WEBVTT
1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.520
Get a humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. I'm in Japan. This is a live.
2
00:00:09.520 --> 00:00:15.080
It's not live. Broadcast from a hotel in Osaka. I'm on vacation with the family. I'm
3
00:00:15.080 --> 00:00:19.120
not going to bang on about how great Japan is. Everyone knows Japan is great. I was going
4
00:00:19.120 --> 00:00:24.760
to say, oh, what a lovely place, lovely people, lovely scenery, lovely food. You know
5
00:00:24.760 --> 00:00:28.000
that. You know, you don't have to have been to Japan to know Japan is great. Nobody
6
00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:31.640
goes to Japan and comes back home. What a dump. What a shit hole that places. They need
7
00:00:31.640 --> 00:00:35.920
to get there. They need to get their act in order. They need to figure out how to do things
8
00:00:35.920 --> 00:00:44.240
with more discipline. So it's chaos is not chaos. It's lovely. Admittedly, the lack of chaos
9
00:00:44.240 --> 00:00:51.640
can be somewhat disorientingly like uniform and conformist and difficult to glean from
10
00:00:51.640 --> 00:00:56.880
the foreigners perspective. But that's on me. That's on me for being a dumb white boy child
11
00:00:56.880 --> 00:01:03.120
blundering into a very orderly place whose norms I don't know. I will say the one thing
12
00:01:03.120 --> 00:01:08.640
I've noticed is that Japanese culture, the Japanese people, great people, lovely people.
13
00:01:08.640 --> 00:01:16.640
They really revere simplicity in all things except for toilets. Very simple. You know,
14
00:01:16.640 --> 00:01:24.200
they love simple, delicate, petite little, not toilets. Huge. They have things blowing
15
00:01:24.200 --> 00:01:29.720
out everywhere and up here, wherever. It's complicated. For a simple people, they really
16
00:01:29.720 --> 00:01:35.480
need to simplify the toilets. That being said, let's move on to the topic of today's conversation
17
00:01:35.480 --> 00:01:42.960
because being in Japan, I found it incumbent upon myself to track down the best podcasters
18
00:01:42.960 --> 00:01:49.480
in the land and do a crossover episode with those people. Their podcast is called Decoding
19
00:01:49.480 --> 00:02:00.120
the Gurus. It's an anthropologist, Chris Kavanaugh, a psychologist, Matt Brown. They take
20
00:02:00.120 --> 00:02:08.000
the piss out of prominent public figures who are influential in public discourse, especially
21
00:02:08.000 --> 00:02:13.120
if they're influential for promoting unconventional ideas or controversial ideas. Matt and Chris
22
00:02:13.120 --> 00:02:17.400
take a big steaming dump on them and play clips of their appearances on various shows. We're
23
00:02:17.400 --> 00:02:21.360
talking about the Jordan Peterson's of the world, Joe Rogan's, the Eric Weinstein's,
24
00:02:21.360 --> 00:02:27.880
James Lindsay's, Peter Teal. They'll just pick a person and they'll go ham for like
25
00:02:27.880 --> 00:02:33.360
three hours. It's very entertaining. I love those guys. I've been on the show before,
26
00:02:33.360 --> 00:02:41.680
maybe twice. I'm not sure. Chris, who is a Northern Irish gentleman, lives in Tokyo. Matt
27
00:02:41.680 --> 00:02:46.760
happens to be Australian and lives in the middle of nowhere, frankly. He lives in some part
28
00:02:46.760 --> 00:02:51.280
of Australia that no Australian has ever been to. Nobody has ever heard of. It's a town
29
00:02:51.280 --> 00:02:58.480
called Bunderburg in regional Queensland. No offense to Bunderburgians, but it's no
30
00:02:58.480 --> 00:03:04.000
Osaka. Let's put it that way. The toilets are not complicated in Bunderburg. I sat
31
00:03:04.000 --> 00:03:08.200
down. Chris was kind enough to come over to my Airbnb in Tokyo and we sat down. We got
32
00:03:08.200 --> 00:03:13.440
Matt on. We dialed up. Matt on the big old audio machine. We wanted the dangerous idea
33
00:03:13.440 --> 00:03:24.000
that we wanted to broach was the idea that the people who bang on a lot about bravely
34
00:03:24.000 --> 00:03:31.600
talking about dangerous ideas, perhaps even yours truly, may just be actually conformists
35
00:03:31.600 --> 00:03:39.520
inside their own cocoons of cozy, anti-elite, dangerous idea, talking points. The talking
36
00:03:39.600 --> 00:03:46.200
about how much you talk about edgy ideas that the mainstream media won't touch is in fact
37
00:03:46.200 --> 00:03:52.200
its own echo chamber. We wanted to discuss what actually takes courage. What is genuinely
38
00:03:52.200 --> 00:03:57.440
heterodox? Who should you platform? Who should you not platform? What is just pandering to
39
00:03:57.440 --> 00:04:03.360
your base? Chris, as I mentioned, who's the anthropologist, is a specialist in conspiracy
40
00:04:03.360 --> 00:04:09.200
theories and radicalisation and religion and rituals and all that sort of stuff. Matt
41
00:04:09.200 --> 00:04:14.000
who's the psychologist is interested in social science and gambling and addiction, but
42
00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:19.360
the two of them really just sort of have a sense of left take on these sort of alt-right
43
00:04:19.360 --> 00:04:23.120
figures and I get in trouble when I call them alt-right. I use alt-right to mean like a
44
00:04:23.120 --> 00:04:28.560
kind of a new media right wing, bro, manosphere, podcast stand, but some people think it means
45
00:04:28.560 --> 00:04:35.200
fascist or neo-Nazi. Not that, but the kind of people who I'm talking about in podcast
46
00:04:36.080 --> 00:04:39.120
stand and it's something of a watershed moment at the moment. I mean, I'm glad that we're
47
00:04:39.120 --> 00:04:42.240
talking right now and I wanted to have this conversation with them right now. And by the way,
48
00:04:42.240 --> 00:04:46.320
this is a crossover episode on their podcast as well. So although their listeners won't hear
49
00:04:46.320 --> 00:04:51.280
this intro, they will hear the body of the conversation on their feed too. It's a watershed
50
00:04:51.280 --> 00:04:59.520
moment because some prominent people in the podcast alternative new media universe are breaking ranks
51
00:04:59.520 --> 00:05:06.320
with the rest of the cabal. Sam Harris has been doing it for a while. In January, he came out
52
00:05:06.320 --> 00:05:14.080
swinging against Elon Musk. He recently had a sub-stack live where his manager was sort of
53
00:05:14.080 --> 00:05:20.080
Jarron was sort of, you know, asking him questions about the rift between him and Rogan.
54
00:05:20.720 --> 00:05:26.400
And most recently, and I hadn't heard this episode when Chris and Matt and I spoke a couple of days
55
00:05:26.400 --> 00:05:32.160
ago, but it's definitely worth a listen and I've listened to it since Douglas Murray went on Joe
56
00:05:32.160 --> 00:05:38.800
Rogan's show with the comedian and libertarian commentator Dave Smith and spent the first half
57
00:05:38.800 --> 00:05:46.160
hour of the conversation really getting stuck into Joe and Dave for platforming people who have
58
00:05:46.160 --> 00:05:52.080
crazy theories about things. I've been texting with Douglas since then. My congratulations and
59
00:05:52.080 --> 00:05:57.440
here I've been trying to sort of, I guess, tease apart and wrestle through what our objection
60
00:05:57.440 --> 00:06:02.960
really is because it's not that we're saying that alternative podcasty people shouldn't talk to
61
00:06:02.960 --> 00:06:10.480
whoever they want to talk to or that we should only listen to elites. But rather, I think something
62
00:06:10.480 --> 00:06:17.280
closer to the Carl Sagan point, which originally in a different form is really David Humes point,
63
00:06:17.360 --> 00:06:24.320
that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And if you're going to be talking to a lot
64
00:06:24.320 --> 00:06:33.280
of guests who have highly unconventional beliefs about vaccine science, about the history of
65
00:06:33.280 --> 00:06:38.640
World War II and whether or not Churchill was culpable for starting it, about whether or not
66
00:06:38.640 --> 00:06:44.480
Putin is really the bad guy in Ukraine, about a whole bunch of things. If you're going to take
67
00:06:45.040 --> 00:06:52.480
really edge-lord stances, then you need to have or you ought to have very strong reasons for doing so.
68
00:06:52.480 --> 00:06:57.120
If you're going to hold really provocative positions, you should have powerful defences for
69
00:06:57.120 --> 00:07:04.640
them. And it's not enough to just lob some big gigantic claim about how actually the Ukrainians
70
00:07:04.640 --> 00:07:09.120
of the bad guys in Ukraine or Churchill was the bad guy in World War II. And then when people
71
00:07:09.120 --> 00:07:13.920
challenge you want to, you say, well, I'm just a comedian. I'm just a podcast or whatever.
72
00:07:13.920 --> 00:07:18.800
So that was basically Douglas's point on Joe Rogan's show. We don't talk specifically about that,
73
00:07:18.800 --> 00:07:24.400
but I just want you to understand that I think the changing layers of discourse that this particular
74
00:07:24.400 --> 00:07:30.400
conversation is feeding on and also dropping into. We talk quite a lot about Douglas Murray on
75
00:07:30.400 --> 00:07:35.520
Lex Friedman's show, which I hope is amusing. We mentioned Candace Owens, who is another person
76
00:07:35.520 --> 00:07:40.320
who comes up a lot on decoding the gurus. But most of all, we just have a lot of fun. And
77
00:07:40.400 --> 00:07:44.880
afterwards Chris and I went out and he fed me delicious sushi. So what's not to love? I hope
78
00:07:44.880 --> 00:07:51.440
you enjoy it. As much as I did, the one, the only Chris Kavanaugh matte brown of decoding the gurus.
79
00:07:55.200 --> 00:07:59.600
You guys recently did an episode of, well, you've done many an episode about Lex Friedman,
80
00:08:00.240 --> 00:08:07.200
which tickles my fancy. Because if there's one thing I don't understand about this new media
81
00:08:07.280 --> 00:08:15.600
landscape, it's Lex Friedman. It's, I don't understand how a person, I mean, I don't want to be
82
00:08:15.600 --> 00:08:26.080
uncommon. This is decoding the gurus. But there are various, look, there are various strands of
83
00:08:26.080 --> 00:08:34.000
this of the emerging new media landscape and podcast to stand and like bro tech culture and
84
00:08:34.000 --> 00:08:40.480
the decline of the legacy media and the rise of independent media, which are worth teasing a part
85
00:08:40.480 --> 00:08:47.520
and bringing together and analyzing in, I suppose, with greater clarity and specificity than maybe
86
00:08:47.520 --> 00:08:54.400
we sometimes do. And all of them are exhibited in their worst form by Lex Friedman. Like here's the
87
00:08:54.480 --> 00:09:04.640
apotheosis of motivated reasoning, blind spots, biased questioning. And what offends me the most
88
00:09:04.640 --> 00:09:11.120
as a craftsman of this form? It's just how bad an interviewer he is.
89
00:09:11.120 --> 00:09:17.920
You know, if he was, if he was violent, like his main offence is one of style, I agree. I mean,
90
00:09:18.000 --> 00:09:23.520
you take Joe Rogan. I hate the guy, but I understand why he is popular. I get it.
91
00:09:24.080 --> 00:09:29.840
With, you know, Lex Friedman will be sitting there talking to someone incredibly important and also
92
00:09:29.840 --> 00:09:33.520
we'll say, so do you like puppies?
93
00:09:38.720 --> 00:09:44.640
It's not that far from there. But, you know, Josh sent a clip mark. I think this is a good time
94
00:09:44.720 --> 00:09:51.760
to play because it illustrates Lex's interview technique. You know, people that might not be familiar.
95
00:09:51.760 --> 00:09:59.120
So, yeah, there's, I also have to say, you say that you hate Joe. Obviously, I love Joe.
96
00:09:59.120 --> 00:10:04.240
Even though I don't, I think he's a pernicious force in the world. I love him as like I love a
97
00:10:04.240 --> 00:10:09.600
puppy dog. And I think he's a immensely talented racon, tur, and conversationalist, which is what
98
00:10:09.600 --> 00:10:15.680
Lex is not, which is why Lex baffles me in a way that Rogan doesn't. But so this clip is,
99
00:10:15.680 --> 00:10:23.360
I actually played this on my show when I had the comic Mark Norman on my show. He's an increasingly
100
00:10:23.360 --> 00:10:29.680
successful American comic, very funny guy. And if you ever want an example of a guest who brings
101
00:10:29.680 --> 00:10:35.840
everything to an interview, he is, he is just coming out with the gags at like a machine gun
102
00:10:35.920 --> 00:10:42.000
fire pace. So if you're willing to dance and rumble with him, it can be an incredibly entertaining
103
00:10:42.000 --> 00:10:47.760
interview. And Mark had just been on Lex Friedman's show. And I listened to that as research before
104
00:10:47.760 --> 00:10:53.920
I'd interviewed Mark in case there was anything there. And it was so intriguing to hear the difference
105
00:10:53.920 --> 00:10:58.560
between what Mark was bringing to the conversation and what Lex was bringing to the conversation
106
00:10:58.640 --> 00:11:05.680
that I actually played this clip for Mark live on my show to hear his reaction because I wanted
107
00:11:05.680 --> 00:11:11.280
to understand what his impression of Lex was. So I haven't listened to Mark throwing some zingers
108
00:11:11.280 --> 00:11:19.280
at Lex and Lex definitely tap dancing away. Are you married? No, single virgin. Of course, yeah,
109
00:11:19.280 --> 00:11:23.520
I can't imagine. I bet you'd be great and bad. You're ripped. The best hairline in podcast.
