Josh Szeps || Thinking Freely

wrong a significant portion at the time. Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome Josh Steps to the show. Josh is an Australian television, radio and podcast host who shake things up with his fierce intellect and infectious sense of humor. Josh's interviews with prominent figures and celebrities like Jen Goodall, Ron Howard, Russell Brand and Neil Patrick Harris have attracted billions of online views and sold

out event tickets. Currently, he can be heard on ABC Radio Sydney and on his award winning podcast Uncomfortable Conversations. What an episode this was. We really didn't hold anything back in our conversation. We talk about lots of things that all surround the idea of thinking freely. In this social media age, it's become increasingly challenging to become an independent thinker. Our tribal nature and online echo chambers tend to re enforce ideologies we already believe in. Even the

way we talk sounds scripted and produced, well not. In this episode. Here Josh and I discuss openly and freely how to generally search for truth so we can broaden our worldviews. We also touch on the topics of intersectionality, wocism, ethics,

and racism. But really this conversation is about so much more, and the overarching thread that runs through all of this conversation is just the promotion of nuance and attempts at taking lots of different seeming opposite sides and looking at them as part of a larger hole, and also not completely identifying with your in group and not completely hitting your app group. We hope this episode helps you think

more freely and powers you to think more freely. So, without further ado, I give you Josh Steps Hey bye, how you doing? I'm great? How are you? I got up from a nap so I'm still in half dream mode. Yes, I'm half half in dream state and half in waking life. But it's okay, it's okay. It's a very philosophical take on things. We should always be in a half dream state, half life. What is reality anyway, Scott? How do we

know it's not all a dream? Scott tell me that. Well, Actually, my colleague David Chalmers, the philosopher, wrote a really good book that came out earlier this year called Reality, arguing that we're probably in a simulation. Right, Yeah, what do you make of the whole the whole simulation thing. Have I just opened up a four hour rabbit hole that's gonna Are we gonna plunge off topic for the next

four five hours? We just don't know. The point is, it is entirely plausible that if you get artificial intelligence, or actually, I should say virtual reality to a certain point where it's indistinguishable from non virtual reality, then there's really no way for us to know we're not in a simulation. And the way that things have been going the past two years, it certainly feels like someone's fucking

with us. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, so, which makes it with that shot, the probability is much higher.

But it's like we reached some alternative timeline. I also wonder, though, if we just haven't been too acclimatized or acclimated, as you say, in America to a normality that was never actually historically normal, like the period between I guess the late sixties and probably maybe nine to eleven, or you know, depending on where you want to count it, the financial crisis or Trump, that that was just a short window.

Like I mean, if you've been around in the sixties when matin Ley the King was shot and Robert Kennedy was shot and like the cities were burning, you would have been like, this is crazy. And if you'd known what a simulation is, you might have been like, we could all be in a simulation. Or when you found out in nineteen forty five that the Germans had just gassed and incinerated six million people, you'd be like, what, this has got to be some kind of a computer game.

Where are we? But they didn't have computer games back then, so they didn't know what that was. So now we interpret everything through the prism of what the current technology is. And you know, back when there were steam engines, everyone was like the universe is just a system of pistons and steam engines and like you know, circulating orbs and things. And now we're like, oh, that's so parssaying we're futuristic. Now we understand about computers and simulations, so the whole

thing must be that. And then in one hundred years we'll come up with some new brilliant theory and the universe will seem to conform to that one. The reality is that we're extrapolating by how fast technology has grown in our lifetimes. In my lifetime, it's ridiculous. The year I was born to now went from no computers existing too us having this podcast chat and being able to see each other, yeah, and through the verse, through the virtually.

I mean, I'm seeing you like I'm seeing you can see my floating Christmas head above my gorgeous Christmas sweater blending into the red background, perfectly across the ocean, Scott, across the world. No, I know, I was thinking I was talking on one of my many appearances on the Joe Rogan podcast, one of my many seven appearances on the most popular podcast in the world. Just thought i'd mentioned that Scott. Just thought i'd mentioned that that's not But I also I should mention it's not the most

popular psychology podcast. Now that's true. That's what you're on reading. I know, oh, I know, and and the honor is

all mine Scott. And I should say to listeners who haven't heard my show or Scott's fantastic appearance on my show Uncomfortable Conversations, that Scott's appearance on Australia's number one uncomfortable interview talk show hosted by a man wearing a red and green sweater Scott was fantastic because I my podcast, the number one Australian interview, uncomfortable show, red green sweater show. So you know, we all have our number one Scott.

We do. We do ever and in every mother's eyes, you know, or a lot of mother's eyes, their child is that's right number one. When I was on Rogan one time, I was talking with I just my grandmother had just died. She died on the eve of her one hundredth birthday. She died at ninety nine and three hundred and sixty four days and she was born in nineteen fifteen during the Gallipoli campaign. Big big day for Australia and New Zealand. Don't know if anyone in America

knows what Philippoli is. You can google it. And I was thinking about the amount of the number of things that she had seen in her lifetime. Like nineteen fifteen, right, nobody's flying anywhere. You know. Planes are made of like canvas and cardboard and have big flapping wheels and like crash into the hill, you know, after they've been in the air for twenty feet. There was one car when she was growing up. When she was growing up in New Zealand, they would know, they would see, oh, there's

the car going by. There's the car that someone rich owns driving past. And then she had the space race. Cars became ubiquitous, she had computing, man on the moon, nukes, holocaust, like everything, and think of what had happened in the hundred years previous, or the hundred years before that, or the hundred years before that. It's like someone's taken the accelerated dial and it's just turned it all the way up.

