Pollyanna, but like you hear a whole different version of like how amazing these tools are and the limitlessness of like the problems that they can solve. So it's not one thing or the other,

but I think there's real existential concerns that we need to, you know, spend some time really thinking about. I mean, yeah, parking the existential stuff for a moment, because I completely agree that even if there's only a 2% chance that there could be an alignment problem and that the systems could become clever enough and shrewd enough to sort of have their own priorities that differ slightly from our own and that that could create a total shitstorm someday once general artificial intelligence is just better at everything than a human brain is. So obviously, even if that's a very, very, very unlikely scenario, it's so bad that you would want to be investing a lot more than we are in

figuring out how to avoid it. In the medium term, I mean, my sense is that in the short term, it's going to be a total shit storm. And in the medium term, it's going to be amazing. And then in the long term, I don't know. Like in the medium term, like everyone's going to have a personal assistant and an accountant and like an attorney and a PR person, you know, and a shopping assistant, you know, and a travel agent just around us all the time. I mean, you know, it's amazing to me that we will listen back on this in 10 or 15 years and be astounded in 10 or 15 years and be astounded that the two of us right now live in a world that is not populated by creatures that we talk to and interact with all the time who do stuff for us. Like we don't really have that. Well, we have sort of Siri, which is no good. But like,

before we know it, we're going to be living in a world with creatures all over the place. I mean, artificial creature, I don't mean physical things, but we'll walk into a room and we'll instantly, it'll be normal to have a conversation with the room or with some device on our body that assists us in. I don't think that's that far away. Not at all. I mean, that's what's amazing about it. In fact, what's amazing about it is when you look back in time, like, so, you know, the ubiquity of the smartphone right now, right? The idea that we're just carrying around in our pocket a supercomputer that gives us directions to everywhere and, you know, has email and social media on it. If you think back in time,

so when 9-11 happened, just to sort of set the timeframe here, if you're of a certain age, 9-11 is still in your adult memory. The iPod had not been released. The iPod had not been released on 9-11. The first generation, big white brick that only contained like five songs on it and weighed, you know, 50 pounds, had not been released with the scroll dial. That was released in October of 2001, a month after 9-11. That is crazy. Then fast forward through, like, if you think about, like, for example, the election of Barack Obama, 2008. like, for example, the election of Barack Obama, 2008. I think YouTube, I don't want to get my dates mixed up here, but something big happened in 2007, which I think was YouTube. The iPhone. The iPhone. It was the iPhone in 2007. I think the first iPhone was 2007. Right. So Obama was

considered to be hip because he was the first president who had a BlackBerry. In other words, any kind of personal device, right? And he also was the first presidential candidate to fundraise in low dollar amounts from the populace, leveraging the internet. Because they could on the internet for the first time. So just think about the fact that when we were walking around in around the era of 9-11 and the Iraq war, nobody had smartphones in their pockets, really. They certainly didn't have iPhones. As recently as when I was in my teens, if you made plans with somebody to go to the movies and they were going to be late, you just stood there outside the movie theater and you just

gazed at passersby or looked at the clouds because there was no way to spy on what arguments strangers were having with each other on the other side of the world, which is what we do now. We open up Twitter or Instagram and infect our brain with, we contaminate it with all of this shit. There is something to be said for the era where you just had to stand there and watch the clouds when your friend was late to the movies. And hey, if your friend had been otherwise occupied and couldn't make it at all, you just had to pick a time at which you would just wander off.

There was no calling your friend because he didn't have a mobile phone. It's always shocking to tell stories like that to my kids. Yeah, exactly. You did what? I know. We had a party line at my house when I was a kid. Do you know what that is?

No. So obviously before the internet, before cell phones, just a landline telephone hanging on the wall in the kitchen. But when you picked it up, like we, to like lower our monthly phone bill, we had what was called a party line, which meant that we shared a phone line with

some other stranger. So occasionally you'd pick up the phone to make a phone call and you, there's somebody having a conversation that you don't know with somebody else. And you would have to hang up and wait until they were done in order to make a phone call. Rich, were you born during the Hoover administration? What is this? Anyway. But yeah, so. And now, I mean, that's like, it's so innocent and it's like the acceleration of these changes are only continuing to like ramp up exponentially. That's right. And I mean, that's sort of my point about, you know, reminding people how

recent a lot of this stuff is. I've got a bunch of other examples I could go through, but I don't want to get the dates wrong. But like the arrival of YouTube and then the arrival of Twitter and then the arrival of Facebook, these things all happened really recently, actually. And it won't be long before we look back on today as being an incredible moment when we were all just starting to understand AI or like to talk about AI. And we are clearly as a civilization going through an information revolution as profound as the discovery of fire or the industrial revolution was. We are currently in terms of our relationship to social media, to algorithms, to artificial intelligence, even to the internet writ large, we are currently a baby giraffe covered in placental goo with wobbly legs trying to figure out how to stand up.

And the story of our lifetimes is going to be a story of how well we manage to stand up, which means how well we manage to get on top of the information revolution and rule it rather than having it rule us. We're brought to you today by Element because just because it's cold out there right now doesn't mean hydration isn't still important. And because contrary to popular belief, hydration isn't just about drinking water. It's about the perfect ratio of water and electrolytes, which makes sense because both need to be replaced in order to prevent muscle cramps, headaches, energy dips, and they do it without any added sugar or other BS. Element has tons of flavors, including a whole bunch of wintery tastes like chocolate mint, chocolate chai, and chocolate raspberry, which are actually

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the podcast election. I'm interested in your perception of that. Is that a reductive take? Is there truth in that? Yes. I mean, both. Yes, it's reductive and it's also true. It's interesting, isn't it? I do think there is something incredibly powerful about a candidate being able to sit down with a person who a lot of people have a really strong parasocial relationship with, which means a kind of, you know, a feeling of friendship, even if they don't know the person directly like Joe Rogan. And hear that candidate riff with the person. I wish that Kamala Harris had done podcasts like Joe Rogan's. wish that Kamala Harris had done podcasts like Joe Rogan's. I think it could have given her an opportunity to seem more human to a bunch of people who, most of whom probably wouldn't have voted for her, but some of whom would have. It's a gigantic audience. And it seems like the reason

why she didn't was because some of her aides who are super social justice progressives felt that we shouldn't be platforming someone as full of hate as Joe Rogan, which is just ridiculous, just contributes to the echo chamberification of everything and the groupthink and the thought silos. You're never going to reach people unless you actually talk to them in the places which they listen to. But at the same time, I struggle a lot with the responsibility of people to hold power to account. So Joe does his show as he does his show. I like Joe. I've done Joe's show seven times. Joe has been incredibly supportive to me. And at the same time, his show is just a place where he shoots the breeze with people. And it

cannot be expected that someone like him is going to carry on his shoulders the weight of doing all of the journalistic pushback against a candidate like Donald Trump. So we can't allow candidates to get away with only doing podcasts and only talking to, you know, and thinking that it's a substitute for holding them to account for their lies to simply have them have an amicable conversation for three hours with a bunch of podcasters. So I'm sort of conflicted. I'd like all of the candidates to do the podcasts, but I am wary that that could become a substitute for actual journalism. And I think it's totally outrageous that both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump were so unwilling to engage with legacy media. I mean, the Harris campaign also was just allergic to putting a foot wrong and to any kind of misstep. It was so cautious. It reminded me of many of the problems with the legacy media that I saw firsthand, where there's this hyper-cautiousness and risk aversion, where you don't want to get

