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

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Josh Szeps, he's a broadcaster, podcast host and a journalist. What are the things you can't criticize? What about gay pride in Australia? What if you're a gay man? What about criticizing the cringe of the anti-work right? Everyone is getting

the heat today, including Josh's ex-employer, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Expect to learn what the difference is between getting cancelled by the left and the right, why we feel the need to forensically pick through public figures' lives, why so many people believe the world is ruined, the problem with the anti-anti-work, what J.K. Rowling has been up to, what happened to the

indigenous Australian people apology trend? And much more. This Monday, the first cinema shoot from our video wall podcast that we shot here in Austin, Texas, with Dr. K goes live, and it's fantastic, and it looks beautiful and you shouldn't miss it. So, make sure you hit the subscribe button, or you will miss episodes when they go up, and it helps to support the show, and it makes me very happy, so navigate to Spotify, a raffle podcast, and press the follow button. I thank you.

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But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Josh Steps. This is why you need to subscribe to my to my newsletter. How dare you suggest that I'm not subscribed to your newsletter? I'm going to read it out to you, Fully. Great. This is the culture wars shiny object cycle. Number one, some woke news story hits the press. Cats suffer from racial discrimination or screwing in light bulbs needs to be recognized as a valid sexual kink or something.

Number two, the right-wing antibody response activates. Look at how insane these people are, Matt Walsh quotes the article and calls it obnoxious. This is the problem with our convenient decadent TikTok society. Number three, this reaction causes the story to gain infinitely more traction than it ever would have done by signal boosting the original fringe scenario into a much bigger event. Number four, the left-wing counter response activates. Right-wing has lose their minds of a one

woman with a particularly dark cat. The daily wire has a meltdown over an insignificant troll article. In times when the story is less insane, this includes a defense of the original article too. Cats actually can experience trauma, minimizing this is the real problem. Number five, the right-wing re-reaction kicks into gear. Apparently, I'm insane for pushing back against cat trauma. See, this is the problem. If we don't stand our ground, these blue-haired idiots will take

over the country. Number six, finally, the touch-grass meta-reactionaries steam in. The real issue is people talking about this issue. Look at how silly this whole thing is. It's time to check out if the culture war we should reconnect with what really matters. You should move to a ranch next to Ryan Holiday and hammer fence posts into the ground for the rest of time. I sometimes participate in every single stage. We find ourselves a huge different one. However, my reptile brain happens

to be activated on that morning, but that's why I don't look at Twitter anymore. I just did a speaking of being banged by 45 guys. Where's this going, ladies and gents? Where's this going? Josh is married to a dude. Is he also getting stuff on the side? Let's find out coming up on modern wisdom. No, I just interviewed on my podcast on Comfortable Conversations Angela White, who I don't know if you're familiar with. She's an extremely successful adult performer. She's an Aussie, but she's

huge in the States as well, has one of the biggest only fans in the world. She was actually super interesting and super smart. She would dismantle every single person in that cycle who you were just talking about in terms of the hypocrisy of people who criticize that form of sexual liberation, the kind of condescension towards women's interests, basically. She's like, she's got massive, massive legs. Huge legs. She's just basically of the opinion that,

what you're all a bunch of hypocrites, everybody likes this. I'm still fascinated by why people would like not just having sex, but having sex while the craft services guy is right next to you with a bunch of sandwiches for the crew and why there's a lighting guy and a grip and a sound guy standing right next to you. But you're saying that really the tricky thing in that industry is the guys because it's hard. I mean, there's sometimes it isn't. Replete with pubs. Sometimes it isn't,

which is sometimes it isn't exactly. And sometimes it might be hard, but you might not get the money shot. Yeah. So there's like a real craft to it. The lady just sort of has to look pretty and go, whoo, yeah. The guy has to genuinely perform. But I think sex stuff aside, that cycle, which I've been thinking about for quite a while, is mostly evident in the sort of right versus left talking points. And I know that you're about to go on tour with Douglas Murray. Yes. And it was Douglas

at the O2 arena in London that actually sort of really gave me this. So just around that out, the cycle's banal. It's excruciating the repetitive. So why does it sustain our attention? If basically every discussion follows the same cycle because each story is sprinkled with just enough novelty to give it the illusion that this is a new event. You know, it legitimates the pushback. We haven't seen this trans flag, which now includes people who've got a gluten intolerance before.

Right. So it's like the 20th season of last where they're back on the island for the seventh time, right? But this time it's winter. Right. People sometimes make a mistake of thinking that human beings like novelty. But we only like novelty up to a certain point. We like novelty that still reinforces things that we're used to and things that we're familiar with. It's like the, you know, the idea of there being a hero's story, right? That every movie tells the same story.

Look at the number of Marvel movies and a number of DC movies. They're telling the same story in slightly different ways. And that's an interesting point that you make. I hadn't really thought about that, but the cycle of social media is essentially functioning the same way. Here's the arc of a story. Here's the evolution of how this thing is going to take place. Each beat is different and yet exactly the same. So we're in the same cycle. There's enough novelty to keep it interesting,

but not so much novelty that you don't go, Oh, I know this is exciting. I know how to respond to this in the rage. Yeah. Yeah. I know the role that I have to play in this thing. Well, this is what Douglas was talking about that, you know, some of the smartest minds of our time and a lot of the dumb ones too have had their attention captured arguing about

whether men and men and women are women or not over the last, however many years. Yeah. And that like explaining why is this cycle so predictable and so repetitive and also why does it continue, if it is predictable and repetitive and banal, why does it continue to capture our attention? And the argument basically being is there not something more that we can argue about? And yet I find myself and I know that you do too, you know, you've said, I've been each one of those six people,

you know, I've been the signal booster. I've been the like matter touch grass reactionary. I've been the original outraged person. Yes. You know, I've been all of those different people. Yeah, it's just, I mean, now I'm all just, I mean, and I think you might be as well just pretty much exclusively on the touch grass. Like let's talk about big shit phenomenon. And like, I don't want to necessarily dismiss all of the things that some of the culture warriors are talking

about. Like I wouldn't necessarily put discussions about trans people into the same cycle as that. Like there may be instances of cycles like that. But on that issue, just to just jump straight into the most, you know, but potentially toxic conversation that we could have, I think everyone would concede who's not a bigot, I believe, that there are some people, some tiny minority of people who are born who from a very, very early age have a persistent sense that they're

in the wrong sex. And the only way to deal with that is for those people to transition and for us to accord them all of the respect that they deserve and for them not to be discriminated against.

What you have now is a scenario in which many of my friends who are a generation or half a generation older than me who have children who are 14 or 15 in the kind of progressive enclaves that people like me live in in places like Sydney and London and New York will, you know, there are two thirds of their classmates will be genderqueer in some way or non-binary or they'll

be playing around with gender. And anyone who asks questions about whether or not there's a phenomenon of social contagion or whether there's a phenomenon of some kind of fashion here or whether in a more kind of macabre way, maybe it's possible that young, a feat gay guys under certain circumstances get more cache from their peers and are hiring the social hierarchy if they come out as trans girls

than they would being pussy fat. Similarly, is it possible there are some girls who feel awkward who are on the outside of the group who may be suffering from anxiety or depression, who may be on the autism spectrum somewhere and who are lesbians, who are like, you know what, I'm actually

cooler if I'm a trans guy. And when you try to ask questions, even if you're a professional psychiatrist, I mean, I had a conversation what I just got fired from or left or is it been ambiguous what a daily talk radio show in Australia that I had on the public broadcaster, which was a big show, but nobody was touching this topic on the entire public broadcaster. You were fully in the mainstream cycle. And I only know you from substack and your podcast, really like and

you're writing and Twitter. So for me, you were just another one of us sort of alternative media and I was a super agent. Yeah, tell me, you would tell me who you were and then what happened now.

Yes. So let me just close the loop on the trans thing. Anytime you raise questions about, you know, this phenomenon of there being quite a lot of people, more people than you might expect statistically to be playing with their gender in their teens, you get accused of denying the first point that I made, which is that there are definitely transgender people who are known in the very end. Yes, exactly. So you were trans for, but no, can't we kind of have the new ask to be

able to separate one case from the other. So I don't necessarily regard all conversations about things like trans as being obviously subject to the kind of toxic cycle of, of course, it's going on on social media, but there has to be a space in which we can also have that conversation in a as bullshit free away as possible that is not subjected to that kind of reflexive tool and throw it right just to interject that. Yeah, Andrew Doyle. Andrew. Yeah, I don't know personally,

about a lot of stuff. Yeah, I really enjoy his writing. Yeah. It's good for him. He uses this really great example and it's quite old now. You know, there's an interview being done with a father of, let's say, a eight-year-old trans girl used to be a boy and they're talking about, you know, how does it feel now that little Jimmy is little Jane or whatever? He says, honestly, I'm just so happy to not see my son mincing around the garden anymore. Right. So much of what I

think is the trans movement is rehabilitated homophobic. I mean, just let that land for a second. Yeah, that is like I have chills. I'm a spine. I mean, I'm a gay guy, right? And I have perhaps the good fortune of not having a particular way of talking and a particular way of dressing and a particular way of voting and a particular way of thinking and a particular way

of dancing that immediately codes as gay. And I have friends who do and who are pretty sure that if instead of growing up in the 80s and 90s, they were growing up in the 2020s, they would be transitioning. I don't want those concerns to overwhelm the conversation and to occlude our compassion for people who are transgender. And I think that's where more gay people than there are trans people. Well, that's right. Yes. But I mean, I don't think the majority of

gay people are necessarily susceptible to that phenomenon, but some minority are. And I hate it when this conversation gets used by right wing blowhards to justify laws that are genuinely discriminatory against transgender people or the kind of rhetoric that is demeaning and dehumanizing to transgender people. I don't any many part of that. But I feel like it's harder to attack that

nonsense on the right. If you're not also faired income as we say in Australia, which means the straight shooter, or free of bullshit, or just kind of straight down the line, honest about the complexity of the actual issue. We're not going to get anywhere by just holding up flags and saying trans women are women, right? I mean, it doesn't solve anything. It doesn't address the legitimate concerns of people who are seeing two-thirds of a school

class being genderqueer. So, yes. So my story, as a... Yeah. Tell me, as a stealth... You used to be mainstream media. I thought you were alternative media degenerate. Yes. You have this ambiguous departure from your old life into this one. What happened? I have a foot in both camps and always straddle him. So, yeah, exactly. It's starting many, many different respects. And look, I started out as a journalist, basically, as a journalist who became a political satirist on radio and doing...

I was good at doing voices and I was good writing comedy. And so I was interested in and I did a lot of improv. I moved to New York straight out of college in Australia and went to UCB Theatre, which is a big improv school and trained at improv and got a TV show and discovery science channel, which was a kind of a smart ass-y look at science and tech news. So I'm

a bit of a science nerd and a politics wank and a cheeky little pixie. And that fell apart and Huffing and Post was launching a big online streaming network at the time called Huff Post Live. And I became a host of that in New York. That was great. That was like the tech boom years in the 20-20-10s and you're in mid-20-10s. And it was awesome. Got to interview tons of people, live streaming video, like three or four segments of 30-minute conversation just like this every day.