It's incredible. And then the most amazing thing is i was traveling through Europe shortly after that, and I'm wandering

around Athens. A good buddy of mine lives in Athens, and I'm standing on the Agora the birthplace of democracy, like on the northwestern slopes of the Acropolis, the first place in the world, in the Western world at least, where people came together and said, you know, maybe we should start sorting out our ideas, but through discussion and discourse instead of just killing each other all the time, maybe we should have a say in this instead of

being ruled by autocrats and kings and emperors. And that. I was just overwhelmed with how old that was and how ancient it is. And then I thought to myself, well, it's four thousand years. Four thousand years, right, My grandmother lived one hundred. You put my nana back to back her life spans, it's only forty It's only forty nanas since the dawn of all of Western civilization. It's only

twenty nanas since Jesus Christ. It's only like three nanas since the Enlightenment, and one nana since all of that stuff that I've just talked about, planes, space race cars, like computing. What happens in another ten nanas a thousand years. It's so short. There are a lot of points to what you just said, is what I should say, Like, there's you know the fact that homo's sapiens are a mere speck in the talking about the history of the universe. It depends do you want to zoom how far do

you want to zoom out? Or you can also zoom in on us, you know, in this generation, which is usually what I do in my podcast as we talk about about what's going on right now. Sorry, I just have a tendency to dominate the conversation place. I mean, no, no, I love it. I love it. I love it. But but you know, it depends the question is how far do you want to zoom out? Right? Like you could do a zoom even further and say, Homo sapien are

really nothing. But I think there's another point there which I do think we tend to extrapolate and think, look at what we've done in a thousand years, the next thousand years, it's hard to imagine what we'll do. But I actually do think there's a limit to what we will do. I think that, you know, we discovered so many things and they're really radical, you know, compared to like a thousand years ago or even ten thousand years ago. But I think a thousand years in the future, there's

it's going to be probably more of the same. If we still exist as a species, humans will still be human in terms of basic needs, in terms of fighting each other, in terms of the different divisions and tribes. Right, yeah, well none of that has changed, has it. I mean, none of that has changed. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Who is who says says like where we're highly of you know we have Is it Dawkins who talks about us having godlike brains but primate like sorry, godlike tools,

but primate brains or something? Well, that's exactly right. Yeah, I'm whoever said that, kudos to that person. We still have stone age minds, and you know, in terms of the evolution of our mind happened mostly on a strip of the Savannah desert. And here we are in this modern world with all these technologies, and we're interpreting things through that lens. By the way, that speaks to why tribalism is so big on social media. I don't like

to use the word virtue signaling. I'm not a big fan of that term, but I but why we see a lot of that is because, like the consequences in the Savannah of pissing off your tribe of ten p people wassation. How are you that I had a climatization and acclamation. You can do ostrasation. If you want ostracization, you'd be ultralised. That sounds more sophisticated when I phrase is interesting, how are you phrasing certain ways? It sounds wor sophisticated. In otherways you'd be left to die. And

that's a big deal. That is a big deal, you know. But but nowadays it's like we don't really think, like, oh my gosh, what if that random anonymous person on Twitter that doesn't even have a human as a profile picture right like doesn't like me? Who cares? But you can't But you can't turn it off, can you? I

mean you don't seem to be able to. We don't seem to be able to turn that off, like it lands as it lands with as visceral and cutting a subjective sensation when you're being attacked by idiots on Twitter, as if you were being attacked by people you care about one hundred percent? And have you noticed that those who seem to call virtual signal that they don't care the most actually are the ones that care the most.

So I've used you know, the ones that are like, I have no folks to give everyone home right, you know, yeah, you know, people like they're like so controversial and they'll say crazy stuff that they're like, I don't care what anyone thinks about. Why are you on social media every second looking to see what people sit? And it becomes deranging as well. And we all know some of those people who started out as dissidents or as like heterodox thinkers and have now just become total conformists for the

for being provocateurs. There's like a clique of generally sort of alt righty kind of provocateurs. Some of them are

left wing. You I know, I probably shouldn't use the term alt right because I get into trouble for using that, But I just mean that not to mean like fascist or white supremacist, but this kind of parallel universe of shit stirrs and provocateurs who think that it's really clever and edgy to constantly be whipping people up and outraging people and getting you know, and saying things that they think are controversial just for the sake of being controversial.

And we've seen those people, and we've seen them descend over the course of really the past five years from being people who I respected to now being a number of them are just trolls essentially and have been captured by the right. And so I don't know how we avoid that, because I think there's a feedback loop that you're pointing to there, which is pretending not to care about what people think, and that pretense in itself becomes

a shtick that cares very much about what people think. Right, So now I'm playing the role of the person who I just don't have two fucks to give, like I don't care, you know, I'm the bad boy. Everyone's become a kind of like milo Ianopolis part, you know, three point zero or something, and that becomes virtue signaling in itself.

I mean, you know, I'm talking about right wing dickheads, but there's also the left wing dickhead phenomenon of people, you know, virtue signaling about how politically correct and woke they are. It seems like the silos that we're in and the tribes that we're in and the clubs that we're in are just drifting further apart and become self reinforcing social media feedback loops where the incentives are all

aligned to extremify ourselves. So I mean, one thing that I'm trying to do in my media career on my radio show in Australia, on my podcast Uncomfortable Conversations, And one reason I love your show, Scott, because I think you're doing You're on a similar mission, is to try to have conversations that like disentangle all of those siloed perspectives and have conversations that, as we say in Australia faired income meaning free from bullshit and are straight, you know,

and are kind of uncomplicated by pretense and nonsense and tribal affiliation and clubs. But because I don't know, I don't know any other way of getting out of the problems that we're in unless we can escape the kind of gravitational vortex of the social media pool towards pleasing our cleaque. I very much share that mission. I'm very serious about that mission. I feel like anyone who is

serious about that mission shouldn't be a provocateur. So I think that if you are a provocateur by definition, you don't genuinely, genuinely care about that mission. There are tourist who clean They're like, is there so much division in the world? These things that like completely attacks a whole group of people, and they're like, oh, I'm such a victim. Well, it depends what you mean by provocateur, right, because some people would regard me as a provocateur for not caring

about triggering the trip wires of cultural convention. You know, if I am having a conversation about one of those red hot culture war issues I don't know, like trans rides or something like that, then there is a very scripted way that you're supposed to speak about it on the left, and there's a very irritatingly offensive, bad boy way that you're supposed to talk about it on the right by saying like these are just you know, I don't know that sex is defines you forever, and that