criticized for anything. Your main priority is making sure that someone doesn't say something nasty about you in the Murdoch press or on Fox News. You're just paranoid about something about saying or doing anything that could go viral on social media in a negative way. And as a result, you're so clammed up and tight-arsed about everything that you don't seem like a real person. Right. And yeah, you come off like the prototypical politician that alienates people. I mean, I think like, look, so my friends Colin and Samir did a little video about this

and they shared some stats that I thought were really interesting. Trump did 14 podcasts that resulted in 124 million views on YouTube. Harris did five podcasts, which garnered 4 million views. I think she did Charlamagne Tha God, she did Call Her Daddy, and Brene Brown, right? So she's self-selecting shows with audiences where she's fundamentally kind of speaking mostly to the people who are already on her side. Totally. Trump, you know, kind of did the more bro-y podcasts

out there. Harris being somebody who is more concerned about control, I think, like Trump's shooting from the hip and say what you want about him, but like he's able to go on those shows and talk as long as those people wanna talk. And there's something, you know, human about that, that I think connected with people. And I think the Harris campaign to its detriment by

trying to control the media outlets, their strategy was out of a playbook from a bygone era that doesn't really appreciate or respect the tectonic shifts that have occurred in media. That's right. And I think if you're a young male between 18 and 28, no matter what your interests are, if you're into video games or you're into UFC or you're into whatever, right? Like there's a podcast for you and that's where those people are tuning in for their,

not just their hobbies, but like kind of their information. And if you're not showing up there, like you're missing an opportunity. And I think the kind of attitude that, oh, you know, we're not going to go on this show because of what this person represents is a missed opportunity to, you know, speak to the people who are on the other side, right? Like, you know, you might be able to connect with if you take advantage of that opportunity. So I think it was a misstep. if you take advantage of that opportunity. So I think it was a misstep.

And I think it is reductive to say like the election came down to podcasts, but I think they played a part. And I think there's a lot that the left can learn about kind of in reviewing how that all went down to figure out a different way forward next time. It also just shows how much more group thinky the left has become than the sort of messy, heterodox Rogan sphere in the sense that, like, Kamala Harris going on Brene fucking Brown, I mean, seriously? Like, it's like the number of people who listen to Brene. She's just speaking to her base.

Yeah. How many, you know, people who listen to Brene Brown were not already going to vote for Kamala Harris? Whereas ask the reverse question of Joe Rogan. How many people who listened to Joe Rogan were not already going to vote for Donald Trump? A lot. Probably a lot. A lot of people would listen to Joe Rogan who were not convinced that they were going to vote for Donald Trump. So you can actually reach, there's actually greater upside for Kamala Harris to go on Joe Rogan than for Donald Trump to go on Brene Brown, for example, because the left in some ways is more censorious and closed-minded, and the right at the moment is this kind of chaotic cacophony of a fairly messy alliance of different factions. Bernie got castigated for going on Rogan for the reasons you just articulated and has been very vocal recently

about like how that is such a mistake. And I think he's right. And I think his kind of statement in the wake of the election is pretty spot on and apropos this idea that like, hey, if you abandon like the working class, like don't be surprised if they abandon you, which is kind of

like what happened. And so I think there's a lot to be learned by really paying attention to how the media has shifted in such a fundamental way. I don't know that like podcastlandia is mainstream media. It's a different thing altogether. It's not really alternative media at that very high level. It's a different thing altogether. It's not really alternative media at that very high level. It's like its own thing. And I think it brings up like an interesting conversation around the ethics of like bringing a presidential candidate onto your podcast.

I mean, certainly anybody should be able to talk to whoever they want. But if you are going to make that decision and sit down across from somebody who is campaigning to be the leader of the free world, I think you have a responsibility to kind of come prepared and to not, you know, Sam Harris recently talked about this,

like launder their talking points. You have to be able to push back a little bit. I mean, it depends who you are. But I mean, I think yes and no. I think you can't just say like, hey, don't listen to me. Like, you know, I'm not somebody you should pay attention to when you have an audience at scale. Like, I think that does come with some level of responsibility.

At what scale? I don't know. I mean, again, how do you measure that? It's a slippery slope thing, right? I mean, Joe Rogan got famous by shooting the breeze with people and talking about whatever he wants to. That's his bag. My bag is if I have someone on who is spinning bullshit, I will hold them to account. My brand is I will not let you get away with bullshit in my studio.

That's not Rogan's brand. Rogan's brand is not I won't let you get away with bullshit in my studio. It's feed me the bullshit. Let's play with the bullshit. Let's inspect the bullshit. Hey, next week we'll have someone spinning a different kind of bullshit and maybe that'll contradict this kind of bullshit, right? Like if that works, at what point do we start requiring him to behave in ways that are not the way that he naturally behaves in order to comport with our ideas about what democracy should be, should be like, I think it's a bit unfair. Like he had Trump on, he invited Kamala Harris. She declined. They know the game. Like we as a society and as a culture should not be outsourcing the interrogation of our political candidates to podcasts like Joe Rogan. But I don't think it's incumbent on Joe Rogan to necessarily conduct an interview

in any particular way. Like he's just doing his thing. And yes, if he then tomorrow stands up and goes, everybody should listen to me because X, Y, Z, then I'm going to go, well, hang on a second. Fair enough. I think you just, you can't have it both ways. You can't say this is the podcast election or podcast is now the way that you campaign or whatever and also say like, hey, I'm just a knucklehead, like don't pay attention to me. Well, I don't think Joe would say that.

I'm not saying that Joe is saying that. Yeah, right. I'm just saying to the extent that somebody is, you know, trying to speak out of both sides of their mouth with me. Yeah, I don't think people are. I mean, I think they're two different people. You know, I think Rogan would say,

don't listen to me. I mean, I just have conversations with people. Like, if you want to get a feel for the vibe of the person, then come to my show. If you want investigative journalism, then go and watch 60 Minutes. But other people will then say that, like, I mean, you would have to be making the argument that it's a good thing that it was the podcast election, which I'm not even sure that a lot of people are doing. I mean, the other interesting thing before we leave that subject is that the cautiousness of the democratic machine, the party machine, that is, the Kamala