And that was the hybrid between mainstream and alternative, right? It's... I mean, Huff Post at the time was the most-read online-only news site in the world. It was massive. It had tons of money behind it. So in that sense, it was legit. But in another sense, you could say whatever the fuck you wanted. And they sort of encouraged it because the clickbait algorithm sort of demanded it. And then I got married to a guy. We had kids moved back to Australia about five years ago. And I

went into full mainstream. I was like, I'm a grown-up now. None of this farting around on the internet. I got a great offer from the public broadcaster in Australia, which is sort of like the BBC in Australia. And I hosted the weekend morning show on television for a year and got a radio show three hours a day, talk radio, politics, cultures of exposure. Huge exposure. Huge exposure. You're like, then he is Morgan of Australia. Well, no, because...

He is Morgan. Are you just outing Piers Morgan's game? The thing is that that gig is... You can't be Piers Morgan on that gig. You have to be... It's more like NPR or the BBC, right? I mean, you have to be... Perfectly. Maybe not fluffy, but straight down the line. You cannot set foot into intellectual territory. Yeah, where you're wrestling with things in a way that might seem like you're having an opinion or might alienate a certain number of people. It's like just to interject there.

Yeah. As someone who has opinions, who your podcast is literally called uncomfortable conversations. Yeah. How does it feel to... mouthpieces to derogatory, but to kind of be the vessel through which something is pushed and you're kind of... They're more performing than you are engaging. Well, I do ever feel this. No, I didn't do it. I felt pressure and I didn't do it, and that's why I don't have a job anymore. Right. Okay. I've jumped ahead in the story to take.

Please continue. It became pretty clear. When you're a host on a mainstream network, that network has the right to say yes or no to all external work requests as well. What network was it? It was the ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It's like the BBC. That's the BBC of Australia, which is an absolute national treasure. I have to say, from the heart, this is much like the BBC and much like I think many people

feel towards... Well, there isn't really an American equivalent. It's fundamental to Australian democracy. I'm not shooting on the ABC as a corporation here at all. There are just different mandates for different positions and different things that you can get away with in different environments. One of the first situations was the transgender issue. There was a moment where the biggest trans clinic in the UK, the Tavistock, closed down. There was a huge national inquiry,

massive news in the UK. There was basically a suggestion they weren't dealing with, transgender juvenile issues as well as the amongst. For anyone that wants to learn more about that time to think, fantastic book, or had the author on. Really just phenomenal, dispassionate breakdown of everything that happened with the Gids and the Tavistock clinic and all of that, very, very good fabulous. So there was... So this raised questions in Australia about whether or not...

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

than sexuality seems to be. And what happened was that no one at the broadcaster was covering the fact that this bombshell had just taken place in the UK. One might have thought that perhaps it could teach us something about the way that we're doing transgender medicine in Australia as well.

The psychiatric association of Australia had long been saying that gender affirming care ties their hands and that if a 13-year-old girl comes to you and says that she's a boy, the current practice was, you can't ask questions about whether or not there's anything else going on psychologically for her. You're not supposed to ask about anxiety, you're not supposed to ask about depression, you're not supposed to ask about her friendship group, you're not supposed

to ask about autism. You're supposed to follow the protocol of affirming that her claim is unquestionably true. Now, I don't want to buy into a scare campaign that suddenly means that she's going to go into an operation, she's going to have surgery and everything's going to run off the rails. That's not how it happens. There is a certain level of caution. But nonetheless, there's an incentive to enter a pipeline that frequently usually ends with transition.

That's correct. That's what came out of time to think. Yes. Puberty block at the time to think is what it's supposed to be. You have time to give them time to think. You have time to think. It's just putting a pause on puberty. Yes. No. It's a very reliable set of train tracks. The number of children that are put on puberty blockers that end up transitioning is unbelievably high. It's not something that's supposed. It's also not reversible. It's like the changes that are supposed to occur.

It's not like you just shift the entire puberty window a little bit later. You're completely correct. Yes. Completely correct with what you said. I was a bit curious about why no one was covering this. Of course, we all knew why no one was covering this. It's because it's incredibly toxic and people who care very passionately about it on the pro-trans side. Many of them are not

trans, by the way, and this is something that I want to get to in this conversation. There is an orthodoxy of social justice at the moment, which is a largely white, largely university educated, largely upper middle class pursuit, where there's a dogma that is being foisted, even on communities who don't necessarily agree with it. Latinx being foisted on Latino communities or particular. I think people, at least a lot of the Americans listening and a lot of the Brits will think that

this is largely a American phenomenon. What is the landscape of social justice like in Australia? The show is bigger, but just by the way, the show is bigger per capita in Australia than anywhere else in the country. Oh, is that right? There's more Australians. Get Iosies? We did it. Go, go for it. That's great. There's a lot of Australian people listening. Yeah, excellent. If you're listening in Australia, you're outside of Sydney. I was on ABC Radio

Sydney. There was this blow-up, right? To be clear, the ABC did nothing wrong at all here. In fact, they let me do. I was the only person who did a story interviewing the head of the Psychiatric Association, who at the moment I got him on the radio said, this is such a relief. I felt like I'm the girl at the ball or at the formal that the school dance who has never been who's never being asked to dance by any of the media. You're the first person,

with except for the conservative media. You're the first person on the public broadcaster who's invited me to dance. Thank you. We had a conversation for half an hour about his take on the Tabestock closure and his sense that there should be a little more conservatism in the way that we deal with pediatric transgender care. Needless to say, the complaints came in, mostly not from trans people, mostly from people who are part of this kind of clique of social justice warriors.

White knights. They don't stand rents. They're not idiots. They'll go through the transcript and they'll pick out every single thing that you said off the cuff and they'll fact check that and they'll find some reason to claim that it's untrue. They'll basically just flood the zone with so many complaints that they know, even if they know that the complaints are not going to be upheld, they know that it's going to waste a half day of my time responding to it.

So, the strategy is just impose a massive tax of attention and a tax of time on anyone who dares to question our orthodoxy and that way you'll scare off enough journalists who will go, you know, it's not worth it. Why am I going to bother? Do I really want to spend the rest of the week talking to my manager and talking to the director and having the complaints department come back and forensically analyze every single thing I said? It's a bullying threat in a way.

Exactly. It's kind of a hecklers veto or a terrorist veto or something. So, I was cleared and they said that I didn't do anything wrong there, but it was one of those moments where I thought, gee, there's a cost to being in the mainstream media. And again, all credit to the ABC, they let me do that story. There was no pushback whatsoever from management about doing that story. They thought it was totally fine and it was it was cleared. This is just about the phenomenon

of what happens when you speak up in an institution that cares about process, right? On this show, we don't have to give a shit about process. I'm on a couple of conversations. We don't have to give a shit about process. Sometimes we get things wrong. We'll try to correct it. And then, you know, the audience can judge whether or not we're telling the truth. And another thing happened last year where women's that first incident that was so when was to have a star? It was probably about

really 14 months ago. I'd be guessing probably, yeah, probably year before last. Then last year, I wanted to write a piece for the, well, I didn't, the main broadsheet newspaper in Sydney hit me up and invited me to write a piece about world pride, which is a giant gay pride, which is like for the whole world. Apparently every two years, there's a pride in a city. I mean, I didn't even know that until Sydney hosted it, right? But there's a pride in there. Like, oh, this isn't just a pretty gay

city, right? Sydney has the biggest gay and lesbian festival in the world anyway, which is the Maddie Grab, but they had world pride to coincide with this. And the editor of the, I've wanted to be broadsheet newspapers knew that I was a little bit heterodox on gay pride. Like I just sort of feel like, haven't we sort of won? Like, will there ever come a point at which we don't have to make such a big deal out of it? Like, will there ever come a point at which it's actually more constructive

to turn the volume down instead of up on our difference? Yeah, one of Douglas's best insights on this. You know when you've reached full equality, when you have to put up with the same level of shit that everybody else does. Exactly. It's not special treatment. It's unspecial treatments that are the genuine mark of true equality. Right. Exactly. And I look, I leave the most boring life imaginable in the sense. I have spouse, I have a mortgage, I have a couple of six-year-old twins

who go to school, you know, I make sandwiches in the morning. Like, that is, that was what the gay pioneers were fighting for. That was what Stonewall was all about, right? Total and complete inclusion into the community, no legal discrimination whatsoever. And so I just feel like, if I, when I was in my teens and 20s, I found it difficult to understand who I was, not because of homophobia, but because the images of gayness around me were so conformist that I was like, well, I'm obviously

not one of them. The brushless, the chat. Why don't dance well enough? I don't, I don't, I don't, you know, so, you know, so if, if you're a 15-year-old lad and you don't code as gay, but you're falling level, you have a crush on another guy, but you had a girlfriend before and now you kind of want to experiment with that, does it help you or does it impede you to have this annual celebration, which is all about guys in arseless chaps sitting a striad giant inflatable

panacea going throughout, going along a parade route? You know what does, what does, I know that you don't speak for the entirety of the gay community, but as a pie, how does the gay community overall think about pride now? Like, to most of your gay friends kind of go a bit like, oh, no, I think most of them are still on board, but is that because it's an opportunity to just have like a really good party? Yes. Right. Yes, probably. I think a lot of people think I'm just

a sour push. Like, just let us have fun. Go and have fun. That's fine. That's great. But don't make it about like the continuation and the perpetuation of a civil rights struggle that has as its raison d'être, the picking of old scabs and the picking of old wounds and the perpetuation of a device, ever sense of divisiveness of us and them, of join a team such that if you want to have a same sex d'alliance, that's going to open up a Pandora's box of so many identity questions

that you cease to even be you. Right. Let's just let your free flag fly however you want to as my attitude. How have you want to live your life? Live your life. That's fine. It does get to tick a box. So world pride day comes along. And I write a piece for the newspaper articulating these ideas, just saying like, we'll ever, we'll ever come a time at which we don't have to make such a big deal out of this. Now at this moment in time, the public broadcaster is the official sponsor,

the official broadcast partner of the festival. And I can see where this is going. So I send the article up the chain and they decline, they decline the external work request for this article would be published sort of at the 11th hour. It was going to be the main opinion piece in the main broadsheet newspaper on the day of world pride. And we go back and forth and back and forth.

And they're like, no, it's a hard no. Why? Because people who present the public face of the public broadcaster hosts like myself are not allowed to express opinions about controversial cultural events. Okay, that's legit. That's legit. But this is at a moment when there are gigantic rainbow flags

hanging in the lobby of the building. And every single other host, all of them straight, is singing the praises of world pride, having on people from world pride, talking about the fabulousness of world pride, every other radio promo in the ad breaks is about how great world pride is, tune on and world pride. You can hear it on the station. So it's not that you're not allowed to have an opinion about a controversial cultural event. It just has to be management's opinion.