these are just men in dresses or something like that. And then on the left you're supposed to say that there's no such thing as women and trans women to women, and you're supposed to mount a lot of platitudes. But I mean, I will just call the truth as I see it. Some people will regard that as being a provocateur. But the difference that I see is that my intention

is never to provoke. My intention is to be rational, cool headed, try to understand the other side, try to give the benefit of the doubt, but not rehearse scripted lines of politically correct bullshit either. Yeah, so intentionality matters, and it matters a lot. I think that's a very good point. You know. There are some Twitter accounts where they're they're intentionally just saying things to with the aim of riling up a certain group. That's what I mean. Yes, absolutely,

absolutely absolutely. Something that really really does upset me and has been on my mind lately, is I despise the Twitter account libs of TikTok. I like despised with it, like such a such a like like I'm not the kind of I'm like mister happy. Yeah, I'm like positive psychology. So to get me actually despising you, that takes a lot. That takes a lot. And this is the thing, is like I am all about talk. I'm all about like appreciating differences. You know, I like a big support of

the neurodiversity movement. When I see trans people, I think, well, I actually put them under the umbrell of neurodiversity. I include them as part of gender diversity, which is part of like you can be artistic and be on the artism spectrum, you can be on the gender diversity spectrum. So that's just how I think about it. So I you know, I'm like, if you bully people who are just different just because they're different, that really gets at me in a really core It gets me, really it

gets me. It makes me absolutely like the whole the importance of being able to hold more than one idea in your head at a time, Right, So, like, I mean, for me, should we be teaching eighth graders that there's no such thing as sex and pretending that the biology makes no difference, that there are no basic differences between the sexes, and that there's no correlation between sex and gender and that you can pick and choose whatever gender you want to be Or is that too confusing an

idea for eighth graders to understand yet? And should we maybe include that as a university level kind of conversation. But should we just assume that sex and gender are generally consistent and then when young people feel that they're not in their case, we treat them with care and compassion and we try to investigate what's going on, but we don't embed this as a fundamental principle of what

we teach young children. Maybe we can all agree on that, but you can hold that as being your opinion and also say that on the other hand, my friend who has a son who was born as a girl, assigned female at birth, and from the age of two, she was saying, what are you talking about. I'm not a girl. I'm a boy, always a boy, always been a boy. This is a phenomenon that exists, that has existed everywhere,

that has existed throughout all of time. There is this thing where there are a young, young, young children of a very early age, before they've learned any quote unquote grooming or gender theory or anything. They are just one hundred percent I'm born in the wrong sect. I'm born in the wrong like my sex doesn't align. And that is a phenomenon that is a psychological phenomenon that we have to deal with. So we have to say, what are we going to where are those kids going to

fit into our culture? Are we going to demonize them and persecute them and ridicule them and hold them up to live lives of shame and hardship with massive rates of suicide and self harm because they feel like they're broken people. I mean, like, screw that. It's not one or the other. We can have multiple ideas that may

seem contradictory in our heads at once. And the job of us as responsible citizens, as members of a demos or a democracy, is to come together and have conversations like this one where we can flesh it out and go, Okay, well, what is too much and how far is too far? And how can we find the moderate compromise between these warring factions that we have, rather than having the factions in this war of attrition where it's all against all and whoever wins is going to you know, to the victor,

go the spoils. That's not how democracies work, that's not how cultures thrive. We can only sort it out through conversation. Yeah, I'm trying to find a tweet I wrote because I want to reach you and see what you think of it. I wrote controversial, tiaq. You can take issue with something and have a reasonable critique of it without calling it the downfall of Western civilization. I put that all in

a quote. Not every issue is the biggest issue in America just because it's the issue you care the most about. I wrote that because what I see is like, oh my gosh, this teacher is teaching, you know, a student about non binary this specific thing is going to lead to the downfall of Western civilization. Okay, can we just like take things case by case basis. Let's not like there's so many cognitive biases going on in the world.

There's extrapolation, there's over generalization, there's black and white thinking. You go down the list of cognitive biases and you see it with everyone. You see catastrophizing as well. Right, and now, I'm not here to defend some things I do think are moral gray zones. You know, there are certain instances where you know, like I'm trying to think of as actually I think once they did show a video of a drag queen with a group of prescorers

and the drag queen was like naked. There's like they're extreme examples. The thing is, I stop there, I don't. I don't then extrapol and say all drag queens are groomers. That's literally the definition of heat and discrimination. Well, it's absolutely, I mean it depends. Look, it depends on the prevalence, doesn't it. I mean, I suppose the reason why people are freaking out about that is because they're assuming that

it's taking place in every classroom in America. And if it were, then it would be a problem worth freaking out about. I mean, you know, Andrew Sullivan makes the point that drag queens, there's a lot of misunderstanding about drag queens, just as an asside in this whole drag queen story out thing. Drag queens are not sexualized creatures

in their natural habitat. What drag queens are for people who aren't in the world of drag and I happen to be married to a guy who's who's sort of you know, who has a lot of friends who are trans and a lot of friends who are who play up with drag. What drag queens are are clowns. They're clowns. Yes, it's like pantomime exactly in the United Kingdom. It's they're a hugely exaggerated cartoon characters of women. They're actually atle bit sexist, if you want to look at it through

that lens. They're taking the tropes of femininity and exaggerating them into these grotesque stereotypes, right, and they're mocking them and satirizing them. There is a small band of drag queenery which will blend into you know, sexual deviancy or whatever you want to call it, or provocative sexual behavior that of course has no role. I mean that should

have no place in the education of children. But the idea that you would have huge larger than life clown like figures entertaining children and reading them stories and getting them, you know, encouraging their love of reading. There is nothing gloomery or sexualized about that. You wouldn't say that if it was a clown. And you know, largely the way that most of these things are being done is by

