TRIGGERnometry - Inside the Bubble of Public Broadcasting - Josh Szeps

Episode Date: March 17, 2024

Josh Szeps is an Australian journalist and TV presenter. He has previously hosted Weekend Breakfast on ABC News and was a founding host for HuffPost Live. He is now the host of Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps. Find it on YouTube and Substack: http://youtube.com/@JoshSzeps_ https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com Apple https://apple.co/327Ydka Spotify https://spoti.fi/3T9KGAh Twitter http://twitter.com/joshzepps Instagram http://instagram.com/joshszeps TikTok tiktok.com/@uncomfyconversations Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc  Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Some producers who I've worked with have been required by management in various media organisations to literally keep a spreadsheet, literally guessing whether or not a guest is gay. You're not going to go up to and go, hey, mate, are you a bit queer? But there's no column for, what's the economic background of this person? What's their class? What's their ideology? So you'll end up turning on the TV and you'll have a panel and there'll be a Sikh woman, a transgender woman, A black woman and an indigenous woman all saying the same fucking thing.

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With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer. Josh Zepz, all the way over from Australia. You haven't been there for a while. I've just come back from there. So that would be an interesting chat for us to get into. This is hilarious as well because we've been going back and forth and back and forth

for like 18 months. And every single time I'm in the UK, you're in the US or somewhere. And then I was in Australia. It's what happens when you're starving. Well, and then finally. And now, then I was here while you were in Australia. And now this is like the one day. I'm going back to Australia tomorrow.

And then the overlap, the stars have finally aligned. And we're here for 24 hours in the same city. That's right. Well, so you were just in America and Francis was there. Yes. I was just in Australia. I came back yesterday morning and you're flying there tomorrow. Exactly.

It was meant to be. It was meant to be. So it's good to have your men. And so much to talk about you had some very interesting things happen in your career with the equivalent of the BBC in Australia. We would talk about that as well. But just, I was curious to get your. perspective on where you think Australia is in terms of comparing to the UK and the US, in terms of

the cultural stuff that we often talk about, because my takeaway from having spent a couple of weeks there was like traveling 10 years into the past. And in the past, that would have sounded like a hack joke about Australia being a backward place. Today, I think it's kind of a compliment. Things aren't as bad. You know what I mean? Well, I'm hoping that we don't have to follow exactly the same trajectory. I'm hoping there are some icebergs that we can avoid. I mean, this is one of the benefits of being a medium-sized country that nobody pays attention to. You get to learn from the mistakes of other countries and you get to see what the US and the UK are doing and hopefully not do exactly that. I mean, Australians are quite, we're pretty relaxed. I mean, we're mostly

pretty chilled out. I feel like the volume on everything in America is turned up to 11. I'm less familiar with where things are at at the moment right now in the UK. I'm pretty familiar with, I mean, I've lived here from, I lived here when I was in my teens, and it struck me that there's a, there's a stiff upper lip sense of English compliance that is reminiscent of Australia, the Australian attitude. And the United States just seems to have gone to a degree that is, I don't know, how you wind it back, especially in an era of social media and coming artificial intelligence and like political polarization and the two fantastic candidates who we have for both remarkable gentlemen in their own right. But I think Australia has managed to kind of, you know,

tack as something of a middle course. There is a wild social justice fringe, but it's not nearly as powerful or as vocal. There is a right-wing, quasi-alt-right, semi-libertarian strain of moderate craziness, but it's not as significant. But what there is in Australia that I think goes unremarked upon there, is it kind of a soft, fluffy, kind consensus that is hard to shatter? Like, why would you have conversations like the ones that you guys do? Like, why not just let things be? Why do you want to keep ruffling feathers? Why do you want to keep making trouble?

Why do you want to keep kicking a hornet's nest? You know, like, we know what the proper way of thinking is. So let's just think the proper things. And that's quite pervasive, I think. And is this why you're no longer the ABC? It may have something to do with it. It may have something to do with it. To tell everybody the story of what happened with you.

Look, there is no precipitating incidents, and I love the public broadcaster. I think it's indispensable, I think. We used to talk like this about five years ago. You think I'm going to come around at some point? Oh, I think you will. I think it's not about you coming around. It's about them changing. That's what will happen.

Well, that is interesting. I mean, you know, so how do you get that change and how do you restore trust in mainstream media institutions? and how do those institutions and organizations earn the trust? I mean, there has come to be a way of thinking about big subjects where the people who are involved in reporting don't necessarily even know that they're inside a bubble, right? So it's not that there's, like, I think sometimes people who are on the outside of media

might suspect that there's, you know, some kind of nefarious conspiracy, that people know that they're avoiding certain stories. And we might be talking about, you know, transgender issues or we'll be talking about, I don't know, the gender pay gap, or it might be talking about race or indigenous rights or something like that. And there can be a perception, oh, well, everyone's just saying the same thing because they're all in on it, or they're all, you know, they're not touching things because they're co-opted in some way. And it's less that and more,

like, you know the old joke about the two young fish who are swimming through the ocean and an older, bigger fish swims past them and says, how's the water today, guys? And they swim on and one of and the young fish looks at the other one and says, what's water? You don't know the water unless you're outside of the water. Like, you have to actually jump out of the pond in order to see what you're swimming in. And for me, there was just an increasing conflict between the kinds of conversations that I want to have on uncomfortable conversations, which is the name of my podcast and which by definition are uncomfortable conversations, which doesn't necessarily mean that I'm making the guest uncomfortable or that we're going to have an argument or that I'm going to confect some kind of

controversy, but it does mean that we're going to touch subjects that would make people uncomfortable if people were to raise them at a party or, you know, at the pub or at a Barbie, as the case would be in Australia. Things where there's a certain kind of orthodoxy on both sides, and you know that once you start talking about them, there are eggshells that you have to tread on. There are tripwires that you have to be careful not to trigger. Trigger nominotry, thank you very much. And so my desire to sort of wrestle with those things on my podcast, occasionally write newspaper articles about those sorts of subjects, but came into conflict with a, you know,

justifiably, I would say, risk-averse corporation and a cautious corporation that is struggling at the moment in a battle between objectivity and diversity. So like there's a whole diversity mantra that's taking place at the moment in newsrooms where you want more diverse people to come in and bring their whole, whole selves to the story and use their own lived experience and so on. Well, how does that mesh with the quest for an objective reporting, right? I've always felt that in a position like the one that

I had, I hosted a three hour a day talkback radio show where we took calls, we interviewed politicians, we interviewed cultural figures and so on. I felt there should be some space for a kind of certain amount of rambunctiousness, a certain amount of pushing the edges, a certain amount of kind of playful interrogation that sometimes rubbed people the wrong way. I would want to see a public square that's as capacious as possible, that's as as vigorous as possible. I think it's the only way we're going to survive the 21st century if we manage to talk to each other in ways that are sometimes provocative and sort of wrestle our way towards the truth. But that does sometimes run counter to the mandates of objectivity, which can sometimes get confused with mandates for

intellectual or ideological orthodoxy. So when you say how did it happen, that's all a very long-winded way of saying, basically, I wanted to write some newspaper articles about various subjects that would consistently get knocked back by management. The Canary and the coal mine for me was during gay pride last year. Now I'm married to a guy. I think I have my bona fides there. That makes me pretty gay.

I'm a card-carrying member. And yet I've always been a bit off about, like, pride. I mean, you know, it's 2024. Will there ever come a point in the future where we can just say stick a fork in it? The turkey is done. Like, it's done. We won. We won everything we asked for.