And I was like, right, okay. So there's a, you know, the old gag about the fish who are the yet to two young fish who are swimming along in the ocean and an older fish swims past and says, how's the water today guys? And the two young fish swim on. And after a while, one of them turns to the other and says, what's water? We are all in certain elite circles in an ocean of water that we don't even recognize. Did the people, did my colleagues feel like they wanted to sense

some of my political opinions, not at all? What they wanted to do was prevent the dissemination of hate, prevent unnecessary controversy. Why wouldn't you want to be on the side of gay people? Like, why are you being mean? Why are you always trying to kick a hornet's nest and cause trouble?

Like, it's a party. Let's just be cool. Let's be cool with everything. So there's a kind of ideological conformism that doesn't even realize that it has political positions because those political positions just land as so common-sensical that it's just like an opposition to being mean or something like that. So don't touch the trans issue because as you primed it earlier on, God, he's going to write this thing and then the complaints are going to come in.

Right. It's going to be an administrative burden. Yes. Exactly. Well, that's true. Yeah. So those were a couple of things where it just became apparent that it wasn't necessarily going to be as easy for me to maintain my integrity and autonomy and authenticity and credibility as I would have liked. And ultimately, then it just became a process of them finding a way to get rid of me really. And luckily, uncomfortable conversations, my podcast, which is now my full-time gig,

and we've just started a YouTube channel and we're starting to do live. Yes, exactly. I'm here with the master. I give you some tips. And now we're doing live. So there was sort of three legs to the stool at the podcast and the sub-stack where you can subscribe and get additional bonus content. And then there's the YouTube channel and then there's live touring. So Douglas is our first live tour. Luckily, I had started doing the podcast before I signed my contract and so they

weren't able to middle in that. So there was like a do whatever I wanted to kind of put the podcast farther in. Yeah. This is part of exactly. Yes. So you can't touch it. That's very, because you've been, I mean, you're an episode like 150 or something now. Yeah, I've got lots. And I'll talk to Barry Weiss and I'll talk to Sam Harris and I'll talk to whoever, you know, it is. And they will say things that are obviously not

impeccable in line with the code of conduct of the public broadcaster. But yeah, the wheels fell off and it became an untenable situation. I think there was what was the actual flashpoint? What was the thing that they got you for? Like everything it was banal. They didn't get me for anything. It was just like a contract was up. So it's time to renegotiate contracts. You know, just letting you know, there might be some, you know, the game of musical chairs where,

you know, there might not be another, it might not be availability of a chair for you. So you might want to, you know, think about the other podcast. When was this? When did you bring, when, when was this a this was over the course of the last six months of last year? Yeah, you know, the final. When was your final broadcast? That's another interesting thing, which is that my final, so I resigned on air and then there was still going to be final six weeks left of broadcasting.

And you like that guy at the sex party that just won't leave. Just hanging around like a bad smell. And then in the final, in the final moments when I was doing some publicity for the podcast, October 7th had happened. There was a lot of heat about Israel and Gaza. And I went on a radio on a television show to talk about anti-Semitism in Australia. And the fact that, and I hadn't been at work that day. So I hadn't been able to fill out a technical, the external work request

form. Now you're supposed to fill out the external work request form, even if it's not work, and you're not getting paid for it. But if you're going to appear on any other outlet, and do do to do this show, yeah, that's right. Exactly. I would have to fill out an external work request form, which is normally just a piece of paperwork and it's a formality. But I was not my computer would enable it to log into the internal intranetware, I have to submit the form

to go to the blah, blah, blah. So I did this show and it was on a conservative network. It was on Sky News in Australia, which is a, you know, not friendly necessarily the public broadcaster. But I was explicitly, I was absolutely inundated with requests to talk about my departure and to talk about the public broadcaster and to throw them under the bus after this all happened. And when I made my statements on the air, I declined everything. I didn't want to be a bad loser.

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

former employers. And I didn't want to do that. But I did this thing about anti-semitism, and they used that as a pretext to say that because you didn't fill out your external work request, you're not welcome back to do your final show and say goodbye to your audience. So take the final. What a bitter ending. So every opportunity there was for, I guess, conciliation and for us, both to be the bigger parties were sort of squandered. And the reality is,

I get it. You know, people are going to be cautious. People are going to be risk averse. People are going to cover their arses. People don't want trouble. Not everybody has to be a trouble maker. I am. And it's so much better. Now I feel like there's a weight lifted off my shoulders. I mean, my sub stacks of subscribers doubled instantly when I left and then doubled again the week of the month after. So financially, I was happy. I was happy. And now I get to just have

rolled around and have conversations with people like you. Yeah. Yeah. With the rest of us. So I learned this thing from Andrew Schultz. Not someone that you might immediately think is like an insight into, like philosophical wisdom of mainstream media. But he's a smart guy. And he said, I came up with basically Schultz's razor. It's not coordination. It's cowardice. So from the outside, it looks like a coordinated attempt to try and trans the kids or to deny some particular narrative.

From the inside, it just looks like people that are terrified of losing their jobs. Yeah. And it may not even be cowardice. It may be something more insidious, which is the water thing, which is a form of group think or a chain verification of like our minds. Right. So on some instances, it'll be cowardice. Like, although they don't, I mean, even cowardice is too pejorative because if they thought that this was a really important issue

to cover, they would have the courage to do it. And they show that every single day, journalists, social blindness in some way. Yeah. It's like, like, I spoke to, when I obviously received a bunch of pushback before doing the trans interview. And the producers who would articulate their pushback would say things like, I mean, it's just not that very, it's not that interesting. It's like, it's one of these kind of fringe things that some people

like to scratch at. But like, it affects so few people. It's like a culture war thing. People love to bang on about it all the time. But like, there are so many more, you know, important things that we could be talking about. That's where their heads are at, right? So it's not that they're thinking, this is a really important story, but I'm going to have to pay a price. They might be thinking that a little bit or they might be thinking subliminally.

It's more that we're developing an environment in which I think, in part, thanks to social media and algorithms, we're all living increasingly inside echo chambers. We're being nudged in directions because we're seeing content that is tailored by Silicon Valley to either reaffirm what we already believe or sort of caricature what we don't believe. Right? Right.

I mean, stage two or stage four at the, like, shiny object cycle. That's right. And even if you don't engage in the shiny object cycle, there are also so many more media outlets now that, you know, it's not like everyone is reading the New York Times anymore. Every person has, you know, their own kind of collection, their own mosaic of different places that they're getting information from. And throw into that the algorithm, which is designed to elicit some kind of reaction,

right? It's good. It's designed to favor content that is going to get you to either like it or comment on it or share it or or something. And the kind of content that does that is not neutral nuanced content. The kind of content that does that is content that reinforces what you already believe or demonizes what you don't. So I think a lot of these people will be like, you know what? This is just not landing. This issue is not landing for me in my media ecosystem as something

it is worth paying attention to. Whether that's the criticism of, you know, aggressive gay pride or the criticism of pediatric transgender issues or you can go on and on with diversity, equity and inclusion or Black Lives Matter or feminism or the me too movement or something like that. When you feel like the world is actually, you know, the bubble that you live in is actually the entire world. It's very difficult to understand why anyone would want to puncture that bubble

if they're not just an asshole. Can you describe for the non-Australians amongst us what the current sort of cultural landscape is like with regards to culture war stuff in Australia? Because from the outside it looks like yutes and bogans and and and good day for a beer and and streakers on cricket pitches and and barbecues. Right. But I see that lady on Sky News who often speaks to Douglas or like repurposes Piers Morgan's content and stuff. And I think, okay, the only reason

that there would be a market for that it's like quite heavily anti-woke. Yes. The only reason that there would be a market for that is if there is a narrative to push up against in Australia. I mean there is not, I would say the culture war is much less hot in Australia than is in the US much less. When you see clips from things like Sky News that is that has a vanishingly small audience. It has nothing like the power of Fox News. It's a little bit of a Rupert Murdoch hobby horse like

let's just sort of keep this thing going. And it is not shaping. Like of course there are people who are very plugged into Twitter and there are people who are very plugged into podcasts to stand and who are very riled up. But a lot of it is inherited. I think a lot of it is kind of like, you know, where they're seeing what's going on with the craziness in America. And it's very selective as well. Like, you know, it's a bit like people have asked me, you know, is London now a no-go zone

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

society. Like Aussies have sold the world this crocodile dundee, Steve Irwin image that were all rugged outdoorsmen, you know, who who buck conformism and where individually, while you quite compliant and orderly on the inside. Yes. Actually, the, you know, the vast majority of the population live in just a handful of big cosmopolitan multicultural cities. If anyone wants to look at the heat map, Australia. It's basically 95% living in these little red dots.

Yeah. In the old middle of it's just the way totally, totally. And so, you know, these are places where latte, sipping, shardonnay, swilling middle classes right there, you know, they can't cruise to work down the street. Now, and so that breeds a certain kind of, I don't know. I was he's love a rule. We love to follow a rule. We love to, there's an ethos called Shelby Wright, which is, it was going to be okay. Like no dramas, you know, like don't worry too much.

That's similar to stiff upper lip. No, stiff upper lip is has more backbone to it. Yeah. Shelby Wright is more like an appreciation of mediocrity and the interests of not, not ruffling any feathers. That's not shit. Yeah. It's just like, that's the, that's the like crap version. Yeah. Exactly. That's that. Yeah. It's stiff upper lip if you take Churchill out. Right. And you put Chamberlain to the nerfed, the nerfed version of that. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, it's interesting

that looking at, especially COVID is a good flashpoint for this. I think, um, first dose uptake in the UK for adults was 93%, I think 93% of people maybe even more ended up getting their first dose. And then it was in the 80s for both second and third. I'm going to guess it's probably something similar. Oh, yeah. It's massive in Australia. Well, we were in prison until we got

vaccinated. It's true. You had more of an incentive to do it. Um, but so maybe the, the UK is even more broadly, but I find myself doing that, you know, I come over to, to the US and I spend time around here and like the inbuilt, I call it like, um, like Q desire, the, the British want to stand in a queue. It's so strong. It's such a compulsion. Yeah. But it, you know, it speaks to a broadie. We quite orderly and we know our place. Yeah. And we don't want to ruffle any

feathers. Yes. And whereas, you know, America was built genetically. It is the progeny of people from Ireland that said, yeah, fuck it. I'll go on that boat for the next weeks. Let's see what happens. Yeah. So you just have that pioneer spirit here. I don't think we do. Where is I mean, Australia is really interesting because I mean, if you talk about the origins of Australia, of course, it's a convict colony. It's a penal colony. So it was, you know, you would expect

that a bunch of criminals would be pretty out there as well. Yeah. Exactly. And we certainly don't have the British sense of, well, we don't line up as well as the Brits do. I got to say. But there's a thing where there's just like, there is a sense of, so there's a thing that sociologists talk about, which is horizontal trust versus vertical trust in the society. Some societies have very strong horizontal trust, meaning that you have trust in your peers,

you have trust in your, in strangers, you have trust in other people. And vertical trust is trust in a hierarchy or trust in authority, in the government and institutions. Yeah. Very interesting. You can imagine societies that have a lot of horizontal trust, but not a lot of vertical trust. So like the Greeks, for example, you know, will have, they'll, you can leave your door open and expect that you're not going to get robbed. But the moment authority is involved,

you don't know, you don't have any trust whatsoever. What would be the opposite? The opposite would be any station country like maybe China, where you wouldn't trust another person on the street, as far as you could throw them, but you absolutely trust in the hierarchy of authority. Yes, study government. Yes, study government exactly. And what was weird during COVID is you sort of noticed that Australia and New Zealand have kind of inherited a bit of an East Asian outlook. I don't

know how that happens exactly. I mean, we're in that neck of the woods. Chinese. We have a lot of, it's here right where the worst is acceptable to the Chinese style. So, yeah, we did, we were extremely obedient. I mean, there was a whole thing, but I don't want to go. We don't have to revisit the entire history of COVID that people might vaguely recognize me from a moment on Joe Rogue. And if they don't already know me, we had a, you know, I've been, I love Joe, I've done