men who are portraying female clowns. Right, I think that's right, and there are a lot of misunderstands about that, but you see what's going on. I mean, there's just this real judging of someone beast on their sexuals because it doesn't fit within their idea of sexual purity or especially if you're you know, a Christian conservative, right like they view any instance of a deviation from what they view as the rate and proper God or dean sexuality, any

deviation from that is immoral. Well, isn't the risk there, Scott that actually the number of people who believe that is not enough to create the heat of the culture war that we're seeing at the moment, the number of people who are actually religiously devoted to heterosexuality as the ideal, and who believe that any alternative forms of sexuality or gender expression are deviant and should be you know, opposed

for almost cosmic orthodox reasons. They're a small minority, but what's happened is a whole bunch of other people, the James Lindsay's of the world, you know, who are not religious, have I don't know if they've spent too long online or if they if they are identifying something real that that you and I are too blind to see, But one way or another, they regard them as being a sil vilizational level clash of the forces of disorder, chaos,

and authoritarianism on the left against forces of community, family, tradition, and democracy on the right right. And they regard all of the fabric that has come together to build Western civilization as being assailed by this crazy sort of quasi authoritarian, woke leftism that wants everyone to be everything and for there to be no structure in the world and for us all to be like just pingpong balls bumping into each other, choosing our gender, choosing our sexuality, choosing our whatever.

And they regard that as being a chaotic dystopia that forces its rules on everybody. That is at the same time anarchic and also authoritarian, because anyone who doesn't, who hasn't drunk the wok kool aid, is going to be excommunicated.

And here I think the left, although we're being critical of the right, I mean I have to put in a vote for the enormous own goal that the left has made, and the failure of the left to articulate a traditional left wing vision that appeals to sort of working class people all across the Western world, really, and the obsession, the obsessiveness with which the left has begun to cling to identity politics and to the empowerment of minority groups as being its load star, as being the

light on the hill, instead of how a working class family and appalatua is going to be able to put food on the table or afford healthcare, Like those things are no longer the things that democrats are talking about.

Democrats are talking a lot about intersectionality and a lot about how you have to say the right things about you have to use the correct transgender pronouns, and you have to call latinos latinxes, and that is an enormous, enormously off putting distraction that to me, pushes this other cohort into the camp of the extreme religious conservatives that you were talking about. If we were just dealing with extreme religious conservatism as the problem, I think we would

easily defeat them. The problem is we've empowered them to form a coalition with a whole sway of reasonable minded, vaguely conservative people who regard the excesses of workism as intolerable. So now we've got a much bigger, a much bigger right wing enemy than we needed to have. Yeah, I'd like to amend what I said then, because I think a lot of it does come down to my colleague Jonathan Heights a notion of moral foundations. There are very different moral foundations, so a lot of it on the

right has to do with it. It's considered disgusting there. It's a moral because to them it makes them feel sick to see a transgender person. For whatever reason, when I see a transitive person, I don't get sick, so I don't really understand exactly what what is so sickening

about it. But but for for a good number of people, it gives them the actual visceral feeling of of of germs, you know, like that feeling, the same kind of feeling you see with germs or you see with something that's a that's a pathogen, you know, in the same way that they did with with gay people, you know, a generation ago. Right, I mean, my lifestyle of being married to a man was introducing as recently as the nineteen

eighties or nineteen nineties, and now it's not. And in fact, one of the great triumphs of the gay rights movement was to take it away from take the conversation away from sexual acts, and turn it into a conversation about gay people wanting to be normal and wanting to be clean. Right, I mean, to follow this line of thinking, right, Andrew Sullivan's argument was, we want to be exactly the same as you. We want families, we want you know, structure, we want to be part of the community, we want

jobs just like the rest of you. Like once you shifted the conversation away from from behaviors and you turn the conversation into one about having the right to be normal. Andrew Sullivan's groundbreaking book was called Virtually Normal, in which he made the first mainstream case for gay marriage. Virtually normal. He wants he just wanted people to be virtually normal. Was that was the triumph. And I think that was by turning off that disgust switch that you're talking about. Yeah,

turning off at discuss switch. And you know, the left cares there are more financial foundations about fairness, right to them, fairness Trump's feeling sick looking at someone who's different from you, right, so it's like what Trump's what within your personality structure? Yeah? And justice. I think they care a lot about justice, don't they. Well yeah, yeah, that's yeah. I'm kind of making the two equivalent in a way fair enoughs Yeah, I mean it's without I'm trying to I'm trying to

give the most. I'm trying to steal a man the disgust towards trans position, right, so that we don't caricature it. I'm trying to sure And I can say that there's other reasons as well why there are critiques of the trans movement, the idea of trans I can see it from the point of view of those who I guess are called turfs. You know, they're saying, well, there is a legitimate difference between a biologically born female and a trans female. Yeah, they had different life experiences, they should

have different rights, you know, to a certain degree. Like there's a different set of experiences if by the same reason that you know that woman Rachel who identified as black and she was born white, Well, no one liked that, right, But I still don't. No one's given me a convincing

agreement where that's really different, different, right, Yeah? I mean, you know, Jermaine Greer, the great Australian feminist who wrote The Female Eunuch in the nineteen seventies, makes the same has You know, She's gotten pilloried for making the same point and has actually been disinvited from writers' festivals in Australia for making that point. She her basically, her basic point is there is something fundamental to being a woman that involves growing up as a girl in a sexist society.

Being a girl in a patriarchal society is a fundamentally life shaping experience. If you grew up as a boy and then you later joined the womanhood, good for you. Happy to call you a woman. You're not the same as someone who grew up as a girl. You're not the same as someone who went through puberty as a girl. Yeah, and JK. Rowling and Jermaine Greer are completely So this is where I'm thinking. So does the disgusts which get activated by the left's insistence that what Jermaine Greer is

saying is bigotry. Like, for example, I have a friend who's not trans who insists that it's transfer but it's super super woke, who insists that it's transphobic to have to not want to sleep with a trans person. That if you, Scott don't want to sleep with a woman, right further explaining it to me, let me explain it exactly what will involve, and all the dangly bent I get the argument, because do we want to start calling everyboney?

