Hi, my Boris, and this is straight talk. When they write the book about Cancel Culture, there will be a page for this moment, which was Josh's welcome to Everything is messy. I think the only solution is conversations. To be on the right side of history at the moment, you have to adhere to a certain set of social justice dogmas or orthodoxies, and if you're stray from those,
you get whacked. You're always asking the tricky questions. Mark, I mean, something's happening to our brains and the way that they're being hijacked that is making it increasingly difficult to have contrarian conversations. I honestly, I think that's the only way we're going to solve the problems of the twenty first century. Mark.
You have been on Joe Rogan Show six or seven times, I can't remember now.
Seven, don't short something?
What the fuck's going on there? Josh Sheps, welcome to straight Talk for as such. And it's very nice to meet you, and actually a nice to meet you in person.
But more importantly, I need.
To tell you that I used to really love listening to you when you were relieving others in the morning and.
Relieving others in the morning. When I was jerking off other gentlemen didn't morning six am, my alarm would go off. I'd go down to the bar, the local public restrooms and relieve a couple of frustrated thanks me or a locum. I was well. I mean, I did the breakfast show on ABC Radio Sydnet he for and I so listened to it a number of years, and.
I see myself the grace respect at the ABC. Please don't get shitty with me. This guy's bloody smart. He's brought a bit of intellect to the show.
In other words, it.
Wasn't like like, literally, you know what I'm talking about the headlines or whatever. You actually put a bit of look like you're putting some research into Look like you're putting your own research into it.
To me, Yeah, yeah, is okay, absolutely. I mean, I just I want to do the things that interest me, and I think that if you're actually interested in something, and then other people will follow you because your intellectual curiosity will carry them along. And it's way. There's nothing more delightful than turning on something that you expect to be one thing and then it's just slightly different or
it's slightly skewing. I never thought about that way, or I never didn't know about about that, So it's now I've never been the type of person who joins an organization or an institution in order to just follow rules and do things exactly the way that I'm told to, because I think that's just a bit stale. It is because it's boring for you, boring for them, not boring for that. I mean, yes, of course is boring for me.
I mean, there's there's some self interest in pursuing my own interests, but I think it's boring for the audience. I think I think there's and I think something that's happening in the media at the moment we can get to this is that a lot of stuff sounds basically the same with the same kinds of opinions that you know are the correct opinions to have about sensitive issues.
So there's a whole whole suite of topics that if you turn on the ABC or you turn on Sky News after Dark or Fox News or something like that, pretty confident you could jot on the back of a napkin before anyone starts talking what they're going to sound like when they're talking about climate change or transgender athletes or you know, gay pride or Marti Gras or women's quality or Black Lives Matter or whatever it might be.
And I'm just more interested in following my own curiosity and trying to figure out what's true and paying no heed to the way that you're supposed to talk about things. And that doesn't always mesh perfectly into an institution, you know, an institutional environment. It didn't for me.
Well, let's talk about that then, since you've gone to that territory I listened to because my mum listened to the ABC and my mother had the abacy on all day, and I can go back to the ABC.
What's Adam's saying, the mathematician Adam Spencer, Adam sincer, great guy.
And it's sort of to me that the ABC stopp being the ABC went sort of around about when he left.
To me, it changed, well, it became more the same.
Issues were being talked about, which were outside the norm. There issues you just mentioned, some general quality, you know, no Palestine Israel, you know, and taking a position that they're not they're not in the middle, they're taking a position so they're not definitely one, they're definitely not reporting the news as a news as a as as as
unbiased news. There's a bias, which is fine. I mean there's a bias everywhere, but they were expressing their bias in the news prior to that, around the Adam Spencer period and way beyond before that.
It was very down the middle. To me.
It was very not conservative base, but straightforward news about what's what's actually happened, without a view, without an opinion. There's no opinion associated with more about facts. And I think today, like you just said, I pretty much know what I'm going to get, just like when I listen to.
Sky News at.
Nine PM, I know exactly where I'm going to get it out of them too, so much so Josh that what I do is I still have the ABC in the morning and I get my.
Full belly of.
What would ordinarily be associated with the left and other groups that sort of fit within the left, Greens, et cetera. I get my full belly of that, and then in the night I put on Sky News so I can get my full belly.
Of the right. You can go to bed sufficiently outraged at the.
World, and then I can know it well, just sort of sometimes I am. But mostly what I do is I'm balanced, and I feel as though, well the news world, I justify one against the other. They're both sort of so far out on the edge of the spectrum that there's not that much in the middle anymore. Because I get that stuff in the middle. I get that fed to me by Instagram, Facebook, all the other mediums, and I know the news before it before its on.
Of course, yeah, I mean, as we all do. I mean, it's immensely frustrating to me to hear you say that that you know, you know what you're going to get from both sides, and therefore you have to put up with this level of kind of tacit unconscious bias that's coming from places that you ought to be able to trust, because I mean, what I'm trying to do in uncomfortable conversations and what I know you do every day is basically wrestle with big issues in ways that disregard the
trip wires and the landmines and allow myself the punishment and the punishment I don't care about the punishment obviously, given that I ended up being sort of you know, my radio show ended up falling apart that I can't stomach the idea that we're to give away our ability to have complicated, uncomfortable conversations about the most important problems that we face in the twenty first century to people who have their thumb on the scale one way or another,
and then we're going to individually try to grope our way towards whatever is true or rational or reasonable on the base of the on the basis of these two sort of biased interpretations that are coming to us through their own prisms, Like why not just do away with the prisms altogether and just get straight to the point and talk to each other like we're grown ups, and say, if I say something that comes across the wrong way or that defends you, tell me why it's wrong, tell
me what's wrong about it, tell me where I've erd. Don't play a game of gotcha, don't try to get me fired because I said the wrong thing. There's so much timidity, there's so much caution, there's so much risk aversion in the media at the moment that I think, like a lot of the bias is not intentional bias. It's just it's coming from the soup that we swim in, you know, there's a part of this is to do with the welcome reaction to what had previously been a
fairly straight, white male profession of journalism. Right. So, you know, over the past ten or twenty years, there's been a push for more diversity. I think that's a great thing. I think more people of color and more women should be in newsrooms. At the same time, they have to adhere to the original founding principles of institutional journalism, which
is objectivity. You know, you can't come in saying I'm going to tell my own story, or like, as an Arab woman, I'm going to focus on Gaza in this particular way. No, no, no, as an Arab woman, you're going to be a bloody journalist and you're going to do your job as a journalist. That's what a newsroom is about. You're not going to come in and say, you know, say, well, you know you have to see things from my perspective. No, we're not going for perspectives. Yes,
they'll always be biased. Yes, we always bring things to the table. No one has a position in heaven sit standing on the clouds looking at everything objectively. That's impossible. But you can use that as an aspiration. You can rely on facts, you can say I'm not going to
allow my own background to influence this. And I think there's a fundamental tension between the desire for objectivity on the one hand, and this newer social justice desire to tell broader truths with a capital T that take down the man and that achieve some social justice in a point. And I think that's what people are smelling at the moment, that everything seems to be loaded, at least in the left wing press, with a social justice point instead of
just giving people the facts. And I think we're just going to have to go through an adjustment period where newsrooms get back to being about the facts and then on the content side. So content is like the fancy broadcasting term for anything that's not journalism, right. So, I mean my show on the ABC was not a news show.