Joe's show. You look to you as well. Thank you. Yes. I'm glad. I did a show seven times. I was, when I was on Huff Post Live, he saw something that I did, which was a funny sort of like social justice run in with a very woke person where I was just like basically saying like she was saying of course, I'm, of course, you know, I would disagree with her because I'm a white man and white men love disagreeing with women of color. And I was like, hang on, I didn't give up my right to

have a rational point of view just because I was born with balls and like I was born white. What are you talking about? Talk to me like I'm a rational human being and talk to me as if I'm a cardboard cut out of some identity. And she hung up on it. You don't have enough intersectional points, right? Like right. White gay men are the straight men of the LGBT world. Yeah. Exactly. That's right. Yeah. Black straight men are the white men of the black world. Yeah. Yeah. It's true.

It's true. But I do like to, if people use the, I pull the identity card, I can always just, at least I've got that, at least I can say like I find your homophobia. Sickening. They're like, hang on. We were just arguing about politics. And I'm like, I see, I see, I see you. But so Joe saw that like back in 2014, 2015 and invited me on a show. And then I basically had an open invitation for the while I was in the States and went on seven times.

But the last time that I was on was during the heat of COVID and it was right at that moment when there was a spot, a spot, a spotify and some artists were pushing back against Joe because of alleged misinformation and so on. And there was a moment where he was saying something that was a, a, a point, an article of faith, essentially among the anti-vaccine community, which was not true in the way that it was being presented. And so we looked it up and it turned out that I was

right on that thing and that went viral. And then of course, you know, seeing in another media organizations, starting to use a football that they're getting around. Yeah, exactly. And then they're like, oh, you know, Australian slams Joe on his own show, which is not what happened at all. We were having an amicable conversation. It's just two, two, two guys that get on and and it's broken for like 50 hours. And people were like, people would hit me up and go, wow,

like it's so brave to like stand up to Joe Rogan in his own layer. And I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? I mean, we're friends. My attitude towards friendship is I'm going to call you on your bullshit. It was perfectly amicable. It's like, if you say something that's not true Chris, I'll be like, that's not true. Come on, like, you know, let's figure this out. I'm going to

sit there. It just shows how little balls everybody else has. If they think that a conversation means with a person in a higher position of power in that context means that you have to sit there and shut up and agree with everything they say. Don't forget as well that there is no such thing as a well-meaning disagreement on the internet. Yeah. Every disagreement on, especially Twitter as ground zero, but pretty much anywhere. No one ever says, hey, man, I think that you're wrong

on this point. Let me just, let me just take you through this or another card that's even more rare is that's out of order. Like you can't, you don't get to say that. Yes. Everything is this sardonic cutting passive aggressive. I'm cooler than you. Nothing can get to me. Yeah. I, that tenor online. I fucking hate. I very much just want to say the thing as it is. The club promoted for 15 years. Someone wasn't coming in the night club because you're too drunk, mate. It's because

you don't have guests list. It's because we're full. It's because the ticket you bought the ticket for the wrong evening. That's not my problem. I'm sorry. That's yours. Whatever it might be. But online, it's all about trying to, I'm cooler than you with my funny little comment. Here's a quote, tweet about something that you said this new question mark. It's all about that. So this, yes, this sort of dunk porn doesn't have any room in it for people who disagree on certain things

to be friends on others. It doesn't have any latitude at all for people to disagree in a way that they could get on afterward or to disagree in an earnest manner. It's like earnestness is what's very, very absent from all of this. It's all sardonic, sarcastic. It's the worst British comedy. Right. Just permanently back and forth. That's right. Between every year. That's interesting. And then you add on top of that, this other thing of like, you don't have standing to talk about

this because you're not from the community. Also, if you're talking about the social justice left, right? So I think the right is very good at this kind of sardonic, nod, nod, wink, wink, shit posting kind of like dunking on everything, like not taking anything seriously, which I agree is actually really dangerous. It's not just annoying. It's actually dangerous. David Pakman does that from the left a lot. His entire tenor on his show is a very sort of passive aggressive.

Well, we're just one second. I've got a thing to do. And it's like a people get back into corners with questions that are purposefully done to try and make them look safe. David doesn't land that way for me. That's interesting. He did a number of times. I've seen it. That maybe because he doesn't see you as activating his antibody response. Right. I say, I say, he certainly did it with the guys from trigonometry. He did it when he came on my show. And for instance, one of the examples

was I referred to the BLM riots as the BLM riots. And he said, right, it's sorry, sorry, right? Is that accurate? I haven't heard anybody outside of Newsmax or OANN. Call it that. And I was like, we yeah, talking about the same as we're burning. Are we talking about the same mostly peaceful protest? Yeah. So shopfronts were smashed. Yeah. David lost. And then he did a couple of shitty moves after the trigonometry interview. And that's unfortunate. It was like just slimy shit. I kind of

thought he was better done. Maybe he's having an off day, maybe had a couple of off days. Maybe, I mean, I generally like David, but he's just I listened to his content for a while. He's like not on again, it's about being on a team. I'm just allergic to teams. I don't want to be on a team. Like I'm the tribe of the, you know, I want to be one of the leaders of the tribe of the tribalists, like people who just feel like, I mean, just Kavanaugh is going to come for you. It's

something not too much. Exactly. I know. Yeah. It's an in joke about that Chris Kavanaugh. Hello, Chris. Love you. But I mean, I just, yeah, where were we before we talked about Pacman? Oh, yeah, that's right. So in addition to the snarkiness, there's a on the left, there's a highly sensorious kind of hysterical attitude about you don't have standing to talk like shut like, read the room. Read the room, bro. Yeah. Like, you know, you don't just isn't your time. This

isn't yes, exactly. This is a time for you to be listening. It's not a time for you to be speaking. Yes. Right. I mean, the other day I was talking about it just happened to be gay pride, Maddie Grat in Australia again. So this came up again. It sounds like I'm obsessed with this issue. It's not just happens to have happened. But didn't the government have cops? Oh, so this is what also happened. So this is a funny story. You're like this. For the past quarter of a century,

the uniformed police in Sydney have had a float in the Maddie Gras. So again, let's be in police officers have had their own float in the Maddie Gras as a way of float. What's that? Are they the gay and the other? Yeah, they're on it. Right. Yeah. What are they wearing? The uniforms for the normal uniform. They're normal uniforms. They're normal. They're normal. They're normal. They're normal. They're normal. They're normal. They're normal. They're like gay versions.

No, regular police uniforms. And in the late 90s, this was a watershed moment because it was a way of taking the gay, taking gay rights and gay pride from being a fringe group that only freaks and perverts were into for the state. Your local Bobby. Yeah, exactly. This is legit. This is now a part of

and a community celebration that involves everybody. This is universal. Even the people who had previously been beating gay and lesbians in the riots of the 1960s and 70s are now, well, not the individual people, but the people who represent the institution that was prejudiced

towards gay and lesbians, they now much. Then in the 2010s, the police force officially apologized to the LGBTQIA plus, what I'm just going to say, community for the historical wrongs, for the hard, the harms that have been done by police against gays and lesbians.

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

the police. The wrinkle is he was a cop. He only had a firearm because he was a cop. He wasn't on duty. It wasn't a case of police brutality. It was a case of domestic violence where one individual went rogue. And as a result, the organizers of gay pride, the Māori Grā board, convened an emergency meeting and uninvited the police from holding their float because it would be too hurtful and triggering to other participants to see police officers involved in Māori Grā.

Now, there will be police officers there. I mean, they're going to be like, it's a huge event, so they will be uniform police officers. It's just a long, long duty. But they won't be ones, so apparently those aren't triggering, but the ones who are standing on the giant penis or whatever

it is, they are, they are, they are, they are, they won't dress normally. So this caused a fewer or essentially an argument about whether or not the mainstream sort of gay and lesbian institutional activist class has become too identitarian and too fragile and too, I suppose, obsessed with a narrative of victimization instead of pride in the community's

calendar when you read this. Eat a little bit. So my phone lit up with phone calls from the opinion editors of all the big newspapers saying, what do you think and do you want to write something for this? And so I wrote something basically saying the cops should be allowed to participate. This person wasn't, you know, functioning in his capacity as a police officer. Not all cops. Not all cops. I mean, literally not all cops, right? And not only not all cops,

he wasn't even being a cop when he was doing this thing. And the police force responded exactly as you would want them to and was equally horrified and has the guy in custody. And my basic argument was like, why are we sort of leaning into a narrative of our own

fragility and victimization? Like as if we're incapable, we're going to be triggered and traumatized and it's going to make us feel unsafe to witness this stuff when the original virtue of civil rights in the 1960s and 70s, not just for gays, but for black people as well and all other minorities and women and feminism. The idea was an idea of universalism. It was an idea that all people should be treated equally regardless of their sex or gender

or job or uniform. And that seems to have been replaced now by an ethos of identitarianism and tribalism where we're sort of picking goodies and baddies on the basis of whether they're in our in group or out group. So I was basically writing a piece arguing, can't we reclaim the universalism, the optimism and the sense of power? Can't we take pride in powerfulness instead of powerlessness and stop scratching at the wounds of the past and be

inclusive and try to embrace universalism? Of course, that got me a huge amount of shit. I'm sure it did. Yeah. If I was a gay Australian person, the last thing that I would want is this like gay fragility. Right? Like I don't know, even if it's like white fragility. It's like this is that's it's almost being transplanted onto, well, we must tip to around and we must common use new book, The End of Race Politics. Really good. Is he coming on? Yeah. You got him on?

Actually, I just sat down with Coleman yesterday in New York and this is to report or yes, we recorded for my part of the cast. We also recorded it for my YouTube. So people should check out the YouTube as well because I'm starting to do like rather than just record things in the studio or via Zoom. I also want to make it a bit more fun and do some stuff outside that sort of feels a bit more like comedians and cars getting coffee and they have us walk around.