God bless all the people in the 60s and 70s, the gay rights pioneers who endured police beatings and campaigned for everything. And now we have effectively total equality. My life is miraculously boring. right? You know, I have a mortgage, I have kids, I have a husband. That's what they wanted. And so I was invited by one of the broadsheet newspapers in Sydney to write a piece about this because the editor knew how I felt about it. And unfortunately, when you are a host or presenter on the public broadcaster and you're the public face, everything has to go through management to get approved. And this piece

that was somewhat critical, mildly critical of the idea of pride, went up the chain. And it was refused to be published, not even in the public broadcaster, right, but published in a different publication. So it wouldn't even have their imprimatur on it. And the explanation was that, you know, hosts on the network are not allowed to hold or express opinions about controversial cultural issues. This was at a time when the broadcaster was the official sponsor of World Pride, which was the gay pride that was taking place. There were huge rainbow flags hanging in the lobby. Every other host on the station, all of whom are straight, apart from me, are going rah, rah, rah, ra, gay pride. Every second promo in the ad breaks is for gay pride.

So I was like, you are allowed to have an opinion about pride. It just has to be management's opinion about pride. It can't be a dissenting opinion about pride. And that's when I thought, okay, we're going to run into some trouble here at some point. And that trouble came to her head in various ways towards the end of last year where I think the risk aversion of management was just like, you know, pick a team. Either you're with us or against us. I was like, okay, I guess I have to be against you, grudgingly so. Josh, do you think that would have happened 10 years ago? Do you think they would have been as strong on you need to adhere to the public message? I don't know, because I had the good fortune of not being in an organization that robust.

It's hard to say. I mean, look, echo chambers have always existed, right? Like, you know, groupthink has always existed. It's not like we've had a particularly courageous set of contrarian institutions or organizations going back into the past. And there's certainly groupthink on the right as well. I mean, I could be making the same criticisms of other media outlets. And I think on the whole, it's critically important for us

still have the news gathering institutions of some of these places. But would it have happened 10 years ago? I mean, I think there'd probably be different blind spots. I think the blind spots, I think it wouldn't be specifically specific to that one because the orthodoxy of what the elite establishment regard as being taboo has shifted. But there would have been other things and there would have been other, you know, how easy was it in the 1970s to, you know, come out in favor of, I don't know, name your social justice issue of the 1970s. You know, you would have had, when the life of Brian was released, you know, the Christians were going nuts and saying that it should be banned.

There's always people who believe that they're on the right side of history who want to silence other people. And I'm not saying that that's what happened here. I'm just saying that there's an effect where when people feel like they're pretty certain what the right answer is, they don't want the questions to be asked. And I think I believe, and you guys clearly believe, that those questions still deserve to be asked, because we haven't settled on a final answer to what's right and what's not. I think as well, and push back on this if you disagree, and the more I've been thinking about this, mainly to do with the BBC, the more I've come to this conclusion, which is if the state-funded broadcaster is not willing to entertain other points of view, let's just call them a heterodox points of view. then why should they be funded by the state? Because there are people in that state who have those

opinions, whether it's being pro-Brexit a few years ago, or, you know, thinking that actually what we need is some kind of more populist government. We need stricter controls on immigration. But if the mainstream broadcaster is not prepared to entertain those points of view, then is it really serving its public? It's a tricky question. I mean, the simple answer, of that is in news gathering, it should be. I mean, in news gathering, so you know, you can divide kind of all media organizations into the news department and then what is sometimes called content, which would be entertainment documentaries factual and stuff like that. I think it is absolutely indispensable for us all to establish uniform facts about the world and for us to be getting

our news from news organizations. I think people who get their news solely from podcasts and blogs are at huge risk of being misled. Subscribe now. Subscribe now and subscribe to uncomfortable conversations, which is launched on Substack and a new YouTube page. But, you know, I do think... I so agree with you, by the way, Carol. Yeah, it's like people who haven't worked in journalism

may not understand the sheer rigor of a real newsroom. If you're at the New York Times, or if you're at the New Yorker, or if you're at the BBC or the ABC, you will have an editor above you, if you're in a newsroom who when you come with a story will say great story you don't quite have it yet you need to get another two sources we need to fact check it we need to go through line by line and make sure that it's true and does that always work no do they sometimes make mistakes of course they do

and then they will correct those mistakes and in an ideal world you're aspiring towards a scenario where you've set up an institution that functions as a self-correcting mechanism to try to arrive at the best possible representation of the truth, however hard that may be. Then when you're talking about the content side of things, so you might be talking about a BBC panel show, for example, you're talking about a chat show, you're talking about a morning show or something like that, where it's not where you're going for your news, and it doesn't have editorial oversight in the same way.

It's more just like, let's talk about the issues of the day, then I completely agree with you. Then you need the largest number of possible voices. And what's happened is that you've got at the moment this diversity mantra, which focuses incredibly intensely on the ethnicity and the religion and the race and the sex and the sexuality and the gender orientation of guests to try to make sure that the net is cast as widely as possible with no focus on ideological diversity or political diversity. I mean, there would be panel shows. So some producers who I've worked with have been required by management in various media organizations

to literally keep a spreadsheet of all of the guests, with columns for their sex, you know, sexual orient. I mean, they're literally guessing whether or not a guest is gay. You're not going to go up to and go, hey, mate, are you a bit queer? So, you know, they're guessing sexual orientation. They're writing down the, but there's no column for, what's the economic background of this person? What's their class? What's their ideology?

What's their political affiliation, if any? So you'll end up turning on the TV and you'll have a panel and there'll be a Sikh woman, a transgender woman, a black woman and an indigenous woman, all saying the same fucking thing. How's that diversity? So yes, expand, you know, expand that as much as possible. But I would never go so far as to say that you shouldn't be funding, you know, state-funded media.

I think that's indispensable. I think that the original idea, if you want to get all philosophical, like Habermas was the first guy who kind of came up with this notion, that anytime you have corporate media, it's going to be influenced by advertisers and by big corporate money. And anytime you have state media, it's going to be influenced by politicians. So you create a public sphere, which is in the middle, which is not funded by corporations. And although it's funded by the state, it's completely free from interference by the state. And the government has no ability to instruct journalists or editors about what they should or shouldn't be saying. That's the ideal. And I still think that that has

merit. I think that's a really good distinction, actually, about the news side and everything else. Because I think that's where the BBC's got into trouble. And I said that you sound like us five years ago, and I think you misunderstood what I meant, because the change that's happening certainly for us is not that we have changed our opinion particularly, it's just as you've seen the content side of the BBC drive it consistently in the direction that you're talking about, at this point, it's kind of hard for us to argue that that is something that should be funded by the public. And I think from my conversations with people who still work at the ABC and your experience too,

that is a direction that it seems to be heading in as well, whereby the content side is undermining people's trust in the new side. I mean, the New York Times is a good example of this where, I mean, the New York Times has been caught lying endlessly at this point. And I agree with you that a podcast. I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure I would sign on to lying endlessly. I suppose it depends on what your definition of lying is. My view would be that the New York Times is consistently representing a slanted view of the world by pushing stories very hard that fulfill that view and suppressing and not publishing

stories that don't. The end result of which is people are presented with a false vision of what the truth is overall. And that is intentional because that is what the people in the organization want to push to the world. Right? So, I mean, well, there are two things going on. One is the editorial direction that they want a newspaper to have.