Harris machine, is illustrative of how many taboos now exist on the left. Because what happened when Trump first came to power was he disregarded a whole bunch of shibboleths on the right, and he just steamrolled through a bunch of transgressibboleths on the right, and he just steamrolled through a bunch of transgressions. I mean, saying that John McCain was not a war hero, saying that the Iraq war was a mistake, saying that so many things that he said that Republicans thought would just make him unelectable. You cannot say that in the Republican Party. He could, and he did, and he now owns the Republican Party, and there's almost nothing that he can say. There's almost no taboo that he can't transgress

that will bring him down. Contrast that with Kamala Harris's acceptance that if she went on a show like Joe Rogan, she would have to have a little machine in her brain that is constantly going, how are you going to respond to this without pissing off your base? How are you going to say this without alienating this particular activist group? How are you going to say this without being thrown under the bus by XYZ partisan lobby? There are just many, many more speech strictures around what you can say on the left, which is leading and becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop, right? Where candidates and spokespeople for the left and elite organs of the left, like in the media, will become increasingly cautious. And then that caution leads to a tightening of the rules around what can be said, because there are fewer people

showing and making an example and trying to do what I do, which is like, hey, look, you actually can talk about this stuff and the sky doesn't fall. You know, the sky doesn't fall if you say like, do we need to have gay pride anymore? Will there come a time at which we don't need to be so proud of being gay, at which it's actually better for the flourishing of young queer people if you turn the volume down instead of up on their sexual identity. Like, I wrote a piece about that and it wasn't allowed to be published because I was working for the public broadcaster and they regarded that as being, you know, taking too controversial a stance on a public issue. I think if we were more willing to model how you can have those, you can broach those uncomfortable topics, and if we were more willing to model it in a

rational and sane way, rather than yielding that territory to the Donald Trumps of the world, you know, if the only people who transgress taboos are maniacs, then you're going to end up with maniacs in power because people like taboos being transgressed and they don't like being bossed around and told what to do. My position is let's all transgress taboos a little more. Let's all be a bit more courageous and a little bit, let's try to tread on some more eggshells and trigger some more tripwires conversationally. And let's just show that the sky doesn't fall. constrained recently, will come around to our side and will join the team rather than feeling like the only people who speak in a bullshit free way are Donald Trump and the far right. It's a bit like David Frum, the Republican strategist, used to have a line about

immigration, which was, if the only people who are willing to enforce the border are fascists, then people will vote for fascists to enforce the border. And similarly, if the only people who sound like they're making sense about some of the most controversial issues or who are even addressing or acknowledging some of the most controversial issues, like the rate of illegal immigration, the failure at the border, the challenge of balancing women's rights with transgender rights, the rate of illegal immigration, the failure at the border, you know, the challenge of balancing women's rights with transgender rights, the question of whether or not race sort of should be a trump card in hiring practices. You know, if the only people who are willing to really get their hands dirty wrestling with those things and ignoring the things that they're supposed to say

are right-wing assholes, then people will give space for right-wing assholes and they might even vote for right-wing assholes. So like, you know, at the risk of drawing too long a bow from Kamala Harris's reluctance to go on Joe Rogan, I think it's indicative of this broader thing. Like, you got to step into the ring, baby. Like, you got to bring it. You got to start talking about stuff and not giving a shit that some lobbyist is going to send you an angry email or that someone's going to write nasty tweets about you.

Do you think that that is possible? Like a candidate could arise who just doesn't get puckered about like anything, you know, and so is unthreatened by like any kind of question and has the facility to kind of gracefully navigate like through all of those landmines that like kind of keep people in abeyance right now or does the does you know everybody at the dnc need to get fired and they need to kind of build rebuild like the left from the ground up well i don't know i don't know enough about the structure of democratic party politics in the united states to be able to comment about the DNC because I don't know how much power it can exert. But my suspicion is that this is a cultural problem, not a party, political one, not an institutional one. In other words, that what is being responded to

are cultural cues like MSNBC hosts getting angry and some progressive activist lobby getting angry and Americans for a kinder future for Latinx, you know, people getting angry or whatever organization it might be. And I can feel it. My prediction about the Trump administration is that people aren't going to like it and he's not going to be a popular president and his base is going to, you know, well, his base might stay with him, but the additional 20% of people who, of Americans who voted for him just to give him a shot because they were dissatisfied with how expensive everything is and, you know, thought the Biden

Harris administration wasn't great, that those people are going to be totally dissatisfied in a couple of years. And there's then a space in, in, in democratic, on the democratic side of things for somebody who seizes this moment and can smell in the air that we're a bit fed up with social justice orthodoxies and with the censoriousness and self-righteousness of the left and can have someone who is transgressive. alien it would have seemed in 2003 to contemplate the election of Barack Obama in 2008, just five years later, like when the democratic establishment was all like, oh, I'm John Kerry. I'm a war hero. And like, it's just very, it was very, it was a party of Al Gore and like John Kerry. And then in comes this magnetic revolutionary, you know, once in a lifetime candidate and changes everything. I think we could be ripe for another one of those. I think in the meantime, it's important for everybody to keep your eye on the climate and not get caught up in the weather. Totally. Because

it's just every day is going to be insanity. There's going to be, we're going to be fed all sorts of things to react to. And I think if we get caught up in that kind of like cycle, then we're sort of allowing ourselves to, you know, play into a narrative that we don't have to, that isn't really helping anybody. This is one of the things I love, Rich, about not having a daily, you know, talkback radio show anymore is that I actually don't have to follow what's happening. I don't have to know what's going on today. And I think that's actually healthy. I think there's a principle in psychology

that a lot of your mental health is related to the metric of where you're focusing your locus of attention. So if you think about spheres of control, for example, you know, at the center of a bullseye, there'll be the things that you have total control over. And then there's a set of concentric rings outside of that of decreasing control. And at the very outer edge are things that you have no control over, which might be, you know, presidential politics in the United States or climate change or something like that, or very, very limited control. And where you spend most of your time, in which of those

rings you spend most of your time, is closely correlated to your mental health. And if you can basically retain focus on the spheres that are within your control, if you can focus on your little garden patch, your neighborhood, being a good person. And funnily enough, this is an ethos that transcends right and left because you hear Jordan Peterson banging on about how you got to start by making your bed. It's like, get yourself, get your own house in order before you start talking about how you're going to solve the world. Like having agency is important. And to wrap that idea about with regard to your attitude towards the news, I have come to the conclusion that if

something is not newsworthy enough to make it into the weekend New York Times or the Economist magazine, you didn't need to know about it in the first place. That bullseye is very narrow. There are very few things that we actually can exert control over. And yet we spend most of our lives, you know, kind of future tripping on when it comes to politics, especially like future tripping on things that haven't happened yet. And it's not that, you know, as sort of, you know, part of citizenship is being concerned about things that are happening in the world and how it's going. And it's our responsibility to express our opinions and vote and do all of that. But fundamentally, like to occupy that space of always thinking about like

this bad thing that might happen is obviously, you know. To say that it's our responsibility, I think this can be a misleading thing. I think people can get a bit too caught up in thinking that it's their responsibility to care about things. I think it's your responsibility to know when you are capable of taking action, and it's your responsibility to then adjudicate whether or not that action is likely to yield results. So think about, just to exit, because there's so much partisanship in America, I don't want to make it about Trump. Let's just take Gaza as like a less controversial and more obvious example. I, in Australia, am routinely hounded and pilloried for being a kind of a like, oh, both sides are type. Oh, I'm actually just sort of probably an apologist