110
00:11:24.480 --> 00:11:28.000
Yeah, I don't know. I haven't tried yet. So we'll have to see. All right. Well, let me know.
111
00:11:28.000 --> 00:11:34.960
Pretty big hog on you. Yeah, I could see you packing a crazy, crazy tool downtown.
112
00:11:34.960 --> 00:11:39.200
Mm-hmm. That matters to girls. Apparently. Yeah. That's all I hear about.
113
00:11:40.480 --> 00:11:44.160
Okay. New Orleans. You grew up in New Orleans? Yeah. Born and raised.
114
00:11:45.360 --> 00:11:49.680
Tramay outside the French Quarter. You ever been? Yeah. Don't remember it.
115
00:11:49.760 --> 00:11:54.160
Oh, you drink? Yeah, I drink. Of course I drink. I don't know. I can't tell if you have fun.
116
00:11:54.160 --> 00:11:58.640
No, not really, but Russia. I mean, Russia, of course, I drink all that kind of stuff.
117
00:11:58.640 --> 00:12:04.080
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Okay. Beer was just labeled an alcoholic beverage in 2011.
118
00:12:04.720 --> 00:12:10.080
Fun fact. What do you mean? In Russia. It was just drinks. It was just like apple juice before.
119
00:12:10.080 --> 00:12:13.120
It finally got declared legally as an alcoholic beverage.
120
00:12:15.680 --> 00:12:19.040
Which means you can regulate it. That kind of thing. I guess so. Yeah.
121
00:12:19.040 --> 00:12:23.760
See, that's where your brain goes. Yeah. I just go out of these fucking rustic. I didn't even know there's rules about drinking.
122
00:12:24.720 --> 00:12:31.120
Good. I'm learning about Russia from you. So, what's the difficult memory experience from childhood
123
00:12:31.120 --> 00:12:36.480
in New Orleans that made you the man you are today?
124
00:12:37.440 --> 00:12:45.200
So, so look, this speaks to the mystery that you were referring to, Josh. Like, why? Why?
125
00:12:45.280 --> 00:12:51.360
What is the appeal of that? I have a suggestion. Please. Please.
126
00:12:52.880 --> 00:13:00.560
I'm lost. I am a little, I'm a little sparrow at sea, like flailing around. I'm comprehending.
127
00:13:00.560 --> 00:13:08.720
I mean, I think there's the part of the aspect is your friend, Joe, and Elon Musk, villain of the
128
00:13:08.720 --> 00:13:18.080
R, but long before he, you know, was on his current villain arc, he, he gave Lexa a leg up because Lex
129
00:13:18.080 --> 00:13:22.400
wrote a paper saying that Tesla's were. Yeah, but lots of people have been on Joe's job. Don't show,
130
00:13:22.400 --> 00:13:29.440
Joe's show seven times. I'm not, I'm not, he's not answering my calls. So, you want,
131
00:13:29.440 --> 00:13:33.360
but did you have Elon Musk, right? So, you did Musk, Andrew, and the multiplying factor,
132
00:13:33.360 --> 00:13:38.240
but the other thing is, so that's the, like, initial thing, but that isn't going to take you, you
133
00:13:38.240 --> 00:13:43.520
know, to the heights that Lex has risen to. So, the other thing, and I think this is the key,
134
00:13:43.520 --> 00:13:52.800
my dick, is that it's unbridled sycophantcy, untold levels of sycophantcy, because, like,
135
00:13:52.800 --> 00:13:57.200
but that explains why people will do the show, why guests will do the show, but it doesn't explain
136
00:13:57.200 --> 00:14:01.840
why humans will listen to the show, or why I even, but I mean, I only listen to the show because of
137
00:14:02.000 --> 00:14:06.400
the guests. I suppose it's like a self, it's like pulling yourself up by your shoelaces. How does
138
00:14:06.400 --> 00:14:12.480
it happen? I listen because I want to hear the guests. Yeah. And the guests are there because
139
00:14:12.480 --> 00:14:17.040
people listen. Yeah. But it's a chicken and egg thing. How people listen, how were people listening
140
00:14:17.040 --> 00:14:21.440
before he was talking to Zelensky? Why does anyone want to listen to that conversation with Mark
141
00:14:21.440 --> 00:14:26.000
Norman when you can hear Mark Norman being interviewed by any number of human beings?
142
00:14:26.560 --> 00:14:33.040
No. Okay. So, this is the thing. The one is that the, I think you're underestimating the level
143
00:14:33.040 --> 00:14:37.680
of sycophantcy that people are going to be treated to. Like, that is, it's really high.
144
00:14:37.680 --> 00:14:42.960
You think people, you think the listener wants it? No, no, no. So, I think that explains,
145
00:14:42.960 --> 00:14:48.160
you know, the guests going on, but then the, we live in the culture, and this is like part of
146
00:14:48.160 --> 00:14:53.280
the thing that we might talk about, but other characters as well, where there's like a really
147
00:14:53.280 --> 00:15:01.120
pervasive atmosphere of admiration for like, you know, people that are successful,
148
00:15:01.120 --> 00:15:10.400
billionaires, podcasters, andrytid, whatever. Like, there's this desire for people to like
149
00:15:10.400 --> 00:15:14.960
receive wisdom from people who are to find out more about what makes them tick. So, if you see like,
150
00:15:14.960 --> 00:15:21.040
oh, there's a four-hour interview with this guy who's super successful and he's laying
151
00:15:21.440 --> 00:15:26.160
you know, his secrets. I think like, once upon a time, people would have been like more
152
00:15:26.160 --> 00:15:30.960
cynical and like, why the fuck do I want to hear from some like, billionaire about how, you know,
153
00:15:30.960 --> 00:15:36.320
his hard-knock life when, you know, he's sat around in jets, but the culture and I seems to be like,
154
00:15:36.880 --> 00:15:44.000
yeah, let's get the wisdom. Like, if we have a really, there's a hero worship that he's indulging
155
00:15:44.400 --> 00:15:50.480
in in a way. Yeah, I suppose it's true. Yeah, and I suppose it's true that if you, like,
156
00:15:51.200 --> 00:15:57.200
the best thing I can say about Lex is if you just removed him from the equation altogether,
157
00:15:57.920 --> 00:16:02.480
the interview wouldn't be much better if it was just a monologue. So, like, he's not doing any
158
00:16:02.480 --> 00:16:08.320
active harm in the sense that I could just like, if he has, I suppose I'm interested in hearing
159
00:16:08.400 --> 00:16:16.800
Zelensky talk for three hours about his worldview. And I guess what Lex's show gives you is three,
160
00:16:16.800 --> 00:16:21.840
it's like, it's like he's just collecting a bunch of people who can give their own master class,
161
00:16:21.840 --> 00:16:25.520
like he's not questioning them, he's not doing any journalism, he's giving, he's allowing the
162
00:16:25.520 --> 00:16:32.800
person the platform to espouse their worldview for three hours straight. And that's, I suppose there's
163
00:16:32.800 --> 00:16:36.160
a, there is a utility in that. If you want to hear the person talking for three hours and there's
164
00:16:36.160 --> 00:16:39.360
no other context in which they would sit down in front of an open microphone and just talk
165
00:16:39.360 --> 00:16:45.200
for three hours. Okay, Josh. I think I can answer your question because I think there's a reason
166
00:16:45.200 --> 00:16:53.120
that isn't apparent to cynical men of the world like us. And that is his style. You know, that
167
00:16:53.120 --> 00:17:02.160
foe, you know, like childlike wisdom that he sort of, you know, this sort of blatant signaling
168
00:17:02.160 --> 00:17:08.880
of humility, that kind of thing, you know, that, that, that light, like ultra philosophy light
169
00:17:08.880 --> 00:17:14.480
stuff that he injected in there, talking about love and identity and meaning and stuff like that.
170
00:17:14.480 --> 00:17:19.040
And, and that kind of real like to us to me anyway, I don't want to speak for you guys,
171
00:17:19.040 --> 00:17:24.160
but it just sounds like out of saccharine bullshit. But to many people when he's talking about
172
00:17:24.800 --> 00:17:32.960
kindness and truth. And yeah, okay, they, they're going right on. I like it. It's a bit
173
00:17:32.960 --> 00:17:40.320
brain A brown. It's like, you know, it's like, brain A brown for men. Yeah, it's like, it's like,
174
00:17:40.320 --> 00:17:47.520
he's the person who can make you feel like there is a pursuit of, yeah, of comedy and togetherness
175
00:17:47.520 --> 00:17:54.320
amidst the turmoil. And why do we? I mean, his diagnosis of the problem with the media,
176
00:17:54.320 --> 00:18:00.480
with the mainstream legacy media, which you guys addressed a bit in your recent episode about him
177
00:18:01.360 --> 00:18:07.600
is almost exactly back to front. He seems to think that the problem with the legacy media
178
00:18:07.600 --> 00:18:13.840
is that everyone is too enthusiastic about being aggressive and negative. And in fact,
179
00:18:14.320 --> 00:18:20.640
that podcasting as well is too much about trying to go in for the, on the attack. And we need
180
00:18:20.640 --> 00:18:25.440
to be less judgmental of other people's ideas and more understanding and hear them out.
181
00:18:26.560 --> 00:18:30.640
What universe is, I mean, I understand that there's a problem of like, glib
182
00:18:32.640 --> 00:18:38.240
grandstanding journalists trying to ask gotcha questions in short eight minute interviews that
183
00:18:38.320 --> 00:18:42.720
they might get, you know, when they're interviewing the Treasury Secretary on, I don't know,
184
00:18:42.720 --> 00:18:46.160
you know, I was going to say 60 minutes, but it's actually 60 minutes doesn't do that, but like
185
00:18:46.160 --> 00:18:52.720
a one inferior version of 60 minutes. But the idea that the main hallmark of the media
186
00:18:52.720 --> 00:18:58.640
moment that we live in is that people are too rigorous in their intellectual disagreements. And
187
00:18:59.360 --> 00:19:09.520
and not too sycophantic and, you know, did he pay no attention to the interviews that Donald
188
00:19:09.520 --> 00:19:16.560
Trump was doing before the election? Did he pay no attention to the whole ecosystem of sort of
189
00:19:16.560 --> 00:19:25.120
back slapping, back scratching, you know, podcasts and I don't, I guess maybe I'm just like living in
190
00:19:25.120 --> 00:19:33.120
an echo chamber of my own media diet. But I think I'm like the only person in the universe who's
191
00:19:33.120 --> 00:19:42.000
making a serious attempt to engage agreeably but controversially with substantive intellectual
192
00:19:42.000 --> 00:19:48.080
points when the guest raises it and actually push back on them in the way that any one of us would
193
00:19:48.080 --> 00:19:53.760
if you were at the at a bar or a restaurant or a friend's place and someone said something that
194
00:19:53.760 --> 00:20:01.040
was patently stupid. Like we all in our I think social environments are much more tolerant of
195
00:20:01.040 --> 00:20:07.120
disagreeableness than we are in the media. It's like we have, we're wearing kid gloves and
196
00:20:07.120 --> 00:20:13.040
treading on egg shells and being and so afraid of offending people. I don't understand where his
197
00:20:13.040 --> 00:20:18.240
worldview comes from that he's this lone voice of friendliness in a sea of animosity.
198
00:20:19.200 --> 00:20:24.480
Yeah. Well, you know, the backstory to this is kind of the story of social media and the internet,
199
00:20:24.480 --> 00:20:31.600
right? So when social media first came along, it was obviously, you know, very nasty, a lot of,
200
00:20:31.600 --> 00:20:37.040
you know, aggression, people, you know, going off the handle, you know, for the same reason that
201
00:20:37.040 --> 00:20:42.080
people behave badly in cars, right? Because there's that social distancing. And you know,
202
00:20:42.080 --> 00:20:48.160
this became a trope at, you know, the the bad faith straw manning type, all that bad stuff that
203
00:20:48.160 --> 00:20:53.200
sort of happens on on the internet. And you know, that's all true. And then they sort of develop this
204
00:20:53.200 --> 00:20:59.280
kind of reverence for, you know, good faith conversations have, you know, always assuming the
205
00:20:59.280 --> 00:21:05.200
best of intentions from the person you're talking to is like this, it became a real virtue amongst
206
00:21:05.200 --> 00:21:11.680
a lot of people and having mixed amongst the, you know, the free speech and the heterodox crowd,
207
00:21:12.240 --> 00:21:19.680
online. Yeah, they still, and you know, they're right in a sense, but that virtue has become
208
00:21:20.640 --> 00:21:28.400
you know, almost a parody of itself. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure that good faith is precisely right.
209
00:21:28.400 --> 00:21:35.360
Like it's probably a couple of things being conflated here. One is granting as much as you
210
00:21:35.360 --> 00:21:40.560
possibly can to your opponent such that you can attack the strongest version of their argument,
211
00:21:40.560 --> 00:21:45.440
rather than the weakest one, you know, not straw manning them. And trying to be as conciliatory as
212
00:21:45.440 --> 00:21:49.920
you can and not needlessly antagonizing people. So you're saying being nice to Nazis basically,
213
00:21:49.920 --> 00:21:57.360
right? Being nice, yes, like, like, yes, in just a few months, the argument against that,
214
00:21:59.360 --> 00:22:07.760
let me put it this way, if I was arguing with a Nazi, in like the 1930s, I wouldn't start by saying
215
00:22:08.480 --> 00:22:14.640
you're a fucking Nazi. I would start by saying I understand that things are very difficult at the
216
00:22:14.640 --> 00:22:19.600
moment in your own land of Germany. And there are lots of complicated reasons for that. And you
217
00:22:19.600 --> 00:22:24.720
have an understandable desire to restore German greatness. However.