So the Wall Street Journal has a self-consciously conservative op-ed page. All of their columnists are, you know, deeply, deeply conservative. The New York Times has traditionally been on the left, and it's, you know, editorials will be slanted in that direction. Then there's the news side of things, just to divide news and, you know, opinion or content again. And I'll take you, I'll grant to you that certainly during the racial reckoning of 2020 to 2021, there was an enormous amount of trying to do the right thing throughout, through their news reporting at the New York Times. So, you know, oh, they weren't riots. They were, you know, mostly peaceful protests

or, you know, in the early days of the transgender issue, it was all just about, you know, respecting people's identity and so on. But I think in the past 12 to 18 months, the New York Times has done a good job of bringing on board a bunch of dissenting voices in the editorial side of things with, you know, columnists who are much more heterodox. And even on the news side of things, you've seen three big feature pieces in the New York Times in the past eight months or so about the controversy over transgender pediatric care and things like that you would never have seen three or four years ago. So I do think there's an ability to write the ship. I don't think you can call it lying. Hold on, but this is precisely my point. An internal bias. Look at transgender

stuff, right? The reason they are now doing this is that people on podcasts and everywhere else have been basically saying, guys, this is like this is a real issue and it's serious and people of being hurt and blah, blah, blah, and the New York Times would have been writing pieces at the time saying, oh, these people are evil, right? Yes. And now, three years later, they're like, oh, actually, this is a big problem. So if I'm one of the people who's been like Abigail Shreyer or Barry Weiss or someone like that who's been raising this issue and being dismissed, I think it's quite reasonable

in that situation to go, well, it's great that they've woken up to it. But if every time an issue doesn't fit their narrow vision, the people who raise that issue, get destroyed, and then three years later, like, oh, actually, this is a real issue. That's not how it should be. Well, absolutely, it's not how it should be. And clearly, I have faith in the ability of podcasts to bring to the mainstream media's attention, things that they ought to be covering. Otherwise, I wouldn't have gone out on my own and I wouldn't now be doing a podcast.

So you're right. I think we have the freedom in the independent media space to notice things that perhaps the structures of an editorial newsroom aren't going to notice and to push on them in a way that they wouldn't feel comfortable pushing on them. And I would just say if they come around late, then that's better than never coming around at all. I don't think it means that they were lying in the first place. I think it means that they had a misallocation of focus.

It's also worth bearing in mind as well that I think this is something that happens to every institution where every institution, rightly any media, will have blind spots with issues that the left thing are more important. And also as well, the things that are. and I would love to have your opinion on this, which is the podcast space, it's beautiful, it's brilliant, it's exciting, but it's not also without its pitfalls,

particularly when it comes to things like audience capture. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look at what's happened over the course since prior to COVID, to many people who I regarded as friends and colleagues, prior to that, there is, I mean, you guys are at risk of this as well, right? I mean, you know, we're not.

Do you know what? We are genuinely far too contrarian assholes to be captured. We like pissing our audience off regularly. Become part of our group. No, fuck off. I'm not part of any group. Exactly. It's the tribe.

I call my people the tribe of the tribalists, right? You know, we are proudly tribalist tribe. But, you know, prior to back in, what was it, maybe 2018, 2018, 2019, I moderated a live event in Australia, which was Sam Harris, Douglas Murray, Marjid Nawaz, Eric Weinstein and Brett Weinstein, right? Now, of that group, and I shan't mention any names, several are still completely sane, and several have gone bat-shit crazy.

Do you know what's interesting about this? Sorry to interrupt, Josh, is Joe Rogan has a great routine about what happened during COVID. She says, he says, we lost so many people during COVID, and most of them are still alive. Yeah. And what's interesting is, which of those five people you would describe as having been lost and which you wouldn't

really depends on where you've ended up as a result. There are some people who would have the exact opposite view to you. Those people would be wrong. Only I am right. I probably will find myself agreeing with your list of who has lost it and who hasn't. But I think it's an interesting point. And this speaks actually to the podcast capture thing. Yeah. I mean, there is something that happens in independent media where if you're if you're prone to a certain type of conspiratorial thinking and you're prone to appreciating the feedback what you regard as the feedback of your audience which actually of course is the feedback of the minority of your audience who can be bothered emailing you because they're sufficiently outraged or passionate and have enough

time on their hands to do so then you can find yourself veering off into cloud kuku land and you can sometimes also just find yourself through guest selection getting a bit misled. Like, you know, there's a challenge about how much do we use our platforms to interrogate people and how much are we just hear for a comfy chat. Joe Rogan ran into this in 2022 during COVID when he was, was that 2022 or 2021 when he joined Spotify and there was that backlash and some musicians were threatened to, you know, pull their music from Spotify because of vaccine misinformation, supposedly on Joe's show. And part of the problem there, I think, was that Joe's style, and I'm familiar with this because I was on his show. I've been on a show like seven times, but the last time was exactly during this.

And he and I had a bit of a bit of biffo about COVID and about vaccines at the time that momentarily went viral. But, you know, his style is just to have a convivial conversation with somebody. He's not interrogative journalist. He's not an investigative journalist. He just wants to have a chat. And sometimes if you have a chat and give a platform, although I kind of hate the idea, you're platforming people. You know, if you just have a chat with somebody

who actually does need pushing back on, then you can find yourself increasingly listening to people who aren't necessarily representing the best science, who aren't necessarily representing the best policy. And yeah, then you can find yourself in both audience capture and guest capture and just, I'm in the prison of my own brain capture, which we all have,

now that we get so much of our information from, you know, supercomputers in our pocket that are programmed by 22-year-olds with skateboards in Silicon Valley who are focused only on how much time you're spending on the app and whether or not you like it, share it, and comment on it. So that inevitably guides you towards things that are going to reinforce what you already believe and demonize the kinds of things and the people who you don't already believe because nuance doesn't really inflame you. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't cause you to engage with things.

So I think all of those things are coming together. Social media, soon, artificial intelligence, audience capture, the fracturing of the media ecosystem, the polarization of our politics, the polarization of our demographies as people move into just areas where there are more like-minded people. And we're in this situation where everything is sort of conspiring to narrow our focus and to push us into tighter and tighter echo chambers. And I think the job of uncomfortable conversations and the job of many podcasts like yours, is to just try to edge open the just by 10%,

the worldview of the audience from wherever they are. I mean, I don't expect my audience to agree with me about things, but I want them to listen to me and go, well, Josh is being fair. He's not caricaturing the other side. He's not fighting straw men. You know, he disagrees with me, but at least he understands the point of view that I'm coming from.

And, you know, now I sort of understand 10% a bit better what the other side thinks. And it's also as well about that idea of embracing discomfort, which is why the title of your podcast is so good, because some conversations by their nature are going to be uncomfortable. And we need to embrace that, because it's only by embracing that that we hope to actually understand the subject or issue much better. You can have someone brilliant on from the right who will explain an issue from a conservative point of view, and everything they're saying may be perfectly valid, but unless you get somebody else's,

on from the left to actually go, well, look, that may be right, but here's my opinion. That's when you come to a real understanding of the issue. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, as I say, that interaction doesn't necessarily have to be uncomfortable. But finding a way to have those conversations in a conciliatory fashion and, you know, without just allowing people to sort of filibuster on their own points is kind of the goal. Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting. Obviously, everyone is subject to the pressures of this. Except for me. I'm completely impartial. I'm something of a god. Exactly. Well, me too. That's what I was going. But, you know, I think Francis and I, first of all, the fact that there's two of us really helps. And we have very different perspectives on things. And also, we're both,

I'm certainly very highly disagreeable. And so we've had several situations where we spend the entire summer of BLM as the racial reckoning you call it, basically saying, this is completely wrong. This is outrageous, et cetera. And in the process attracting a lot of Trump fans to the channel. And then January the 6th happened. And we were like, this is completely wrong in exactly the same way and outrageous. And people got pissed off with us. And we had absolutely no problem with that because it's what we believe to be wrong or right, depending on what the situation is. And I think I know so many people now in the podcast space who absolutely resent and hate their own audience because they have built one. And that doesn't really

reflect who they are, it reflects where they think the clicks are and, you know, how do you avoid getting negative comments on your YouTube channel? Yeah, that's right. Don't read them to comments. There's the answer to that. Yeah, don't worry about how many negative comments there are. And it's not really reflective. Like, if you look at a video that people will destroy with comments, so to speak, you'll

still have an 85, 90% like to dislike ratio. Right. So the overwhelming majority of your audience actually still enjoyed the conversation that you had. It's just a minority of very angry people who, as you say, had a lot of time on their hands, who may be creating that false impression. It's really important not to fall for that. I mean, one of the good things, in a sense, about being a public figure is you don't have the luxury of falling into the trap of caring about what people on social media think because it would drive you absolutely bloody insane. I had Jimmy Carr on the show, the comedian yesterday, which will come out in a few weeks when his Netflix special drops.