for the Israeli colonial settler state because I try to sort of both sides are type, oh, I'm actually just sort of probably an apologist for the Israeli colonial settler state because I try to sort of both sides it. In reality, I'm the grandson of Holocaust survivors. I have not traditionally been a Zionist. I've been deeply concerned about the Palestinian cause all my life. I firmly believe that you can't keep people rotting in open air refugee camps in perpetuity

and expect that to be sustainable. And I think it's criminal that Israel has not found a way to relinquish the territories from 1967. All that being said, it's fucking complicated. And I've spent many podcasts trying to articulate to people that this is a wretched situation and the precise ways in which it is wretched and the precise ways in which it is wretched, and the precise ways in which we might be able to progress beyond it. That is an unpopular and uncomfortable position to be in because it lacks the visceral frisson of moral clarity that so many people have around this issue. So many of my colleagues in Australia, where the climate is pretty different from in the United States, where I think the center of gravity is much more pro-Palestinian, much more like Western Europe. Most of my colleagues think this is a clear

cut case of genocide. And when you see an evil being perpetrated, you have a responsibility. This is coming back to your point about having a responsibility to be an informed citizen. You have a responsibility to speak out. If you are not posting about the crimes of the bloodthirsty Zionist state on a regular basis, you are a moral coward and you should be ashamed of yourself. So the first question is, is this an issue about which I can take action? Well, yes, I can take action. I can post lots of bloody pictures of dead Garzen children, and I can telegraph my outrage on social media. The second question then is, is that action likely to yield positive results? Well, no, that's not likely to yield positive results. It's not even likely to yield

any greater sympathy for your cause because it's likely to inflame a backlash among people who might've been winnable if you'd sounded more reasonable and less strident. So yes, be informed to the extent that the information and your being informed is going to be able to contribute to an action that you can take. But even then, question whether or not the action is worth taking. Because a lot of the action that we're taking is performative, virtue signaling. Yeah, it's not really action. Useless. It's not exactly. It's certainly not productive.

And I would agree with that by saying that, like, what you do have control over and what you should take responsibility for is exercising discernment with your relationship with your information stream, right? So that is something you can control and perhaps restrict. And I think disabusing yourself of this idea that you have to have an opinion on everything for the very point that you just made, which is that most of these things are incredibly complicated, you know, and the incentives or the, you know, the temptation is to like have a hot take or like to, or to have total conviction or clarity around issues that are indeed very complicated. Yeah. And that's why they're so intractable and persist, right? Exactly.

That's part of the reason. But I think that raises the larger kind of issue of our distrust not only in media and institutions, but also of like, quote unquote, experts, right? Like, oh, well, there's experts who've devoted their entire life to understanding this particular issue or who are, you know, at the head of some, you know, regulatory agency, and they're making decisions that impact us downstream, but we have such a distrust of these people. We were convinced they don't know what they're doing or they're corrupt or what have you. I think that in turn makes people feel like the onus is now on them or that they have to find these alternative sources that they deem to be more trustworthy. And I think the denigration of our

kind of perspective on expertise in general, you know, is also, you know, part of this problem that if we don't figure out a way to solve, you know, sort of threatens like our ability to kind of cohere as a society, because we need institutions that we can trust and we need experts that we can rely upon. Like we need that. We can't be a healthy society without those things. Yeah, I've gotten quite reflective about this lately, about I suppose I feel a bit of self-recrimination and guilt about maybe playing into the climate of distrust for institutions. Like, if I have one regret about the past five years, it would be that

I suppose my sort of community, to call it that, of like heterodox people who eight years ago might have had quite a lot in common. Brett Weinstein, Eric Weinstein, Douglas Murray, Marjit Nawaz, Sam Harris, you know, you can sort of list the kind of Barry Weiss, the kind of, what did they call him? What was the name of the club that Eric came up with? The intellectual dark. Yeah. The IDW. Yeah. That was Eric's thing. Yeah. So, you know, this is in, in some respects, you know, I'm on the periphery of that group and it has led to a lot of soul searching, I've got to say, over the past 12 months because that, well, three years really,

that group has splintered in crazy ways and I feel uncomfortable having potentially contributed in some way to its corrosive sort of snarky attack on institutions that are actually vital, which is not to say that the institutions aren't to blame for much of this. The groupthink in legacy media organizations, the false certainty of public health officials, certainty of public health officials, the smug kind of lying of government officials and parties about whether that's about Joe Biden's cognitive decline or about the importance of mask wearing or vaccines on community transmission of COVID or whatever it is you might want to pick. transmission of COVID or whatever it is you might want to pick. They've definitely contributed to the loss of trust in them. But Sam Harris kindly invited me to co-host two episodes of his podcast

throughout 2024. And one of them was about the institutions of knowledge and about how we come to gain and filter what is true and what is not true through meticulously established institutions of knowledge, basically cultural institutions of knowledge. So this is in the scientific, in science, in the university academy, and in newsrooms and journalism. We have established like long, difficult systems of kind of truth filtering. So in a newsroom, I think anyone who thinks they can get their news from podcasts and from Mike Cernovich on Twitter or something does not understand how a professional newsroom works. I've worked in a newsroom, and if you're at the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post and you have a really strong belief that something has happened, you know, you will find all the sources you want and you will go to your editor and they will say, you don't have it yet.

You need a third source on this particular fact. And you'll be like, but it's obvious that it's true. And they'll go, you don't have it yet. Not up to the standards of this organization. And sometimes mistakes will be made and then those mistakes will be corrected. And it's part of the iterative process of, you know, an organization like that to self-correct. way from the kind of heedless speculation that gets thrown out on podcasts and on social media, where conspiracy theorists and cranks can just kind of hear something and repeat it. You know, they'll just be like, oh, you know, apparently, you know, COVID doesn't affect, you know, Jews and Chinese people the same way that it does other people. And all of a sudden that becomes like a known factoid,

like a talking point that is circulating among podcasters, Dan. And the more outrageous, the more quickly it travels and the more difficult it is to, you know, kind of disentangle. And so I think the correct solution, in addition to being critical of like institutions, is to say to people, they're still much, much better than the alternative. And you need to be as scrupulous about what you put in your ears as you are about what you put in your mouth. A lot of people would be careful about not eating shit all the time, but then when they turn on the radio or podcasts, they don't really have a good way of determining

what is true and what is not because they're quite comfortable just listening to people spitball ideas with dissident experts. And the spitballing becomes a kind of a layer of sort of morass of semi-bullshit that occupies the same space in their consciousness as facts do. So on the one hand, you've got these institutions of knowledge, science, the academy, journalism, which is really where we should be getting all of our information from and where we should be getting our data from so that we can then go off and have conversations in podcaster stand. But instead, we're getting information from podcaster stand as well because we've had our trust eroded so much in those institutions and i think it's been a it's been

an error of the sort of heterodox group of people to throw so many stones at the failings of elite institutions that they've bred a distrust that is now coming back to bite us in the ass and there's a fair amount of that distrust that's earned. And so it's understandable. But when you look at that heterodox fear and the various kind of faces and personalities that populated it at that time, how do you account for kind of the fracturing of it? Because you've seen so many of these people like go kind of pretty far off the reservation in terms of their relationship with reality. No, I mean, as I said to Sam Harris when he was on Uncomfortable Conversations most recently, you know, are you just a bad judge of character?