218
00:22:24.960 --> 00:22:29.680
So many people have criticized Mr. Hitler for going slightly too far.
219
00:22:32.320 --> 00:22:38.880
Josh, there's like the, you know, Lex often raises the question, this is like his go-to question,
220
00:22:38.880 --> 00:22:45.040
is can you steal man position for blah blah blah, right? And I'm in favor of what you said,
221
00:22:45.040 --> 00:22:50.000
like, you know, you shouldn't try to straw man someone's argument. And like you can even
222
00:22:50.080 --> 00:22:56.160
grant a little bit more charity than it deserves. And like, in some cases, to make the attack
223
00:22:56.160 --> 00:23:00.160
better, right? Because you can show that, look, I'm not, you know, if you want to criticize someone,
224
00:23:00.160 --> 00:23:05.680
and you are, if you're just presenting the weakest version of it, it's like, even if your goal is
225
00:23:05.680 --> 00:23:11.520
to take it down, it looks like you're kind of not doing a good job. But there's one,
226
00:23:12.480 --> 00:23:14.960
have you heard of the concept of star mining?
227
00:23:15.600 --> 00:23:22.880
No. So this is Eduardo. I forget this, Dean, but he's a head of darks version. He, he argued,
228
00:23:22.880 --> 00:23:29.280
a, I think, associated with fire, the organization, that we need to not just hang on, but we should
229
00:23:29.280 --> 00:23:36.400
actually elevate the argument to like the best possible form. So that like it's, so now we're
230
00:23:36.400 --> 00:23:42.000
super hero, we're super hero manning, we're super manning it. So like that, I thought that the
231
00:23:42.080 --> 00:23:47.760
issue is like, you might have to be often waffle on, but there's a perhaps too much like in terms of
232
00:23:47.760 --> 00:23:53.200
like, you know, we're saying it a bit too far in the positive direction. But like, there's a
233
00:23:53.200 --> 00:23:59.760
value in academia and I think in journalism as well of like the adversarial interaction.
234
00:23:59.760 --> 00:24:05.360
Yeah. Like the hard-nosed interview, right? Like I think the difference between like a caffeine
235
00:24:05.440 --> 00:24:09.920
Newman or it was a coffee young, the one who can't be young. Coffee young interviewed Jordan,
236
00:24:09.920 --> 00:24:13.760
Peter said, no, no, sorry. Coffee Newman. Coffee Newman interviewed Jordan Peterson.
237
00:24:13.760 --> 00:24:19.520
Right. That is in like, and I think with good reason, that's like a sort of a hit-beast attempt,
238
00:24:19.520 --> 00:24:24.160
right? Yes. It's kind of gotcha question. But Helen, Helen Lewis's was perfect. Yeah, absolutely
239
00:24:24.160 --> 00:24:29.520
perfect. But for a lot of people online, especially like, and I would say like for Lex Friedman or
240
00:24:29.600 --> 00:24:35.600
Jordan, and for Jordan Peterson themselves, he saw that the same way as like a brutal attempt to
241
00:24:35.600 --> 00:24:40.960
like, I don't think they do. I don't believe that they genuinely do. I mean, I don't believe that
242
00:24:40.960 --> 00:24:46.560
they don't see a difference between they just like the fact that he that Jordan won one and lost
243
00:24:46.560 --> 00:24:50.480
the other and he lost the other because Helen is formidable or any one may have her because
244
00:24:50.480 --> 00:24:55.920
coffee is not. But he's but Jordan and people like when I've heard Jordan talk about Helen
245
00:24:56.000 --> 00:25:01.360
multiple times, it sounds like he has a dartboard. Of course he does because he, he, you know,
246
00:25:01.360 --> 00:25:07.920
he's so caught in his own self-identity is that he's this sage and for him to be shown up as a bit
247
00:25:07.920 --> 00:25:15.040
of an emperor with not with no clothes by some uppity journalist is insulting to his, his self-identification.
248
00:25:15.040 --> 00:25:20.720
Right. Perhaps especially a feminist journalist, but the in not case though, for Jordan,
249
00:25:20.720 --> 00:25:27.280
I don't think he's pretending that he thinks Helen is a bad fief interlocutor with like, you
250
00:25:27.280 --> 00:25:33.520
know, a kind of agenda that they came down like that she was acting maliciously by asking her
251
00:25:33.520 --> 00:25:39.840
questions and whatnot. He seems generally very upset with her as a person and the way she approaches
252
00:25:39.840 --> 00:25:44.160
things. He's talked about her like being possessed by the, I don't know, the demon of anger or
253
00:25:44.160 --> 00:25:50.640
something like this when he talks about that. And so it seems to me that like not just the audience
254
00:25:50.640 --> 00:25:57.200
but them and this applies to a lot of heterodox forecasters as well. They genuinely take like that
255
00:25:57.200 --> 00:26:05.680
as an attack and attempt to besmirch them like, you know, asking those kind of questions is like
256
00:26:05.680 --> 00:26:12.480
doing the same thing as coffee human. And to me, there's like a big guy just say that.
257
00:26:13.120 --> 00:26:16.960
I think they just say that because they're embarrassed. I think if you got drunk with Jordan
258
00:26:16.960 --> 00:26:24.960
Peterson or a high on Hollywood or whatever else he was addicted to. And I think if you really
259
00:26:24.960 --> 00:26:30.000
interrogated him about it and asked him what he thinks that Helen was doing, I don't think that he
260
00:26:30.000 --> 00:26:34.720
would, I don't know, I doubt that he would be saying that she's demonically possessed and has the
261
00:26:34.720 --> 00:26:42.880
heart of an angry woman. I think you're wrong, Josh. We should get Jordan Peterson and get him
262
00:26:42.880 --> 00:26:49.360
drunk and see what? You know, the thing that this made me think of is like, so your interaction
263
00:26:49.360 --> 00:26:54.560
with Rogen, famously the myocarditis one, Matt, do you remember that? Yeah, I remember that.
264
00:26:54.560 --> 00:27:00.800
Okay, I have a clip here which I'll play for the whole time. Okay, so if people don't know
265
00:27:01.760 --> 00:27:09.920
in January of 2021, I went back on Rogen's show for the seventh time since 2014. And it was while he was
266
00:27:09.920 --> 00:27:15.920
in that snafu that people may remember the controversy about vaccine misinformation. And he said
267
00:27:15.920 --> 00:27:22.240
something that was not true. And it then became briefly a very viral moment. And everyone sort of
268
00:27:22.240 --> 00:27:27.200
like CNN was reporting it as if he got owned on his own show, which completely baffled me.
269
00:27:27.280 --> 00:27:33.520
But it was, he did kind of well. You can let the, let the list of it. I'll play the clip,
270
00:27:33.520 --> 00:27:40.480
not just the remind us for young boys in particular, there's an adverse risk associated with the
271
00:27:40.480 --> 00:27:47.120
vaccine. It's two to four fold increase in the instances of myocarditis. Yes, but you know what
272
00:27:47.120 --> 00:27:52.000
the, you know that there's an increased risk of myocarditis in among that age cohort from
273
00:27:52.000 --> 00:27:56.800
getting COVID as well, which exceeds the risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. I don't think that's
274
00:27:56.800 --> 00:28:00.320
true. I don't think it's true. I don't, no, no, I don't think it's true that there's an increased
275
00:28:00.320 --> 00:28:06.000
risk of myocarditis from people catching COVID that are young versus increased risk of myocarditis
276
00:28:06.000 --> 00:28:10.000
from the vaccine. No, there is. There's bodies. Well, let's look that up because I don't think that's
277
00:28:10.000 --> 00:28:14.640
true. There's bio carditis more common after COVID-19 infection than vaccination. But is this with
278
00:28:14.640 --> 00:28:22.800
children? Yeah, we're talking about young people and boys aged under 30 after there's this what says
279
00:28:23.200 --> 00:28:27.840
with children is the issue. Well, no, we were talking about 15 year olds. Well, we're talking about
280
00:28:27.840 --> 00:28:33.360
young children. So yes, 12 to 17, 12 to 17, more like to build myocarditis with three months of
281
00:28:33.360 --> 00:28:41.040
catching COVID at a rate of 450 cases per million infection. This compares to 67 cases of myocarditis
282
00:28:41.040 --> 00:28:46.720
per million of the same time, following their second dose of Pfizer. Yes, so you're about eight
283
00:28:46.720 --> 00:28:51.760
times likely to get myocarditis from getting COVID than from getting the vaccine. That's interesting.
284
00:28:51.760 --> 00:28:57.360
No, that's not what I've read before. But also, it's like, well, even when we're reading these
285
00:28:57.360 --> 00:29:01.440
things, it's like, what are we getting this from? It was this from the VAERS report. But even
286
00:29:02.160 --> 00:29:07.360
from the VAERS reports, when they report this stuff, it's like the amount of people that report,
287
00:29:07.360 --> 00:29:17.120
the I'm like, it's the under reporting. Josh, before you eat the fan joke, I know that you
288
00:29:17.120 --> 00:29:23.120
interviewed a relevant professional and like kind of highlighted the actual, you know, like issues
289
00:29:23.120 --> 00:29:29.440
around that topic after. But the reason I wanted to mention this is because, regardless of how you
290
00:29:29.440 --> 00:29:37.520
frame that unframed like Joe's follow up reactions to it, that is like a case where you are disagree,
291
00:29:37.520 --> 00:29:41.760
with Joe, right? Friendly, but you're saying, no, I think that's wrong. And wait, no, but we were
292
00:29:41.840 --> 00:29:48.080
talking about 15 year olds, right? That's not. So you are like kind of, not, not, you're calling
293
00:29:48.080 --> 00:29:52.400
right the way you were to friend, right? If you argue with them. But I'm very recently, I don't know
294
00:29:52.400 --> 00:29:58.480
if you'll have time to, or you have had time to hear it, yeah, but Douglas Murray just went on
295
00:29:58.480 --> 00:30:04.160
Jerome with, no, no, I didn't hear that. I heard Douglas on legs. Oh, Douglas went on with Steve Smith.
296
00:30:05.040 --> 00:30:12.720
I saw that that happened. I haven't heard it yet. So it starts off and I just explain who Dave Smith is.
297
00:30:12.720 --> 00:30:19.440
So Dave Smith is a libertarian in America, but he's a comic, right? He's a comic and he basically
298
00:30:19.440 --> 00:30:29.280
got a profile boost from Rogen as well, appearances there. But and he's libertarian, very pro-Palestine
299
00:30:29.280 --> 00:30:37.360
in the like, Israel Gaza conflict and has also like was kind of endorsing Trump before the
300
00:30:37.360 --> 00:30:43.600
election, right? So and he's quite isolationist and this sort of yeah, kind of like in the VN of the,
301
00:30:43.600 --> 00:30:51.120
you know, norm Chomsky version of like Western imperialism is a lot of the problems in the world,
302
00:30:51.120 --> 00:30:56.320
right? Yeah. So there's overlaps, right? Right. But poor, poor Putin was just back into a corner.
303
00:30:56.320 --> 00:31:01.680
Exactly. Yeah. So you predicted that, but here. So Douglas Murray,
304
00:31:01.680 --> 00:31:07.680
apparently to say holds like a lot of different geopolitical opinions on that, right? Very
305
00:31:07.680 --> 00:31:14.880
strong advocate for Israel. Some might say propaganda. I think we would all say it too strongly,
306
00:31:16.160 --> 00:31:23.440
the advocate for Israel. But and also as we played in the recent thing, very strongly critical
307
00:31:23.440 --> 00:31:29.040
of Putin and people that offer apologetics to him. Now in the Rogen episode that you haven't heard,
308
00:31:30.560 --> 00:31:37.600
remarkably at the start, he specifically calls out Joe at the very start of the interview and
309
00:31:37.600 --> 00:31:44.320
directly says you've been having people on that aren't experts that are very skewed to one side
310
00:31:44.320 --> 00:31:50.320
and it's been going on for multiple years and they they have a 40 minute near well back and forth.
311
00:31:50.320 --> 00:31:57.520
With Douglas Murray being quite strong and direct at times like and it gets relatively heated
312
00:31:57.520 --> 00:32:02.880
including with Rogen and Deep Smith. It was obviously going to get heated between them, but yeah,
313
00:32:02.880 --> 00:32:10.560
right. He calls out Rogen. Now Douglas Murray being Douglas Murray, he ends up like in a kind of
314
00:32:10.560 --> 00:32:15.120
difficult position because he saying you should have more people with actual expertise who have
315
00:32:15.120 --> 00:32:21.040
been to the region who understand this conflict at the same time that he's saying experts are
316
00:32:21.040 --> 00:32:25.680
consistently wrong about it. He then goes on the lab lake and he talks about you know and they are
317
00:32:25.680 --> 00:32:30.320
saying well this is inconsistent so you're saying we should keep that right. So he gets in trouble.