He's coming up on your show as well, I know. And, you know, I was talking to him about how much crap he gets on social media. He was like, I'm still selling out shows. Yeah. Who cares? Why would I be caring about what Butface 77 has to say on Twitter when I'm selling tickets to my show? And I was like, yes, absolutely. You do get to a point at which, don't worry about it.

It's, you know, water off a ducks back. And if you're uncancelable, which is the good thing about being independent, then it doesn't matter. The problem is some of us in the independent. media landscape don't have that fortitude, I suppose, and are still kind of focused, even in a subconscious way maybe, about like, I'm wondering what happens to some of the people who I think have gone off the rails and whether it's actually that they're reading tweets and YouTube comments or whether it's just that they notice the numbers growing when they do certain types of things,

when they have certain types of conversations, when they interview certain types of people. and there's just almost a subconscious thing of course you kind of veer towards the sunrise you know of course you veer toward you just go towards the flower bed and if that flower bed is full of toxic bullshit then you're going to find yourself off the rails pretty quickly to mix metaphors but i think there's a lesson in this even for people who aren't in the public eye and don't have podcasts that i guess hitching your own sense of validation and what you should be thinking and what you should be saying to the opinions of others is extremely perilous and is going to lead you absolutely nowhere.

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And I think we can all feel over the past few years that there's been more and more of that because the opinions of others have become so potentially inflammatory. Like it used to be the case that if you said the wrong thing at a party, then maybe the person you were talking to just wouldn't talk to you anymore. Now there's a sense that if you say the wrong thing, they are going to really believe that you are evil and they may, you know, maybe the mob will come for you, at least in an online fashion, or you might lose your job or something like that. Like there's become this increasing censorious and increasing hysteria,

whereby you might not even have offended them on precisely the thing that they care about, but you've said something that puts you in a column that they think, oh, that means that you're in that particular tribe. You know, it's sort of crazy that if you tell me what you think about climate change, I can probably predict what you think about corporate taxation. Well, those two things don't have anything to do with each other, right? So, you know, you say one thing, the person goes, oh, well, that person's either, you know, a Trumper or a Brexiteer or whatever they might be, and all of a sudden,

everything else that you have to say just hits up against a brick wall. We have to find a way to talk to each other in, in, it's both nuanced and also heterodox where you're like, well, I'm just going to take the most reasonable position on each issue, regardless of where that looks. leaves me. And if that leaves me in a flaming hodgepodge, then so be it. I just have to sort of cop the flack, not pay too much attention to feedback and have, you know, integrity, authenticity and credibility as my load stars and pursue that. I've been thinking about this a lot. Do you think part of the problem is social media, but not social media in the way where they're discussing it,

but social media in that is turned all of us into celebrities with our own little followings and audiences, you know, however, you know, hundreds of followers or whoever they may be. And as a result of that, we now need to have public opinions or stances on every single issue. When the reality is, we don't have time to research into every issue, dive into the nuance of it, read about it, and then as a result of that, come out with a balanced opinion. So instead of that, we just go, oh, let's take this opinion off the shelf, because I need to have a public stance on Israel, Palestine. Yes, absolutely. It's like everybody has to give a decree about what their opinion is about something. It's like we're all little Roman emperors,

like, you know, announcing what our position is on everything. Nobody gives a shit. Like, nobody gives a shit apart from the facile people who gobble up that sort of nonsense. Yeah, I completely agree. The amount of people who have wildly passionate opinions about Israel and Palestine, I saw a screenshot that someone had posted of themselves in Australia, uh, recently on Instagram where they'd taken this proud stance. They were at a panel event in a public forum and they held up a card that said ceasefire now. And they were doing this as like a really courageous thing. And I thought, oh, that's great. No one's thought of that. We never thought of there being a ceasefire. Thanks for your enlightening fucking insights. You know, nobody ever thought about it might be a good

idea if, you know, Hamas released the hostages and Israel stopped the shelling. No, no one's been talking about that for months and months and months and months and months behind the scene. in negotiations in Qatar, nobody's been trying to pursue exactly that, you know, as foreign dignitaries and foreign ministers and secretaries of state have been flying around the world trying to sort out this mess. Like, chill out. You're not an expert on this. You know what you're talking about? Like, it's similar to, like, I heard you talking about the Tucker Carlson interview with Putin, right? And you made a very good point, which was, like, if you haven't watched the entire two and a half hours or whatever it is, don't have an opinion about it.

And that was like a breath of fresh air for me to hear because I didn't watch it. I don't want to watch it. I don't care about it. I know what I think of Tucker. I know what I think of Putin. I'm not that interested. Like, go at it. But you will never hear me comment about why Tucker was right or why Tucker was wrong.

You'll never hear me tweet about it. You're not going to hear me comment on it because I don't know. Like we need a bit more of, I don't know. I don't have an opinion about this. I have opinions about the things that I know about. And if someone in front of me has a lot of knowledge, then I'll interrogate. them and I'll tease it out and I'll try to use my bullshit detector to figure out what's true and what's false. Hopefully my audience gets a lot of insight out of that. But you're right. Why do we all have

to be constantly broadcasting our opinions to the world about things that we're ignorant on? And not only is it kind of corrosive to the conversation because we're being fed so many different opinions. It's hard to sort through what is actually an informed opinion and what is just someone trying to follow their tribe. But I think it's also corrosive to the people who are producing the opinions, aka all of us, to constantly be feeling like every thought we have is potentially auditioning as being a piece of content. You know, I mean, this is sort of a more spiritual or woo-woo thing if you want to go there, but I do feel like there's a way of being in the world that we're losing, which is just

being present, listening, appreciating, contemplating. contemplating, musing, like, at the risk of sounding like the middle-aged guy, when I was young, you made a plan to go and meet a friend outside the movie theatre and you didn't have a phone, so you just stood there if they were running late and you watched people go by,

and you looked at the clouds. You didn't pull a supercomputer out of your pocket to see what people are arguing about on the other side of the world. And there's something that happens to your head when you're constantly punctuating time every time you sit down on the toilet you're looking at this stuff.

And you're not just consuming it. You're a content creator, all of us are now. So it's like you're walking around with this little version of you on your shoulder who's saying, that's a nice sunset. I wonder if you could take a photo of it and if it would get some likes on Instagram. Oh, that's an interesting thought.

I wonder if you should broadcast that to the world on Twitter. Oh, that's an interesting argument that you could have. You could probably dunk on someone really well by parachuting back into that Facebook comment thread and arguing about it. It's like instead of living our lives, we're curators of an avatar of ourselves that is an artificial version of ourselves that we're producing for other people. Like, what does that do to your head? It's not healthy.

No, it's not healthy. And there are some times where you have a thought and you go, I'll tweet that. And then you go, let me just think about it for a second. And then an hour late, you go, I'm really glad I didn't say that thing out loud. Because we all think stupid things. It doesn't matter how smart you are or how principled you are. You are human. You are fallible.

You are flawed. And you're going to think dumb stuff. We all do. And I think one of the things a lot of people haven't considered. and the bigger my platform has got, the less I post and the more careful I am about saying what I'm saying, because the thing that I've really got over the last couple of years is everything you're saying now, I mean, you don't know where the world is going five years from now.