So many of those people that he associated himself with have become, you know, fairly lunatic. I mean, to his great credit, he's the one man standing, isn't he? Like he is the titan who has managed to retain his head amidst the madness. So amidst the swirling kind of chaos of people just spinning off the centrifuge left and right and going into crazy town, I think Sam has maintained an even keel and has remained a person of reason and integrity through it all. How did he respond to that question? I think he dodged it a little bit by sort of saying, well, it depends on who you're talking about. Like, you know, I didn't, a lot of these people I didn't have very close connections with. If you're talking about like Candace Owens, I barely knew her, you know, it was, it was more

about like trying to parse the exact details of it rather than respond to the, to the characterological assassination that I was attempting. But I mean, I love Sam and, you know, I don't hold that he can't possibly have known what he didn't know and nor could I. You could write a really interesting, you know, psychology thesis about how, you know, take at the risk of getting myself into trouble, take Marjid as an example. I don't know if people know Marjid Nawaz, but this is a good case study, I think, of how you go into crazy town. This is a person of great integrity originally because he was locked up for being part of an Islamist group in Egypt. So he was locked up by the military regime in Egypt and rotted in a prison along

with a bunch of other Islamists and jihadists. And Amnesty International got him out and he went to the UK. He's a Brit, an Arab Muslim Brit, and he founded a non-profit to de-radicalize young British Muslims. I mean, you know, what better thing could you possibly think of doing? And he and Sam Harris wrote a book together about Islam. And, you know, Majid was really doing, fighting the good fight. And then COVID came and the lockdowns happened and vaccine, you know, punishments for not getting vaccinated happened. And he had a radio show in the UK on LBC and he started diverging increasingly from public health information about the vaccines and started peddling vaccine misinformation

and he got fired. He now has, I believe, a case against them for unfair dismissal. And subsequently on his podcast and independent show, he's become convinced, sort of Chinese Communist Party style control to be foisted on the rest of the free world by, yeah, testing our willingness to go along with insane rules. You can imagine from a psychological point of view how that is a logical psychological response

when your priors have been baked in by being thrown in jail by a military regime for your Islamist beliefs. Right? Sure. it's not a leap towards viewing the world through, through a lens of, of, of threat that leads to becoming, if that gets fed and incentivized, it's, it's not a surprise that that person can become conspiracy adult. That's right. And so it seems perfectly logical psychologically to him to be maximally skeptical of power. And of course you would be if power once rounded you up for your ideas and threw you in prison. Similarly with Brett Weinstein, the experience of being excommunicated from the left and hounded by social justice warriors for

taking a principled stance at Evergreen College, and I won't go into all the details of that, but some people will know it and you can listen to many a podcast with him if you don't, has created in him, I think, a righteous psychological need to be the defiant truth speaker, right? That institutions of power are out to silence you, they're out to hide the truth, they're out to be glib, they're out to enforce their own orthodoxies, that it's a game of struggling against dogmas and hunting for every crack in the artifice. You know, a conspiracy theorist is very good at knowing a lot about a subject because they're constantly picking apart all of the inconsistencies in the official story. But it can be deranging and you can understand why psychologically they feel motivated to do it because they get their sense of meaning and self-validation from being the brave dissident who is standing up to the all-powerful machine that is trying to hoodwink

you. If that's your worldview... The validation piece is important, though, because when you have that heuristic, like you're seeing the world through that lens of, you know, that is becoming increasingly conspiratorial by nature as a result of your past experiences, some of which are understandable. And then you share that in a public forum and you're celebrated and publicly validated for that. And then you're financially incentivized. You're going to move kind of towards that audience that has a great appetite for that type of story because those sort of stories that get to the heart of this problem that you have that's answered through these other people

who don't have your best interest at heart. It's not your fault. What is happening to you is not your fault. There's a cabal of evildoers over here who got together and created this thing that is this great mystery that I'm now unveiling for you. It's a neat story, isn't it? I mean, it puts you as the protagonist and the hero. And it's also very entertaining and engaging, right? What that leads to is not only

an increased kind of sense of conspiracism writ large, but also kind of this galaxy brain mentality where now you're suddenly an expert on everything. And then all the world's issues get filtered through that heuristic and kind of get spit out the other side, you know, for that audience to feed that appetite. And suddenly, whether you're an evolutionary biologist or you're a psychologist, all of your opinions on immigration, on vaccines, on, you know, authoritarianism, on Gaza, they all have equal valence, right? And I think this is like deranging, not just the heterodox sphere,

but like all kinds of people on social media right now. And it's very problematic, which goes back to, you know, the discernment that we all have to have about the people and the sources of information that we're exposing ourselves to. Yeah, why does everyone have to have an opinion about everything? It's such bullshit. Like we're all like on social media. It's like, what do you think?

I'm not qualified to say anything about most things. Yeah, I know. Me too. It's like we're all little kings who are like reading from a decree about like, if you want to know what I hear, I hereby announce that Josh Zeps' position on, you know, Gaza is that killing babies is bad. Oh, how morally courageous of me to have this moral insight. This is why I spend most of my time looking at how we have conversations rather than taking a position about things. I mean, my interest is in

analyzing what's working and not working about the way that we have conversations about things. Because you're totally right that once you get into the game of this is what's true and this is what's not true. And have you ever noticed that like what they told you about this wasn't really true? Therefore, can you should be suspicious of this over here as well. It can be somewhat maddening. And as you say, it's like there's almost a kind of a God complex thing where I've got this galaxy brain that is going to provide you with all of the answers that you need about everything. It's sort of a template or a heuristic that you can apply to anything at that point. And that's a dangerous place to be.

I mean, when I say that it's psychologically understandable that these people have ended up there, that's not to excuse it, you know, because they could have done otherwise. And if they're so smart, why didn't they? Well, in some ways, geniuses are ill-equipped at life. Like, I sometimes get into arguments with people who object to me saying that someone like Eric Weinstein or James Lindsay is a genius because they're like, well, they're just, they're crackpots who are taking potshots at things that, you know, are sound conspiratorial. No, they literally, I believe, have genius brains, a lot of these people. They're incredibly high IQ.

But as a result, sometimes they see connections between things that don't exist. It's like the, it's the, you know, you break into the serial killer's lair and there are like strings on pins like all over the wall. When it's motivated by a persecution complex, it's not going to go well. And then amplified by what you were just saying earlier about like the sort of audience capture phenomenon of like when I do more episodes about X, then I do get more listeners and I get more money.

Like sometimes people frame that as a very cynical interpretation, which is not the way that I interpret it. I don't think that podcasters who've gone to crazy town are insincerely pretending to believe the things that they believe because it makes them more money. What I think happens is that we all could potentially believe a whole range of different things. And we all have different levels of belief in a whole range of different things. And we all have different levels of belief in a whole range of different things, some about which we're more certain and some less. And people ask me about this about Tucker Carlson, people like that as well.