318
00:32:30.320 --> 00:32:36.320
But the whole thing for me was that I the first part was very cathartic because it's one of the
319
00:32:36.320 --> 00:32:43.200
really rare times I've heard someone directly, you know, read criticism to Joe directly to his
320
00:32:43.680 --> 00:32:50.000
the same thing that happened with when you were talking about the myocarditis and I'm curious
321
00:32:50.000 --> 00:32:56.000
for your kick as somebody that is like more, you know, broadly sympathetic to the the heterodox
322
00:32:56.000 --> 00:33:03.040
like kind of ecosystem. Why that is so verboten like given all the values that they say, you know,
323
00:33:03.040 --> 00:33:09.280
that we are for the marketplace of ideas we're here. Criticism is okay and yet anytime it happens
324
00:33:09.360 --> 00:33:15.040
you can see online now. Everybody is in that absolute tezzy about like the saying, you know,
325
00:33:15.040 --> 00:33:19.840
Douglas Murray will never be invited back and so on. And the same thing happens of course with
326
00:33:19.840 --> 00:33:26.080
Sam Harris, right? When Sam Harris has a temerity to disagree publicly with any of them,
327
00:33:26.080 --> 00:33:32.080
everybody melts down and there are these you know essays being written on the what's what's
328
00:33:32.160 --> 00:33:39.760
happened to Sam. So yeah, like it is the thing, right? Yeah, I mean, but people, I mean,
329
00:33:39.760 --> 00:33:44.800
firstly, I would not ascribe too much, I don't know how representative people yelling online are
330
00:33:44.800 --> 00:33:52.320
about like the what's relevant to me as a player in the space rather than like someone who's just
331
00:33:52.320 --> 00:34:00.240
topping away on Twitter about what Joe Rogan is doing is that is the cowardice of the average
332
00:34:00.240 --> 00:34:06.160
guest. Really, I mean, what's remarkable is not that Douglas and I are willing to talk to Rogan
333
00:34:06.160 --> 00:34:11.040
as if he was a friend and colleague. What's remarkable is that so few people do.
334
00:34:11.920 --> 00:34:18.480
They're like, it's incredible the reaction that I got after that exchange with people saying,
335
00:34:18.480 --> 00:34:23.520
oh, that was like so bright. And like, honestly, I remember, I remember coming out of the
336
00:34:23.680 --> 00:34:35.760
studio and waiting for my Uber to go to the airport and doing a mental catalog of, is any of this
337
00:34:35.760 --> 00:34:40.000
going to get me in the shit with my employer? Is any of this going to blow up? And like I sort of
338
00:34:40.000 --> 00:34:45.680
mentally went through the three hours thinking like, is there are there any landmines here that I
339
00:34:45.680 --> 00:34:51.760
should be mindful of? And there were a few that I identified that didn't cause any kind of
340
00:34:51.760 --> 00:34:58.560
a ripple. And that one, I remember, did not come up at all in my brain. I like that didn't land.
341
00:34:58.560 --> 00:35:04.160
That didn't code for me at the time as being anything, what remarkable, whatsoever. And then
342
00:35:04.160 --> 00:35:10.640
that was the one that became a shit storm. I think just because people, then this may be partly an
343
00:35:10.640 --> 00:35:15.360
American thing. It may just be a cultural difference between Aussies and Americans. Americans are
344
00:35:16.000 --> 00:35:20.720
polite. Like Americans don't think they're polite. They think they're uncouth. But they're actually
345
00:35:20.720 --> 00:35:26.160
super polite. Like which people think they think that British people are polite and that Americans
346
00:35:26.160 --> 00:35:32.320
are swaggering boobs. But actually, in which country would you be more likely to find a family
347
00:35:32.320 --> 00:35:37.680
sitting down and saying grace before a meal or holding the door open for somebody behind them as
348
00:35:37.680 --> 00:35:44.480
they walk, you know, as they walk through or vomiting in the street or like, Brits and Aussies
349
00:35:44.480 --> 00:35:48.960
were much more likely to interrupt, were much more likely to call people out. And I think there's
350
00:35:48.960 --> 00:35:55.680
a certain decorum that has developed in American podcasting where the norms are quite gracious,
351
00:35:55.680 --> 00:35:59.920
actually. And especially when a person has power, I guess they're also starfuckers more than we are.
352
00:35:59.920 --> 00:36:05.680
So they're more intimidated by the king in his lair and coming in and not wanting to, you know,
353
00:36:05.680 --> 00:36:09.840
challenge him in some way. And it maybe it's not a coincidence that Douglas is a Brit and that
354
00:36:09.840 --> 00:36:14.880
I'm an Aussie in the sense that yeah, like who gives a shit? Aren't we here to have like an
355
00:36:14.880 --> 00:36:18.560
interesting conversation the way that you would with colleagues and friends in any other context?
356
00:36:18.560 --> 00:36:23.600
Constantinist and Kissin is doing a good job of adopting culture as a British person.
357
00:36:25.120 --> 00:36:29.760
Him and Andrew Gold, they're holding up the British side of the sycophantics.
358
00:36:31.200 --> 00:36:35.680
Yeah, I mean, I'm also sometimes it's interesting that people, you know, in terms of platforming
359
00:36:35.680 --> 00:36:40.800
controversial people and like the and date wise Dave Smith, you know, being listened to and
360
00:36:40.800 --> 00:36:46.320
shouldn't we be listening to experts and stuff. I obviously copped the critique of why do I have
361
00:36:47.040 --> 00:36:50.800
Douglas Murray on the edge. Can someone's on the show? Why do I have Douglas Murray on the show?
362
00:36:50.800 --> 00:36:56.880
And every time I say anything about Israel or Palestine, someone will get into my mentions and say,
363
00:36:56.880 --> 00:37:02.800
this coming from the man who platforms the likes of Douglas Murray. And it's not even worth
364
00:37:02.800 --> 00:37:07.200
replying. Well, what about the Palestinians who I platform? Like, do you not see it?
365
00:37:08.800 --> 00:37:13.440
There's something contradictory about thinking that I endorse the views of every person who's on
366
00:37:13.440 --> 00:37:18.320
when I have people on who have wildly different views. Or Anthony Lowenstein, who was just on the
367
00:37:18.320 --> 00:37:27.760
show, who's the most anti-Israeli, anti-zyonist, journalist I can think of. And sort of balancing the,
368
00:37:28.480 --> 00:37:33.280
I'm basically just interested in people who have interesting ideas. And I'm interested in
369
00:37:33.280 --> 00:37:37.120
interrogating why those people have those ideas. That doesn't mean that I would have an
370
00:37:37.120 --> 00:37:42.000
unreconstructed fascist on the show because those ideas probably wouldn't be very interesting.
371
00:37:42.800 --> 00:37:47.520
Candace would be the closest, right? I mean, Candace, that's the borderline case.
372
00:37:47.520 --> 00:37:53.760
I have a question about that because like this would be my criticism of listening to that
373
00:37:53.760 --> 00:38:00.880
with Candace. It's like, I can understand, you know, I also, I even can understand Lex's
374
00:38:00.880 --> 00:38:07.440
argument for having Kanye. I look like there, I think there's much bigger like, you know, mental
375
00:38:08.080 --> 00:38:14.800
possible issues as well, right? Because Kanye generally seems unhinged. But there is an aspect
376
00:38:14.800 --> 00:38:20.320
which overlaps. And it's like Candace Lowen's, as you covered in the episode, a couple of times
377
00:38:20.320 --> 00:38:26.480
when you reference things for her. It's not like she's just on the block and we don't know what her
378
00:38:26.480 --> 00:38:32.880
perspective is, right? Like we know from Candace being in the discourse sphere for many years,
379
00:38:32.960 --> 00:38:41.040
that she is a conspiracy theorist. She is a, like, polemical partisan, very, like,
380
00:38:41.040 --> 00:38:47.120
loquacious, but she endorses, like, all manner of conspiracy theories and of a particular
381
00:38:47.120 --> 00:38:53.600
stripe, right? In a particular anti-jury stripe more recently. But, but she's not a, like,
382
00:38:54.560 --> 00:39:01.200
I would say somebody who demonstrates, like, a capacity for doing detailed research or for,
383
00:39:01.200 --> 00:39:08.480
she's good at talking, she's good at getting an audience. So if you talk there and you also know
384
00:39:08.480 --> 00:39:14.400
that she's like, she's a polished media person, so she can give answers, right? It's not the first
385
00:39:14.400 --> 00:39:19.920
time she's heard someone say, aren't you an extremist? Like, aren't you a conspiracy prone person?
386
00:39:19.920 --> 00:39:28.880
So, like, isn't it the case that, like, you're basically just, you know, giving her, like, a little
387
00:39:28.880 --> 00:39:34.400
bit of a platform and giving her another chance to say the same shit that she's been saying for
388
00:39:34.400 --> 00:39:41.440
years? Well, hopefully not. Hopefully not, right? I think there is a craft. This is where, sort of,
389
00:39:41.440 --> 00:39:47.600
like, without wanting to sound like a total wanker craft does come into some extent in the sense that
390
00:39:47.600 --> 00:39:52.000
it's very, there's no, you're right that there's no point in doing a gotcha with a person like
391
00:39:52.000 --> 00:39:56.720
Candace because she's so good in an adversarial debating environment that she will, she can own
392
00:39:57.360 --> 00:40:02.400
anybody. But I do think there's something interesting about a person who started out very far
393
00:40:02.400 --> 00:40:09.920
left. She was like, she found it a website that was apparently going to dox anybody who wasn't,
394
00:40:09.920 --> 00:40:14.800
you know, a social justice warrior. And then that fell apart because she didn't understand
395
00:40:14.800 --> 00:40:18.960
the internal logic of the social justice movement and she thought she was being an ally when
396
00:40:18.960 --> 00:40:25.200
in fact she wasn't and they turned on her. And so then she became, she started sort of flirting
397
00:40:25.280 --> 00:40:32.000
with this, you know, I'm a black person who stands up to black people orthodoxy and then
398
00:40:32.000 --> 00:40:37.120
became an anti-Semite. And like, that's a really weird trajectory and she has one of the most
399
00:40:37.120 --> 00:40:44.480
popular podcasts in the world. And so I think it's interesting a to interrogate what it's like
400
00:40:44.480 --> 00:40:51.520
to go on that journey and then be to try to expose her in ways that she's not going to find
401
00:40:51.600 --> 00:40:55.920
confrontational or that she might not even be bright enough to understand are happening
402
00:40:55.920 --> 00:41:01.280
in the conversation. Like there's a good maximum in journalism, which I think podcasters could do
403
00:41:01.280 --> 00:41:10.000
more to appreciate, which is if you want to, if you suspect that your guest is a liar or you
404
00:41:10.000 --> 00:41:15.680
suspect that your guest is a hypocrite or you suspect that your guest is operating in bad faith
405
00:41:15.760 --> 00:41:25.200
or is mistaken. Don't say to your guest, are you a liar? Why are you a liar, sir? That is
406
00:41:25.200 --> 00:41:29.680
probably what Lex Friedman is responding to when he's saying that there are bad versions of
407
00:41:29.680 --> 00:41:35.520
gotcha questions. That's just not a very good question. The best thing you could do if you suspect
408
00:41:35.520 --> 00:41:41.920
your guest is a liar is to reveal to the listener that they're lying in some way. If you think
409
00:41:41.920 --> 00:41:46.320
they're a hypocrite, then find a way of constructing a conversation such that the listener will go,
410
00:41:46.320 --> 00:41:51.680
huh, that guess sounds like a hypocrite or if you think they're mistaken, have a conversation in which
411
00:41:51.680 --> 00:41:56.640
the guest is going to go surely that which the listener is going to go surely that guest is mistaken.