It was on ABC Radio Sydney. It was talkback. We'd sometimes talk to chefs about cooking, we'd sometimes you know, you talk about everything, anything and everything, And in that sphere, I actually think there should be more tolerance of and respect for different opinions and having the opinion of the presenter or the hosts come through. I don't think I should be required to be as objective as the person who's delivering the seven pm news if I'm hosting a
three hour long daily talkback radio show. So I think at the moment, everything's in flux. People don't know where
they stand. Journalists feel like they're allowed to bring their whole selves to work and tell their own stories in ways that undermine objectivity, but commentators at the same time feel impeded from going out on a limb and talking about things in a bullshit free manner because they're afraid that they're going to trigger a tripwire and all the hell's going to break loose because they said the wrong thing and they offended the social justice dogmas that they're
supposed to adhere to. But how did that happen? How did I don't know?
I'm not a You may well be closer to be an ABC story in yourself than I am. But what happened at the ABC, for example, that created the current outcome? And I just want to say this as well, Equally, Sky News at a certain time of night has felt the need to defend the other side, the other argument, and there they are as they prosecute equally as hard, but are on the opposite side of the fence.
Oh yeah, or harder. I mean, sky News has less fidelity to I don't want this to seem like I'm ragging on the ABC, because I actually think that the public broadcaster is in a pickle. Is a national treasure and needs to be sort of protected and defended. And one of the reasons why it is currently so cowed, I think, and so fearful and so cautious is because it's under constant attack from disingenuous conservative politicians and Sky News figures who are always on about how biased the
ABC is. Right, there has to be some space for the ABC to be able to stand up and have a backbone and go no, no, no, like just quit it. The ABC still does great investigative journalism. It still has great journalists who are working there. I think that the how did it get here is really complicated and has a lot to do with changing viewing patterns, changing listening patterns.
The democratization of the media, social media, YouTube like that stuff has meant that people no longer are tethered to a public broadcast of the way that they might have been even just ten years ago, let alone thirty years ago. And so now that you can get so much of your information from Joe Rogan or Peter Attire or whoever it might be, or a Josh Steps or Mark Burris,
it's there's just more choice. And so then the airBC goes, well, what is the purpose of the ABC, And the purpose of the ABC really fundamentally should be to create a town square in which everybody feels like they're being given a fair shake, in which everybody feels like their voice is being heard, in which the most important issues of the day can be wrestled with without fear or favor. But that's going to piss people off by definition, because
you're gonna have a whole bunch of voices. If you're actually doing that, then you wouldn't just be in lockstep with I don't know, just to pick an example of one fight that I got into with ABC management with Marti Gras for example, you know, I was in a position where I'm an openly gay guy. I'm married to a guy I was I wrote an ophead for the Sydney Morning Herald during World Pride, which was a big
gay pride event last year. During Mardi Gras, just sort of I was just sort of saying, like, will there ever come a point at which we can turn the volume down instead of turning a volume up on our identitarian difference, like when it's not that important, Like how much equality will we have to get before we don't have to? You know, wear aarseless chaps and sit astride a giant inflatable penis on Oxford Street, you know, smothered
in baby oil with waxed chests. You know, does there ever come a point at which we're just like, what I have achieved I mean through no thanks to me, but through the through giving thanks to the the early gay rights pioneers, the gay activists of the stonewaller of the sixties and seventies, what I've achieved is that everything they dreamed of, which is I've got a boring life. It's unremarkable, you know what I mean. Like, you know, I say, I tell someone I'm gay and I'm married
to a guy, and they're like, okay, whatever. I don't really don't beat me up, you know. I mean, yes, it's very privileged. I'm middle class, I'm white. Whatever. I'm sure it's different if you're you know, if you're growing up in a in a Muslim Australian household in the southwest of Sydney. But for me, we've achieved everything that
we wanted to achieve. So my article was basically just saying, like, you know, will therever come a point at which we actually achieve greater individual flourishing, greater sexual fulfillment by not really caring about labels and just falling in love with who you fall in love with, getting your rocks off with heavy, who you want, whoever you want to get your rocks off with, and if you know what I mean, it's not impro So I tried to publish. I tried
to publish this thing. And when you're a host, when you have a contract at any organization, any media organization, you have to get sign off from management for any external work to be approved. Where was it being published in the any Morning Herald right right? And this was going to be the opinion piece on the weekend of
gay Pride that would have thrown a face. It was not bed yet and you know, it went all the way up the chain and management wouldn't allow it to be published because they said that hosts can't take positions on controversial cultural issues, right, which in principle is I suppose fair enough, it's a public broadcaster. You want me to see them impartial. You're not there to be an appearance of bias. The problem is, at the time the ABC was the official broadcast partner of World Pride and
of Mardi Gras. In the lobby, they're a gigantic rainbow flag. Every other presenter, every other host on the station, all of them not gay or not to the best of my knowledge, is singing the praises of how fabulous it is. You know, join us tonight for our live streaming coverage of the parade. Every second promo is about the parade, is about how fabulous it is. We've got all these
guests of diverse genders and sexualities and whatever. The one gay host is not allowed to pipe up and go do we really need it?
Right?
So it struck me that it's not that hosts can't have an opinion about culturally provocative issues. It's just that it has to be management's position. Yeah, it has to be the right position. You have to be on the right side of history. Why does Josh keep wanting to kick a hornet's nest? Why does he keep wanting to upset the apple cart. Well, I don't know, because I'm interested in ideas, I'm interested in thinking things through. I'm
interested in not being a conformer. So I'm interested in going, well, okay, why was Marti Grass so crucial? Will it ever not be crucial? At what point does that happen? Like, let's just talk about it. Let's just talk about it. But you can't talk about it because that transgresses an unspoken boundary, which is that to be on the right side of history at the moment, you have to adhere to a certain set of social justice dogmas or orthodoxies, and if
you're stray from those, you get whacked. So who could But who?
I mean, I'm always been curious about this, But who creates these social justice dogmas? Like I mean, I mean, I often wonder myself, he is a group of people somewhere who are silent and we don't get to see them. Who actually, who actually are out there manipulating all these social justice dogmas?
Are a blam et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I mean, I think it's it's a largely white, largely middle class, university educated elite of people who talk to each other in certain ways and who probably don't fit into any of the end to end the category. No, often they don't. Often they don't. You see, there's a lot in like the transgender Wars, which is probably the most toxic or sensitive vishue at the moment or even at the moment right right now.
But so, and what I mean, I'm curious as to your opinion on these things.
There's no doubt you thought about.
It is a guilt based yeah's feeling guilty, yes, And it's just some way of them washing their guilt.
Yes, and therefore it is dangerous. Well, it may not be dangerous. It may just be dull, and it may be conformist, and it may be dull to.
You, dangerous to somebody who will be influenced by it potentially.
Oh, you mean they think that it's dangerous to step outside the or you think.
No, I think it's dangerous with people who people who might be watching it and following and being influenced by it, unnecessarily influenced people being able to make up their own opinion.
Some people can't make you to draw their own opinions. You know that, right.
They're heavily influenced by what other people say. What institutions say what individuals say. But maybe that's just maybe that's just.
How the world is today.
By the way, we might not be able to change it, but I think it's dangerous to people who are influenced by it, and I.
Worry about that.