If you flipped all of the incentives so that the money that they made was exactly reversed, would they hold exactly the same beliefs as they currently do? Well, no, of course they wouldn't, and nor would any of us. So it's sort of a bit unfair. It's like you start to produce things and you see a kind of a feedback loop happen, and that encourages you to think in more particular ways about stuff. It's like people sometimes say as an analogy, do I believe that Donald Trump believes all of the lies that he says? I think that's the wrong question. It's not about belief in truth or falsehood for him. It's about what works. It's true if it gets the outcome that he wants. It's sort of irrelevant. It's immaterial to him whether or not there were actually the correct, you know, what number of ballots were cast where in 2020. The point is that the 2020 election was stolen is true to him because it gets him to win the 2024 election. So by definition, it's true. That is so depressing. It's like this kind of

hidden, it's like a sort of solipsistic kind of like version of truth. Like truth is functional, right? It's this idea that, I don't think he rationalizes it this way. I don't think he thinks about it this way, but I think he just instinctively believes that as a winning organism, you win by doing the things that enable you to win. And therefore the truth is the stuff that gets you towards that goal. And similarly, when you talk about podcaster stand and like how audience capture works, I think it's not that people are saying things they don't believe because they'll get more listeners if they do. It's that there is an incentive to tweak their content slightly towards the things that will get more listeners. And that then makes them believe that a little bit more. And it's functionally,

I mean, it works, it works. And I have to be incredibly mindful of this because the last thing in the world I want to do is pander to my audience because unlike most podcasts, I think my audience actually comes because they don't want to be pandered to. And they know that, as you said at the top of the show, very kindly, even if they disagree with me, they're going to hear me be straight about something and call it as it is. And they're going to enjoy watching my brain kind of wrestle through how to be honest about it. But I mean, I'm interested also in how you deal with that, like authenticity and quality of content is for you and me, the primary thing. And then you just hope that the audience will come along for the ride. I mean, I try not to make decisions about who I invite on the show based upon whether they're going to work on YouTube or garner a bunch of attention.

I really try hard to make that decision based upon the people that I'm interested in that I think have something interesting to say and somebody who I'm well suited to have that conversation with. Right. And I'm sure, you know, like everybody, I have my biases and I'm sure somebody who's listening or watching this could probably has a whole opinion about how I'm doing that wrong or whatever. But I definitely don't invite people on just because like, oh, this will be, I'm not courting controversy. You know, I actually try to avoid it and I'm not making like platforming decisions based upon, you know, how many, how many, like how large their audience is or something like that, or how outrageous their opinion is. Yeah. It's just not what I do. No, that's right. And there's also, I mean, one of the risks of audience capture is that you end up stuck in a rut that then doesn't go anywhere when the winds change and people no longer want

what you're selling. Like if you hitch your wagon, in other words, so much, like you started out as a fruit seller and then everyone was like, oh, we love the oranges. We love the oranges. Then you end up only selling oranges. And then when they don't want oranges anymore, you don't have any apples to sell them. And it's like- Yeah, I mean, I think authenticity, integrity, like, you know, I just, I'm playing a long game. Like I don't get caught up in the ups and downs

of what's happening weekly or monthly on the show. It's just like, I've been doing this for a long time. And in order for it to stay interesting to me, like I just have to trust my curiosity and make decisions based upon that and what feels ethically correct to me. Yes. And I think that comes through. I think that, I mean, that's why I like your show. And I think that's why a lot of people resonate with you is that there's a sense that underneath your intellect and curiosity, there's a heart and there's an integrity where a lot of these guys, and sometimes even me,

art and there's an integrity where a lot of these guys, and sometimes even me, are sort of brains in a vat, like floating in blobosphere, you know, talking very rationally about things, but not deeply connecting with people, which is, I think, something that you've got. I mean, on the question of getting stuck in a rut as a result of some of the audience capture, I think that's starting to happen now with the anti-woke shtick. But now they're the establishment. Yeah, exactly. That's right. So what are they going to decry at this point? Well, I mean, Fox News is going to keep, Tucker Carlson will keep banging on about, you know, he'll find some viral video of some transgender teacher, you know,

reading from a gay book to kids and say that it's the end of the world. But the sense that there was something important and transgressive about calling out the censoriousness of the left, I think is now pretty old hat. And that was sort of part of my thing as well. I mean, that was, you know, my initial success was being a person of the left who was talking about the ways in which the left was being too scolding and too obsessed about identity politics and insufficiently attentive to the needs of working people and was losing an entire generation and an entire class of people. In fact, just as an interesting aside on that, it pans out, it plays out really interesting in really interesting ways in America,

specifically this failure of the left because of the question of race here. There is such a tight correlation between poverty in America and race. I mean, such a disproportionate over-representation of black Americans that what often codes for Americans as racism can appear to an outsider like actually class inequality. and you're worried that they might steal something,

then your reaction to that person can seem quite bigoted and prejudiced. You might be the shopkeeper in this example, might seem quite bigoted and prejudiced and judgmental because of the sheer class difference there, the sheer inequality that is staring you in the face. Like you're dealing with a statistical reality that this person is probably not going to be a profitable shopper. They're probably going to cause trouble. And so your reaction to that because of the persistent existence of this underclass of people in

America that is not as bad in other Western countries, which have better social safety nets, your reaction to that person is now in America coded through a racial lens because the likelihood that that person's black is higher than the likelihood that any random person coming in is black. And so I think part of the whole social justice movement in America, one of the problems with it has been that it has sort of distracted Americans from the real game, which I think is inequality and class and economic disadvantage. The ever-growing socioeconomic.

Exactly. I mean, this persistent underclass of people, the sheer difficulty of escaping being truly working class in America in comparison to in other places. The lack of mobility between the working poor and the economic elites in America is the tragic story that the left ought to be focusing on. What can you do to create greater flourishing and advantage for people who are just mired in really low-paid shitty jobs and might be single moms with lots of kids working four jobs or whatever? and because it's become this thing about America is an irredeemably racist society, that is a white supremacist society, and we need to change the narrative with the 1619 project and wake up white people to understand that the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's all felt a bit hectoring and divisive, where you probably could have made much more practical gains that improve the lives of more people if you coded it as like, we are Americans, we believe in egalitarianism, we believe in equality, we believe in being the

land of opportunity, so let's lift up everyone who's disadvantaged. And then sort of by accident, most of those people or a disproportionate number of those people would be people of colour. I think strategically, that would have been a better way of, you know, of redressing injustice than focusing relentlessly on picking out which groups deserve to be referred to in particular ways and who gets to be elevated and not. There's something a little bit sort of authoritarian about that way of doing things. I mean, I think it's important that the DNC and the democratic leaders have a long, hard look in the mirror and really take account for like what is not connecting with working class families and people across America and figure out like how they're going to become the party of those people again. Like that's their mandate. And somehow that's become, you know, kind of

deconstructed and taken over by the right. And until they figure that out, like, I think they're in real peril. Yes. But I think the point under a Trump administration, like what is your forecast for what then becomes like, what, what is transgressive then given the fact that like that kind of transgressive narrative became like an attention magnet and now we're in kind of a new world, what are all those people going to do? Like, what does that look like? Like, you know, what is the transgressive heterodox narrative become when that whole world has now, you know, has been institutionalized in power? Yes, it's a great question. And fortunately, I have an answer to it, which is that the