Just do you want to call everyone eracist if you don't sleep with a black That is another conversation that I have. Yeah, I mean, and you know what, I don't have no time for it because like a black friend of mine used to who's gay, would always say, because there's a lot of racism in the gay in the like white gay, white guys can get away with

a lot racism than straight white guys can. I think there's a kind of really I think so, I think there's a casual, sassy, kind of yes girl, yes queen sort of white supremacy in the super camp gay world that is quite dismissive of people of color and openly so. And so this black gay friend of mine was saying, Look, you might think that you don't want to. You might just be like, oh, hey, you know, I'm not racist, but I just don't want to sleep with Asians. I

just don't want to sleep with black guys. But his point was, well, you should probably interrogate where that comes from, Like does that come from Nowhere? Were you born not being sexually attracted to those people, or through puberty and your youth, did you form ideals about what it means to be a man and what it means to be

a sexualized being and did that shape you? And because I'm quite fluid in my thinking about our sexuality in general, because I think I look at ancient Greece and ancient Rome and places where there's been a lot more kind

of casual sexual fluidity between gayness and straightness. Paris in the nineteenth century and a lot of like South Pacific cultures and things like that, And because my own personal experience was one in which I had long and fruitful and loving romantic relationships with girls and also guys, and then I sort of happened to find a guy who I wanted to spend my life with, and that was the person who I chose to be with, because my experience has always been one in which I just assumed

that when I was young, that I was uniquely open minded in thinking that, of course, attractive people are attractive, and charming people are charming, and charismatic people are charismatic, And who are we kidding if we don't think that there's some kind of sexual frisson When a young guy is walking down the street and sees a massive Abercrombie and Fitch billboard with a naked torsau of a young man on it, there is some kind of arousal there

that we have been acculturated and trained to funnel into sort of maybe self love or some sort of aspiration to have that body. But then in another culture, in another era, in another time, in another place, it's conceivable that that could land as attraction rather than as something aspirational, right. I do think these things are messy and they get influenced by culture, and in that respect, yeah, maybe my lack of sexual interest in a particular race of people

is sort of fundamentally racist. And so maybe there is something in the revulsion that a straight man might feel towards sleeping with a trans woman that comes from bigotry or transphobia, and in another universe they wouldn't feel that.

But I just don't think you win any friends or you gain anything strategically in the cultural argument by demonizing dudes who don't want to sleep with a woman with a penis as being transphobic bigots and insisting that you know, the only way to get on board the trans train is to is to go all in, one hundred percent with everything that the most extreme trans ideologues insists that you agree with. That's just not going to win the case.

You're extraordinarily open minded to consider the nuance and things. So I really like that about you. So let me just ask you this then, because I was wondering what your thoughts are on whether reverse racism exists. I believe in reverse racism. I don't believe in this kind of new definition of racism that has come about recently where it has to be bigotry plus power. I mean, I

don't think it's useful. I mean, I think if you want to say that there's a uniquely pernicious racism, when racism interlocks with institutional power structures and sort of invisible cultural norms which some people might call, say white supremacy,

then that can be useful. If you want to say that it's uniquely pernicious when a majority white country that has a history of slavery and a history of Jim Crow and a history of racism, when a white person in that context expresses racism, that that's a particularly bad

form of racism, then I'm fine with that. But you can't say that's the only form of racism, and that when a black person is smashing up a Korean corner store because they hate Koreans, or is setting a synagogue on fire because they hate Jews, that that's not actually racism because black people have never been the oppressors, because

black people aren't coming from a position of power. Well, not only have you just abandoned reason and a command of the English language, in my opinion and clear thinking you've also alienated so many people from what they regard as being their common sense attitude towards racism and bigotry that you are never going to win over the population and you're probably going to trigger a white backlash against such foolhardy nonsense. So what game are you even playing

at that point? Well, that's an interesting question. What game are you playing? Yeah? I think that if you do play genuinely the game where you want to unite people and you want to have a kind of a humanistic approach, as I like to take, well, there are certain ways of thinking about people in the world that naturally follow

from that opinion. I would like a world in which we didn't think stereotypically about a person just based on knowledge of the color of their skin or or even their gender, you know, like insure there's some world where you say, oh, Johnny's black, and your mind is blank about agnostic about who Johnny is. Do you know what I mean? I mean that shouldn't be controversial to say. I would. I would love to live in that kind

of world, you know. And I do think there are valid criticisms of wokeness, and there are some non valid criticisms of wokeness as well. But I think some valid criticisms is that we run the risk of using identity as such a divider that we suddenly think we know the rest of a whole person, you know, and we can fill in the blanks too quickly based on their sort of level of oppression. You know that we have said that, well, if you're this, you know this kind

of identity, then it's this level red level. If you're this, you're blue, if you're white, you know you're the do you you know what I mean? And further dividing people that way, that's not in common with my mission of a humanistic way of thinking about it. But no, I mean, and we all know people. I mean, you know, I'm sure you've bumped into my friends Colmin Hughes and Camille Foster. You know John mcwater a picture of me and Camille Great, well,

he's a good buddy of mine. And you know, these are people who would would readily say that they are not hopelessly disenfranchised and disadvantaged because of the color of their skin. There are challenges, there are challenges for everyone. There are challenges to being Jewish, and there are challenges to being shorts. There are challenges to being ugly, there are challenges to being gay, there are challenges to being bad at sports. There are things that people are going

to tease you for and pick on you for. And none of that is to say that those attributes are, as you know, as profound as the history of discrimination against African Americans over the over the centuries. That's not

my point. My point is that right now, at a snapshot in when you look at the life challenges and life experiences of individual X, who is an IVY League educated, highly articulate, professional Black American, and individual Y who in twenty twenty two is an uneducated white person from a mining fat family in the Midwest, that those two people you can't just split them apart and say that the black person is disadvantaged and the white person has white privilege.