So, you know, what's an example of the palest palace the university. So I was listening to admittedly it was top but I was listening to tu jib this morning, and you know, my male mate bands on there was I was young, and he was talking to some correspondent they have in the US and the US was talking about the university protest, let's call it protests riots are
going on some of the universities, particular in Ohio. And he made the comment that isn't it funny that all the students from New York, Ohio and u c LA had exactly the same tents. They had somehow managed to garner, you know, hundreds of tents made by exactly the same company, look exactly the same, and these tents were all pitched on the lawns and it was all coordinated.
And and the question then becomes, well do those how many.
Of those people are actually students at the university, and it seems as though not a lot of them were not students, actual students of the university, and they're occupying territories, parts of the parts of the campuses, and they were protesting against Israel and in favor of Palestine, which is fair enough, that's an opinion, that's cool, But it looked like to me it was extraordinarily well organized. And the media, the way the media cover it is as if it's a.
Truth, right or a spontaneously erupting shit's me yeah, yeah, I.
Don't know what happened to syn the university this week, but maybe it's the same thing. But this is organized disruption to create a problem that looks as though it's students freethinking, like student campuses used to be free thinking, like you were saying, let's have a discuss about it. But students have all got together, they've actually got a
view when an actual fact, that's not the case. It's well organized by others outside of the university, and then the media has gone reported it as it being the truth.
Yeah yea, And that kills me and well, and that's right, and that points to the sort of double standard as well, which is similar to the to the Mardi Graus gay rights thing in the sense that I just actually just finished doing my first live video talkback episode of Uncomfortable Conversations where the audience can actually join in, and one of the questions was about this was about the Columbia pro to Columbia University protests, and I made the point that if you had a group of people, so now
you know some of these institutions over there, Jewish academics and Jewish students have been told by the police not to come to class because they're worried that they can't control of violence. You've got slogans which verge on being anti semitic. If not they're openly anti semitic, I would say they are. Yeah. And if any other group was conducting protests like this against a minority, just imagine that
it's make America great again. You know, white dudes wearing red trucker hats and they're going off about how and they're going off against Black Lives Matter, for example, and intimidating black students. How much would the conversation be what it currently is, which is university academics very earnestly stroking their chins and going well, free speech is important on campus, and there's a great and venerable tradition of protest on campus. There would be none of that. They would have been
out of there on the first day. There would be no conversation about the free speech rights of white people to harass and intimidate and question the existence of black Americans. Now, if that's the policy, then what's good for the goose is good for the gander, and those people should have been out of there as soon as they started protesting.
So why were they Why do the mayor not call the police in or end or.
What are the vices? I'm not saying they should. You could also take a free speech position that this is legitimate, and it would also be legitimate if you had right wingers, you know, beaning on about transgender students or whatever it might be. But be consistent. So why is there an inconsistency comes back to that set of social justice dogmas and orthodoxies that have become insinuated into society and culture.
And as you point it out, I don't think it's mostly Palestinians who are doing this on the Palestine issue, and I don't think it's mostly transgender people who are doing it on the trans issue, and I don't think it's you know, mostly actually people of color who are doing it on the Black Lives Matter issue. I think it is a class of self congratulatory people. And I think guilt is an interesting thing for you to flag there,
because it's something we don't talk about enough. But I think that we have evolved into this sort of postcolonial, anti racist mindset where and it's a laudable instinct, it's a laudable instinct to try to catch ourselves and go, well, all right, let's recognize our white privilege. That's recognized the
evils of colonialism. But as a result, we're seeing the world through a frame where if you're poor and brown skinned, you're the good guy, and if you're standing up in a suit and you look like a white, straight male, you're by definition the bad guy. So complicated issues like Israel and Palestine get reduced into this very overly simplistic oppressor versus oppressed, colonizer versus colonized sort of binary, and living inside that trap, there's sort of no there's no
way out. It's its own weird internal logic, even if it's orchestrated, like as you say, with the tents and so on, or not orchestrated just because it's a way
of people making sense of the world. I mean, I think a lot of it is just a lot of the group think is just a combination of people trying to make sense of a complicated world being handed an easy interpretation of the world, which is that men, white straight men have been piercing all over everybody for thousands of years, and now it's time for their come up, and so we need to give more diverse voices, allow
more diverse voices to be heard. And then the other component of it is the backlash and the threat that you get from what we might call cancel culture, where if you step out of line, people don't come back to try to articulate why they think you're wrong. They go straight for the jugular and they try to destroy your life, whether that's on social media or by getting you fired, or by severing your relationships with your publisher or whatever, or your podcast network or whatever it might be.
So there's a kind of a hysteria, a sensoriousness, an oversimplification, And all I'm trying to do is have conversations that pay no heed to any of that and that makes sense that both sides could listen to and you might agree with me or disagree with me, but at least I'll be articulating your worldview in a way that is generous to you, and that makes sense to you. I mean, I think this is such a problem now, Mark, that we're demonizing the other side and caricaturing the other. So
you ask something. You ask one of those protesters to articulate what the Zionist position is, they can't do it. And you ask a hard cores Ionist to articulate the Palastinian position, and they probably can't do it. And you can go through any number of different things. The left has become extremely sanctimonious on this stuff, so much so that it can't even see its own blind spots. They can't even see its own biases. Why wouldn't you just want to be nice to gay people? Why would you
want to raise questions about Mardi Gras? You know, what are you trying to do here? It's like the old parable about the you know, the two fish swimming along in the water and the young fish and the big fish swims past them and goes, how's the water today, guys? And after the big fish swims away. One of the little fish turns to the other one and goes, what's water? You don't know water when you're in it. You don't know the norms that you've inherited, that are just part
of the air that you breathe. There's a certain way of talking about this, there's a certain way of talking about that, you know, stop making I think is the overarching sentiment of that kind of social justice like elite clique can I ashue?
Then, just on the topic of freedom of speech, for example, I mean, it's a broad topic, I know, and it's got lots of constraints, but just on this blue that's sort of bubbling around between Alban Easy pitching up and sort of saying that he's going to take Musk on In relation to I think it relates to the more recent stabbing of the priest, the Orthodox priest out in the West sub of Sydney, and whether or not largely where the kids should be allowed to see, but really
you know, whether anyone should be allowed to see it. And Musk's position, of course, as I understand a Musk position is it nodes and we should be allowed to see anything, and we should be censoring any of There's just a medium and people can put up whatever they want to.
Have a look at.
What do you think about the governments? What do you think about governments taking a stand on something like that against forget about must position, but what do you think about governments taking.
A stand on that? Well, in terms of representing us, the voters, it's complicated, like so much, I am, isn't it just simple? Well, what's the simple answer?
Then it's free freedom speech? Not even it's not that it's not. This is a platform. If you don't want to look at it, don't don't open it up, right, And you're a parent, and if you're worried about your kids, don't let.
Them look at it. Right job to some extent, yes, but I think where we get confused on social media. And I'm a big free speech advocate. I mean, I've spent most of my adult life in the United States, and I've sort of inherited their attitude towards a maximum
amount of free speech. And I don't really believe in, you know, hate speech laws or coming after people and finding them because they said the wrong thing about you know, they accidentally use the wrong transgender pronoun or they you know, they spread vaccine misinformation when all we're trying to do was wrestle with what's true and what's not true in the middle of a public health emergency or whatever. But what's the thing about social media is the Elon Musks
and the mark Zakaboos of the world will fall back on. Look, we're not publishers. We don't publish anything. You can't be held to account for any of the stuff that's on our platform. It's just a platform. It's cute, people just use it. Unfortunately, that's nonsense. It's it's a cute argument, I mean, and it's nonsense because you've got the algorithm
behind it. Like, if Facebook were what Facebook was when Facebook was created, they'd have a point, which was it used to be a reverse chronological feed of all of the things that either people you follow had put up. There was no like button, there was no infinite scroll, there was no algorithmically delivered content that is tailor made to your attention, to your favorites. And well, exactly that's right now they've got you know, everything is about engagement.