No. And it's all in public. And the positions you take best to be very carefully thought out. Because three or four years from now, what you're saying is. saying maybe, you know, maybe in conflict with things that you then believe. And then what are you going to do? You know? A comedian once said to me, like, he's always thinking about what clip could be offensive

in the future. He was like, you know, 10 years ago, I didn't know that it would be offensive to do jokes about like men dressing up in women's clothes or something like that. But now, of course, that would be considered transphobic. He's like, you know, you fast forward 10 years into the future. And maybe everyone will treat it as being beyond the pale to make fun of clowns. And he was like, he was doing jokes about clowns. You clown phob?

And he's like, I didn't know. We didn't know in 2024 that it was bad to make fun of clowns. It was just a thing that we did. Yeah. And I don't mean it from a being offensive perspective. I've got no problem, you know, owning the fact that this was like, you know, Friends is now considered offensive. And if I had written friends, I'd be like, fuck you, I don't give a shit.

You know, look how many people watched it at the time. It was probably, you know, a good thing in its own time. What I mean is, you know, I saw this with the war in Ukraine, which was a subject that I knew. knew more about than most people in the West. I just happened to know more. And I had people call me up and asked me my opinion and they didn't know what their opinion was.

And then I'd see the same person like three days later having the strongest possible opinion about it in public. And I was going, well, if you agreed with me, you only agreed with me because you heard me and you heard my opinion. But a lot of these people didn't agree with me because obviously they'd gone to someone else and they got a different opinion. And I'm going, three days ago, you were not qualified. And now you're qualified?

And three years from now, this is going to be a whole different situation. There will be another conflict somewhere else, and the stuff you're saying is going to be in complete opposite to what you're now saying. And it's just that awareness of everything we say in public can and will be used against you. Rightly so, by the way. Like, you're going to be held account. Why rightly so? Because people should think before speaking in public.

Should they? Yeah, they should. Absolutely. Yeah. Isn't this what your argument was about Joe? I mean, having people on who say things that is part of a conversation may end up hurting people. People should think about how they speak in public. I'm not sure people should think about what they say in public.

I think they should be very careful about what they say. That sounds a bit Maoist to me. No, no, no. It sounds a bit like... I didn't... No, no. I think the Maoist part is you should think about what you say in public because you'll be punished. That's Maoist.

What I'm saying is you should think about what you're saying in public because the chances are you're wrong. Right, but earlier you were saying you should think about what you say in public because in three years time people might re-evaluate it. No, no, you will realize how wrong you were. Right, I see what you're saying. And then you're going to be in a position where you're like, oh shit, I said all this crap about this conflict. And now I'm, I'm, and then people will remind you. I think it's important for us to not care so much about consistency as well. Like, I'm a big fan of not being consistent over time.

It's regarded as being the biggest slam dunk against people, especially politicians. If they're like, if someone's like, well, hang on, you're for this policy now, but five years ago, you weren't. Well, you know, as a great man once said, when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do? But that's a different point. It's like, I understand what you're saying, that like, you know, be mindful of the fact that the things that you're saying now are provisional, right? And that facts may change and that you may have, you may turn out to have been wrong. I agree that you need to sort of pick your battles.

don't go out fighting for some huge social justice cause that you don't know anything about or to save democracy if you don't even understand the contours of the battle, especially if it's something complicated and foreign like Gaza or Ukraine. On the other hand, I do think we need to have greater forgiveness

both of other people and ourselves about things that we got wrong in the past. And, you know, we can't be held to account for things that we tweeted eight years ago that was a different climate. It was a different place. The milieu was different. The taboos were different. You know, we've reached a point where we have this kind of outrage archaeology, which is, I know what you weren't defending there, but it's a difficult and nuanced thing to tease out, like how careful we'd be about the things that we're saying now versus how much justification ought people to have in the future

for punishing us for things that we're saying now, because those things no longer comport with the norms of 2030. Well, I don't know the norms of 2030, so I'm going to say what I'll say now, and so be it. No, no, I agree with you. What I'm talking about is something completely different. And you see it now with the war in Ukraine, and I focus on it because it's interesting to me, and the war in Iraq. I was against the war in Iraq. I was against our invasion. And there were so many people who were for it, who because they were for it, and they were so disappointed in their cheerleading for that war, and now, like, I'm against all war. Well, anyone should be against all war, but there are times when you're going to find yourself in a position where

you have to defend yourself, you have to help someone else defend themselves. But a lot of people, Tucker being one example of this, who cheer led that war, because of the, you might call it, you know, if you want to go into woo-wee conversation, the psychic damage they did to themselves by cheerleading a conflict that they didn't really fully understand because that's what everyone else was doing. They're now in a completely different position where they're overreacting in the opposite direction. That's interesting. So don't, in other words, don't learn the wrong lesson from your mistakes in a way. Like, I remember at the time of the Arab Spring, uh, when Syria was going up in flames, uh, remember Obama was seriously considering

intervening there. He had said that chemical weapons would be a red line and that the United States would do something if Assad, the dictator in Syria, uh, used chemical weapons on his own people. He did. Um, Obama tried to get the UK, uh, involved and the UK, uh, involved and the UK, didn't do so, so that was basically a, you know, US didn't want to go it alone thing. I was interviewing Phil Donahue, the old American talk show host on HuffPost Live when I was living in New York, and he was coming out strongly against intervention in Syria. I was pretty in favor of intervening. I thought the humanitarian catastrophe justified intervention on, you know, just moral grounds. And I was saying to him, he was saying, like, you know, Iraq, haven't we learned

the lessons of Iraq? And I was like, yeah, but aren't we smart enough to? to make distinctions between different kinds of war? No, no. Like that? The answer to that is no. And, you know, it's a similar thing with COVID and with like, you know, coming back, looping that point that you're making, Constantine, about the, you know, the derangement of certain people who are in podcaster stand, as Sam calls it.

And the lessons learned from COVID. You know, there are certain people who have experiences of being traumatized by the overreach of governments, by government's use, you know, certainly in the developing world and in the Arab world, of emergency decrees in order to introduce, you know, fundamentally to enslave the population and introduce authoritarian regimes, who when COVID happened, they were like, uh-oh, this shit is that. I have to oppose every, you know, we can get into all our arguments that we want to about lockdowns and when they went too far and whether Australia went too far and whatever. But as public health officials tried to scramble to figure out what to do about a global

pandemic, there were people who regarded any inhibition on individual liberty as being evidence of a police state that was just around the corner. They were learning the wrong lessons from the past. We didn't end up with a police state. We are not currently living in a police state. Australia is not currently a police state. And it wound all of the, all of the restrictions. And similarly, if you've got an evolutionary biologist who starts to sort of talk about how, well, maybe Ivermectin this, and maybe the vaccines are doing this. that or whatever it might be and realizes that he was right about a few of those early things, not in the case of ibomectin, but in the case of, I don't know, side effects that the vaccines

might have or whether or not it's really necessary for young people to get vaccinated. Then you can go, oh, because I was right and the establishment was wrong about this little thing, that means that establishments are always wrong and that the conspiratorial contrarian point of view is always right. It's the wrong conclusion to draw. So I mean, yes, treat every individual you know, example that you're faced with in as rational a way as possible. Learn from your mistakes, but don't create a kind of a paradigm or a filter or a prism through which you henceforth filter all of your information thinking, well, I made a mistake last time, therefore I'm never going to make that same mistake again.

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Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. And it also ties into the idea of identity because these people, then, their identity is, I'm the heterodox guy. Yeah. Or I'm the guy who is, you know, the COVID guy who will come in and explode the troops and show you what's really going on. And once you've got that identity, if a fact comes to light, which actually shows a lot of your positions to be incorrect or false or lacking in

nuance, then you're not really going to accept those facts because what it does is damage your identity, your brand and the way that you make money and the way that you get invited onto other or the podcast or platform. Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? We're all becoming sort of, it's a little bit like the social media avatar phenomenon that I was talking about a moment ago. We're starting to inhabit more and more tribal roles.