That's far too simplistic. We all have our challenges, we all have our attributes. And if we're going to break things down on identitarian lines and favor some people over other people and privilege some categories over other categories because those categories have been historically disadvantaged, then I think you're

opening a Pandora's box. I mean, my fear is that, as someone who's very interested in history, a lot of people forget that in most times, in most places, most of human history has been tribes of people warring with other tribes in a zero some game where they think that the pie is finite and they're just scrambling for the spoils. I mean, look at any empire, look at

any civilization. These are places where people conceive of themselves primarily as members of a group or a clan, and they want to defend that clan, they want to defend that family and that tribe, and it has caused enormous hardship and stultification and backwardness. And the sort of revolution of the past few centuries in the West has been the Enlightenment idea that first and foremost, we should think of ourselves as individuals. We should treat each other on

the merits. We should judge each other by the content of our character, not the color of our skin, as Martin Luther King said. And the idea that we would do away with that now because so many work people think that that's naive, that you should be colored blnes. It's naive to think that you should aspire towards a world in which the color of people's skin is about as relevant as the color of their hair, which is

a world that I would like to see. The Workerati will tell me that that's so naive, that I'm basically a white supremacist for even suggesting it, and that we all have to think about ourselves as our plans. Well,

I'm sorry. I may be a white guy and I have that going for me, but I'm also gay, and I'm also a Jew, and I'm not crazy about fostering in a world it hasn't gone so great for Jews and gays in the past when we've started encouraging straight white guys to think about themselves as straight white guys like it's this is not a game that we want to start playing. This is not a Pandora's box that we want to start opening again. We've seen what happens.

We've seen what happens when people think of themselves as members of a group instead of as individuals. In a culture and a society where every individual is deserving of respect because they are an individual, not because they are a member of a disadvantaged class, not because they are a member of an oppressed class, because they are an individual, and I think we're getting to a point at which the backlash is a real risk. I mean, the thing that worries me the most about workness is not the

wokesters themselves. I don't think they're going to create an authoritarian Marxist regime. I think what they're going to do is alienate the Middle America and Middle Australia and Middle Europe from the left and create an easy path for people like Trump, or people more charismatic than Trump and

Savviia than Trump, like Tucker Carson or whoever. The next generation of right wing authoritarians could be to march into power like a cakewalk, Because once you start triggering people to think about themselves as members of a tribe, the majority tribe will start thinking about it. I mean, the middle the working class white guy is only going to last for so long with every single other Rainbow coalition all having the right to defend their own interests and

to think about themselves as a class of people. But what I'm the only person, says the straight white working class guy. I'm the only I'm the member of the only class that can't be proud of itself. Everybody else gets to have a fucking day. You've got the Puerto Rico Day, You've got the Black Lives Matter, you got the Gay Pride month. Everyone gets to have a fucking party. And I'm the only person in the world who doesn't get to be proud of being a white guy. Screw that.

I'm here as well. Camille meet a very good point the other day, and I've been thinking about it ever since. He said, well, why are we proud about our intrinsic characteristics that we had no choice over? And should we be proud of like what we do in our lives,

like the hard work we put into something. I just that point is, I've just been just reflecting on it NonStop because I think about it in terms of like the gifted education community, Right, should you be proud if you're a gifted student, Like, like all the tests come easy to you, right, Like I would think I'd be more proud if I, like was not a gift student. I put so much work into it, and you know,

my through my character, you know, I became something. So you know, it's just I've been thinking about I've been really reflecting on that. I have worked questions and answers, but yeah, it's so funny that you say that thing about pride, Scott, because I just did an episode of Uncomfortable Conversations, my very good podcast, which everyone should subscribe to right now. You can pull your phone out of

your pants and just click subscribe. And one episode that you should look for in addition to my terrific conversation with Scott earlier, is a solo monologue that I basically

did about gay pride. So the podcast network was doing a big Pride sort of month where they would have podcasters from around the world on this Pride train doing sort of monologues about how important pride was and what pride meant to them, and I was the person selected for us to do the Australia one, and then you know, I would hand off to some queer New York show and everyone's doing this great oh you know, pride, pride, pride and why pride so important, to why visibility is

so important? And I was like the black sheep, of course, always always being the person with the contrarian opinion who and I spoke for about I think about an hour about my thoughts about pride, and I made exactly that point that you're attributing to Camille there, which is I really think that pride ought to come from something over which you have some control. I mean, I don't feel ashamed of being gay, and I don't feel proud of being gay. I don't feel proud of being six foot.

I don't feel proud of being white. These are just attributes. I mean, you know, I feel proud of what I've done. I feel proud of what I've accomplished. Now, if I were living in Nigeria, right if I were living in a highly homophobic place, if I were living maybe in some deeply religious evangelical parts of the Deep South, still, then I understand the utility in confecting a notion of pride in order to counterbalance the shame with which gay

people have been inculcated. But really, if you're listening to this podcast, or if we're listening to my podcast, odds are you're living in a large metropolitan center in a reasonably you know, forward thinking part of the world. You're probably in the West, and you're probably in a place where, if not right where you are right now, probably nearby there's a significantly there's a metropolis with a significant gay population. And I mean, let's face it huge companies are run

by gay people. I mean Apple is run by gay people, like I think Dour Chemicals is run by you know, I mean a gay guy. I mean we are around you know. Media is saturated at the moment with gay stories. Every great Netflix hit seems to have you know, non

binary or gay characters in it. Now, the one of the few things that you could say in an office situation that would get you hauled before HR would be to be openly homophobic about something or open being basically being openly homophobic or openly racist now are the worst possible things that you Or openly sexist are the worst possible things that you can be in a professional environment. Like at some point you have to say we've won, we really have won. Does that mean there's no homophobia, No,

of course not. Does it mean there's no racism, No, of course not. But there's a lot of you know, everyone's fighting battles. You know how much of a penalty it is to be short. You know how much of a penalty it is to be ugly. They've done studies short. I don't appersonally, you don't, of course, God, because you're you're a seven foot goliath. You're a beautiful man, I mean you are just you're a god essentially, this adonis. I'm sure it's very hard, but I'm sure it's very hard. Listen,

it is difficult. You know, they've done studies where you had job candidates are discriminated against if they're short and ugly versus if they're tall and beautiful. Like everyone has, everyone, there are penalties to everything, basically, and at some point my point about pride, Don't be proud of shit that you can't control. Don't be proud of being pretty, don't be proud of being tall, don't be proud of being gay.