Oh, I'm really sick. Yeah. Sorry, I don't know if you know Thomas Chatterton Williams, who's another really interesting guy. He and I caught up and we just went to Riverside Park and just sat outside and chatted and walked around Grant's tomb and talk shit and then Coleman Hughes and Jesse Singles. Yeah. Jesse, Jesse, Heterodox thing. Yeah, right. So the three of us hang out. So that video will all be, it's not up yet, but that's all coming to YouTube.

I love Coleman before this one does. But with Coleman's new thing, he kind of highlights the like patronizing nature of assuming that black people are very fragile and that we must you know, we must sort of step on egg shells around them, which is a kind of soft bigotry in a way. And it's the same thing with, you know, again, true equality is when you have to put

up at the same level of shit that everybody else does. Yeah. And in terms of who gets to talk about this stuff, just looping back to like who has standing and like, you know, read the room and kind of, you know, now is a time to be quiet and just to listen. When I wrote that, of course, the reason why the three newspaper editors called me is because I identify as gay. But the arguments that I was making really have nothing to do with my own gayness. I have a special pedestal because I

happen to be married to a man. And I was in a room talking to another bunch of people and they were all sharing my, my sense about this that was kind of agreeing with me. And one of the guys said, well, thank God you can say it. And I was like, you actually can say it. Yeah. As a straight guy, you actually are allowed to say it. And I actually am allowed to have an opinion about the way that

blacks and whites should get along in society, even though I'm not black. And I actually am allowed to have an opinion about how we should be dealing with children with gender dysphoria, even though I'm not trans. And I actually, you know, like we all live in this fucking society. This is a demos. We're in a democracy. We get to hash it out. We get to have conversations. We get to wrestle with this

shit. I want a capacious public square that is ram bunches and fun and funny and playful. And when it needs to be earnest and serious and that wrestles with things that you're not allowed to wrestle with because that's the only way that we're going to progress. I mean, yeah, sorry. Your lived experience will have informed some of the insights that you have about pride and global pride day. But presumably a sufficiently smart, while reasoned person could have got

pretty close to that without having to. Of course they could. I mean, they could look, if you're, if what you're investigating is what it feels like to be in the closet or come out of the closet or what it feels like to walk through the world as a Pakistani woman or what it feels like, you know, to be a five year old transgender person with one leg, then you need to talk to those

people to get a sense of what it feels like. But if what you're talking about is like house society should respond and think about the way that it structures itself, the way that it talks to itself and the way that it deals with grievances, then that's something in which we all have a

sake, including straight white males. Talk to me. Talk to me about the problem with the anti-woke because, you know, again, being a part of your tribeless tribe, presumably you've got problems with both step number four, which is like the left wing re-response, but also step number two, which is linked. Yeah. So there is this cynical industry of anti-woke right wing shitwards, really, who will use the spectra of cancel culture as an excuse to push beliefs that

they've always had in the first place. Cancel culture is something that really began with the right, was perfected by the right. Macaotheism was cancel culture, the sensoriusness of the religious right against pornography and, you know, the hysteria of the war on drugs. Like these were all right wing things. Harry Potter, when Harry Potter first, Harry Potter, yes, exactly because it was demonic or the most banned book. The most banned book of the 21st century Harry Potter and not

banned by the left. No, not by the right. That's why that lady's thing, the witch trials object, wrongly, with so much. Actually, people should listen to that episode of uncomfortable conversations with Megan Phelps rope, because it is modern wisdom conversation with them. Yeah, but mine's even better. Right. She's great. She's great. She's so good. But so where was I just going with that? The anti-woke industry. Right. The anti-woke industry.

There's a cynicism to it. There's a kind of a, like, a kind of what got you and what did you just say? There was, we've got the sort of left wing story goes out. The right wing response to that, what it causes downstream is for the shit wads industry to spin up. Right. And then the sensoriousness, well, cancel culture was perfect. Yes, that's right. There was something, the particular thing that I was thinking of there was a multi-partthane. So, a multi-partane comes out

with the life of Brian. And of course, it's the right wing that doesn't want. They're absolutely looting their shit. They've got their tits in a tangle because it's satirizing Christianity.

The right perfected cancel culture. And what's happened recently is that the left has lost its focus on the bread and butter of the left, which is uplifting working people and striving for equality and caring about class, essentially, and wanting economic justice to becoming obsessed with the narcissism of small differences between our tribes and the color of your skin and who you want to sleep with and what your gender identity is and so on. And in so doing, they've become as

sensorious and hysterical as the right always used to be. And that has now triggered some bad actors, many bad actors on the right to take the moral high ground and, you know, complain constantly about cancel culture. A cancel culture that they themselves have been complicit in or their movement has been complicit in for bloody decades. I mean, talk, let's talk about McCarthyism, right? And, you know, the sorry history of time. I don't know what that is.

Oh, sorry. So, in the 1950s, the end in the Cold War, Senator Joe McCarthy wanted to crack down on communism in America and basically created show trials for anyone who was suspected of being a communist, many of whom were just innocent left-wing people. And basically blacklisted half of Hollywood and half of the creative arts in this country in a witch hunt of communists. It was devastating. It was sort of Soviet style. It was Stalinist. It was incredibly intrusive.

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

supposedly, and their anti-work and their anti-cancel culture. And the moment somebody says, you know, some, I don't know, anti-zionists says something pro-Palestinian. All of a sudden, they're in favor of that person losing their job. Well, hang on a fucking second. Excuse me. Like, my parents were Holocaust survivors. I'm a conflicted, you know, sometimes anti-zionist, sometimes zionist definitely think the Palestinians should have a state. I think it's absolutely

tragic that the Palestinians are in the situation that they're in. But also, and deeply uncomfortable with the extremities of some of the anti-zionist rhetoric, which I think is bordering on anti-Semitism. I'm, it's complicated. If you're not finding it complicated, you're in the wrong. I'm sorry. The world is extremely messy and extremely complicated. If you're not confused by it, if you're confused by it, then you're on the right track, I would say. These are very messy,

complicated things. And the only way to resolve them, in fact, the only way to survive the 21st century in an era of algorithms and artificial intelligence and climate chaos is going to be for us all to get on the same page by having conversations, by having uncomfortable conversations,

and by talking to each other and wrestling through these things. So don't give me this bullshit, if you're on the right by saying that, you know, our cancel culture is coming for us, and endlessly amplifying sort of cherry-picked examples of the extremism of the left, the kind of lips of TikTok phenomenon, where, oh my god, look at this ridiculous protest on some random university campus in the United States. This is the most important thing that we have to focus on

every hour of the day. And then the moment someone gets censured for having a position that you disagree with, you pile on as well, and you participate in a cancel culture from the other side, just stop it. Like stop it. We have to engage with people on the base of ideas. Don't punish people for their ideas. If they're saying something stupid or hateful or wrong, then counter that by saying

something right. The solution to a bad idea is a good idea. It's not getting the person who has the bad idea fired, you know, whipping up a mob on social media to try to take them down, storming

corporate offices with kind of metaphorical pitchforks to try to ruin people's lives. And I've come out, you know, in fact, in support of my enemies, my ideological enemies, to say that they shouldn't have, you know, been petitions in Australia, to have certain people who I vehemently disagree with, who I think are doing real damage, to have their contracts with their publishers canceled, or to pressure behind the scenes for them to lose a podcast or other. And I've actively said,

to my colleagues and friends, don't do it. Don't go down this path. You don't want to open this door. You don't want to end up living in a society where everybody is trading on egg shells, aren't able to say what they think. Worry about triggering trip wires. Worry about the mob coming for them. And we, I mean, it's going to come for you. You'll reap the world one. You will reap the fucking whirlwind. And even if you don't reap it personally, you will reap having to live in a

world in which people feel stifled and suppressed and afraid. Speaking of protests at live talks, did you see Concenton Kissen is in Australia at the moment and shame I'm just missing him. But I'm actually using up with him right now. You can break the door down. What? You've not seen this video? I haven't seen it. I've been traveling for the past week, so I haven't seen anything. You should be on to it. You should be locked into the main frame.

It should be directly IV. So Concenton is at what looks like some prestigious university, big vaulted halls. And he's giving some sort of a talk up on stage. There's these big wooden doors huge arched motherfuckers and the banging and chanting and like, and they're obviously trying to break in. And this woman goes over with a blanket, puts a blanket at the bottom of the door to like just drown out a little bit more of the sound. So maybe there's a bit of gap or whatever,

puts a little bit of thing. Concenton takes it. Yeah, that'll fix it. Yeah, Concenton says something and everything continues. But Douglas Murray as well. There's going to be a lot you've got. Yes, it already is. Yeah, already is. So talk to me. You know, you've got Concenton, Russian immigrant living in the UK and you've got Douglas going over to Australia. What is the, what's happened with your tour so far? Is that petitions for

you? Yes, live shows that we don't want this to happen. Not in our city. Yes. No hate, man. No hate, Chris. Why are you in favor of hate? Why are you in favor of Douglas spreading his hate? Douglas and Josh spreading their spreading hate in Australia. I don't know, man. It's something's happening. Something's happening in the world. I think since COVID, friends and colleagues of mine who were on the heterodox side of things have Karine completely off the rails into far right

conspiracy land. And on the left, friends and colleagues of mine have Karine off the rails into if you disagree with us, then by definition, your peddling ideas that are so bad that you shouldn't be allowed to say them. And yet we live at a time when everybody has more ability to counter ideas than they've ever had. Everybody, sure, not everybody can write an opinion piece for the newspaper or have bazillions of podcast listeners as we have the good fortune to do. But we didn't get there

from, from, we're because I was born there, right? I mean, we earned it and anybody can earn it now. You have the capacity to push back against bad ideas, but there's something on the left at the moment, which is sensorious, hysterical. It's a group think. And it has brought into an idea about what discourse is supposed to be that is completely detached from the values of traditional

liberalism and the enlightenment. Like it's like these people are not aware of, jumps you at mill, and are not aware of the idea that the best way to progress as a society is to have a maximally large conversation about things so that together you can weed out what's true and what's not true, what's useful and not useful, what's hateful and not hateful. And communally, collectively, you can sort of arrive at better and better ideas.