Everything is about trying to get something that is going to have you hover over that video for as long as possible, and or share it or comment based on what they know you like. So there's this idea that they're not publishing is, as you say, cute, it's a
bit twee. I mean, you are publishing because everything that's coming into this fire hose of a system that you've got is being cranked out by Silicon Valley engineers, many of whom are twenty two years I was riding skateboards in Menlo Park, who are brilliant at finding a way to mass in engineering. That's right to entice your neurological system to respond as with as much reptilian angst and kind of addiction as it possibly can to whatever it is that they're showing you. So I don't think it's
actually a free speech versus anti free speech thing. I think it's about managing information flows and the idea that we as a people just have to be held hostage to whatever ingenious junk food Zuckerberg and Musk can throw at us, with no mechanism to push back other than to tell our children not to go on those websites, which is tricky. I think is a bit rich. Like I'm extremely leary of government control over what canon can't
be said. But I think that in fifty years time, we'll look back on this period and go, that was a crazy wild West and we had no idea. We'd just given everyone a machine gun, and we didn't know how to regulate it or how to figure it out. And I think there'll be a more nuanced collaboration, should we say, between the people, through their governments democratically elected, and AI companies and social media companies to manage that
flow of information. Because just like those tents came up miraculously on the lawns of all of those American universities, so too do the videos of gars and babies with their limbs blown off go up on TikTok in a way that is suspiciously well curated. I don't know what the Chinese Communist Party, how they manage the TikTok algorithms.
I don't know what role the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has in coaching the quote unquote journalists, the citizen journalists who are in Gaza, about how to tailor social media information so that it'll go well on Instagram. But these are not dummies. We saw ISIS in its first incarnation get quite good at social media. I mean, remember the US air men in orange jumpsuits trapped in a cage and the desert being being set on fire and stuff like
these huge spectacles, these big displays. They've gotten pretty good at it, Like jihadists. They know what they're doing. So you open that app and it's like you've got the whatever company is supplying those tents is also supplying your information about steroids on steroids. So the idea that you know, the Australian government didn't play a role in softening that understanding, that mitigating that, I think is crazy. We've got to get our arms around it somehow.
Who appoints the cabal of people who actually made the decisions.
In the government. You're always asking the tricky questions, Mark, I mean, or they'll appoint themselves. They'll appoint themselves, won't they.
And then we're going to get fed exactly what they want us to see and not see.
I mean part of the promise of public broadcasting. Just to get a bit wonky for a second and a bit philosophical, since you've been banging on about poetry earlier on in the show harbor Mass, you're going to harbor mask the philosopher who came up with the idea of public broadcasting with basically saying the only way that you're going to get true, impartial information is by freeing it from the two core biases that can derange the information product.
One is capitalism, where you don't want corporations and powerful people who have all the money to be influencing what stories get told. And the other is governments. You don't want people with all the guns to be deciding what gets told. The idea of the public sphere was that the government would fund it but would have no control over it politically, and we've got pretty good at that. I mean, the ABC and the BBC are pretty good at having carved out a sphere of conversation that is
independent of whatever party happens to be in power. And so maybe that's a model for regulating this stuff. You certainly don't want government partisans from the political party that happens to be in power telling us what we can and can't see on social media. But can you create a regulatory framework about what algorithms can and can't do that is overseen by people who are as impartial as our public health bureaucrats. You'd want them to be, or the chairman of the ABC you'd want them to be.
Maybe it's early days.
I'm going to be fascinating. But for me, this whole program is fast. Not what you and I talking about, but the whole program of how it is going to roll at is quite.
You're talking about. It is even more fascinating. Mark, don't say yourself, this is the right here. I want to change.
Second, my producer told me you have been on Joe Rogan show six or seven times? I can't remember now seven, don't short something? What the fuck's going on there?
Hey tell me that. How do you know Joe? Because of both comedians? No, no, no, no, I never got to anything like his level of success. I mean I did a bit of stand up when I first got to New York, just to sharpen my chops and you know, get a feel for a live or Yeah. Pretty scary, yeah, especially in a town like New York where you know audiences can be it can be brutal. But it's good. It's good. It's good training. I mean, it's once you get into a television studio then having had the experience of.
Shooting your pants because no one's going to you can put it that way.
Yeah, it certainly gives you a keener keen of moving away. But just what was your what was your what what.
Was your stick like in terms of your comedy act.
Meanwhile, it was mostly I mean it was pretty intellectual, I think, I mean, it was observations. I mean, at the time I was pretty good at impressions. So really, yeah, when I moved over there, it was George W. Bush was still president, so I do quite a lot of Bush stuff. Did you learn how to duck from as I was just standing out the delivery? Yeah? No, I mean so yeah, and fair bit about like Cheney and the Iraq War and and you know, the religious right,
and you know, just poking holes in in things. It was good fun and it was well, it was well received. But and I think Americans kind of like having a foreigner, you know, chiefly take the piss out of them, especially and I you know, you're non threatening, you know you're coming, you're coming with goodwill, but you're also willing to highlight to them the ways that they know they're ridiculous. And so it was actually I was my first big job was the Huffington Post was at the time the most
read online only news website in the world. This is twenty twelve. I remember that period, yeah, and there was a lot of bars behind it, and they basically decided that they wanted to do to television what they'd done to newspapers and destroy them completely and find a new way of having conversations. And so they launched half Post Live, which was a twelve hour day streaming television network online and I was one of the founding hosts and producers
of that. So I would host, you know, four to six half hour shows every single day with Newsmade, you know, Thomas Friedman and Michael Moore and Robert F. Kennedy Junior or whoever it might be. And there was one moment
that Joe saw go viral. It was one of the first I think if when they write the book about Cancel Culture, there will be a page for this moment, which was Stephen Colbert was doing his satirical show still this was before let Himan retired, so you remember he was doing the Colbert Rapport, and he did a joke that an Asian American activist felt was racist against Asians, but it was satirical, and she was lined up at this activist that is as a guest on my show
the following day in a kind of rap of the news and everything's going on. And we started talking and she started interrupting me and saying like, well, I would certainly expect that a white man would enjoy talking down to me. And I was like, well, hang on a second. We're just having a convers like I'm trying to understand what your attitude to live on air. Yeah, streaming live. That's cool, it's good, that's good. Yeah, challenge, it's a
challenge exactly. I mean there's no mistakes or when there are mistakes, that's just part of you know, live TV. I said, hang away, we're just having a conversation, like and she said, well, yeah, you know, as a white man, you probably feel like it's your like it's your right to talk down to women of color. I was like, what are you talking about, Like when I was being born with balls doesn't give me, It doesn't It doesn't doesn't mean that I don't have the right to have
an opinion about satire. Like, you know, she's you know, she says, she goes on like this and like it basically just standed in a you know, flame flaming heap, and I was I was just like, well, okay, I mean all right, so yeah, yeah, yeah, if you don't want to talk to me, and we do much to talk about. It was this weird experience mark that I've had many times since, but I've never had it before then,
and that was probably twenty fourteen. So this was just as like the kind of social justice reckoning was about to happen, right where you're talking to someone and you realize they're not actually talking back to me as a human.