It's all just They're all just attributes. Well, yes, I mean there are certain contacts and certain characteristics where if you said you're proud of them, you would come across as narcissistic by any reasonable standard of narcissism. But then there are other characteristics where if you say them, you're exalted, as enlightened. I guess, well, so there is kind of a hypocrisy there to a certain degree. Now am I saying, am I making the case that people who say they're

proud of their sexuality or being narcissistic? No, I'm not saying that, but I'm just saying from larger for logical consistency, right, like why, I'm just asking the question. I dare to ask questions. I've found this ever since I was like two years old. I always wanted to know if I was the kid in the classroom there was like I have more questions than answers. I really do, Like, like, for like why I always question things about logical consistency. I was like, well, if you're gonna say X, like,

are you gonna have to say why too? I feel like no one can kind of talk that way these days getting in trouble, right, absolutely. I mean that's what my whole career is based on, is asking those questions and making it okay to ask those questions and making it okay to hear answers from people who might be outside the mainstream or might not necessarily you know, it's it's incredible to me that so many of us are

talking on a predictable script at the moment. Scott like, if I that's true, and this is being worsened by social media, it's being worsened by the mainstream media, by Fox News and by MSNBC, Like it's extraordinary to me that if I ask you what you think about whether or not corporations pay enough tax I can probably tell from your answer what you think about climate change. Now,

why is that the two things are completely unrelated? Corporate taxation and climate science have nothing to do with each other. But the vast majority of people will have picked from column A or column B, and their tribe, their team will have certain beliefs about a whole set of completely unrelated things, from inequality to climate science, to transgenderism, to whatever, and to religious freedom. And most people will fall predictably

inside a silo of thought. They have inadvertently ticked a list of checkboxes about their beliefs, and they've subscribed to a team that has a certain set of beliefs. That's why I so admire people like you and me and the other people who in our culture at the moment are making a concerted effort to escape the silo and to escape the checkbox and say no, screw that, that we don't have to play that game. We're allowed to have a bunch of different thoughts in our mind at

the same time. We're allowed to explore wherever our curiosity goes. We're allowed to ask uncomfortable questions and have uncomfortable conversations, as the name of my podcast suggests, and we're allowed to hopscotch between the checklists. And has there point me to a time or a place in history where one side has had a monopoly on the truth and has been one hundred percent right? I can't think of one. I mean right. So it's obvious that that would probably

be true right now. And it's highly likely that the current progressive woke orthodoxy has some flaws, and it's highly likely that the current conservative orthodoxy has some flaws. So if you believe either of them wholeheartedly, you are wrong

a significant portion at the time. So if you're truly an independent thinker, and if you value reason, and you value the virtue of conversation and of of intellectual thought, you're gonna find yourself being the target of hate campaigns from one side or another because your your opinions are just not going to align neatly with the two silos

that we've created. And that's a good thing. I think part of the frustration of being a free thinker, and I wouldn't want to be any other way, but is that I don't even like reducing people to the idea like woke people, because there are certain things that I'm sure I could say that would make me sound extraordinarily woke, you know, And I'm sure there are things I would say that would make me sound very different than woke.

I like to kind of mix and match different things based on what I think of them, independently of each other. So I really like to mix and match different political policies. I like to mix, mix and match things that some people would call wokes with some things that they were going to do. If things make sense to me, they

make sense to me. There are things coming from the so called woke people that make a lot of sense to me, and there are a lot of things that come from the so called wok people that don't make sense to me. I think it's just a shame that we live in an climate where you have to pick a side, and when you pick that side, you have to agree with everything on that side, and if you decided you're not on the other side, you have to

disagree with everything on the other side. That's what infuriates me. Yes, So how do we de escalate that? Well? Maybe I hope the kind of conversations we're having. I hope more people can have honest, compassionate conversations like this that that are in the in the nuance zone or in the

gray zone. That would certainly be one way. But also, you know, like people like Andrew Yang is trying to form a whole third party, you know, the Forward Party, because he's like, well, we creating this binary is not good for him, so maybe can we stop just pitting binaries against each other? And with Abraham Maslow called dichotomy transcendence.

That's the phrase he used, which I love that. That's great. Yes, that's just a fancy way of saying having two ideas in your head at the same time, I or more than two ideas in your head at the same time. I do think that on a personal level, Pickle often ask me what I think the solution is, and as you say, there might be structural or political solutions, like

a third party. I think on a human level, on an everyday level, the best thing to do is to try to note when you're not being generous to people you disagree with to their ideas, when you're caricaturing them. I think that's the most useful thing because so frequently, like I was. I was pitching a show, an idea on my radio show. I wanted to do a segment about nuclear power the other day. Now, one of my

producers is young, a young, woke female. I said, if we're going to be serious about climate change and about fighting the fighting climate chaos, then I want to understand why the environmental left is still so opposed to nuclear power, because my understanding is that new nuclear reactors are extremely safe. You know, you're not going to get a Chernobyl again if we're using the new designs in you know, and setting them up the way that western liberal democracies would.