And maybe it was always thus. Like maybe in prehistory, it was more like that. You know, things were more stratified. Things were more predictable. Things were more feudal, basically. Like you knew your place. And then post-war, especially post-1960s in the civil rights movement, there was this great kind of flowering of individualism

where everybody could, you know, find their own jam, however they wanted to. But it seems like social media is creating an environment in which we're able to revert back into more secure, more stable, more comforting tribal identities. So, yeah, I'm the COVID contrarian, or I'm this type of person. And we even do it in our individual lives. I mean, the reason why I originally went on Joe Rogan's show,

we were talking about this, Francis, before we were rolling, was because I was a host of HuffPost Live, which was this, you know, streaming talk network in the US. And there was a campaign, a campaign came up to cancel the Colbert rapport. Remember Stephen Colbert's original show? Because he'd made a joke that was allegedly racist. Do you remember the joke? I do.

I do. You want me to tell it? Yeah. Yeah. So it is a little bit of backstory. The Washington Redskins is a sports team. Obviously, Redskins is regarded as being offensive. So there was a furor about changing the name of that team. The owner didn't want to change it, but he wanted to prove that he wasn't racist. So instead, he set up a charitable foundation for educating young Native American people to say, see, I'm not racist. I've got my charitable foundation. So Colbert comes on one night and he goes, you know, I've been accused in the past of, racism towards Asians. And he runs, I believe, a fake clip of old pretend versions of him being racist towards Asians, like pretending to be an Asian, wearing a Chinese pointy hat, like all this sort of stuff. And he says, so as a result, I'm going to prove that I'm not racist by creating the Ching Chong Ding Dong Foundation for Orientals or whatever. That's a good. Very funny. Yeah.

So people were trying to cancel him for that. So out comes an Asian, American activist. She's young, she's enthusiastic, she creates a petition, she creates a campaign, Comedy Central should get rid of the Colbert rapport. And I, she's lined up to be interviewed on my show on a half post live and I try to explain that what he's doing is satirical, right? He's satirizing this other guy who was doing a thing that might be racist and he's trying to make the point that it's a facile and cynical. thing to do. In other words, he's not actually racist himself. And she says something along the lines of, well, it doesn't surprise me that a white man would have that opinion. And so I interrupt her and I say, hang on, sorry, this has nothing to do with the fact that I'm a white man. Like, you know, I didn't give up my right to have an opinion about comedy and satire because I was born with

balls and white skin. And she says, well, you know, I would expect a white man to enjoy talking over a woman of color. That's, you know, that's something that you like to do. It went up in flames and like, ultimately, I was like, well, I mean, if we're not going to be able to talk to each other, then we're not going to be able to talk to each other. And we ended the interview early. I was going to say that I feel like it's incredibly patronizing for you to paint these questions this way, especially as a white man. I don't expect you to be able to understand what people of color are actually saying with regards to cancel Colbert. He has a history of making jokes. Sui, being a white man doesn't prevent me from being able to think and doesn't prevent me from being able to have reasoned perspectives on things.

I didn't give up, I didn't give up my right to be able to have an intellectual conversation when I was born. I know, but, well, white men definitely feel like they're entitled to talk over me. They definitely feel like they're entitled to kind of minimalize my experiences, and they definitely feel like they are somehow exempt and so logical compared to women who are painted as emotional, right? No, no one's minimizing your experiences. No one's minimizing your right to have an opinion.

It's just a stupid opinion. I mean, it's a misunderstanding of what satire is. I just called my opinion stupid. That's incredibly unproductive. And I don't think I'm going to enact the labor of having to explain to you why that's incredibly offensive and patronizing. Explain. I just told you I wouldn't enact that labor. Okay. Thanks for being with us, Suey. So Joe Rogan saw that. He played it on his podcast and that was how my friendship with Joe began. But what reminded me, why he reminded me of that, Francis, was the experience of talking to this person was an experience of talking not to another human being,

not to another rational mind, but to a cardboard cutout of an identity who is treating me as a cardboard cutout of an identity. She is woman of color. I am white man, right? You try to talk about the actual thing you're talking about. You try to talk about the joke, you try to talk about satire,

you try to talk about where is the boundary, where it's too far, where it's not far enough, you know, do Asians get picked on in particular? Or if you did it about a black person, maybe it wouldn't be acceptable. All kinds of interesting things that could be talked about, none of which are being talked about because we've got our roles. We've got our fucking, you know, sort of avatars that we have to inhabit. Like, that's no way to live your life.

I am operating from the place of being a spokesperson for my identity group. And the more we do that, the more likely it is that the 21st century is going to devolve into some kind of low-grade cultural civil war, or not so low-grade cultural civil war. And it worries the hell out of me. Like, we have to be able to talk to each other as human beings, regardless of where we come from, not as a bunch of checkboxes on some diversity tick list.

The reason people do that, and it is, it does when you are on the other end of it, as you have been, it feels like you're arguing with a tape recorder because it's just playing specific lines and response that you know are coming anyway. But the reason people do it is it's a very powerful tool. It's a weapon. They forge this identity weapon that they use,

Which takes us back to Australia. How do you feel that you guys are doing on that front? Because you just had the voice referendum, which was quite comprehensively rejected by the Australian public. And the idea of it was, you'll correct me if I misrepresented. But it was essentially about embedding what I would say is identity politics at the constitutional level, right? Saying essentially Aboriginal people should have an extra way of being heard. and it was quite unspecified as part of the various legal conversations that are being had. And the Australians rejected it quite overwhelmingly.

And I've just been there. It's a very multi-ethnic society. And people talk very proudly in Australia about being the world's most successful multicultural nation. What do you think of all of that? Yes, I think that's true. I mean, I think it's a source of enormous pride for Australians that we are one of the most successful multi-ethnic and one of the most multi-ethnic countries in the world were one of the highest rates of immigration per capita,

either the first or second number one or number two country in the world for refugee resettlement. The voice, and remind me to come back to the point about multiculturalism, because there's an interesting point to be made about immigration and Brexit and Trump and Australia's multiculturalism. But on the voice, so, yeah, let me give the most generous articulation of the voice just to steal man it for a moment. So you had it,

the 1700s, the world's most powerful empire in the British Empire crash into the greatest traditional civilizations in the world. The Australian Aborigines have been around for the longest period of time. They're the oldest continuous civilization in the world because even in Africa there have been a number of changes. As far as anthropologists are concerned, there's something very unique and very special about a bunch of civilizations. And they really were a bunch of civilizations speaking different languages with different practices all over a continent that is the same size as the contiguous United States, living in incredibly harsh environments with enough wisdom to last for many, many, many, many tens of thousands of years.

But obviously that was going to be an irreconcilable clash between the gunboats of the British Empire and those civilizations. And as recently as the 19, as the middle of the 20th century, let's say, you had policies that were incredibly brutal. I mean, you had indigenous children being ripped away from their families in order to be raised the proper way by real proper white people by, you know, often harsh nuns in convents and things like that. I mean, imagine the experience, you know, you're a father of having your child ripped away from you because of your race. So it's been difficult to find progress on that. A lot of money's been thrown at the problem, you know, a lot of attempts at affirmative action and equality have been thrown at it. The consensus

that came out of a forum that was held a little over a decade ago was that it would be useful to have a single cohesive body that could articulate the First Nations point of view on legislation that Parliament was considering that would affect Indigenous people. And at the moment it was a bit too haphazard, it was a bit too random, the voices were all a bit too scattered. You needed to coordinate them somehow. So the idea that was come up with was you'd create a body called the voice and it would give voice to First Nations people. Those, its advice wouldn't be binding. Parliament would be free to ignore it, but it would be a place of collecting those, those voices. Perhaps foolishly, the government decided instead of just creating this thing,

and these things have been created at a state level in Australia just through legislation. Australia is a federation like the United States. So, you know, our hospitals and our, you know, police and schooling are done on a state level, not a national level. So some state governments have actually tried this, and you could have done this at a federal level just by creating it, just by Parliament passing it. But the government decided instead to try to embed it in the constitution, which requires a referendum to literally change the nation's founding document. That's a big ask. That requires a majority of states as well as just a majority of voters, in a majority of voters in a majority of states. It didn't even get anywhere close. It didn't even get anywhere

close to that because there were legitimate worries. I mean, why are you embedding something that is supposedly trying to remedy a temporary inequality? One hopes that it's a temporary inequality. One hopes that in a thousand years time, if we're all still here, there won't be a disparity between First Nations health outcomes and education outcomes and the rest of the population, in which case, why do you still have this thing that's going to be in the Constitution forever? And then as you say, Constantine, there's that sort of egalitarian thing of like, well, hang on, more than half the Australian population has arrived since the Second World War. We have this huge multi-ethnic society. Why does a working class Chinese Australian shopkeeper not get a say, but a First Nations person does just because they're a descendant of people who were wronged?