That's what the enlightenment was. That's why we're surrounded by the prosperity that we are, basically, because a few scots mostly came up with the idea that human beings should be maximally tolerant of other ideas and respectful of each other's property, and including intellectual property and engage with them rationally on the basis of science and reason instead of on the

basis of superstition and prejudice. That's why the West has achieved what the West has achieved, essentially, along with the Industrial Revolution, which was largely generated by those same principles. And yet there's now a push that is almost messianic in like its self-certainty. It's like people who are like, we don't need all this troublesome talking. We already have the answers. We know that Douglas Murray is a fascist Zionist. We know that he says intolerable things about

Muslims. He's an Islamophob. Let's march in the streets, go and get Josh and Douglas. No, hate. No hate, isn't he? Get rid of the hate. Well, that's very convenient, isn't it? Everyone you don't like is just hate. Like, what are you talking about? How would we know whether he's right or wrong until you're unless you hear him? And when you do hear him, push back, tell him he's wrong. I mean, and then the counter-argument always ends up being, well, what if it was a Nazi? Would you platform a

Nazi? What if it was someone saying that we should kill all the Jews? No, I wouldn't platform such a person because that's not an interesting point of view. And it's likely to get lots and lots of people immediately hurt. But let's set the bar a little higher than a rather a feat intellectual Englishman who has accurately predicted some of the some of the royaling social issues and cultural schisms that have emerged over the past 20 years. There's an idea from my

friend, Gwinderbogel, called a semantic stop sign. One way people and discussions is by disguising descriptions as explanations. For instance, the word evil is used to explain behavior, but really only describes it. It resolves the question not by creating understanding, but by killing curiosity. And that's the same as like, no, hate. Yes. The semantic stop sign. Right. Right. Yep. And when you called the BLM riots, riots, you were also engaging in hate,

in a sense, right? Yes. It's like the bubble is inescapable. And I mean, this is something I'm also cautious about in, you know, expanding uncomfortable conversations from podcast into YouTube, into live events that I too don't get caught in a bubble. You know, I don't want to. Yeah. There's this phenomenon of audience capture where you think that the audience wants something. And so you keep on feeding it to them. I'm very wary of that. It's very hard, man. I mean, you know, you are,

you want to make things that add value to the world. You want to embrace your own curiosity. That's what you do. You're following your instincts. That's something that's super, super important. Yes. It's your best competitive advantage. It's the way that you can stay ahead of trends. It's the way that you come across as unique. And it's also the most enjoyable thing for you to do, because it's just natural outpouring of whatever you're interested in. Yeah.

But you also want to do things like it's not just your pet project. This isn't a fucking hobby. Mm-hmm. It's, it's somewhere between business enterprise, an environmental impact movement, a way to nudge the world and leave behind some sort of legacy that you think is, well, at least, you know, one tiny fucking microscope movement of culture was done maybe by one conversation for

one family of people that I had. So I can see, you know, audience capture being basically puppeted by throwing red meats to your audience to only give them what they want and what they're going to agree with. And on the opposite side, being like some dude yelling about whatever he's interested in in his basement that no one listens to, like on that spectrum, there is a middle ground that you want to try and achieve. Yes. Well, I mean, some guy yelling in his basement about something

that he seems to be interested in is definitely not my aspiration. But I do think that some dude talking in his basement about some of the most important issues and with some of the most intriguing intellects in the world in ways that are considered taboo and in ways that could, you know,

get you in trouble in a mainstream institution is has an appeal. And that in order to maintain the integrity of that, actually the best sort of load star, the best light on the hill is still my own sense of integrity, interest and authenticity because the problem with listening too much to your audience is that the kinds of is that the tiny fraction of your audience who actually reaches out to you and tells you what they like and don't like do tend to be the most invested. And it's this

self-selecting group. I learned this in talk radio, you know, sometimes I started as a talk radio producer when I was when I was just starting out. And the host of the radio show would like sometimes do something and he'd say, look at this, the board's lighting up, everyone's calling in. And I'd be like,

well, yeah, but the board has eight lines on it. And there are 300,000 people listening, right? So the the the measurement of how many people are calling in is just a measurement of is there a sufficiently invested minority of people who are willing to pick up the phone and talk to me? Doesn't necessarily mean the other 300,000 people find that particularly interesting. And similarly, it's important to know that the people who really, really, really, you know, you're throwing red

meat to because they're super, super ultra fans. That's fabulous. God bless them. I love you. Don't untunstribed. But nonetheless, at the end of the day, I'm not going to give you exactly what you want because I think there's a bigger pool of people. I can't have a reasonable center. And I should add here, when I say center, some people misunderstand that. And they think, oh, Josh is just a kind of person who positions himself between two poles and whatever the left does and whatever the right

does, Josh is going to sit comfortably in the middle and shout at both of them. That's not what I mean by the center. What I mean by and maybe center is the wrong term. I sometimes call it the radical center. What I mean is a position where I try to evaluate what the most reasonable position is regardless of whether or not the left or the right happened to agree with that thing. Sometimes

you'll put me on the left, sometimes you'll put me on the right. The average is going to end up being the problem that you have there is I think most ideological beliefs aren't about what you believe. There are about shows of fieldity to your side or the other. And what people see in someone that they can't predict is an unreliable ally. This is why I am an unreliable ally. But that's a huge

problem. If we know, don't know, don't need to worry about Josh. He's on board with the trans stuff, he's on board with the gay stuff, he's on board with the abortion stuff, he's on board with the immigration stuff, he's on board with the gun control and the taxation and all the rest of it. If I know one of your views and from it I can accurately predict everything else, then we don't

need to worry about him. And this is, people have got lots of problems with Sam Harris. But one of the biggest ones that no one really ever talks about is that he's one of the most unreliable allies that you're ever going to have. And I have to presume that Sam believes the things. It's way easy to say, oh, he's confused or he's captured or he's deranged in some way or whatever, whatever thing it is. Because for Sam to arrive at a lot of the positions that he holds,

he pays like a pretty high price for them. He regularly loses huge swaths of his audience, he regularly gets made fun of online and Twitter and stuff like that. It'd be way easier for him to either not comment or to comply, you know, what's the like one-z outfit that I'm a part of and I'll just sort of slot this next view in on the end of that. So the incentive to do something

that pisses off any group. And this is the same for it to matter if you're not going to podcast or anything like you're at work and someone brings up something and you just find yourself the compulsion to just go, yeah, yeah, no, isn't it, isn't it awful? And you go, I don't think that. I don't think that. I don't think isn't it awful. I think I completely understand why that thing happened or the reverse. The human compulsion for compliance in many people, I'm one of them,

is unbelievably strong. And I understand that we've got guys like Douglas or a bench peer or whatever who just like effortlessly sit in toe-curling cringed debate and seem to revel in it like pigs in mud. Cool. That's not, I think most people and for the, you know, the silent majority of people pleases out there. Yeah. Understanding there are these polls, there are these sort of compulsions and

desires that your inner state has to just, we'll just smooth the world. But Chris, do you feel comfortable in that state? No, no, being disagreeable both in personal life and on the show is something I'm actively having to work unbelievably harder. Disagreeable in a personal exchange like we're having now or disagreeable about an abstract idea when you're publishing it on social media or elsewhere.

First one. Right. First one. If you know that position that I had about like this fucking shiny object cycle, that I think sits somewhere in the middle of a bunch of things, but it's going to piss off a lot of people because they say no, no, no, it is righteous. We do need to be able to be pushed back against this stuff. I'm fine to do that. It's more so into personal. Yeah. So for me to, you know, if I was around the water, I don't think Sam has that either. And I don't think I

have that either, but he and I both share and I think you do as well. If I want to psychoanalyze you, a desire to scratch behind the surface of what's really going on in a way that you know is going to piss people off just to get to the intellectual juice. What's actually happening? I think it's largely a fight between your discomfort at upsetting people on one side and your desire for intellectual satisfaction on the other. Yes. And it's a few interesting things to you. What pulls

you through? Yeah. And it's interesting you say that you would be easier for Sam Harris to sort of strategically, you know, pan to particular groups. Of course, that's not true at all because I know Sam well. And he would find it incredibly difficult to betray himself because he's a man of immense integrity and authenticity. So the easiest thing for him to do is the thing that he is doing, which is to be true to himself and to have credibility in his own eyes and to get up

in the morning and look in the mirror and respect himself. And so the anti-ali thing is interesting. Yes. Of course, you're not an ally to the tribes as they currently constructed in society. You're not an ally to the right and you're not an ally to the to the social justice left. But you are an ally to people who value integrity. And I suspect there's a lot of those people actually. People will disagree with me on particular issues. My gamble here is that they will always value the fact

that I'm free from bullshit, that I'm authentic and that I have integrity. Right? I'm an ally on that. So yeah, I'm not going to be an ally on your fucking pet issue. You know, don't come at me because I said the wrong thing about X, Y, or Z. But you know that I will be arriving at that conclusion rationally and reasonably. I'll be respecting my people who I disagree with. I'm not going to be demonizing them. Not going to be strong-maning them. I'm going to be trying to articulate

things that I disagree with in as generous a way as possible. I'm going to be epistemologically humble and I'm trying to understand the limitations of my own knowledge. I always hedge a little bit and say on the other hand, I do understand that, you know, other people, other reasonable people can disagree on this particular issue. And I'm an ally on that. I'm an, you know, Richard Dawkins once said something about people who get offended when he criticises their religion. He said,

I respect you too much to pretend to respect your stupid beliefs. That's how I feel about everything. Everything. Don't come at me and tell me that you're offended because of what I'm saying. It's a sign of respect to you to believe that you are capable of hearing what I'm articulating. And if it's wrong, tell me why. Don't try to get me fired. Tell me why it's wrong. And I will respect your position. I mean, if it's a really stupid position, then I won't, of course, I won't

respect it. But I will use the yardsticks of reason and rationality to try to understand you. And I will always have you back on that. I will always be an ally of people who do that. I just won't be part of your tribe. I mean, it's bloody ridiculous what you were just saying about how you can predict people's opinions on things on the basis of other opinions. Like if you tell me what you think about corporate tax rates, I can predict with some certainty what you think about climate change.

They're too completely fucking different ideas. Why can I make that prediction? Because you've gone down a bloody checklist of, oh, yes, all right, this is what my tribe tells me to believe. You know, on something, take immigration. I think part of, I think one of the reasons why I was initially successful in the United States to the extent that I was was because Americans are

actually quite open to hearing. And I wonder if this is your experience as well. Hearing what's kind of advice from a friendly foreigner or like the take of an ally from abroad who sees things differently. Like I've never understood why it's a crazy idea to secure the southern border and to bias America's immigration policy towards migrants from who you choose from all over the world. Like I love migrants. I love living in Sydney, which is incredibly multi one of the multi ethnic

cities in the world. I, you know, I'm a huge fan of immigration and Australia picks its people very, very specifically. And in fact, after the Second World War, Australia made a conscious decision that the price to pay to increase the population massively and have one of the highest per capita immigration rates in the world. And I think it's number one on a refugee resettlement, one or two

Australia. In order to, the price you have to pay to get the populace to agree with that is to have a bloody brutal border policy, which is obviously not easier if you're in an island than if you have a physical border. But you have to make this fasty impact where you go, if the people feel that they are in total control, then you give them the freedom to be generous towards foreigners. And you can have a high immigration rate and a highly multi cultural society with very little pushback.

The reason why you have anti immigration sentiment as high as it is in the United States and in the UK, UK, UK as well. And I believe the reason why you had Brexit and the reason why you had Donald Trump was in part because people felt like things were spilling out of control. They felt like there was demographic change that they couldn't handle that nobody was in control of. There were hordes coming in from somewhere or other. They didn't know who these people were.