So what exactly is the objection If this is going to be a you know, our ticket a short term you know, maybe when you use them for one hundred years, until renewables get better, until batteries get better, what exactly is the objection? Is it rational or is it a kind of an anti nuclear superstition because I've read things online that lead me to believe that that nuclear power

is safe. And she rolls her eyes a little bit, this producer and goes and she goes, yeah, I've been to that segment of the internet as well as if to say there's this segment of the Internet that is easily dismissible where right wing idiots are promoting nuclear power. But I don't really have to investigate that because I just sort of know that it's role now. That to me is an example of where you should catch yourself and go, that's not thinking. It's not again, it's I'm

inside this silo. Of course, it doesn't occur that way to her. To her, it occurs that she's being enlightened and she believes in justice and environmental equity, and these other people are finding pretexts to promote something that is environmentally damaging. But constantly catching yourself in those moments where you're dismissing something you disagree with and going, why have I given it the benefit of the doubt? Here? Have I really done the work to actually hear out what

its most logical proponents are saying? Am I meeting them as close to the edge of what I think is reasonable from their perspective as I can go without losing my own credibility or intellectual credibility. That's what I'm always trying to do. Whoever I'm talking to, I'm trying to

see the world through their eyes. And give them as much ground as possible so that I'm not creating a straw man of their ideas, because that not only makes it easier to find compromises and to conciliate and to have a healthy, flourishing democracy and culture, but also makes my ideas much stronger. I mean, if I don't understand what the opponents, what my opponents really believe, then I don't really know why I believe what I believe either.

I mean, I have to be able to defend my positions in the face of the most power of the strongest opposition to them, not the weakest. So it makes no sense for me to go around only knocking over the weakest version of my oppon and arguments. I have to be able to take down the strongest ones. So I have to hear them, I have to engage with them. I have to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I have to sort of assume that they are right to some extent and then start picking apart what's wrong with their ideas from inside the worldview that they have not just firing arrows at their opinions and at their positions. From my point of view, that's going to get us nowhere.

So when I think about the solution to this, I think we need to change the incentives of social media companies for them to make them as much money as they do just on the amount of time that people spend on the site, because the algorithms are just extremification machines that make us, you know, that make us crave posts that are that either we agree with or that we really vehemently disagree with. You know, nuance is not

rewarded on social media. So you need to change that, and you need to change the way that we interact with each other so that just on a personal level, we're doing less dismissing of positions that we think are wrong or evil and more understanding of those positions, even if it means that we're not going to be one over by them. I think that is three quarters of the battle. Well that's it. But my default is that

I just I have a radically open mind. That so I feel like whenever I'm talking to someone and they say something to me, I don't care how ridiculous it sounds. I take it in, I process it, and I think, oh that's interesting, let me see what the evidence is. But that's my default. I don't know why I'm so weird in that why or why is everyone else so weird? Why is everyone like that? Well, yeah, but I mean no, I think you are weird, and I think I am. I think we can take that just in the sense

of being not normal. I mean, most people are tribal. Homot apiens are tribal. We're primates. We want to be in the klan, and people like you, like you and me, for some reason, either don't have that jigsaw piece or we think that it's virtuous to overcome it. I think in my case, it's just that I try to be virtuous in overcoming it. I don't. I don't lack the temptation to join a club I have. I feel this and I regard it as being pernicious, and so I

try to run from it. I think it might cause I'm just radically curious, and that's just that's my default state of being that just trumps everything else. I mean, I'm trying to think of like, you could say something that a horrible, horrible thing, and I'd be like, huh is that true? Like like you're not even supposed to entertain that certain horrible things could even be true. And you know, like I don't want to start by examples,

but do you know I just like that. My default is is that like, if I process the information and I don't pross it through a lens of like, oh, what should I not entertain? What should I entertain? What should I That's what a good philosopher or psychologist does, right, I mean? And this, you know, if you don't want to give any examples, I'll give an example that I'm stealing from my friend Sam Harris. He won't mind, but Sam says, you know, part of the point of philosophy

is that you're you're supposed to entertain outrageous ideas. You might be in a philosophy class and the professor might say, you know, why is it wrong to eat dead babies? Right? I mean, like the babies are already dead, you know where we have them. They're edible, they're nutritious, they're high in protein. If the parents are okay with it, or if the parents are dead as well because they all died in a car accident or something. This is food.

Why are we wasting resources producing other food when we already have these dead babies that we could be eating. And he makes the point that if you were to just grab that line from the philosophy professor and pull it out of context and put it on social media and say why aren't we dead babies? Right, then all of a sudden, that would just sound like the most

horrendous thing. But in order to understand why we value what we value and why our moral universe looks the way it does, you actually do have to push at the edges of it with questions like that. And then of course someone cheekily made a meme that went on social media of Sam Harris saying why can't we just eat dead babies? With a picture of a pen ominous looking picture of Sam Harris's face. So, but that's the

kind of thing that you're talking about. I mean, you have to, I agree, you have to be able to entertain any and all questions. Otherwise you're just floating along on a bunch of inherited assumptions and you're not actually getting to the CrOx of why we believe what we believe. Yeah, and how can we separate the search for truth from like the compassion issues. It's a different issue to me, like I would or teae anything. But then, like if you started to say like, Okay, well this is true,

but then there's implications for hurting people. Well, then something else clicks in my head, Like there are different things that click in at different times, right, Like I'm a caring human. I'm a caring human, but I also care about the truth, Like why can't we have both? Yeah? Yeah, no, that's great. That's great. My man. You said you had to go to a meeting at four fifteen? Is that is that I do? Unfortunately, I have to produce a

radio show. I do three hours of live radio a day on ABC Radio in Australia, ABC Radio, Sydney, So I'd like I could just stay here all day and chat with you. But it was super fun. Other people want to hear these dulcet tones as well. Yes, I got you. I don't want to hug you all to myself. I really appreciate you having this conversation with me and being able to talk in the grey zone. It's it's very refreshing when I could talk to someone in the

gray zone. It's great to you, Scott. I came off when when you were on my podcast Uncomfortable Conversations, which people check out. It's a great because you'll get insights into Scott that you may not otherwise have. I came off that recording and yeah, it was like I was floating along on a cloud. It was really great. It's just lovely to throw ideas around with you. I think you're you're a terrific asset and the contribution that you're

making is fantastic. We need more people like like you, throwing ideas at the wall and just having these conversations that are stimulating and you know, free from free from the usual nonsense. Well, thank you, Josh, Well all the best to you. Thanks Scott, make you care jeez like. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react and way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusycology

podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page thus Ecology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior and creativity.