412
00:41:56.640 --> 00:42:03.200
So my job with someone like Candace is to get as close as I can to making the accusation so that
413
00:42:03.200 --> 00:42:07.840
the listener understands that the accusation is being made and to get her to reveal something about
414
00:42:07.840 --> 00:42:13.040
herself at the same time as not overtly alienating her so that she just shuts the conversation down
415
00:42:13.040 --> 00:42:17.840
or goes into antagonistic mode. And there is a craft so that we should only get from tens of
416
00:42:17.840 --> 00:42:22.640
thousands of hours of interviewing, I think. I have a clip of Josh. He's always going to
417
00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:29.600
Candace that will maybe be relevant at this point. So I'll play it for you to hear. Don't you
418
00:42:29.600 --> 00:42:34.720
sort of find what you're looking for and if you keep hunting for ways in which the mainstream
419
00:42:34.720 --> 00:42:41.840
narrative about everything is corrupt, it could sort of send you around the bend. No, I just
420
00:42:41.840 --> 00:42:47.040
think that that's not like a small inconsistency, like whether you were born a man or a woman,
421
00:42:47.040 --> 00:42:51.040
I don't know, I feel like that. But this isn't just the only thing, Candace. I mean, we could
422
00:42:51.040 --> 00:42:56.960
play a bazillion clips or talk about a bazillion different things that whether it's about 9-11
423
00:42:56.960 --> 00:43:03.840
or about Frankus or the Jews or COVID epidemiology or vaccine medicine or online doxing or
424
00:43:04.400 --> 00:43:09.520
transgenderism or World War II, there would be a number of things that we could talk about where
425
00:43:10.320 --> 00:43:15.600
it strikes me that with the greatest respect, it might be a little bit like the experience you
426
00:43:15.600 --> 00:43:23.120
had initially with the social bullying thing where there's a whole ecosystem that has its own
427
00:43:23.120 --> 00:43:29.840
internal rules and ways of operating. You come in unaware of them. I mean, you said at the
428
00:43:29.840 --> 00:43:34.560
beginning of this conversation that you were sort of blindsided by the way that that whole doxing
429
00:43:34.560 --> 00:43:43.600
and harassment, game-a-gate ecosystem worked. You proudly call things as you see them to your
430
00:43:43.600 --> 00:43:51.520
credit because you're powerful and independent-minded, but you're sort of unfamiliar with the soup
431
00:43:51.520 --> 00:43:56.080
that you're swimming in and then the people who are familiar with it point out to you the ways
432
00:43:56.080 --> 00:44:01.040
in which you're unfamiliar with it and the reasons why you're wrong and you regard them as being
433
00:44:01.040 --> 00:44:09.680
conspired, you know, as imposing upon you speech codes and, you know, harassment and then you get
434
00:44:09.680 --> 00:44:13.680
to sort of play the victim when an actual fact is just that you don't really know what you're talking
435
00:44:13.680 --> 00:44:22.560
about. I don't think that's a fair assessment. I like that. I feel embarrassed even listening
436
00:44:22.640 --> 00:44:28.400
back to that because you can hear me just trying to not say the thing for so long. I'm like,
437
00:44:28.400 --> 00:44:32.720
you're very intelligent and powerful, but also, okay, I'll just say it. You don't know what you're talking
438
00:44:32.720 --> 00:44:35.760
about. Have you considered that you kind of what you're talking about? Yeah, you know the point you
439
00:44:35.760 --> 00:44:44.880
made about like the well or or not, you come from someone or not, like, you know, well or it's
440
00:44:44.880 --> 00:44:48.640
useful to do that in an interview. And I think that point because like I think that question
441
00:44:48.720 --> 00:44:55.600
now is a good illustration of it, but, you know, the streamer Destiny, yeah, he had Candace Owens on
442
00:44:55.600 --> 00:45:01.360
a bit before and it was back when he was like more inclined to kind of reach across the island,
443
00:45:01.360 --> 00:45:06.080
try to, you know, speak to some people on the hard right knee, we'd argue with them, but we'd do
444
00:45:06.080 --> 00:45:11.200
it politely, right? And he's he sensibly moved away from that because he said that like the way
445
00:45:11.200 --> 00:45:17.520
he took it was like he could have a conversation with them, but it was always him extending the kind
446
00:45:17.520 --> 00:45:25.200
of nice word or saying, you know, you are a thoughtful person. And like then they would still endorse
447
00:45:25.200 --> 00:45:29.120
all their conspiracies, they would still do the thing and they would still present like the left
448
00:45:29.120 --> 00:45:34.400
constantly as a caricature. So it was all on his side. And then before the election, he had
449
00:45:34.400 --> 00:45:42.880
Bacha Ungar Sagan on, I think that's open onto him from the free press. And she this is when it kind
450
00:45:43.040 --> 00:45:47.920
of had lost patience with that, right? And she was, she's a very Trump, she's the opinion editor
451
00:45:47.920 --> 00:45:52.720
of Newsweek. I had her on the show before the election as well on my show. And she is, yeah,
452
00:45:52.720 --> 00:45:59.520
probably the most articulate pro Trump. Yeah, well, yeah, in journalism. Yeah, articulate, but like
453
00:45:59.520 --> 00:46:04.400
today, just today, she wrote out a thing about high bad Barack Obama was and all the stuff that they
454
00:46:04.400 --> 00:46:10.560
did in 2008, one year before he became the president. He was like, remember when he passed all this
455
00:46:10.560 --> 00:46:17.280
legislation to five years, but in any case, she went off with destiny. And she just before
456
00:46:17.280 --> 00:46:21.520
a week before the election or something, she presented herself as, I'm a liberal. I don't know her
457
00:46:21.520 --> 00:46:28.160
I'm voting for it. And he, he said, no, you know, you're not like you are. And he was rude like
458
00:46:28.160 --> 00:46:33.360
she, he was basically said, you're, you do know who you're voting for? You're absolutely voting
459
00:46:33.360 --> 00:46:39.040
for Trump. We are not the same. We're not on the same team. And you know, subsequently, as
460
00:46:39.200 --> 00:46:45.200
it's went on, it's very clear. She is, like you said, a very strong advocate from Aga. So destiny
461
00:46:45.200 --> 00:46:51.440
could have, you know, kind of been more interpersonally receptive there and said, oh, yeah, look,
462
00:46:51.440 --> 00:46:56.160
we all agree, you know, that it is important. I mean, I would say two things about that and
463
00:46:56.160 --> 00:47:02.000
remember what you're going to say. One is destiny is playing in a different space. I think of destiny
464
00:47:02.000 --> 00:47:07.200
as being like a left wing version of Ben Shapiro or something where the whole, the argumentation
465
00:47:07.360 --> 00:47:12.080
is the point. Like, I love destiny. I love destiny's content. I think he's really interesting.
466
00:47:12.080 --> 00:47:17.440
And he's a fascinating debater, but he's really not about, I don't think teasing out truth.
467
00:47:17.440 --> 00:47:22.560
Or like he's about owning, he's about owning the destiny, disagreeing them. Secondly,
468
00:47:22.560 --> 00:47:28.160
there is a time and a place for, for going in hard. When I had Batia on my show before the
469
00:47:28.160 --> 00:47:34.800
election, I kept asking her about things that, to defend things that she supported in Donald
470
00:47:35.600 --> 00:47:39.360
Trump. And she kept saying, she kept doing this rhetorical move that really irritates me,
471
00:47:39.360 --> 00:47:44.080
where she would say, like, if you go and talk to people in, you know, rural Pennsylvania,
472
00:47:44.080 --> 00:47:49.200
then what, then they feel betrayed. And I said, butchette, like, and I went in. And I was like, at
473
00:47:49.200 --> 00:47:53.520
some point, you have to give up this stick about saying, like, the Hoiti Toiti, a leader's
474
00:47:53.520 --> 00:47:58.080
podcast, it doesn't understand the little man. I'm asking you why you support this policy.
475
00:47:58.080 --> 00:48:02.800
I'm not asking you to be a suitsayer who can, who's like a, a little man whisperer to whisper
476
00:48:02.880 --> 00:48:07.280
to me, like, why the, you know, what the, what the people, what the populace is, is feeling.
477
00:48:07.280 --> 00:48:11.680
I'm asking, I'm having an intellectual conversation with you about tariffs. Stop telling me what
478
00:48:11.680 --> 00:48:16.080
people in Middle America think about tariffs and start talking about tariffs. So like, yes,
479
00:48:16.080 --> 00:48:20.240
you sometimes need to course correct and go, like, this is not what, this conversation is not
480
00:48:20.240 --> 00:48:25.120
working for me because we're not on an agreed, you know. But I don't think that this is rocket
481
00:48:25.120 --> 00:48:30.880
science if you just take it out of the universe of an interview and put it into the universe of a pub.
482
00:48:31.600 --> 00:48:34.560
Like, I just don't think that they said, I think we all know how to do this into
483
00:48:34.560 --> 00:48:39.680
personally. Like, well, most of us who are good at, I mean, some of us don't, some of us just
484
00:48:39.680 --> 00:48:45.120
smash a glass and stab the broken glass into someone's face. But many of us know how to sort of,
485
00:48:45.120 --> 00:48:50.080
you know, gently navigate and negotiate disagreements with friends and colleagues. It's just we assume
486
00:48:50.080 --> 00:48:53.920
that the moment you turn the microphone on, it's verboten. Well, I was going to say, I think
487
00:48:53.920 --> 00:48:59.600
broadly, we totally agree because in the general principle of showing rather the telling.
488
00:49:00.160 --> 00:49:05.680
And it's far better if the people that are listening are coming to the conclusions
489
00:49:05.680 --> 00:49:10.800
themselves rather than being lectured to. So even with that stuff, I mean, we let it slip heat,
490
00:49:10.800 --> 00:49:15.920
but we know what we ought to do, which is, you know, you show the material, show the evidence,
491
00:49:15.920 --> 00:49:24.960
make the extremely uncontrovertual deductions from that and let people, you know, decide for
492
00:49:25.040 --> 00:49:29.840
themselves. I mean, we could, I mean, we ultimately often do just, you know, let it rip just for fun.
493
00:49:29.840 --> 00:49:34.400
But, but that is much stronger than getting up on your high horse and and ranting and raving.
494
00:49:34.400 --> 00:49:40.560
And what we found is a lot of the other people who criticize the same people that we criticize.
495
00:49:41.440 --> 00:49:44.880
Firstly, they're often doing it for different reasons, usually because they just don't like their
496
00:49:44.880 --> 00:49:49.520
politics. So, you know, they're the enemy. We don't like that they're stupid, mainly.
497
00:49:49.600 --> 00:49:58.800
And also, I feel like like they're only preaching to the choir, you know what I mean? Like,
498
00:49:58.800 --> 00:50:03.200
if you've got your little dedicated audience of haters, then they will love to hear you
499
00:50:03.920 --> 00:50:10.880
get very striving, but you're not convincing anyone else. So, yeah, you know, I'm all laid back
500
00:50:10.880 --> 00:50:15.600
approach generally with. I was just thinking that like something that we've noticed,
501
00:50:15.600 --> 00:50:19.760
right, is obviously because of the people who we usually cover our audience cues left,
502
00:50:19.760 --> 00:50:25.920
right? Like, obviously, Matt and I are academics, you know, to the, like, left leaning academics,
503
00:50:25.920 --> 00:50:32.240
right? So, that will inevitably attract an audience that skews that way. But as a result,
504
00:50:33.040 --> 00:50:39.200
any, like if we cover Yvonne or Harari or someone like that, not really any issue,
505
00:50:39.200 --> 00:50:45.520
also even Jonathan Hayd people didn't care that much. But it like us being critical, right?
506
00:50:45.520 --> 00:50:53.120
That's, that's fine. If we cover Nome Chomsky, Slava Gisek, the, who's the most recent one,
507
00:50:53.120 --> 00:51:02.080
now we climb, right? Like every time that happens, people are beautiful. But like, this
508
00:51:02.080 --> 00:51:06.560
one of the differences is that, you know, there's various friends on Reddit or these people, Matt
509
00:51:06.560 --> 00:51:12.480
and Chris haven't studied Marxist academics. They, like, the system, the thing works except when
510
00:51:12.480 --> 00:51:19.760
they cover people that we like, but it's the, it's the thing that I find is, like, people are talking,
511
00:51:19.760 --> 00:51:24.720
you know, when that happens, does that make you not want to, like, you know, cover those kind of
512
00:51:24.720 --> 00:51:29.200
people because you're going to get blowback or whatever. And it might be Matt and I personality
513
00:51:29.200 --> 00:51:34.000
or character, but when that happens, I'm like, I'm going to do this little bit more.
514
00:51:34.000 --> 00:51:41.360
Yeah, it's going to be Gary's economics. I know it's going to annoy people, but I kind of like,
515
00:51:41.440 --> 00:51:47.040
because there are for us, it isn't in 10th, there's like, you know, like a political
516
00:51:47.040 --> 00:51:53.520
podcast. No, no. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I mean, why does everything have to be politicized? It's,
517
00:51:53.520 --> 00:51:58.880
it is interesting. I mean, I am, I don't have quite that luxury, I suppose. I do have to be more
518
00:51:58.880 --> 00:52:06.800
mindful of it now a bit because I, I just find that there are, in my guest selection, there are
519
00:52:06.800 --> 00:52:13.200
frequently more interesting people who are more willing to say more provocative and unusual things
520
00:52:13.200 --> 00:52:20.320
who are, who I'm drawn to getting in the ring with, who are on the right, then on the left. Like,
521
00:52:20.320 --> 00:52:29.600
I think maybe the social justice sort of ethos of hyper caution and sensoriousness and fear of
522
00:52:29.600 --> 00:52:35.840
being pilloried has led people to be much less keen to like even in politics, like there's an
523
00:52:35.840 --> 00:52:41.280
Australian election coming up and, you know, I'm the conservative side of the aisle of fairly
524
00:52:41.280 --> 00:52:48.640
willing to come on the show and, you know, the governing Labor Party don't seem to be quite so keen.
525
00:52:48.640 --> 00:52:54.320
And I don't know what that split is, but it does make me wary. Like one newspaper called me an
526
00:52:54.320 --> 00:53:03.760
edge lord. I really offended me last year because I was like, I think I want to be Helen Lewis,
527
00:53:03.760 --> 00:53:07.760
I don't want to be an edge lord, you know, I don't want to be, I don't, I don't, I don't,
528
00:53:07.760 --> 00:53:12.960
are you going to make my shoes or that's not right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, because, because I,
529
00:53:12.960 --> 00:53:17.600
I sympathise with you, but on the other hand, it could be the case that the more interesting
530
00:53:18.320 --> 00:53:27.280
and fun types of views are just wrong, right? Like, like, yeah, often the truth is boring,
531
00:53:27.280 --> 00:53:31.840
right? And, you know, this is, this is one thing, you know, just in research and science and stuff,
532
00:53:32.320 --> 00:53:36.240
like we have a little replication crisis and stuff like that. And, you know, if you're a psychologist,
533
00:53:36.240 --> 00:53:40.480
you want to get something published. And it's going to be sexy, it's going to be amazing,
534
00:53:40.480 --> 00:53:45.920
this changes everything, you know, it's a bright, sparkling, exciting thing. And you just read
535
00:53:45.920 --> 00:53:52.560
the title and you go, I'm 99 percent sure this is bullshit. Before you even, before you even
536
00:53:52.560 --> 00:53:57.120
look at the methods, right? Did you confirm that? So, I mean, I think, you know, and I think
537
00:53:57.360 --> 00:54:02.560
I hang on, but you're, but you're embedding in that critique and assumption that a wrong,
538
00:54:02.560 --> 00:54:09.760
a person who holds a wrong idea is a less, that conversation with that person who's going to be
539
00:54:09.760 --> 00:54:14.640
a less constructive, less illuminating conversation than a conversation with someone who's right.