As a pro immigration person, I always was on the kind of conservative side of this, even though I'm on the left. So there, so people would find it hard to peg when I got here. And I think Americans kind of appreciated that. I like, he's a foreigner. Well, I remember I went on the, one of the first times I went on the air and have both live. We were talking about voter ID laws in the United States, which for people who don't know if they're outside the states, some states introduce,

identifications, the requirement to show ID when you vote at the voting poll. Normally, you don't have to show any ID. You just go up and you give your name and you vote. So they say, let's secure the polls by requiring people to show ID. Now, some states misuse this and abuser by saying that you can show a gun license, but you can't show a student card. In order to cherry

pick the kinds of demographic, demographics who they want to vote. But the fundamental principle, everybody else at half post and all my left-wing colleagues were like, this is a way of suppressing people of color because people of color tend not to have, you know, up to date, they move more. Basically, the idea is that poorer people move more and are less likely to have IDs. And poorer people are black. Of course, they never say the poor bit. They just claim that it's racist.

It's racist. Yeah, it's a racist policy, essentially. But they're blind to class problems and economic problems unless the race problem. Unless they race problems, exactly. So I just went on the air and I was like, I mean, sorry for not telling the party line here, but who doesn't have an ID? Like, you've never driven a car, you've never been to a bar, you never got on a plane. Who are these people who are? Now, I'm sure this is a very privileged thing. I'm

sure lots of people don't have IDs. But the fact that I could say that and make that makes me an enemy to the left, right? But I'm also an enemy to the right because I'm not saying it for the same reason that they are. I want to secure the border. I want to take a lot more people. I want a lot more Bangladeshese in America. But why do Bangladeshese get discriminated against just because they

can't walk across the Rio Grande? Yeah. But isn't it interesting that the only way you've been able to get away with saying that is by not having the left or right presupposition requirement of somebody that was born in this country. Right. So he's able to ask that question because he doesn't know. He's able to ask that question because he's just interested. Yes. And it's a rational

question to ask. But I do it in Australia as well, even where I am, you know, and native. And just sorry, just lastly on that point about sort of building up flexing the muscle of being disagreeable in one-on-one communications. I don't think it's necessary for everybody to fight every fight. I don't think it's necessary in the office when someone says something that you regard as being tribalistic or that is evidence of them being trapped in an echo chamber. For you to

go to the wall on that, I think it can be deranging. Jordan Peterson was in Australia and he tweeted when his plane landed. It's a big thing in Australia now as a bit of background to do a land acknowledgement or an acknowledgement of country before you do anything. Right. This has become part of the culture. So this is a it's a way of saying of First Nations Australians that the land that we're now on is, and you name the tribe of the land or whatever it is. Okay. It's a way of

signaling. It will it will get started out a bit virtue signally. I think in the US it's still highly virtue signally because it hasn't become mainstream yet. But in Australia, it is completely normalized to begin a meeting by saying just want to respect the traditional owners of the land, the so-and-so people. Now that can get a bit ridiculous. It sounds silly. It sounds I'll tell you what it really fucking silly. I'll tell you what's really silly is when you're like in a zoom

meeting with four white middle-aged ladies who are from HR and they all try to do it. Like then it's like, what do we do? Is this a mutual masturbation club or all just telegraphing to each other that we're on the correct page? Like it's a virtue signally thing. Nonetheless, the airlines in Australia now do that. You land and they go, you know, welcome to Melbourne, you know, the traditional place of the so-and-so people. So Jordan Peterson tweets out, stop this virtue signalling nonsense.

You're a communist, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't want to have this shoved down my throat. And I'm like, bro, love you. Pick your battles. Pick your battles. You don't have to be, you don't have to be so, you're not going to win it. And it sounds petty. Not everything is an existential fight. So I would say like, don't become the asshole who tries to call everyone out. I understand the compulsion on that, you know, I see, I explained this on a Q&A recently about how I really

enjoy the fact that I have this unreasonably reasonable audience for the most part. But as you brought up, we don't know what compels people to comment. And whatever it is is unified at least across some subset of people that are commenters. So comments always kind of have the same tanner to them. A lot of them sort of converge onto a few broad buckets of whatever they're talking about. But as the channel grows, because you remember the insults, not the compliments,

any increase in channel size doesn't feel like an increase in support. It just feels like an increase in hate. Because you start to accumulate more of these outlier events whereby people find a thing that they think is reprehensible. And I started to, I've started to notice maybe in the last six months, at least the beginning of why people of whatever Jordan size or whoever size could be motivated to like see conflict everywhere. Because they are so used to just this

barrage of bullshit online. And the problem with a barrage of bullshit is that there is probably some streaks of piss that you could have paid attention to in that bullshit. And the whole thing is just washed to one side. So what do you do? You see everything is an attack. Everything is something that you can go for. You should go up against picking, picking your battles when you're in the middle of a war is unbelievably difficult. It is. It is. But it's so necessary. It's actually

so necessary because you're deranged by your experience of the world. You become everybody. Fucking champagne problems. Yeah, I get it. This is the job you chose. This is the platform. Understood. I agree. But that doesn't fix the dynamic that we're talking about. The dynamic is still going to persist. Whether you or me or anybody believes that it should be that way or it shouldn't be that way. But you have to just have to be cognizant enough to take a 30,000-foot view

and go, that dynamic is also taking place on the other side. So the people on the other side of politics are, you know, my opponents are also receiving the same kind of crazy bullshit from people who would regard themselves as being on my side. Therefore, we're both trapped in mirror image

echo chambers of hate that are ratch that are extremifying us. The algorithms are also, you know, load that on, plus load on the fracturing of the media landscape, plus load on the cowardice and group thing of mainstream media institutions that are failing to wrestle adequately with some of

the issues that you want to talk about. And you have a recipe for a self-reflexive feedback loop of ever greater polarization, which is only going to lead to ultimately, I do fear, tearing society apart into some kind of low-grade cultural, genuine civil war, which could mean, you know, at least the temporary collapse of, you know, give me a realization in the 21st century.

So you can't participate in it. You've got to find a way. I sometimes regard my job as, I'm not going to necessarily, you're not necessarily going to agree with me, but I want to talk in such a way that I can nudge both sides 10% closer to understanding each other. And if I've done that, then I've done my job. I don't want to be going 10% further away. And all the incentives, as you say, are pulling it, pulling me 10% further away. They're trying to make, they're trying

to radicalise us. It's our job to resist them. It's our job to make sure that, whereas generous as possible towards people who disagree with us, we don't exaggerate minor slides. We play a big game, we talk about the big stuff and we talk about it in ways that everybody who's listening, unless they're literally about shit crazy, can sort of understand that we're being, we're being fairly reasonable about. Talk me through what you see for the next five or 10 years when it comes to

culture and the landscape of conversation and stuff like that. I fundamentally disagree with the doom orism, the world is ruined, everything's going to hell in a hand basket. A perspective, I fundamentally disagree with it because I think that people are super agentic and the ability for people both individually and collectively to adapt and to come together in different ways is essentially unpredictable, but it does seem to be becoming increasingly

predictable. The tribal, this is the classic cycle of shiny objects syndrome that we're going to see. What do you think? Run me through your prediction for the next seven years. I mean, it's so hard to know, isn't it? It's like, my, I tend to agree with a guy I had on uncomfortable conversations

called Toby Walsh, who is Australia's leading artificial intelligence researcher. He runs the AI lab at the University of New South Wales, who says he thinks everything's going to be fine, in fact, great, ultimately, and the next 20 or 30 years are going to be really rough. What a time to be alive until we figure out what's going on. I say that because, I mean, you're a good

example of the potential of the agentic person, right? Transformation, self-reliance, kind of, you know, putting in place, and anyone who's had this experience is aware that it is available to us. In the first year of the pandemic, I put on about 10 kilos, like more than 20 pounds, eating ice cream and watching Netflix. And then in the second year of the pandemic, I lost, like, 50 pounds, like 20 kilos. Right. And I've maintained that screw you weight gain since.

Yeah. And I started working out and I started eating properly and I started giving a shit. And anyone who's had that experience of sort of reasonably radical and fast, I can change my world. Yes, that's absolutely possible. That is available to us in every single second of the day. And I think it's a wonderful thing that you do. And I think it's a wonderful thing that Joe does to the extent that his content is about that as well. I mean, Joe

is one of the reasons why I have a podcast. I went on Joe's show before I had a podcast. And after the show, you know, he was like, what are you doing with these dumb, dumbs at, you know, half-posts? You know, a podcast. And I was like, all right, I'll give it a shot. He's an inspiring person. He's a person who helps people. He's a person who has done an enormous amount for everybody in the community. I'll always be appreciative and grateful to Joe. And he gave me exposure,

like massive exposure when I wasn't a person who deserved it. But maybe I deserved it, but I didn't had no other avenue for it. And so, yes, to the extent that people can get into that, can lock into that fabulous. Do most people in practice lock into radical transformation of

themselves on a daily basis? They don't. So the temptation, the sort of cookie jar that's in the kitchen, always looking at you and the temptation to take the cookie, which is this supercomputer in your pocket, with apps that are designed with algorithms to just be constantly begging for your

attention, using the principles of like poker machines, like intermittent rewards that will time your notifications on precisely the number of microseconds, milliseconds, that the engineers know are likelyest to coincide with when you're most vulnerable and susceptible to responding to that notification, to looking at it and to therefore grabbing your attention and dragging you back into their multiverse of madness. Those temptations are very hard to counter. Artificial intelligence

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

collationic offs. But we didn't regulate collationic offs. We were just like, hey, we invented the collationic offs. Let's all have one. And at some point in the future, I mean, I'm leery about governments regulating things because they're usually so bad at doing it, but there has to be some kind of break on the way that artificial intelligence is going to intersect with algorithms to be able to devise maximally addictive and maximally deranging content. And I can't see how the average

person is going to be able to resist it. Yeah, resist it. Regardless of the self-factualized conditions that we might want them to. What's happened in Australia? What's happened in the UK with vapes? You know, smoking. Right. Or these sort of laws that are coming in. And basically what it's been deemed is that even though this isn't illegal, it is able to hack the human system in such a compelling way that basically people don't have full control of themselves.