So it became a real cultural clash. There was a lot of misinformation about a. about it. And it went down in flames. It was an interesting time because it was interesting how blinkered and blinded people were on both sides about, well, especially on the pro, you know, on the left progressive side about the reasons why people might have reservations for it. I mean, so many of my colleagues would just say something like, oh, it's just bloody obvious. Don't be a dick. You know, just vote for it. You know, throw them a bone. You know, they've got a hard life, you know, why wouldn't you? Well, maybe people have reservations about

changing the founding document if they don't know what the ultimate legal consequences are going to be. Maybe people have reservations about how much it's going to cost. Maybe people have reservations about whether or not it's going to be truly representative. Maybe they don't know where these people are going to be chosen from and whether they're going to come from, you know, an elite kind of social justice oriented university class or whether they'll actually represent the interests of First Nations people on the ground. It was amazing in the wake of the referendum when it went down. I still had my radio show at the time. I would be interviewing very learned academics and learned journalists about it. And, you know, one of them said to me, I think the reason why, you know, it failed was because

a lot of Australians who live in big cities, they don't know a lot of First Nations people. Now, I pointed out to her, actually, the places in Australia where wealthy elites who don't know a lot of indigenous people live are the ones that voted most in favor of the voice body. The places that made it fail were largely rural and regional electorates. In fact, I think the two electorates with the largest number of First Nations people were the ones that went most strongly against it. Now, you could say, oh, well, that's because white racists live amongst the First Nations people. Whatever. It's clearly not true that it was people who don't know indigenous people who were voting against it. So I explained that to her and she said, oh yeah, but in the big cities where they voted yes, they go to art galleries and they appreciate indigenous art.

So that's why, that's probably why they were voting yes. I was like, bubble much, echo chamber much, like group think much. You don't think that it's possible that there are people who are just, you know, the idea that you had to. to be a racist in order to have reservations about this is what drove more people against it. If you'd been less elitist and sort of dogmatic and condescending towards people who had questions about whether or not this was the right way to address inequality, racial inequality in Australia, then maybe there would have been a potential to cut across the aisle and convince some people. And on the question of multiculturalism, I mean, it's a really interesting

one. Again, in the same way, the question of creating a sort of a, sort of a a quorum of support for a particular policy, right? How do you get the largest buy-in? I mean, this is something that I'm interested in on uncomfortable conversations. I want to speak to the winnable middle. I want to speak to people who still regard themselves as being rational, thoughtful, you know, I'm never going to win over the far left. I'm never going to win over the far right. I'm hoping that there are people on the fringes who will join us in a kind of a radical centrism, so to speak. So what Australia's multiculturalism has to teach, I think, the UK and the US, is that you can get enormous public buy-in for very high rates of immigration,

even into a very white country, which Australia was in the 1950s, if people feel that they have control over the borders. That was the deal. After the Second World War, the first ever immigration minister, Arthur Caldwell, said, you know, we need to make sure that the borders are secure in order to reassure Australians that we know exactly who's coming here and that we're making, we've got a good selection criterion for it. And that has basically persisted the entire way through. I mean, I know you had Tony Abbott, the former Australian Prime Minister on this show. I'm not a huge fan of Tony's. I think his border policies were unnecessarily harsh. Nonetheless, it remains the case in Australia that if you embark on, now, of course,

we have the good fortune to be an island. So, you know, it's not exactly the same as the United States. You can't walk into Australia. We have that fortune here, too. We do have tens of thousands of people coming here illegally. Yeah. And so, you know, what Australia... Why do you say it was unnecessarily harsh? Because the year before Abbott's government implemented Operation Sovereign borders that you had about,

I can't remember it was either 12 or 17,000 people come illegally. Yeah. Today it's 74 people. So it's solved the problem. Yes. So there are ways and there are ways, right? Like I think that I say it's unnecessarily harsh because, so just for people who aren't across the entire thing. What Australia basically did, and this was a solution that was actually

devised in the early 2000s pre-Toney Abbott by John Howard, the basic contours of this, was that if you try to come to Australia illegally, in other words, if you get on a boat, there are very sophisticated people smuggling rings, or there were through Southeast Asia that would funnel people from South Asia, through Indonesia, you get on a boat in Indonesia, come down into Australia. As soon as you're on Australian soil, of course, then you can declare refugee status and Australia has to process you. The idea was find the boats before they get there, before they have the right to claim asylum in Australia and make the promise that if you try to come to Australia illegally, you will never ever set foot in Australia, guaranteed, sign, sealed and

delivered. We'll ship you off to a South Pacific Island nation that we're bribing to build concentration camps to house you in in the hot desert until someone else will take you. And then we you just sort of find other partner countries that we can disperse those people to. It's harsh because do you need to be keeping them in the conditions that they're in, which are actually quite opaque, and it's very difficult to find out what's going on in those places, but they're run by private prison companies, and by all accounts, they're absolutely awful. There have been cases of people on starvation diets there. There have been cases of people sewing their lips closed there. There have been cases, there was one award-winning Australian podcast that was recorded by an inmate there who was

able to have a recording device smuggled in. It's all very cloak and dagger. I think that once someone is in your care, you have a duty of care. Like, yes, you can always say, oh, but what about these thousands of other hypothetical people who might have drowned at sea, you know, trying to get there, who we're stopping because of the deterrent effect of what we're doing to this small number of people on this Pacific Island nation. Well, great, in some global moral calculus when you're finally at the pearly gates, maybe they'll tally up all the lives you saved and, you know, you'll get to go to heaven. But in the meantime, you're brutalizing people and you're brutalizing them to make an example of individual human beings, including women and children, in order to deter other people. There's got to be a

way of doing it that's somewhat less barbaric, but also provides the deterrent effect, I think. But just to the general gist, I do think, is that in immigration, when you have rich, wealthy, prosperous countries where it's great to live, and you have a lot of countries where it's not so great to live, there's going to be some kind of brutality along the way in filtering out who can come and who can't, even if that's just saying you have to stay back in your shithole in Bangladesh. Some follow the noise.

Bloomberg follows the money, because behind every headline is a bottom line, whether it's the funds-fuelling AI, For crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. And Australia has chosen the path of we're going to be particularly brutal and particularly kind of firm about the border. And as a result, you have massive public support for immigration. Of course, there's still a bit of worry about immigration because as you get pressure on infrastructure,

pressure on public schools, pressure on the health system, you know, and so on and so forth, people say, do we need to be letting in like half a million people every year? Could we make it half that or whatever? But you don't see Brexit and you don't see Donald Trump. And I do think a part of that, not to blame both of those things entirely on immigration, but I don't think you could get those without a sense from the public of immigration being out of control. And they're just being chaos fundamentally. Definitely.