540
00:54:14.640 --> 00:54:19.040
It may be the reverse. Yeah, no, I wouldn't, yeah, I wouldn't go as far as that. I wouldn't say this,
541
00:54:19.040 --> 00:54:24.720
that's bad to talk to them. Just pointing out that, like, good more often, the
542
00:54:24.720 --> 00:54:28.560
crazy people, crazy people. Right, but I mean, take the, you know, take the Douglas Murray example,
543
00:54:28.560 --> 00:54:33.280
just because, you know, you'd raise him Chris, you know, I did a tour in Australia with him,
544
00:54:33.280 --> 00:54:37.440
because, and we booked it before October 7th. Some people thought it was in response to October 7th,
545
00:54:37.440 --> 00:54:43.280
but, you know, he was, I think he's interesting. Like, we also invited Slavo Gishek,
546
00:54:43.280 --> 00:54:49.440
who was going to come and then had health problems on a tour, right? And so, like, yeah,
547
00:54:49.840 --> 00:54:52.480
both of those people, I think, are really interesting. Anthony Lawrence,
548
00:54:52.560 --> 00:54:59.040
also, is a really interesting journalist, lived in East Jerusalem, is in, you know, a fiercely
549
00:54:59.040 --> 00:55:07.600
anti-zionist critic of Israel. These are interesting people who, it's interesting for me to talk to,
550
00:55:07.600 --> 00:55:13.280
and one of the most interesting things about my tour with Douglas was every night him and me arguing
551
00:55:13.280 --> 00:55:18.000
in a slightly different way about Israel. No, it's not like I was sitting there like Lex Friedman,
552
00:55:18.000 --> 00:55:22.160
just saying, the floor is yours. You know, what's New Orleans like?
553
00:55:25.520 --> 00:55:28.720
Yeah, I was pushing back. I was like, how can you say that it's in the interest, you know,
554
00:55:28.720 --> 00:55:32.400
the long-term interests of the Jewish people to have this, this state hanging around the
555
00:55:32.400 --> 00:55:38.000
neck like an albatross? You know, anyway. So, yeah. Yeah, there. Look, I just think we need to get
556
00:55:38.000 --> 00:55:42.720
you back on Rogen, and you can talk to him about the massive structures underneath the pyramids.
557
00:55:42.720 --> 00:55:49.280
That's all he was talking about this morning when I met him. I mean, I heard the news.
558
00:55:49.280 --> 00:55:52.880
I was like, come on, listen to the bad guys.
559
00:55:54.880 --> 00:55:59.440
George, that's a question. It's probably, yeah, but that feeling, this is the comfortable question.
560
00:55:59.440 --> 00:56:06.240
Yes, but you haven't been back on Rogen since that interaction. No, that's true. But I don't live
561
00:56:06.240 --> 00:56:12.400
in the United States anymore, and I've only been back there once since, at which point I did send
562
00:56:12.400 --> 00:56:18.960
him a text, but I mean, he's gone from, when I was first on the show in 2014, he was a big
563
00:56:18.960 --> 00:56:24.480
fucking deal, but he wasn't like the most powerful person in media. I think, and I get asked
564
00:56:24.480 --> 00:56:28.800
this sometimes, like, would he have me back on the show or has he blackballed me or banned me?
565
00:56:28.800 --> 00:56:38.080
Um, blacklisted me. What's blacklisted me? Is that a term? Is that just my romantic fantasy about
566
00:56:38.160 --> 00:56:44.720
and about Jeremy? Um, it's, but I think that if I had, I suspect that if like I had a book out
567
00:56:44.720 --> 00:56:50.480
that was, you know, that he found interesting, and if I, if he still checks the phone, his number,
568
00:56:50.480 --> 00:56:55.440
I have, then he would have me back on. I don't think he's petty. He tweeted after that thing,
569
00:56:55.440 --> 00:56:59.360
something very nice about me and said, like, he thinks the whole blow up is silly.
570
00:57:00.400 --> 00:57:04.560
Yeah, hello here. Who knows? Who knows? I mean, it's impossible to say.
571
00:57:04.640 --> 00:57:10.480
Yeah, they, um, the Douglas Murray with the Smeth, there is a bit in that. I mean,
572
00:57:10.480 --> 00:57:13.600
this was the thing because like, we have this experience already with Douglas Murray when he was
573
00:57:13.600 --> 00:57:17.840
talking to Lex, because like, he was very good on pushing back on you. Hello, he did that thing
574
00:57:19.200 --> 00:57:24.960
where what you're talking about with politeness that like, you can't say directly to Lex, Lex,
575
00:57:24.960 --> 00:57:30.240
your opinion on this is naive. You're the things that you have said, like Russia joining
576
00:57:30.240 --> 00:57:36.160
NATO is ridiculous, right? And you're, and so what Douglas does for right, that interview is
577
00:57:36.960 --> 00:57:44.080
some people have argued, you know, and this is a naive position, right? And then Lex is also
578
00:57:44.080 --> 00:57:49.840
responding saying, but there are people who always call naive. You're actually very smart,
579
00:57:49.840 --> 00:57:56.960
and literally saying that I actually very smart. And we'll, yeah, at the moment we prove in the
580
00:57:56.960 --> 00:58:01.520
logo that we corrected that kind of thing. But like Douglas Murray said to Rogan and the Smeth,
581
00:58:01.520 --> 00:58:06.320
when they were talking about the mainstream media and the power that the mainstream media has
582
00:58:06.320 --> 00:58:09.840
these experts on, they're doing all these things and they get things wrong. And Douglas Murray said
583
00:58:09.840 --> 00:58:16.240
to them, you guys have power. This is power. You have the biggest podcast. You have an influential
584
00:58:16.240 --> 00:58:21.360
podcast. You have power now. And we are often talking about, you know, the alternative media is
585
00:58:21.440 --> 00:58:27.840
better than the legacy. But we have to then admit that what we do makes, you know, I'm starting to
586
00:58:27.840 --> 00:58:34.720
talk like, but I was like, yes, yes, that's right. You know, that's, that's the thing that like,
587
00:58:35.280 --> 00:58:41.280
if you are going to talk every episode, we just covered Chris Williamson and Joe Rogan. And
588
00:58:41.280 --> 00:58:46.480
I'm friendly with Chris Williamson, but I said this to him, interpersonally as well, that they,
589
00:58:46.480 --> 00:58:52.800
they were like, the alternative, the legacy media is dying. And it's got, it just spends all
590
00:58:52.800 --> 00:58:58.080
its time talking about alternative media. And they're like, we are the, you know, the kind of new
591
00:58:58.080 --> 00:59:03.200
king dex on the street. That was the general message. And I consume a lot of alternative media.
592
00:59:03.200 --> 00:59:10.000
I think it is rare that I hear an alternative media episode that doesn't mention the mainstream media
593
00:59:10.000 --> 00:59:16.480
in some part to complain about it or to cover stories from them. So like, they presented it
594
00:59:16.480 --> 00:59:20.720
that the mainstream media is parasitic on the alternative media. But like, from my perspective,
595
00:59:21.280 --> 00:59:28.400
the alternative media cannot shut up about mainstream media. But even as it steals stories
596
00:59:28.400 --> 00:59:33.920
completely, yeah. I mean, look at the whole, you know, the way that that controversy about the
597
00:59:34.560 --> 00:59:40.160
the British Pakistani grooming gangs went down where like Elon basically co-opted that and was
598
00:59:40.160 --> 00:59:44.720
talking as if this was a story that nobody had ever covered, even though it was the tireless
599
00:59:44.720 --> 00:59:50.480
work of legacy media journalists in the UK who have official government like reviews on the topic
600
00:59:50.480 --> 00:59:55.440
as well. So this happens all the time. I mean, I think one thing that's important to note in this
601
00:59:55.440 --> 01:00:01.760
whole conversation about the fate of the legacy media and the rise of new media is the importance
602
01:00:01.760 --> 01:00:07.360
of investigative journalism from legacy media sources. There is just no substitute in the new
603
01:00:07.360 --> 01:00:12.560
media for the kind of investment that you need to hold politicians accountable by investigating
604
01:00:12.560 --> 01:00:17.280
like possible corruption or, you know, having a foreign bureau who can actually be on the ground.
605
01:00:18.080 --> 01:00:24.960
So investigative journalism reporting like all that stuff, I think, will never be replaced or
606
01:00:25.040 --> 01:00:32.320
not anytime soon by any like the legacy media excels there. The concern is that in the opinion,
607
01:00:32.320 --> 01:00:40.240
analysis, commentary, panel conversation, interview space that there it has become a bit
608
01:00:40.240 --> 01:00:45.680
stale, a bit too talking pointy. Everyone is like everyone sort of knows you can basically predict
609
01:00:45.680 --> 01:00:51.200
if I give you the name of a news outlet and then I give you the particular topic, be that
610
01:00:52.000 --> 01:00:57.680
transgender athletes or the MeToo movement or Indigenous rights in Australia or climate change
611
01:00:57.680 --> 01:01:01.920
or something like that, you can jot on the back of a napkin in advance what roughly you're going to
612
01:01:01.920 --> 01:01:05.120
hear, the kind of talking points that you're going to hear, and that's what people are rejecting
613
01:01:05.120 --> 01:01:11.040
and why they tune into shows like mine, I suppose. Yeah, I got a question for you actually about
614
01:01:11.040 --> 01:01:18.240
the ABC and the BBC, but I just have to mention to yes Andrew a bit, like I, it's unpleasant,
615
01:01:18.240 --> 01:01:22.880
but often I find that when I'm reading an article from a standard newspaper,
616
01:01:24.080 --> 01:01:28.480
yeah, it's often like, like when they're talking about something I know about, like, you know,
617
01:01:28.480 --> 01:01:35.840
this sort of generally a bit more online, it's kind of embarrassing how lazy it is and just
618
01:01:35.840 --> 01:01:42.240
have so many things have gotten, gotten wrong. Like one example was a Guardian article I read and
619
01:01:42.240 --> 01:01:48.160
it was about the, it was about AI, right? AI, you know, the AI wars and, you know, destroying artists
620
01:01:48.160 --> 01:01:54.880
and stuff like that and you know, the Hayao Miyazaki quote, very, he talks about the, you know, the AI
621
01:01:55.520 --> 01:02:00.400
as being like a, you know, like a threat to human dignity or something like that, right?
622
01:02:01.040 --> 01:02:05.920
And the thing is that like the quote was completely taken out of context, which you can,
623
01:02:05.920 --> 01:02:10.000
you can find out, there's no mention of the fact that Hayao Miyazaki is a bit of a freak,
624
01:02:10.000 --> 01:02:13.680
frankly, this is my reason why. Anyway, there's a barb moment.
625
01:02:15.680 --> 01:02:24.160
Any general that the summary was just this sort of like, like by the numbers, like, you know,
626
01:02:24.160 --> 01:02:29.200
basically AI, anything to do with AI, AI, AI, AI, it was bad, you know, think of the poor artists,
627
01:02:29.200 --> 01:02:35.760
it was just a boring, conventional take. So yeah, there's that, but I wanted to ask you,
628
01:02:36.640 --> 01:02:41.280
so what do you think about the, like, publicly funded outlets, like the D.D.?
629
01:02:41.280 --> 01:02:45.680
I think it's, I think it's, well, I think they're crucial. I think they have to, I don't think I
630
01:02:45.680 --> 01:02:50.640
absolutely disagree with people who think that they've lost so much credibility that we should
631
01:02:50.640 --> 01:02:56.640
defund them or do it with them. I think we should reform them and reinvigorate them and fund them
632
01:02:56.640 --> 01:03:00.800
properly, because I think a lot of the problem is that they've suffered so many funding cuts and
633
01:03:00.800 --> 01:03:06.480
so many attacks from the Murdoch press and from others and from unscrupulous politicians that
634
01:03:06.480 --> 01:03:11.600
they've ended up hunkering down. I mean, I think this was why my tenure at the ABC Left was that
635
01:03:11.600 --> 01:03:15.440
there was just a management structure that was extremely risk averse and was exhausted by,
636
01:03:16.800 --> 01:03:21.840
you know, and was just in a mode of hypercautiousness. And so people who were a little bit more spicy,
637
01:03:21.840 --> 01:03:27.600
like me, you know, triggered the immune system of the organization. But I think you need to,
638
01:03:27.680 --> 01:03:31.360
I don't think that means that you punish the organization and strip away its funding. It means that,
639
01:03:31.360 --> 01:03:34.960
like, that's part of the problem is that you've been punishing it and stripping away its funding.