Therefore, daddy government needs to come in and assist them toward an outcome that we think on balance is probably best for everybody. Your phone is way stronger of an intrinsic drug dealer than a vapes. It's think about how many times you've been sat on a plane and you pull your phone out and unlock it and cycle through a bunch of apps before you realize that you're 35,000 feet in the air. It's ridiculous. It's a compulsion. It's so hard. And you know, it's the biggest still for

me now. So many, I think episode 10 I had with Kai Wei, who was the guy that created the light phone, which is now in its second or third generation. It's six years ago I've been thinking about this Tristan Harris. I've ever said I heard him on Sam Harris's show, The nominal interesting guy talking about how the variable schedule rewards and how the human psychology gets a limbically hijacked to stay on time, screen time and stuff like that. All of this stuff six years

later, I'm still only marginally better with my phone use than I was back then. It is a, do you have the apps on your phone? You know, social media. I have two phones. So I have one cocaine phone and a kale phone. Cocaine phone has got all of the stuff on. What you really need is three. You really need a third phone. So you need one, which is that's my take about phone that is people that really need me have got that number and it's got Uber and Kindle and

Audible and maybe YouTube if you want. And it means I can get about and do whatever. Second one, which is messaging for most people, that's the number that almost everybody has, that's your Instagram, that's whatever. That's just tethered in that should be on a string, like in the fucking landline in the house. And then the optional third phone, which is meditation, timer, the stuff that you do if you have a morning routine where you need a, and where to

Twitter go on the tethered phone. 20 goes on the tethered phone. 20 goes on the phone to me. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I took the apps off my phone about a year ago and it's been dramatic, it's dramatically improved my life. I mean, I don't, yes, if I really want to, I can open a browser and I can go like and log in and I can check something if I need to, but you lose it brain remembers that that's one point of friction and it doesn't want to, you know, if you tell

I'm not great, I don't know. It doesn't hold there. Opal, which is like a bit, bit more of a scheduleable, intense, screen time thing. And opals, fantastic. I've been using that for about six months now. And we mean all of my friends, we'd used to do a series on the show called LifeHacks. Yeah. You know, like 25 episodes, maybe if this is fucking life hacks, we're only

done 750. It's a significant portion of this show is based on these life hacks. And it's like, dude, I got this new recipe for making a toasted sandwich, but this is the very particular sandwich maker that you need. And you need to get the 450 not the 400 because the 400 has like a, the drip tray doesn't work. Or this is a new meditation app that we're using or this is, I once found I still do find I think it's a gate 35D in Amsterdam, Schiphol Airport is the only

set of benches in all of Amsterdam Airport that doesn't have handrails between them. So if you need to have a nap at some point, now often get packed in photos from people like at 35D, dude, I'm so glad you told me about this. There's a website as well, Sleeping in Airports, which I sometimes look at. I'm like, I'm a travel hack guy. Exactly. I use all my, like, I acquire

miles cheaply and then spend them on expensive things. I'm always flying and, you know, Singapore Airlines first class and stuff and using the rule that we have is we can tell the guys about it. We can say, look, here's a new thing that I'm using. But until it's past the six month mark, it doesn't count as being a viable hack. So it takes a little waiting for the six month window. But Opel's passed the six month window. So that Opel just is a practical thing for people.

And then the second one is Cold Turkey, which is the equivalent essentially for Mac. So you download Cold Turkey and you set up schedules throughout the day and you can block any website you want. You can also block apps. And for me, it's like Twitter, Instagram blocked. And the only way if you want, you can set it to the only way that you can get around is to donate money to charity. So if you donate a dollar to charity, it's just linked to your car. Donate money to charity and

you get to look at Twitter for five minutes or whatever if you really, really need to do it. That's great. So that's been part of my solution. But no, I don't disagree. It's a deranging time where people have basically got a hacker, a human system, human OS hacker sat in that pocket. And I do one of my smartest friends has a question that says, what will be studied by historians but is ignored by the media? Right. And I think that the proliferation of dopamine hacking, limbic,

attack, smartphones in everyone's pocket is probably going to be up there. I mean, that's a beautiful line. May I say, what will be studied by historians that are being ignored by the media? I mean, that exemplifies why I've gone independent with uncomfortable conversations really because I don't want to be chasing. I don't want to be a cat with the laser pointer who's chasing the latest story or the latest outrage, the latest news cycle. I do want to be someone who is in some

sense writing the first draft of history as best we can as it's going on. And so that's why a lot of my guests, like we'll not necessarily align with the usual heterodox, like there's a kind of, we all know the guests who keep showing up on some of the same podcast over and over and over again.

I don't spend the majority of my time doing that. I recently had on this indigenous academic who is this wonderful guy who's skeptical about like all of these kind of virtues, signaling kind of white, savior type practices that have emerged around the wisdom of the native truths and everything. And yet, as indigenous bloke himself, he's not like, he's not a kind of anti-woke like dissident. He is very much a spiritual person who draws a lot of meaning

from the traditions and spirituality of this ancient culture. So like, it's not about, for me, it's not about dunking and shitting and like, well, why is everything going crazy? It's about like, let's understand as best we can where everybody is coming from. Quite apart from anything, it's just really interesting. I mean, it's just more a more interesting way to live than to constantly be sniping and being to see, you know, to observe conflict where there is

any. You know, you can very much down-regulate whatever another person, even the most sort of aggressive, egregious. And we saw this in nightlife, like a drunk person that can't get into a club with their friends. There's, you know, there's that. And then only above that is a mother protecting her

children, like that's the level of intensity that you have. And, you know, so much of the de-escalation involves just like getting the other person to mostly through questions and to stand where you're at. So, you know, if someone says something like, it's been looking at how many episodes you've done this year and there's only been an ex-percent of them are women or something like that. And I'm like, oh, that's okay. Which women would you like to see on the show? Please send me suggestions.

And immediately, almost without fail, people go, oh, actually, yeah, this person's on a month. Thank you for the suggestion. I genuinely appreciate the suggestion. Yes. Really de-escalate it. The problem is it's so rare. The reason it de-escalates so well is that people are waiting for the cutting, sad, don't it? Don't fest. Throwback. But, yeah, man, I don't

know. I think I really hope that I hope that our lives, that my lifespan, your lifespan, everyone listening, isn't some bizarre, like, prelude to an endilic future where we are forced to pay the costs, like those women that were making watches with fucking radium. And, you know, we just did know the side effects. We just didn't know them back then. And that all of us are going to live in this weird, mentally-deranged, tribalistic, limbically hijacked world. And then we die. And then two

generations from now, it's like, ah, that may just be the price we pay. My dad was born in a refugee camp during World War II in Switzerland of Jewish parents who fled from Poland in 1938 and lived, my grandma lived her, you know, the entire first 20 years of her life being hunted by Nazis and almost being sent to Auschwitz and all the rest of her family were wiped out. And at that moment, it was the stakes were high enough that reasonable people got their shit together. And they built a

fuck ton of bombs, a fuck ton of bombers. And they blew the Nazis out of the water. And, you know, decent societies like Australia and America and, you know, the UK and Canada welcomed in people like my grandmother, my grandmother, my grandmother, when after the war, she went to the port in France where

they were loading refugees onto boats to go to the new world. And the person who was signing people in to get on, to allocate people to particular ships said, you can go to the United States or Canada or Australia, which one do you want to go to? And she said, which one's furthest from here? Every generation puts up with its traumas in order to aid the eventual progress of human civilization. I'm an optimist about the long game. I think human resilience and ingenuity

is strong enough that it will triumph. And in every era, you know, sometimes there were just blessed generations. The boomers got lucky. You know, they were born at a time where nothing really happened. They got to watch Seinfeld and watch Bill Clinton play this accident and then retire rich after the biggest property boom in the history of the world. And I suspect that our fate or

maybe our children's fate will be trickier. I mean, you know, quite part from anything, even if you're skeptical about climate chaos, it is a near certainty that the world is going to get a lot more chaotic. It's going to get a lot more unpredictable. Storms are getting more intense. Droughts are getting more intense. Hurricanes are getting more intense. Bush rise are getting more intense. At the very least, even if you don't regard it as an existential threat,

it's going to be a pain in the ass. It's going to be an enormously expensive pain in the ass. We're going to have to rebuild constantly. If lights are constantly going to be delayed because

of thunderstorms, you know, it's just going to be enormously expensive and annoying. And you add that stress to the stresses of the hijacking of the limbic system and to the stresses of society not knowing what's true and what's false because anybody can generate an image of President Biden being assassinated and it's completely convincing and it can be disseminated

online. When AI has the ability to move markets, which it already does, by producing some bullshit, if it can manufacture a convincing example of an airplane crashing and the AI itself can go short on airlines and then make a profit in the 30 seconds after it posts the airline crashing. Then even if we can correct that in 90 seconds, the AI has still made a killing. Like what are the incentives that we are blundering into? I can't see how it's not extremely stressful

for us and our children to figure out what to do about all this. We need wise heads to prevail. We need to not get caught up in nonsensical culture war spats on social media. We need to not worry too much if an airline gives a nod to indigenous people when it lands. They're a bigger game to play. I don't think that the thing we need to be worrying about is a Marxist woke takeover of universities and I don't think that the thing we need to be worrying about is

transgender activists grooming our children. The extremes of both sides are flying off the rails. They're in echo chambers of their own, their victims essentially I think to echo chambers. We need to remain even killed. The last thing I would say about the challenge of this moment which still relates to algorithms is that it's not just that you've gotten the addictive supercomputer in your pocket which is tugging at your attention. It's also that you're

being encouraged to curate your own life in real time. There's a constant demon on your shoulder that is whispering in your ear to say, is this meal that you're having sufficiently pretty that you should be posting on Instagram? Or is that thought that you just had sufficiently witty to post it on Twitter? You're in the process of this funny thing. Of course this predates social media. I was backpacking around India and we were in Kashmir in the wilds of the Himalayas

with a couple of mates of mine when we were in our 20s. We climbed to the top of this mountain where there was a Buddhist temple to watch the monks prepare for the day. I was sitting there on outside this temple watching the sunrise and was struck by just how incredibly wild that situation

was and how incredibly beautiful it was and how surreal it was. My two friends are amateur photographers and so they had their whizz-bang cameras and they're scrambling all over the mountain, scrambling all over the temple and they're getting the right photo and the unit and after the sun's risen we climb all the way back down and they're comparing their cameras and I would look at this one, oh that's a great one, oh that's going to come up really great

and I'm standing there going. You missed it. You missed it. You missed the moment. You got the photo and you didn't get what I got. Consciousness is like precious. This is a brief window of time that we're here. The corrosive impact of having these supercomputers in our pocket is not just that they're distracting our attention from living our lives, it's that the actual living of life becomes more difficult, becomes sometimes impossible if you're always thinking about whether it can be

a piece of content. That's why I'm pretty clear about keeping my content, my content and my life, my life. Experience life, don't document your life. Resist the shiny object. Resist the shiny object. Live man. Live. Josh Slapps, ladies and gentlemen, Josh, I appreciate you. I'm really, really glad that you came through. We want you to find time to do this. Me too. Me too. It's a lot of thanks for talking to me. It's great. Why should people go? They want to keep up to date with all the

uncomfortable conversations. The substack is probably the easiest place to start. Uncomfortable conversations.substack.com. You can subscribe there for free. I mean, they're a free and paid versions. But if you're free, then you'll be able to find the podcast and everything, or just search on any podcast app for Uncomfortable conversations. Or on YouTube now that we've got these live YouTube thingies, we're doing it. Thanks, mate. Thanks, Josh. Cheers.