transgressive thing is going to be to be reasonable. That's what I'm banking on. How dare you? Yeah. No, I mean, I really do. I think that, you know, some people have said- To be nuanced and reasonable. Well, yeah. I mean, some people have said to me like, well, what's going to happen to your show if your whole point of Uncomfortable Conversations was to have uncomfortable conversations about taboos? And now you've got an administration coming into power in the United States that intentionally transgresses all of those taboos. And even there's a hot conversation on the left

about whether or not identity politics and wokeness and cancel culture drove us into a ditch. And so this soul searching is now starting to happen in the open. We're starting to understand that maybe we should be a little bit less judgmental of each other on some of these hot button cultural issues like trans issues and immigration and so on, identity politics. What will happen to your podcast, Josh? And I have no concerns whatsoever. I'm not worried about that. The point was never to attack a particular target. The point of my show is to model how to have rational conversations, often with adversaries that grope our way towards some kind of superior

understanding of each other and superior way of talking to each other that makes people feel a bit more heard and that makes people feel like the other side is not quite as crazy as they thought that it was. And to show that we don't have to be antagonistic towards each other when we disagree. And that at the same time, we can really call each other out on our bullshit. And I mean, I made headlines in like, I don't know if you remember my last, the last time I was on Joe Rogan's show, but it was during the, it was just after the pandemic. It was in early 2022, I think. And it was when Joe was going through his whole Spotify thing and he was being accused of vaccine misinformation and all this sort of stuff. And I was on his show and he said something untrue about vaccines. He was talking about vaccines causing myocarditis, which is true. They do in some cases. And I said, yeah, but you know that the incidence of myocarditis from getting a fully fledged case of COVID is worse than the incidence of myocarditis from the vaccine. And he was like, I don't think that's true. Jamie looked it up. It turned out to be true. And then of course, all this, and Joe and I had no beef about that.

Like CNN goes off on like, you know, Rogan owned on his own show by Australian journalists and all this like, you know, trying to beat up that this, you know, he was kind of slapped down. Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. The two friends couldn't. I just said to him like, I think that's bullshit, Joe,

or something like that. And people were like, oh my goodness, someone dared to go into the Rogan lair and actually speak up to the big, I'm like, he's not a fucking giant behind a curtain. He's not the Wizard of Oz. He's like, you know, what are you talking about? We're two mates.

We're having a conversation. We disagree about this particular thing. We call each other out on it. If you do that at the pub all the time, don't you you're healthy you do so what will become transgressive is just opening up the space to have more conversations like that for us all to relax our assholes a little bit and breathe out a bit and go you know what we're grown-ups crazy orange man in charge right now that's fine that'll be what it'll'll be. And the left is going through its thing. There will be no shortage of topics on left and right for me to point out where we're failing ourselves in the conversation and model better ways of

having that conversation. If anything, that is a more pressing need now than it was four years ago. And I'm frankly liberated to be sort of unshackled from the expectation that I'm always going to be banging on about how ridiculous the woke left is, because at the end of the day, it's not that interesting. The excesses of the social justice movement were a bit silly and tragic, I think, for the political fortunes of the left. But there are more interesting things to talk about. You know, I'd rather talk to you. I'd rather talk about artificial intelligence. I'd rather talk about how we solve the big problems, you know, and how we all get along with each other. There's only so much banging on about, you know, wokesters that I want to do.

Well, I mean, everything that has needed to be said about it has been said, right, at this point. And it's time to move on, i think to greener pastures and i'm not worried about you finding uh fertile terrain to invest your skill set um but i'd love to be put out of a job by everyone becoming super rational yeah i don't think that's gonna happen uh but maybe we can kind of end this with some insight or or advice that you could share about like the art and skill of engaging in uncomfortable conversations. Because I think right now, like a lot of people are like, whether it's in their workplace or in the homes or with extended family, like there is a rift and within a lot of households, like, you know, people are on different sides of the, you know,

kind of political spectrum. And there's a lot of kind of, you know, chilly silence at the moment and fear around like how to, you know, kind of broach conversation and do it in a healthy way. You want the- And we're all kind of, you know, like a lot of people are just sort of like, whether they're losing friends or alienated from family, like that's its own kind of like tragedy in all of this. And to the extent that bridges can be built and repaired, you seem like someone who might be able to have some advice for people who maybe aren't as, you know, Asperger-y as you and kind of do you care what other people think about them? That's right. Yeah. I'm like, yeah, people think about them? That's right. Yeah. I'm like, yeah, Homo sapien ought to say this at this juncture. I'm like, my robot brain kicks in and I try to figure out how to deal with the messiness of human beings. I have a few ideas about that. I mean, the first thing would be that there are

some topics on which people will claim to have a great deal of knowledge that totally diverges from your own, which may not be the best places to start. So, I'm thinking specifically about the 2020 election or climate change or whether COVID vaccines are safe. People might be extremely set in their ways on particular things. So, don't start with those issues. Start with issues where it's more a matter of opinion than a matter of fact, right? Because then you can win people's opinions easier than you can change their minds on facts. And begin by acknowledging what is correct about their side or what is justified about their position and what is wrong about your side. So take trans as the issue that Donald Trump capitalized on so much in the campaign and that is getting sort of blamed for so much of the left's derangement. This is fundamentally

a matter of opinion. It's not really a matter of... There isn't a huge dispute about the facts, unless you're talking about some rhetorical question of whether or not... Even when you say, like, do men and women exist or are trans women women, you're not really talking about facts, you're talking about values, because you're talking about what the interpretation of the meaning of the word is. Let's suppose that I'm the person on the left and I'm having, you know, a Christmas dinner with a family member who is, who thinks that, you know, transgender activists are grooming our children and that we need to pass anti-trans legislation.

The place to start would be by saying, I get that things have moved very fast and that there's been a lot of nonsense on the pro-trans activist side, you know, and that it's not helpful or constructive to have loyalty tests where you ask people, you know, can you define a woman? What is a woman? Or like, you know, are trans women women? And it's not helpful to say things like

anybody who disagrees with us has the blood of trans children on their hands, you know, and it's not helpful to insist that there is no relationship between biological sex and gender. So, you know, acknowledge all the failings of your own side and give credence to whatever their concerns are. You may even just want to ask them and, you know, what are you worried about here? And they're probably going to say something about women's sport or they're probably going to say something about women's restrooms because really it's in the edge cases that get people riled up. And you might just want to concede that it's a really tricky question exactly how you divide up sports.