640
01:03:34.960 --> 01:03:39.440
Like, I think it needs, I don't, I look at the landscape in the United States and I just think,
641
01:03:40.240 --> 01:03:44.720
like, they're but for the grace of God, I do not want to go there in terms of how divided the
642
01:03:44.720 --> 01:03:51.040
media is. I think everyone having a, having a common source of news of just information,
643
01:03:51.600 --> 01:03:54.880
you know, you can go out and you can talk about all that, I think there needs to be a much,
644
01:03:54.880 --> 01:04:01.440
so, I mean, my advice to public broadcasters is re-institute a firewall between news and
645
01:04:01.440 --> 01:04:06.800
opinion, clamp down hard on activists journalists, especially younger activists journalists,
646
01:04:06.800 --> 01:04:12.960
usually of color, keep talking, or like from the LGBTQIA plus community who keep talking about,
647
01:04:12.960 --> 01:04:17.040
you know, how we have to share the stories of the lived experiences of people in the new, no,
648
01:04:17.040 --> 01:04:22.960
that's not for news, that's not for news. Get back the, the light on the hill as being like some kind
649
01:04:22.960 --> 01:04:30.880
of objective journalism in the news pages. Do away with jargon, don't allow yourself,
650
01:04:30.880 --> 01:04:37.200
like in the news pages of the ABC, I mean, the most obvious example lately is just LGBTQIA plus
651
01:04:37.200 --> 01:04:43.600
stuff. It's so obviously, in the, in the push for diversity and it's important to diversify
652
01:04:43.600 --> 01:04:48.160
newsrooms and it's good, it's a good thing that they're not all staffed by middle-aged white
653
01:04:48.240 --> 01:04:56.160
straight males anymore, but my argument, I wrote a piece recently, arguing that diversity should
654
01:04:56.160 --> 01:05:01.840
be done in a story agnostic way, so that you should hire a diverse newsroom and then be agnostic
655
01:05:01.840 --> 01:05:07.680
about the stories that an editor assigns, whereas what's happened is that it's inconceivable that
656
01:05:07.680 --> 01:05:15.200
you would have a like quote unquote queer story written by anyone other than the queer staffers,
657
01:05:15.200 --> 01:05:18.640
and it's inconceivable that you would have a story about race written by anyone other than
658
01:05:19.840 --> 01:05:25.040
journalists of color. And I think that has got to stop. I think that is just leading.
659
01:05:25.040 --> 01:05:31.520
It's pushing audiences away because so much of the coverage is written in a jargonistic style that
660
01:05:31.520 --> 01:05:36.160
doesn't actually raise any of the little niggling concerns that the reader might have if they're
661
01:05:36.160 --> 01:05:41.920
not already on the team. So it actually makes it harder to be critical, for example, of President
662
01:05:41.920 --> 01:05:46.720
Trump's executive order on gender, because the reporting is written from such an obviously
663
01:05:46.720 --> 01:05:54.560
partisan perspective using terms like affirmation, care, you know, instead of I don't know gender transition
664
01:05:54.560 --> 01:05:58.320
or something like that, it's just not written the way that human beings talk. It's written the way
665
01:05:58.320 --> 01:06:03.360
that activists talk. And so I think stripping that out of newsrooms, getting newsrooms back to being
666
01:06:03.360 --> 01:06:08.160
just about the bread and butter of what happened, and then having actually a much more generous
667
01:06:08.720 --> 01:06:14.960
first person attitude towards commentary towards what's technically called content, which is a
668
01:06:14.960 --> 01:06:21.520
horrible word, but that's what the ABC calls it at least, where there's like my fate was sealed
669
01:06:21.520 --> 01:06:26.240
because I was straddling those two worlds where technically I was in the content division because
670
01:06:26.240 --> 01:06:31.440
I was hosting a three hour a day talk back radio show, which is not in the news division. So you're
671
01:06:31.440 --> 01:06:37.120
supposed to have more latitude, but there's an informal assumption that you're gonna pull your neck in
672
01:06:37.760 --> 01:06:45.120
and tow a certain line of caution. And I think the muddiness of exactly of the rules around that,
673
01:06:45.120 --> 01:06:50.960
and you know, the uncertainty on the part of a viewer or a listener or a reader about like,
674
01:06:50.960 --> 01:06:57.280
is what I'm reading or watching supposed to be just the facts, ma'am, or is this also allowed
675
01:06:57.280 --> 01:07:01.280
to have some spin? And if it's allowed to have some spin, then it should be allowed to have tons
676
01:07:01.280 --> 01:07:05.680
of spin for more kinds of different directions. And I think the public broadcaster should be more
677
01:07:05.680 --> 01:07:10.880
courageous about allowing a much wider range of views, whether that's against COVID lockdowns or,
678
01:07:10.880 --> 01:07:14.880
you know, floating ideas about the lab leak or whatever it might be. It should be a much more
679
01:07:14.880 --> 01:07:24.000
rambunctious space in the commentary realm, and a much less like personal feels the kind of activist
680
01:07:24.000 --> 01:07:29.360
space in the news realm. That would be my, that would be what I would do if I was emperor of the
681
01:07:29.360 --> 01:07:34.560
world. Yeah, yeah, that sounds fair, that sounds fair. Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of universities
682
01:07:34.560 --> 01:07:41.120
where they've kind of, they've become more corporatized, become more cautious and riskabuse.
683
01:07:41.760 --> 01:07:49.840
And I think I like little, scared little puppies rather than sort of independent institutions
684
01:07:49.840 --> 01:07:56.880
with a strong voice. And I actually more keen to clamp down on academics who are inconvenient
685
01:07:57.840 --> 01:08:12.480
in terms of the reputation of the off-beat boy. Actually, I saw, like, I guess you may
686
01:08:12.480 --> 01:08:18.000
be thinking about, like, I guess sometimes the messaging around that the activists and stuff
687
01:08:18.000 --> 01:08:23.600
can be counterproductive. I think that kind of cross-month be recently, which was, it was
688
01:08:24.240 --> 01:08:29.600
from an activist organization that was pro, you know, gay adoption and parenting,
689
01:08:29.600 --> 01:08:34.640
but the graphic was too, like it was probably AI generated or something, but it was too
690
01:08:34.640 --> 01:08:43.360
extremely muskly, oiled up, shaved. Like naked, like holding a head, holding a baby, and I like,
691
01:08:44.080 --> 01:08:50.640
they don't look like any, I mean, you haven't seen my partner and I never met.
692
01:08:53.600 --> 01:09:00.400
I've got to show if you want. We'll be giving Chris a private dance later on.
693
01:09:00.400 --> 01:09:05.200
How many of you guys roll? How many of you guys roll?
694
01:09:05.200 --> 01:09:12.000
Like, I thought, you know, the things like, you know, the Flint, I don't know if you know him,
695
01:09:12.000 --> 01:09:15.680
but like the archaeologist that had to be up with Graham Hancock on Joe Rogan's show,
696
01:09:15.680 --> 01:09:18.960
and it was like a three-hour thing. He gave a, like a PowerPoint presentation.
697
01:09:19.120 --> 01:09:25.760
And I've regularly enjoyed it because he made Graham Hancock look like a fool, but that would
698
01:09:25.760 --> 01:09:30.880
not be a format that fits, you know, like a BBC, I know the ABC, but I'm thinking to BBC,
699
01:09:30.880 --> 01:09:35.840
but there's no reason it couldn't be. It would be something, right? And they, especially if they
700
01:09:35.840 --> 01:09:41.040
gave like, you know, Flint the time to present his things, but they wouldn't like that format,
701
01:09:41.040 --> 01:09:47.760
because of, you know, I think Graham Hancock alone, they did give him a series before Channel 4,
702
01:09:47.760 --> 01:09:53.200
but the thing to me is like, when people talk about the podcasting space and they'll turn
703
01:09:53.200 --> 01:10:00.800
to medium, whatever, they are usually like singly night that they mean they don't like Joe Rogan,
704
01:10:00.800 --> 01:10:06.560
they don't like Sam Harris, they don't like Tim Poole, you know, this, the kind of ecosystem there,
705
01:10:06.560 --> 01:10:10.400
but like what they do like if they're critical of those kind of things is they will like
706
01:10:10.400 --> 01:10:15.920
Cune on Anonymous, Conspirituality, they might like Mary Hassan's channel, you know,
707
01:10:15.920 --> 01:10:20.400
and they're not, they're not kind of putting them into the same bracket. I'm not saying they're
708
01:10:20.400 --> 01:10:26.960
all of equal like levels of, you know, standards or quality, but I mean that the independent media
709
01:10:26.960 --> 01:10:32.960
is a big wide array of things that a lot is like a whole bunch of things that we like, you know,
710
01:10:32.960 --> 01:10:38.800
history podcasts or like random podcasts like ours, the coding, the girls or, or yours, right?
711
01:10:39.280 --> 01:10:45.840
But the, I don't see why, I mean, I guess I see from the viewing things as a zero something,
712
01:10:45.840 --> 01:10:52.560
but like madamee make a podcast about gurus, we talk for hours, about obscure people,
713
01:10:52.560 --> 01:10:57.040
and like they're, I'm playing clips of them, right? And there's an audience for that,
714
01:10:57.040 --> 01:11:03.680
but I've never been like, you know, the mainstream media, they can't do, I'm doing, I'm just like,
715
01:11:03.680 --> 01:11:09.600
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there's a whole stick, isn't there? Of which I've probably been
716
01:11:09.600 --> 01:11:13.280
guilty, like three or four years ago, because I think it needed to be said then, but now it's
717
01:11:13.280 --> 01:11:18.240
become a tiresome cliche about elites, you know, sort of not listening and not being responsive.
718
01:11:18.240 --> 01:11:24.880
Like, I think there was a real thing in 2021 where, you know, the school closures during COVID
719
01:11:24.880 --> 01:11:32.320
in the United States, the kind of punitive attitude of the post George Floyd moment on race relations,
720
01:11:33.040 --> 01:11:38.960
the sensoriousness of the trans ideology, you know, that those things really did need to be
721
01:11:38.960 --> 01:11:48.000
called out. And elites did a bad job and the media did a bad job in being upfront and, you know,
722
01:11:48.000 --> 01:11:52.400
nonsense free about calling out those things. And there was a lack of courage and people
723
01:11:52.400 --> 01:11:58.400
were losing their jobs if they did call them out in many cases. Now, that's just become a trope.
724
01:11:59.040 --> 01:12:04.960
It's just like, you know, the claim that the elites are betraying us and don't know anything
725
01:12:04.960 --> 01:12:10.640
has just become, you're not allowed to talk about this, Joe. A stupid, stupid, stupid point that
726
01:12:11.440 --> 01:12:16.400
that people make usually to feather their own nests or give increased credibility to their
727
01:12:16.400 --> 01:12:21.600
independent media, media sphere. So I don't, I don't bang on, I mean, people regular listens
728
01:12:21.600 --> 01:12:26.000
of my will notice that I don't bang on about that anymore. I mean, I don't talk about how elites
729
01:12:26.000 --> 01:12:30.160
have lost the trust of the little man or something like that. I think we need more elites,
730
01:12:30.160 --> 01:12:35.600
not less. And I mean, even as you say, Chris, the difference in the media landscape is
731
01:12:35.600 --> 01:12:41.040
fast in podcast to stand. Even the three people who you mentioned, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris and
732
01:12:41.040 --> 01:12:45.280
Tim Poole, I mean, could not be more different. You know, Tim Poole's a fucking idiot.
733
01:12:46.480 --> 01:12:53.520
Joe Rogan is a, Joe Rogan is a really, is a really curious and talented conversationalist.
734
01:12:54.480 --> 01:12:58.720
And Sam Harris is like a rigorous and courageous genius. Absolutely.
735
01:13:01.920 --> 01:13:09.040
And none of them is without their flaws as a great, but yes, it's a very large landscape.
736
01:13:09.040 --> 01:13:12.960
I think what people are talking about when they're talking about podcasts to stand as a
737
01:13:12.960 --> 01:13:17.600
phenomenon is a particular type of, I mean, you guys cover this well on your show, which is like
738
01:13:17.600 --> 01:13:25.280
the weird combination of conspiracy mindedness mixed with credulity, mixed with skepticism,
739
01:13:25.280 --> 01:13:29.120
like intense skeptic, like, you know how the conspiracy theorist is also really
740
01:13:29.120 --> 01:13:34.240
credulous about certain things. And I think that's just that's kind of what we're talking about,
741
01:13:34.240 --> 01:13:43.680
like a kind of dude, bro, podcaster, dumb guy, smart guy, like what a dumb person thinks a smart
742
01:13:43.680 --> 01:13:50.000
person is talking to people in a really uncritical, but professorial kind of contemplative
743
01:13:50.720 --> 01:13:57.600
way about bullshit without much cheap pushback. There's one thing that I meant to mention that
744
01:13:57.600 --> 01:14:02.640
like it plays this. I know we should wrap up soon, Mark, because we're going to go, like,
745
01:14:02.640 --> 01:14:07.520
you know, sushi, we're going to go eat food that's better than Australian and American food.
746
01:14:08.000 --> 01:14:12.000
That's not a standard picture. Don't send me pictures. I don't like pictures.