The reason it's interesting, and we've got to wrap up, but I'll ask you this last question before we do the usual one, is about the multi-ethnic versus multicultural, because I asked you about multiculturalism, and you immediately went to multi-ethnic, which I think is the right way of talking about it. And the reason is that in Europe, during periods of mass legal, not illegal, but legal immigration,

several people who nobody would describe as culture warriors or far right or anything like that, including people like Angela Merkel, David Cameron, were forced to concede that multiculturalism has failed in Europe. And that was a little bit of my worry with Australia in the sense that I think that maybe we talked earlier about how it's like going back 10 years in the past. I just got that little bit of sense,

the illegal immigration issue is different, that there's a little bit of complacency about that because when you have large waves of immigration come in from different cultures, from different religious backgrounds, and you don't encourage assimilation, you are going to create problems that then will result in a Brexit-Trump-style response. Maybe, yeah. I don't think it's a non-issue. You're right that I specifically chose the word multi-ethnic because I'm in Europe.

UK amount, I think it's in Europe, but in my brain it is. And I do think the word has different valence here. largely because probably of that Angela Merkel speech where she was talking about multiculturalism. I think I don't believe that we should be aggressively trying to get people to abandon their home cultures. I believe in multiculturalism in the sense that I love living in a melting pot. I love being close to a neighborhood where I can go to

and the signs are in Mandarin and then the translation underneath the Mandarin is in Korean. And there's no English translation at all. Like, I like that. I like living in a place where the food is incredibly authentic and it feels like you're bumping into the chaos of humanity. Where I think you have to draw the line is that there are fundamental principles that we all agree on in this country, right?

Men and women are treated equally. Gay poop is fine to be gay. You know, basically sort of universal small, liberal principles. And if you come from a culture where that's not the case, You don't get to continue to live that culture in Australia and continue to insist that your women wear burkas against their will. Do you not think those two things are incredibly connected and unavoidably so? If people live in a community in which they speak the language they spoke in the country from which their grandparents came, if people live in those societies where they're not fully integrated, then the cultural heritage, including social values, will be passed down inevitably.

And in the UK, that's what we see. We see second and third generation people whose parents and grandparents came here who are more socially conservative, including on those issues. Are they? Yeah. That's not the way that it works in Australia. I mean, or America, actually. It gets less, it gets diluted with each generation. It may be because of the different types of people that you allow in.

It could be. I mean, if we're talking about conservative Muslims, which I think is probably a subtext, then, you know, the first generation comes over and they have their ways of doing things. And in general, the next generation, just through, by necessity, bumps into more people from more different cultures and more local Australians. They consume the public news. They like, there is a, there is a filtering effect. Would first generation be chanted gas to Jews outside the Sydney Opera House? I mean, there is no way of avoiding the fact that there is going to be a radical, you know, subset, a tiny radical subset of people. I don't think that was the overwhelming sentiment.

So I suppose the question really is, is there a maximum kind of cap on the number of people who you would bring in from particular cultures because the pace of dilution of their conservatism is too slow for a liberal democracy to be able to sustain? Assuming that dilution is going to continue over long periods of time as their percentage of the population grows rapidly, yes. Yes.

That's not necessarily the case. I mean, people are talking in this country about an Islamic party now, right? An Islamic party is not going to be socially liberal, I don't imagine. Do you see what I'm saying? Well, I don't know. I mean, if it's an Islamist party, it's obviously not going to be socially liberal. You know, if it was to represent British Muslims broadly, then who knows. Yeah.

What, really? Is that a pun-in-line? Come on, man. Are you serious? Look, this isn't just about Islam. Like my in-laws are socially conservative Orthodox Christians. If there was an Orthodox Christianity party of Britain, they would be socially conservative. Definitely.

But you didn't say an Orthodox Muslim party. You just said a Muslim party. An Islamic party. Islamic party of Britain. I mean, I'm, look, maybe I know too many moderate Muslims in Australia and I have rose-kinsed glasses about it. I'm having a go to Muslims. It's a conversation about whether you are able to integrate people when there are large

waves of immigration. while encouraging them to retain entirely their language and their culture without really working hard to integrate. Yeah, I mean, look, it may be the case that Australia just has more covert assimilationist policies than the UK and the US do is that we talk a big game about multiculturalism, but actually, if you call through to the government helpline, you're going to have to have rudimentary English in order to understand. That's very different.

It's possible that here, you know, you can press number 16 for Arabic and number 17 for, you know, Pashtun or Urdu or something. and you don't have that in Australia. So, yeah, I think there's probably a, there's a balance to be struck between an overt kind of, you know, philosophy of welcoming multiculturalism, but also a practical recognition that in order to get by, and in order to be socially tolerated, really, you're going to have to join the mainstream.

Will everybody? No, but the force is strong enough, the centrifugal force to pull you out of the bunker and into mainstream Australia. I have sufficient faith in that that I think that we can, yeah, you can do it. All right, we're all moving to Australia then. Excellent. Come on down. Come on down. So, and the question that we always end our interviews with is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Before Josh answers, make sure to head on over to locals after the interview is over to see this. I don't see how you can be so comfortable with Australia's response to the pandemic, voiding section 92 of the Constitution, police brutality, detention

of citizens who committed no crimes and removal of basic natural rights, none of which was based on any evidence. Some people are talking about it, but artificial intelligence is on my mind more and more. I think we are about to enter a different world, well, I know we're about to enter a different world, where we're talking all the time

and hearing from all the time creatures that are in our own. pockets that seem to be, I'm not implying that they are sentient, but they'll land for us as if they are. And that's going to be a change at least as big as the change of the smartphone. I mean, just to put the smartphone in context for this thought experiment, when 9-11 happened, which doesn't feel like totally ancient history to certain people of a certain age. Old people. Old people like me.

When 9-11 happened, the iPod didn't exist yet. Remember the original white iPod that held like 15 songs and weighed four bricks with the scroll button? That was released in October of 2001. So when the 2007 election happened in Australia, I don't know what the equivalent would be here, but that's a big marker in Australia because it was a big landslide elections. But let's say the erection of the erection. Let's say the erection of Barack Obama in the United States, right? And it was a big one.

It was a big one. When that happened, you didn't have like Facebook and, you know, you didn't have mobile device. In fact, you didn't have the iPhone. So the entire history, if you'd told us just 15 years ago, there were BlackBerry's, right, but there weren't smartphones. If you'd told us 15 years ago that it would be completely normalized for people to be, walking around with supercomputers in their pockets that they used in every spare moment of the day to parachute into conversations, news that was being tailored for them. And there were as many

versions of those news feeds as there were people in the world because there were computer programs that were learning exactly what you liked hovering over and the number of milliseconds that you spent looking at a particular video before moving on. And the Chinese Communist Party had the most popular version of these things and the most young people were getting their news and information from the Chinese Communist Party's computer programs that were trying to determine exactly what each individual liked and didn't like.

That would seem like a weird and dystopian future. And if you fast forward the same amount into the future from now, I think we'll look back on this moment where we're all sitting here today and go, I can't believe that was a time. time when we weren't just constantly talking to things all around us, cracking jokes to them,

having them laugh, having them crack jokes back to us, and having basically creatures all around us in artificial form that were helping us do everything. We will all have a personal assistant, we will all have a lawyer, we will all have an accountant, and they will all be virtual sooner than we realize. And the impact that that's going to have, like we talk a lot about, job loss or something from AI or misinformation. All of that's very important. But I think just the psychology of what we're about to embark on, social media was basically a gigantic experiment in which none of us enrolled,

but we all find ourselves in. Well, that will look like a walk in the par in comparison to the kind of global psychological experiment that's about to happen. Josh Zep's, check out uncomfortable conversations and head over to locals for the bonus questions. Having been brave enough to make his position as clear as possible to those who only see one side of the Israel-Hamas war, has Josh had feedback from his audience that shows there has been a change in understanding or attitude?