It's a little bit arbitrary. Like we even divide men and women into different categories in like table tennis, ping pong, like that shouldn't really matter, but like we do it anyway culturally. So you might want to encourage them to think about why we break things up into sex. Some of it might be arbitrary anyway, and there might be some kinds of sports where it doesn't matter, where you just have like an all sex grouping, but in areas where it does matter, then where there's a clear biological advantage to having gone through puberty as a male, then maybe we need to rethink that. And similarly, with girls' locker rooms. I mean, if there's a concern about predatory behavior, then that should certainly be addressed. And you can speak maybe in vague terms about that, but then say, then you get to the thing that you actually, then you get to the thing that you actually believe, which is probably something along the lines of throughout all places and times, there has been like a tiny minority of

the population who from the very earliest ages believes that they were born into the wrong sex. And these transsexuals are currently having a horrendous time because they're copying an enormous amount of flack for something they didn't choose. And like, do you believe in equality? Like, do you believe in egalitarianism? Do you believe that a person should be able to be discriminated against when they're trying to rent an apartment because they happen to have been born with this dysphoria. And then the person will probably go on about, yeah, but I mean, you know, you've got 15-year-old classrooms of girls who are all deciding that they're non-binary and like, you know, wearing

boys' clothes. And you'll say, absolutely, absolutely. And there may be a social contagion component to it. And it's worth being specific about what we're talking about because, you know, there may be kind of a gender fad that is sort of happening as well as a result of this. And at the same time, there is still this minority of people. So I wonder if there's a way in which we can uphold the rights of those people and just be as decent a person as I know that you are, you know, so that those people aren't allowed to be fired from jobs, aren't allowed to be discriminated against, aren't allowed to have their healthcare taken away because we're reacting to this kind of, you know, silly gender fad or getting anxious about

whether or not the girls swim meet is going to be contaminated by biological boys. Like something like, you know what I mean? Like find the common ground. boys. Like something like, you know what I mean? Like find the common ground. Regardless of the issue. I mean, essentially what you're saying is lead with empathy, you know, respect somebody's emotional response to whatever issue is, is inflaming them. And instead of seizing the opportunity to, you know, pounce on them and tell them all the reasons that they're wrong, instead say, well, tell me more about that basically. Like, you know, pounce on them and tell them all the reasons that they're wrong. Instead say, well, tell me more about that, basically. Like, you know, lead with curiosity and be open and

kind of model that openness as an antidote to kind of the intensity that generally kind of surrounds whatever issue it is that is like triggering, basically. Yes. And find common values that you can pin the conversation around. Like I think one of the great triumphs of the gay rights movement a generation ago was, and it's a shame that we haven't followed the same playbook for trans issues because it would have been a lot more successful, was to argue for universal values that everybody agreed on rather than arguing for specific rights for that minority group. So what I mean by that is that in the era of like Stonewall and like,

you know, gay liberation, the activists who were writing, especially in the 1990s about, you know, gay rights were basically saying, do you believe that everyone should be treated equally? Do you believe that people should be punished for who they love? All we're asking for is the same stuff that you have. Nothing special. We want to be able to visit our loved ones in hospital. Andrew Sullivan. Exactly.

I mean, he wrote a brilliant book called Virtually Normal about this in the 90s. We want to be able to visit our loved ones in hospital when they're dying. We don't want to be turned away as if we were a stranger just because we're of the same sex. We want to be able to rent apartments without being discriminated against. We want to be able to open joint bank accounts without, you know, not being counted as the most important person in each other's lives. We don't want to be able to be fired from a job. Do you believe in the basic values of American democracy, that this is a fair land

where everyone is treated equally before the law? Then come on board. And people buy that. People buy that. People will buy that. And if that had been the rhetoric around the trans issue, just to sort of flip the tables now and be more critical of my side of politics, of the left on this, if it had been, all we want is what everybody else has, we just want basic rights, we would be so much further ahead. Instead, we've triggered this backlash by asking for much, much more and requiring that you must agree with us that a person who feels inside internally, a man who feels like a woman is exactly the same as a woman. Isn't just a person who deserves the same rights, same legal rights, but you're allowed to feel however you want to about them. See, what the gay movement didn't do was say, you have to like gay sex. You have to like the idea. You have to like the idea. You have to endorse me getting a blowjob from a guy.

You know, you have to picture that in your head, grandma, when you're going to vote on gay marriage or something. And you have to feel the same way about that that you do about heterosexual sex. Exactly. You have to feel just as good about a couple of guys banging at it, you know, going at it, as you do about... They didn't ask for that.

They didn't make that demand. They said, it's not about sex. It's not about any of that. It's about basic equality and fairness. By contrast, what the transgender movement has done, and I don't mean to be critical of trans people here because I have tons of, I mean, I'm married to a guy, if people don't know.

I mean, I'm part of the community, so to speak. And, you know, many of my trans friends feel the same way as I do about this. Where this has actually really been driven is this same kind of university educated, elite kind of critical theory group who've foisted a lot of identity politics on us and who've been the most aggressive about pushing a trans agenda that has not been good for trans people. But instead of simply saying, we just want to be treated the same as everybody else and don't think too much about what our wobbly bits look like, don't think too much about what's between my legs, that's sort of irrelevant,

they instead took a maximalist position of, you need to express fealty towards our claims about our own identity, otherwise you're erasing my identity and there's not even a starting point for having a conversation about this. Well, what a great way to win people over by telling them that they have no standing to be part of the conversation, unless they sign up to agree with you before they've even had the conversation and before they've even thought it through, because you're a transphobic bigot from the outset, unless you agree that trans women are women, whatever that even means, before you even have a conversation about what that means, or about what woman means, or about whether there's

something fundamental to the experience of being a woman that entails growing up as a girl in a sexist society, which some feminists think. But to even make the claim that you need to grow up as a girl in a sexist society in order to be a participant in the full community of womanhood is to mark you as a TERF and as a transphobe and as a bigot. And therefore the conversation doesn't begin. And therefore people get put on the back foot and therefore it becomes adversarial instead of collaborative. And therefore you end up in the environment that we're currently in, which is terrible for trans people and terrible for really everybody on this issue because it's so irrational and it's so hot. Turn the dial down, people. Turn the reason up and the heat down and

find the areas on which you can identify values around which you can collaborate. Because when you speak to people about their deepest values, fairness, equality, justice, then you can actually get somewhere. Then it becomes less about my side. It becomes less about my facts. It becomes less about my position. And it becomes about, okay, let's cut the bullshit. How do we get to a deal? I think that's a good place to end it. How do we get to a deal? I think that's a good place to end it. Final thoughts on having an uncomfortable conversation.

Thank you, man. I appreciate it. I loved it. Love you. Love you too. This was super fun, man. Yeah, it was great. We did it. Absolutely.

I feel fabulous. All right, man. We'll come back and let's do it again sometime. Fabulous. And enjoy your trip here in the United States. Thanks. Cheers, States. Thanks. Cheers, buddy. Crazy times.

Yeah. Uncomfortable Conversations, you can subscribe to it wherever you subscribe to podcasts. You're on YouTube, Substack. Oh, yeah, the Substack. You can pay your little, you know, your shekel a month and get bonus content and no ads and all that. And we'll link all that up in the show notes. Sweet. Cool, man.

Cheers. Thanks. Peace. We're brought to you today by Element. Element has tons of flavors, including a whole bunch of wintery tastes like chocolate mint, chocolate chai, and chocolate raspberry, which are actually designed to be enjoyed hot or swirled into your favorite cold weather beverages. Visit drinklmnt.com slash richroll to get a free sample pack with any purchase. That's drinklmnt.com slash richroll. We're brought to you today by Bond Charge.

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