They're talking to me as a cardboard cutout avatar of white maleness, and they're expecting me to talk to them as a representative of some abstraction, some identity group, some oppressed minority, Like we're supposed to be talking about comedy, satire, offense, cancelation because she wanted to get Colbert canceled that a whole petition about it, and instead of having a conversation where we treat each other as equals, we're having a
conversation where two cardboard cutouts of different identity groups are sparring. And that went momentarily viral. Joe saw it. Someone texted me that he'd played it on his show, and so I think I just DMed him on Twitter or he hit me up and somehow said, next time you're in La, why don't you come on the show? So I said, oh, I just happened to be in LA in a few weeks, quickly booked my tickets just so I could have that experience,
and they and I hit it off. And then I sort of had had a standing into invitation whenever I was in town. A conversation about the Joe the show with Joe well, I mean everything, you know what his shows. I like, you sit down for three hours and you talk about anything and everything. You just go wherever. So and he was cool, Oh he's great. I mean I love Joe. And then he was he was the reason I have a podcast. He's been you know, he really is the podfather. You know, he has been really caring
and generous and supportive. You know. He just pulled me aside after one of the shows, I remember where it was, the first or second or third. He was like, what are you doing with these dummies? Getting Peter p Check? Going do your own thing? And I was like, yeah, okay, I think I will. And I started the precursor to uncomfortable conversations.
So tell me about uncomfortable conversations. So what's the format?
The format is through the format now yep. The format started as a one on one interview with a guest about some issue that we find difficult to talk about in a faired income one.
With the guests or with the guests the guests. But what I remember there's the guest finds it difficult to talk about it.
No, guest doesn't have to. So sometimes people will listen to uncomfortable conversations, so they'll go, oh, that wasn't actually an uncomfortable conversation at all, which is fine. The point is not to make the guest uncomfortable or to create or to confect, you know, intentionally uncomfortable scenarios or anything.
Sometimes that'll arise because I disagree with the guest on something, But the point is to have conversations about topics that if someone were to raise it at the pub or at a barbie or at work, everyone would just pucker up their bombas a little bit and fear a little you know, oh are we going here? Are we? You know, there'd be it'd be create an uncomfortable situation. I want to create a safe space for dangerous ideas, a safe space for people to air those kinds of conversations. So
that's the main thing. My first episode was with Stan Grant a couple of years ago. Now I understand how the drama this, no, this is before that. Yeah, so
it was only any exits last year. He was pretty recent and Stan and I are still mates and he has been a great supporter of mine as well, because you know, we were actually getting real about race, not just talking not mouthing the usual talking points about white guilt, but recognizing that there are difficult identity questions here and you know asking It's like I will be accused of being, you know, some white fascist if I raise a question
about whether or not it's really necessary for four white, middle aged women who are on a zoom call about HR to be doing acknowledgments of country before they start talking about the human resources issue, Like, what do you say about that? I'd love to know, because he's he's on the same page.
Tells me a bit like, you know, arrive on an aeroplane and landed from Sydney to Brisbane and yeah, I'm getting asked to think that, you.
Know, Yeah, the Lances yeah, that's cool.
But like I already and then I go to my meeting, and that's how we start off. One of my staff will start the meeting off, and I'm hang on, like, what a stance about that?
He's not a huge fan of I mean, I don't want to speak for him. Let's just say that I get the impression from him that he's not in lockstep with what what the correct way of doing indigenous rights is? You know, but that doesn't help indigenous rights. And well exactly, I mean the party comes back to your point about guilt, right. I think it's got this, you know, we've got this.
It's a way for this class of mostly whit it's almost exclusively white, middle class, university educated people to signal to each other that they're on the right side, that they're on the right team.
Right.
It's like a it's like putting he him in your email signature or she her, you know, like, don't worry, Gary, No one was in any doubt that you're a dude, you know, like we all know you, Gary. Yeah, yeah, that care. There was no ambiguity. But it's it's a way of saying I care, right, I care, which is all very well until it becomes a conformist lockstep mandatory thing that if you decline to participate in, you're regarded
as being a bad guy. So anyway, we were having these kinds of conversations with with Stan and then I expanded it out to talk to I mean anyone and everyone, Malcolm Turnbull or you know, yeah, that's right, and just talking about it. Actually in that period, Yeah, I think you might. I might have had him on the AB
side the ABC. It did. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And so yeah, and now Uncomfortable, now that my show at the ABC has fallen apart, Uncomfortable Conversations is going gangbusters because I can devote all my time to it instead of it being a side hustle. And so now we're expanding into doing things like live talkback, video segments, audience, yeah, inviting the audience, in doing panel segments. Our last panel is with Ben Fordham. You just mentioned Ben and Antoinette Latouf.
So like having spar, having people who spar a little bit on the couch and that's all going up on YouTube and interviewing people like Jimmy Carr who just had on the show, and you know, comedians and stuff like that rather than just going straight for the culture war Juggueller. I love he's a good man.
Although sometimes they go, oh, I'm watching him.
Mother the fuck? That's the point, isn't it.
It is the point, But he does it with such I can ask a questions. Do you think he does it and uses comedy and satire as an excuse for what he's just done as a backdoor, or is he doing it for social awareness for people to think about what it is he's saying and to have a debate perhaps after the show, or he's just doing for gags because he knows the audience is his Cheersquad.
Gags, GGS gags. He's a comic and I think he would say that make him laugh, that's the.
Rules, but it's his cheerleaders only, like I don't know, maybe it happens occasionally, but most of the people come to listen to him a lot, and a live audience sensible to him are.
There because they like him, like what he says, right, Yeah, I mean I asked him on that and people should listen to the episode or watched on YouTube because it's interesting and he talked I asked him about this, you know about haters on Twitter, and he was like, what happens is that people who weren't at the show get angry about it on social media, but there is no
controversy about it at the show. I mean, the people who come to see a Jimmy Carr show, people who are cool with Jimmy Carr, right, and they want to you know, so, I mean he said something interesting. This was actually the first video I just joined TikTok well after the time you know I have just now. I mean, this is all within the past few with the program,
if even TikTok. So just my first TikTok video that went past a million was was Jimmy Carr making an interesting point where he goes, whatever it is that's going to get me canceled, I said it ten years ago. There's nothing I can say now that's going to be worse than the things that you can dredge up, which
points to this other phenomenon that I talk about. I did to show at the Melbourne Comedy Festival just before the pandemic, which was about why social media was ruining everything, and I made the point that there's this whole phenomena of what I call outrage archaeology where you know, people go back through your past tweets or you the things you said in the past, or your old podcast like archaeologists, like they're trying to hunt for the jewel, you know,
of the most offensive thing, like who's the comic? Who was Kevin?
He was?
Anyway, he's going to host the Academy Awards the year before last, And they went back and they found that nine years before, he tweeted something homophobic, which he'd apologized for. You know, he says something in a routine that he ended up tweeting that it ended up on Twitter, and you know, he ended up being uninvited from hosting the Academy Awards, a pretty big gig because some outrage archaeologist has gone back and found something out of context from
a previous time when norms were a bit different. And as far as Jimmy, Jimmy's concerned, I mean, he's right, We've all got the paper trail behind us. Now. I've been talking for long enough in years now that there are all kinds of things that I've said that I'm sure that if you go over it with a fine tooth comb, you could create an outrage. Do you worry about the about no, I don't anymo because I don't have an employer. But did you worry about it? Yes? Yes,
and thank god I don't have to do anymore. I mean, you remember probably his name. He used to say, you know what I hate? You know what I hate?
Who was that famous comedian, like twenty thirty years ago?
Shit, I come reader.
He had a routine, you know, and I ate I hate it and he was he talked about haters and he was and he took the piss out of everyone and ever.
I mean I said love.
I used to love listening to him anyway, And this is twenty years ago, and he got a radio show for a little while and then they cut him out of He's on to day if and will triple in one of those things, and they cut him because he just upset so many people at the time. But it wasn't Red Simon's, No, it wasn't Red, but it was
around Red's time. It was, Uh, it doesn't matter, but irrespective, people have been taking the piss in comedy about social the way society operates for so fucking long, and he was basically just reflecting.
How we are. We all everyone say, oh, I can hate that. I hate.
End up you get the haters. Some people just hate everything. Yeah, professional haters. They sit with him and they told age, you went to school with the Mew year twelve, with them center for twenty two years, and you sit down with them and they just fucking complain about everything, and they fucking hate everything. Don't they use the word hate, But they just dislike everything. They've got no positive they
don't have a new thought on any issue. And I think people have been doing that for a long time. But this guy, he ended up getting canceled. But Rodney Rude, Oh I remember, right, Roddy Rude.
Yeah, I mean it's literally right there in his name, mark Rude, Rodney Rude, and.
That was his That was the routine, you know. And but he ended up getting canceled. But it took a long time to get canceled. But society didn't cancel them. Some dude, like somebody like a management management or somebody at the top of the tree got rid of him because somebody would have prot him a little bit and probabcly of that guys like he's upsetting too many people.
But today you.
Get canceled by the numbers and like hordes of people will all have an opinion on whether or not Josh Epps should be saying what he's saying. Why do you think all of a sudden there is there are audiences of all of a sudden got to say that management ordinarily would have.
Yeah, well they're loud and angry. I mean there are professional Umbridge takers who will take umbrage at whatever it is that they can find, and we'll try to coerce cowardly management. So that's the issue. I think that's the issue. Yeah, and management is too jumpy and they understand by people enough is it? Because everybody wants the management want to
be liked. We all want to be like. Yes, I think they're afraid of the optics of seeming like they're not taking seriously the concerns about the microaggressions and the victimization and that they're not on board with again this kind of orthodoxy of social justice, and like they want to seem like they're the good guys. They don't want to seem like out of touch. There's nothing. No one
is more woke, just to use that problematic term. No one is more woke than a terrified, like white, straight, middle aged man who is trying to do the right thing by the kids who are coming with pitchforks and flaming tortures.
You know, But I'd like to understand what your view is. Is it about not being disliked they don't want to be disliked, or is it more about I want to be liked because and I want to go right back to Facebook in a Facebook Instagram. They've created this light thing and they've worked out or their scientists have worked out that, in an evolutionary sense, for us to survive, we're going to be liked by a community, because if we get fucked over by a community, we won't survive.
That's an evolutionary instinct in our brain. And they've worked this stuff out, and that's why everybody wants you to press the like on your Instagram page or Facebook page, et cetera, et cetera.
They've created this like world.
And I've often wanted to myself the decision makers who make these decisions about when they're getting pressured by groups. Is it they're doing it because they don't want to be disliked or is it because they want to be seen as being liked?
As an organization? So let's cook with the ABC.
ABC wants to be liked as an organization by its audience.
Have you ever thought that through? Like? No, it's an interesting question. Tease it out for me. Why is it important to you the distinction between avoiding dislike and clamoring for like. I don't have.
I don't have a particular view. I just see that as I see it as binary, because there are and I've often I don't see I've often wondered, is there an instinct within us, in our brain somewhere that don't be disliked?
It doesn't. It's not the same as being liked. But you can't be dislike because you're disliked. I think that's it. You're on the outside. I think that's it. Yes, don't be excluded. Don't be exclus exactly. That's right?
And why is it you don't care? Why does Josh Zepps doesn't care whether he's dislike? So so in an evolutionary sense, why do you think that you've chosen not to care?
Is it because if you disliked?
Is it because Josh also realizes he can create his own community of people who are going to like him for not caring about being disliked and therefore you've got your own community.
I don't now you're protected. I'm a trouble maker. I mean, I'm a trouble maker before the before the community of troublemakers follows me. I mean I would I would sooner be alone, outsider with no friends but my own internal credibility, and just have faith that at some point people are going to value authenticity, credibility, and straight talk more than they do sycophancy and conformism. And honestly, whether a tribe
is with me or not is secondary to me. I mean, I just I'm just a sucker for like intellectual honesty. I don't really, it's not even really, it doesn't even feel like a choice to me. It feels like a drive.
Okay, I like it because I just want to quickly I'm getting wound up here, but I want to keep going on about this a little bit, if you don't mind, Yeah, I want to do.
A Joe Rogan three hour on you don't worry.
But because for me, I've always had this view on instinct versus intellect, and I sometimes feel as though most of society operates on instinct, which is the like or dislike argument, and whereas intellect takes me to another level. And when I say in a lot, I don't mean better or worse them, and it just takes me to a different level, a different universe whereby I override my
instincts with intellect. And that's not just in relation to commentary on what society is doing, the sorts of things you and I do, but it's also like temptation, you know, knock myself around, take drugs, and drugs mean, I always take the view.
I like to take the view, and I.
Don't always achieve it personally, but I like to say the view that my intellect is always greater than my instincts.
Sometimes my instincts do overtake.
And I've really tried hard over my sixty years to fucking work out work that out, and I fight my intellect tries to fight back. But I'm a I'm a real, a big I'm quite interested in this instinct versus intellect and how.
They I mean, I'm highly intellectual to an almost like Aspergers you degree, and I can see that. Yeah, in terms of being, it doesn't come naturally to meet to me, to meet other people empathically, you know, wherever they are instinct instinct is bad being right, I don't have a set. I don't have that sensitivity. For example, what my partner does who he's very very good at tuning into people's emotional wavelength. I'm not. I'll just go straight to the brain and.
Go else in the world like that, because I know I forget criticized of being this by people in a personal level, by people who know me closely. You that people think that I lack the empathy. Someone might send a Texas says I love you, and I might go, oh, thank you, right, yeah, yeah, because I don't really see
the fucking point of the word. I mean, it's the dumbest fucking word in the fucking you because I love my dog, I love food, I love the fuck you know, like it just articulated a little bit more like you know, like because I don't even know how to respond to it.
I don't. I sort of do that, you know what I mean.
I know it's a sign it would how to respond to it, But in terms of how I really feel about it, I think it's just a dumb fucking word.
Are you so? Are you motivated by being liked or avoiding? Yeah? Right now, I wonder whether or not. That sensibility which you and I share, if you want to get psychoanalytic about it, is driven. Like the flattering interpretation to us is to say where galaxy brains who can override our
base instincts with our minds. The less flattering interpretation, which comports with your thesis that people are generally driven by a desire to be liked, would be where the types of people who, maybe when we were younger, didn't fit in and didn't find it easy to fit into the cool kids club, and therefore took a posture of you know what, any club that would have me as a member, I don't want to be part of anyway. And so you know I'm different. I'm special. I don't need to
a you adapt, I'm a contrarian, so you adapt. I think. So that's probably Do you think that was that you were you that kid? Yeah? Probably? Yeah, I probably was too.
I wasn't I wasn't pushed out of groups or I wasn't not accepted into groups. But at the same time I didn't care.
Yeah I did. Are you sure you didn't? Are you sure that the not caring wasn't a consequence of exclusion. I don't really remember being excluded as such.
I mean, like most things I did, I did quite well, like sport and blah blah blah in footy teams and yeah, well school academically and stuff. I don't think so I do believe I just didn't care like my mates would ring them up. And so we're all going to meet down the road when we're fifteen, you know.
And you know I don't steal stuff off cars and stuff.
And I not that I had a moral position, but I can't people I'm not coming, you know. I was rather stay home, read my book or whatever. So my my position is here in viewing me now. But my position is I don't know if I could well have had that somewhere my background, I don't really know.
I haven't done as analytic sort of exis on it.
But but it's interesting because that's why I sort of warmed to you without even having met you.
Listening to you on radio. I liked listening to on the radio.
That's why I like I like listening to Adam because he's a bit odd too, not to say we're odd, but he's bit different.
No, I mean I like it. I'll take god, it's a compliment to me. For me, it's good too, weird, odd, you know, thinking about things in a strange way. You know, this is part of what I worry about, just going back to the likes on social media versus the likes in the real world, where you can touch the grass and actually, you know, have conversations with people that aren't limited by the number of characters you can put in
a tweet like. Part of what's corrosive about the way that we're living is so much of our social groups and so much of our likes, and you know, strokes, our social strokes are coming from coming mediated through machines where not only are you chasing the wrong kinds of respect because mostly it's conformism, like the way that the
other side either side exactly. The easiest way to get a lot of likes on social media is to go on and say, I stand with the people of Gaza, I stand with my trans allies, I stand with the women of Australia against domestic violel Oh, bravo, what a brave position. You don't believe that men should beat and murder their wives. How enlightening? This is incredible. Talk to me about this moral revelation this epiphany that you've had.
It's so bloody facile, and yet that is actually the currency that we're swimming in, and it's distracting us, it's capturing our attention. It's a bit like it's a bit like you're walking around with another version of Josh Zeps on your shoulder who's constantly monitoring your life and looking at your life and saying, is that thought something that you should be broadcasting that would get you likes? Is that, you know, coffee, something that you should put on Instagram
and would get likes. Something from something as facile as a meal that you've had going on Instagram, to something as complicated as making a geopolitical commentary about the most intractable conflict in the world in Israel on Gaza. It's all being filtered through this kind of meta experience of witnessing yourself having experiences and then pushing those experiences through the algorithm and the filter of going, am I going to get more likes and followers and strokes by disseminating
this to the world. So it's like I think, I mean, for me personally, I don't use social media anymore. I use it as a broadcasting platform. To push out my content, but I no longer engage with it, and we only get one life. As far as we know, this is actually it. Today is the actual day. When you're experiencing today, You're never going to get today back. You're never going to get to interface with reality and touch the grass and look at people and wrestle with ideas in this
moment again. And yet most of us spend that moment, whether we know it or not, with a little editor in the back of our brain who works for Meta
or Elon saying is this content? Is this content that can get me the social cutos that if we weren't embedded in social media, would come from actually sitting down and having a cup of tea with somebody and talking to them like something's happening to the what to our brains and the way that they're being hijacked that is making it increasingly difficult to have interesting, unusual, innovative, contrarian conversations and is dialing up the reward for having facile,
conformist ones. So do you think that is actually being consciously done? No, I think it's just the algorithm doing what algorithms do. That's what our attention. You know by definition, you're going to engage with things that either reinforce what you already believe or demonize what you don't already believe. The messy, muddy space of wrestling with things in a complicated, nuanced way is not an instantaneous dopamine hit, right. It
takes more thought, energy, It takes energy. It's hard, I mean. And people who value that are my audience. Like, if you value that, come and subscribe to uncomfortable conversations. Be part of the team, be part of the journey. And
it is a tribe of the tribalist. It is a tribe of people who just want to talk about things without caring about whether or not they tick the correct checkbox on a preset list of opinions that you're supposed to have in order to make you a good progressive or a good conservative, Like I just want to be all over the map. I want to be as heterodox as possible because I want to be as honest as possible, and neither side has a monopoly on the truth.
Do you think that part of the success of your podcast, your show is your.
I'll call it amazing control of.
Your literate brain and your ability to articulate in such a.
I won't call it polish, but quite beautiful way. Like you speak very well.
I mean on one of the things I remember, listen to me, right, I thought, this dude can put a sentence together. You know, your command of the English language is very good. But you do it in you don't do it in a poshway or a pompous way. It's sort of just works. How important is that to you?
Is everything? I mean, it's my bread and butter. Yeah, it doesn't it doesn't hurt. Put it that way. Yeah, and un blessed because it's I mean, it's natural. It's natural. It's like, you know, I am really really grateful. There is so much to be grateful about. Grateful that I'm born in Australia, you know, grateful for so many things. But you know, whatever it is that you've got in your toolkit, that's that one thing that you can really
lean on. If I could tell young people anything, I mean, it would be like, you know, I find the thing that you I mean, it sounds facile, but it's only you have to reach middle age before you realize that it's profound, because it sounds stupid when you're in your twenties. But like, find the one thing that you're a lot better at than other people are, and they'll always almost always be something. And then the trick is in monetizing that. Yeah, right, there might not be a job. You know what kind
of a job is radio host? There aren't a lot of them around. It's a rarefied spot to get to, especially like intellectual radio host who's required to have half hour long, you know, high fluton conversations about something. So if you can't get that, then just make your own thing. And that's what the podcast is basically. Now, I don't have to worry about whether or not management thinks it's okay to question Mardi Gras and gay pride and I don't care.
And I got to ask you a bit of a personal question, but are your parents still around?
Yes, dad's got Alzheimer's, so he's half around. What do they think of their son? Oh?
Very proud in doing these in doing what you're doing now and what you've done the past.
Yeah, very proud, very proud there. You know, dad was a Dad was born in a refugee camp in Switzerland during the war to Jewish parents, you know, and means he's Jewish, which means he's Jewish. Yeah, and so he has an incredible story of escape and his mum. Yeah. He was raised in Paris and actually spent his seventh birthday in an orphanage in Paris when his mum was sick, but was raised when he was very young by a staunch Lutheran family in Switzerland who took him in out
of the refugee camp. He was born in nineteen forty three and his mum marriged to scrounge up enough money to bring him and his sister out to get out of Europe. And she had been a penniless, you know, Jewish refugee from Poland who spent the war fleeing the Nazis in France. And she got to the she got to the port in France where they were loading these
huge refugee boats to go to the New World. And she went up to the clerk who was signing people in, and the clerk said, you can go to the United States, or Canada or Australia. And she had no understanding of geography, so she just said, which one's further from here. He put down Australia and they came out to Australia, and so Dad has always had an extreme reverence I would say for contrarianism, for pushing through. You know, he's got
a refugee spirit. You know, it's someone who doesn't doesn't take no. And Mum is just this fabulous font of love and wisdom who as long as I'm happy, she'll be happy.
It's dedicated to her son's Yeah, yeah, and I mean that's cool.
Like at the end of the look, if I was making a living being a neo Nazi, she might she might draw the line. But I don't think I'm doing anything. You know, if in any other scenario there would be respect for people who I mean, look, I suppose we've always been a minority, like the kind of Chris for Hitchens as of the world, the people who are always trying to find the angle that is against what the
mainstream think. But it's an honorable tradition and it's just upsetting to me that now progressives who think they're on the right side of history, you have inherited a censoriousness and an intolerance which traditionally was associated with the right. Like you know, the right bangs on a lot about free speech and cancel culture. And wokeness these days. But it's pretty hypocritical because you know, when Monty Python was releasing The Life of Brian, it wasn't the left that
was calling for it to be canceled. It was the religious conservatives, you know, McCarthyism in the United States, the anti communist crackdowns and the witch hunts. That was the right. The right mastered cancel culture long before the left got
wind of it. And it's just in the past decade or so I suppose that the left has unfortunately taken up the tactics of the old right in creating a kind of a purity test and like, these are the things that we believe, we hold sacred, and you know, there is a certain sanctity around the opinions that you're supposed to have about racial inequality, about gender inequality, about gender identity, and if you transgress those, now the left goes batshit crazy, the same way that the right used
to go crazy if you transgressed, you know, if you were offensive or if you were blasphemous in some way. I just think the volume needs to be turned down all over and we need to rediscover a small lel liberal tolerance towards a plurality of views and try to cast the net of acceptable conversation as wide as possible. Honestly, that's the only way we're going to solve the problems of the twenty first entry. Tone it down, just well,
tone it down and expand the expand the landscape. Like, the twenty first century is going to be really, really tricky, the intersection of artificial intelligence, climate chaos and the rise of China and disruptions to liberal democracy and the alternative path of you know, whatever new world order putin wants to introduce, or dictatorships, dictatorships in general, Like, it's going to be hard to manage, and you can't know what the correct path is unless you have the maximum number
of voices all arguing about it and chipping in so that you can grope towards what the best course is. If you carve out you know, if you make it forbidden to talk about race or sex or sexuality or whatever it might be in advance, If you earmark a certain set of opinions as being beyond the pale before you even talk about them, how are you going to know what's true.
Well, that's the greatest form of censorship. I want my last question, I'd just like to ask you if you don't mind, of course, and I haven't had anybody ever asked this question of for a long time.
Do you think.
That Australia should have a bill of rights for its citizens similar to what they have in the USA and talk about things like freedom of speech and et cetera, et cetera.
I go back and forth on it. At the moment time, I know, because at the moment if you built, if you wrote a bill of rights.
A modern bill of rights, should say not the American Bill of Rights because it's out of date.
Yeah, But if you wrote it now, then the social justice warriors would get in there and they'd make everyone have a right to not have their gender questioned, which would mean that people, you know, for example, feminists like Jermaine Greer, you know, or comedians like Barry Humphries who took the position that there's such a thing as biological males and biological females, could be in breach of the
Bill of rights. But if what you mean is a bill of rights that enshrines freedom of speech in some respects, I feel like the absolutism of the American approach causes more problems than it solves.
The reason I say it is because during the COVID period, I kept thinking to myself, we governments can actually do whatever they want, and I thought it was we don't really have a bill of rights here. We have there is a legislation which says you can't do this, you can't do that. We to protect people's rights. There's rights protection legislation which sort of therefore by definition is sort of like.
A number of bills or bills of rights.
But during the COPIAR I thought of myself, there we don't have one in Australia, and my rights are being determined by other parties based on epidemiological studies and models and all that sort of stuff, which to something that I didn't agree with. I'm talking about the modeling, the mathematics of the modeling. I'm talking about them. I'm not talking about protecting people from getting COVID. I'm talking about how they modeled these things, because models, by definition always wrong.
You're talking to somebody, by the way, who wrote an opinion piece at the end of twenty twenty one in the City Morning Herald saying, you know, is it time to start thinking of having a national conversation about the human rights implications. So I don't know that, but that's that's my position. I literally, you know, I literally wrote the article. It's at a time when it was extremely
unpopular because everybody felt like that was killing grandma. But I interviewed on my absuit right well, at the time at the top, this is the end of twenty twenty one, when we were basically all vaccinated, and we still had ridiculous scenarios like a woman who I interviewed who flew from Melbourne to Adelaide with her family to see her family, with her little kids, to see her family for the
first time since the lockdowns began. There was one person on her flight who tested positive for COVID the next day, so the police came to her hotel in Adelaide and took the whole family and locked them up and wanted to lock them up for two weeks. And after five days she made such a fuss that she was driven in police convoy to the border of South Australia and dumped out into the border of Victoria onto the Victorian side of the border after having been incarcerated for five days.
All of them were COVID negative, but just because she'd been on the same plane as someone who had COVID. And I used that as a way of saying, like, at what point do we start asking do we start saying the human rights of this woman are more important than whatever epidemiological solution you thought you were achieving in terms of tracking and tracing that that disease. So, yeah, I mean, or.
Is it a conversation that maybe perhaps maybe not, somebody's just going to get his the bill. Maybe that's probably a certain way putting it. But should there be a conversation around this.
Yes, yes, there would certainly be a conversation. Well, which is offered it? No, that's true. I mean, yeah, I would have. I mean, we need to get ahead of a lot of stuff. We need to get ahead of AI. We need to get ahead of the next pandemic which will come and it'll be worse, I mean a pandemic.
Yeah, the next one always will be worse because they adapt, right, right, because it's there to control the host exactly, that's right, So it will do it.
Yeah, yeah, and there may be smaller ones, but there will be bigger ones. And yeah, so I think that would be a good idea having some kind of a national round table where you know people could come together or do you think it's not possible? No, I think it's possible. Do do you think it's possible to settle on something?
Though?
I have to have faith in democracy, Mark, we're grown up.
So but do you think it's going to be Anthony ABERNIZI or it's going to be the you know, is it?
Is it going to be Chris Means? I mean is what do you think?
Do you think that we have the capacity to do to sales?
I think you could have. Yeah, I think you could have a national cabinet where the Premier sit down with the Attorney General, with the federal Attorney General and Health Minister and Prime minister, and you get academics together, and you get human rights people together and you just hammer out even if it's not a Bill of rights, a set of a one pager about like a discussion page. Yeah, this is what we expect as Australians. This is what we expect of our government, sort of like a code
of conduct. Yeah, exactly, that's right.
As opposed to a bill where you can you know, you can you know you can talk about that. I'm not going to answer that question because I've got a bill, there's a been somebody.
Well exactly, yeah, that's right, I mean, it's it's everything is messy. Basically, I think the only solution is conversations. I don't think any bill of rights or any I mean, constitutions are worth the worth the paper they're written on unless they're enforced by courts, and courts aren't worth their salt unless they're backed up by the good faith of the political process. And the political process isn't worth its salt unless the military obeys what the politicians tell it
to do. And you know, at the end of the day, everything is a conversation. Everything, everything is trust as a story, really right, It's like, you know what's money? You know, money, money is nothing money, money, money is relationships, right, money
is you know, investments in things. So yeah, to me, looking for that one thing that's going to save us, like the Bill of rights or something is a bit of a fool's Errand like my mission is to have a platform uncomfortable conversations where people can have conversations about uncomfortable things in ways that are as inclusive and as interesting and satisfied people's intellectual curiosity as much as possible, and I just hope that that is one piece of
a larger mosaic, like one piece of a jigsaw that can contribute to a sane and prosperous future. It's not gonna be the whole answer, but I'm pretty convinced that that landscape of having conversations in an honest and generous way is the easiest. Like that's the path of least resistance to our success as a culture. Josh Epps, to use a controversial word, I loved it. Good on you, mate, Thank you