747
01:14:12.720 --> 01:14:16.640
It's going to be pearls before swine. He wouldn't even recognize. He'd be like, this isn't just
748
01:14:16.640 --> 01:14:24.640
good as my local, wonderful job. Let me uh, so we did, we recently covered the
749
01:14:24.640 --> 01:14:29.840
Chris Williams appearance on Rogan. And one of the things that got me a lot, I've expressed it
750
01:14:29.840 --> 01:14:36.640
quite clearly on the episodes, but was that there was this lamenting about how partisan people
751
01:14:36.800 --> 01:14:42.000
got high, people born together over hundreds of art groups and how, you know, kind of like Lex,
752
01:14:42.000 --> 01:14:46.480
you know, the, the platitude and this shouldn't we all be more charitable, shouldn't we be,
753
01:14:46.480 --> 01:14:53.760
and within one minute, they had moved to talk about high, the Tesla attacks were being funded by
754
01:14:53.760 --> 01:15:01.360
USC and NGOs and the academics were like corrupted by China to promote communism. And they were,
755
01:15:01.360 --> 01:15:06.160
then they would switch back and be like, yeah, and these guys just demonize our groups and they
756
01:15:06.160 --> 01:15:12.400
they bond over hatred. And I was like, you can't do this. You can't be like, you have to
757
01:15:12.400 --> 01:15:19.120
need at least five minutes. Right. What I want is like someone there like in that case,
758
01:15:19.120 --> 01:15:24.560
it happened to be Douglas Murray, not about a super fond of, but he, you know, someone that says,
759
01:15:24.560 --> 01:15:31.920
hold up guys, aren't we bonding over hatred of my group? And it just seems like that is
760
01:15:31.920 --> 01:15:41.360
unfortunately like rare. And yeah, so if you could do that. It's also, it's particularly
761
01:15:41.360 --> 01:15:46.160
fatuous because it's true that we are bonding over. I mean, you guys literally have a show in
762
01:15:46.160 --> 01:15:51.360
which you just shit on other people like, you know, it's like, we are, but that's fine. Like,
763
01:15:51.360 --> 01:15:56.480
that's fine. There's a place in the world for that. And that and analysis analysis does often
764
01:15:56.480 --> 01:16:00.800
involve shooting on other people. That's why it's analysis and not secrecy. Yeah.
765
01:16:02.160 --> 01:16:11.520
But yeah, I mean, it's like the style. Anyway, yes, I think I think the point has been made.
766
01:16:11.520 --> 01:16:15.520
Should we go and eat sushi then? Yes. Oh, though, the very last thing there,
767
01:16:15.520 --> 01:16:21.040
at last time that we had you on, he had like this really important question that he wanted to ask.
768
01:16:21.040 --> 01:16:25.680
He wrote it down. He forgot to ask it. Okay. Okay. He's not shaking his head. No, no,
769
01:16:25.680 --> 01:16:29.680
no, I got it for you. I know you were talking to me about it on the front. I didn't bring this up
770
01:16:29.680 --> 01:16:34.880
to Josh. I didn't like, wasn't there a cook up era that you wanted to ask him a fight?
771
01:16:36.640 --> 01:16:40.560
What the mask got from the Olympics? What?
772
01:16:41.520 --> 01:16:48.800
What? I'll explain it to you. I can explain it to you. Just be on the basis of the word
773
01:16:48.800 --> 01:16:55.840
cook up era during the 2000 Olympic in the 1990s when I was in high school, I was a voice actor
774
01:16:55.840 --> 01:17:00.800
and I got cast as one of the mascots in the Sydney Olympic as the voice of one of the mascots
775
01:17:00.800 --> 01:17:07.440
in the Sydney Olympic Games whose name was Oli the cook up era for the 2000 Olympics as a teenager
776
01:17:07.440 --> 01:17:13.520
and then they kind of just sideline. By the way, you don't get in the suit. There are dancers,
777
01:17:13.520 --> 01:17:18.240
they could dance in the suit and then the voice actors are in the studio pre-recording it
778
01:17:18.240 --> 01:17:23.520
and the only thing that we, they kind of shied away from the idea of using mascots at all because
779
01:17:23.520 --> 01:17:27.040
it was a bit cheesy so they didn't really appear. I don't even think they appeared in the opening
780
01:17:27.040 --> 01:17:34.800
ceremony but you know the biggest thing that we ever did was an album called Sid Millie and Oli
781
01:17:34.800 --> 01:17:42.320
who were the three mascots sing your favorite Olympic tunes and the one country where it sold
782
01:17:42.320 --> 01:17:50.000
massively was Japan. The Japanese love Sid Millie and Oli sing your favorite Olympic tunes
783
01:17:50.000 --> 01:17:56.720
because it was a platypus, a cookabara and a kidna in front of a cartoon opera house and hungry.
784
01:17:56.720 --> 01:18:01.840
Maybe the sushi restaurant they should ask if they have it. I remember I only remember one
785
01:18:01.840 --> 01:18:07.840
track which went Olympic Games, Olympic Games were having fun at the Olympic Games, Olympic Games,
786
01:18:07.840 --> 01:18:14.320
Olympic Games, Sydney Olympic Games. Those were the likes. That's a remarkable career you've
787
01:18:14.320 --> 01:18:23.760
had, Josh. You picked it. Who would have thought that high school student who was singing as a
788
01:18:23.760 --> 01:18:28.640
cookabara about the Olympic Games would someday go on to be sitting with the likes of YouTube?
789
01:18:28.720 --> 01:18:36.160
Yes, in the Japanese and in the UK. My dreams can come true kids.
790
01:18:38.400 --> 01:18:41.920
All right, enjoy the sushi guys. Thank you very much.
791
01:18:41.920 --> 01:18:45.200
Lovely thanks for having me or me having you. I don't know what this is.
1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.520
Get a humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. I'm in Japan. This is a live.
2
00:00:09.520 --> 00:00:15.080
It's not live. Broadcast from a hotel in Osaka. I'm on vacation with the family. I'm
3
00:00:15.080 --> 00:00:19.120
not going to bang on about how great Japan is. Everyone knows Japan is great. I was going
4
00:00:19.120 --> 00:00:24.760
to say, oh, what a lovely place, lovely people, lovely scenery, lovely food. You know
5
00:00:24.760 --> 00:00:28.000
that. You know, you don't have to have been to Japan to know Japan is great. Nobody
6
00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:31.640
goes to Japan and comes back home. What a dump. What a shit hole that places. They need
7
00:00:31.640 --> 00:00:35.920
to get there. They need to get their act in order. They need to figure out how to do things
8
00:00:35.920 --> 00:00:44.240
with more discipline. So it's chaos is not chaos. It's lovely. Admittedly, the lack of chaos
9
00:00:44.240 --> 00:00:51.640
can be somewhat disorientingly like uniform and conformist and difficult to glean from
10
00:00:51.640 --> 00:00:56.880
the foreigners perspective. But that's on me. That's on me for being a dumb white boy child
11
00:00:56.880 --> 00:01:03.120
blundering into a very orderly place whose norms I don't know. I will say the one thing
12
00:01:03.120 --> 00:01:08.640
I've noticed is that Japanese culture, the Japanese people, great people, lovely people.
13
00:01:08.640 --> 00:01:16.640
They really revere simplicity in all things except for toilets. Very simple. You know,
14
00:01:16.640 --> 00:01:24.200
they love simple, delicate, petite little, not toilets. Huge. They have things blowing
15
00:01:24.200 --> 00:01:29.720
out everywhere and up here, wherever. It's complicated. For a simple people, they really
16
00:01:29.720 --> 00:01:35.480
need to simplify the toilets. That being said, let's move on to the topic of today's conversation
17
00:01:35.480 --> 00:01:42.960
because being in Japan, I found it incumbent upon myself to track down the best podcasters
18
00:01:42.960 --> 00:01:49.480
in the land and do a crossover episode with those people. Their podcast is called Decoding
19
00:01:49.480 --> 00:02:00.120
the Gurus. It's an anthropologist, Chris Kavanaugh, a psychologist, Matt Brown. They take
20
00:02:00.120 --> 00:02:08.000
the piss out of prominent public figures who are influential in public discourse, especially
21
00:02:08.000 --> 00:02:13.120
if they're influential for promoting unconventional ideas or controversial ideas. Matt and Chris
22
00:02:13.120 --> 00:02:17.400
take a big steaming dump on them and play clips of their appearances on various shows. We're
23
00:02:17.400 --> 00:02:21.360
talking about the Jordan Peterson's of the world, Joe Rogan's, the Eric Weinstein's,
24
00:02:21.360 --> 00:02:27.880
James Lindsay's, Peter Teal. They'll just pick a person and they'll go ham for like
25
00:02:27.880 --> 00:02:33.360
three hours. It's very entertaining. I love those guys. I've been on the show before,
26
00:02:33.360 --> 00:02:41.680
maybe twice. I'm not sure. Chris, who is a Northern Irish gentleman, lives in Tokyo. Matt
27
00:02:41.680 --> 00:02:46.760
happens to be Australian and lives in the middle of nowhere, frankly. He lives in some part
28
00:02:46.760 --> 00:02:51.280
of Australia that no Australian has ever been to. Nobody has ever heard of. It's a town
29
00:02:51.280 --> 00:02:58.480
called Bunderburg in regional Queensland. No offense to Bunderburgians, but it's no
30
00:02:58.480 --> 00:03:04.000
Osaka. Let's put it that way. The toilets are not complicated in Bunderburg. I sat
31
00:03:04.000 --> 00:03:08.200
down. Chris was kind enough to come over to my Airbnb in Tokyo and we sat down. We got
32
00:03:08.200 --> 00:03:13.440
Matt on. We dialed up. Matt on the big old audio machine. We wanted the dangerous idea
33
00:03:13.440 --> 00:03:24.000
that we wanted to broach was the idea that the people who bang on a lot about bravely
34
00:03:24.000 --> 00:03:31.600
talking about dangerous ideas, perhaps even yours truly, may just be actually conformists
35
00:03:31.600 --> 00:03:39.520
inside their own cocoons of cozy, anti-elite, dangerous idea, talking points. The talking
36
00:03:39.600 --> 00:03:46.200
about how much you talk about edgy ideas that the mainstream media won't touch is in fact
37
00:03:46.200 --> 00:03:52.200
its own echo chamber. We wanted to discuss what actually takes courage. What is genuinely
38
00:03:52.200 --> 00:03:57.440
heterodox? Who should you platform? Who should you not platform? What is just pandering to
39
00:03:57.440 --> 00:04:03.360
your base? Chris, as I mentioned, who's the anthropologist, is a specialist in conspiracy
40
00:04:03.360 --> 00:04:09.200
theories and radicalisation and religion and rituals and all that sort of stuff. Matt
41
00:04:09.200 --> 00:04:14.000
who's the psychologist is interested in social science and gambling and addiction, but
42
00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:19.360
the two of them really just sort of have a sense of left take on these sort of alt-right
43
00:04:19.360 --> 00:04:23.120
figures and I get in trouble when I call them alt-right. I use alt-right to mean like a
44
00:04:23.120 --> 00:04:28.560
kind of a new media right wing, bro, manosphere, podcast stand, but some people think it means
45
00:04:28.560 --> 00:04:35.200
fascist or neo-Nazi. Not that, but the kind of people who I'm talking about in podcast
46
00:04:36.080 --> 00:04:39.120
stand and it's something of a watershed moment at the moment. I mean, I'm glad that we're
47
00:04:39.120 --> 00:04:42.240
talking right now and I wanted to have this conversation with them right now. And by the way,
48
00:04:42.240 --> 00:04:46.320
this is a crossover episode on their podcast as well. So although their listeners won't hear
49
00:04:46.320 --> 00:04:51.280
this intro, they will hear the body of the conversation on their feed too. It's a watershed
50
00:04:51.280 --> 00:04:59.520
moment because some prominent people in the podcast alternative new media universe are breaking ranks
51
00:04:59.520 --> 00:05:06.320
with the rest of the cabal. Sam Harris has been doing it for a while. In January, he came out
52
00:05:06.320 --> 00:05:14.080
swinging against Elon Musk. He recently had a sub-stack live where his manager was sort of
53
00:05:14.080 --> 00:05:20.080
Jarron was sort of, you know, asking him questions about the rift between him and Rogan.
54
00:05:20.720 --> 00:05:26.400
And most recently, and I hadn't heard this episode when Chris and Matt and I spoke a couple of days
55
00:05:26.400 --> 00:05:32.160
ago, but it's definitely worth a listen and I've listened to it since Douglas Murray went on Joe
56
00:05:32.160 --> 00:05:38.800
Rogan's show with the comedian and libertarian commentator Dave Smith and spent the first half
57
00:05:38.800 --> 00:05:46.160
hour of the conversation really getting stuck into Joe and Dave for platforming people who have
58
00:05:46.160 --> 00:05:52.080
crazy theories about things. I've been texting with Douglas since then. My congratulations and
59
00:05:52.080 --> 00:05:57.440
here I've been trying to sort of, I guess, tease apart and wrestle through what our objection
60
00:05:57.440 --> 00:06:02.960
really is because it's not that we're saying that alternative podcasty people shouldn't talk to
61
00:06:02.960 --> 00:06:10.480
whoever they want to talk to or that we should only listen to elites. But rather, I think something
62
00:06:10.480 --> 00:06:17.280
closer to the Carl Sagan point, which originally in a different form is really David Humes point,
63
00:06:17.360 --> 00:06:24.320
that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And if you're going to be talking to a lot
64
00:06:24.320 --> 00:06:33.280
of guests who have highly unconventional beliefs about vaccine science, about the history of
65
00:06:33.280 --> 00:06:38.640
World War II and whether or not Churchill was culpable for starting it, about whether or not
66
00:06:38.640 --> 00:06:44.480
Putin is really the bad guy in Ukraine, about a whole bunch of things. If you're going to take
67
00:06:45.040 --> 00:06:52.480
really edge-lord stances, then you need to have or you ought to have very strong reasons for doing so.
68
00:06:52.480 --> 00:06:57.120
If you're going to hold really provocative positions, you should have powerful defences for
69
00:06:57.120 --> 00:07:04.640
them. And it's not enough to just lob some big gigantic claim about how actually the Ukrainians
70
00:07:04.640 --> 00:07:09.120
of the bad guys in Ukraine or Churchill was the bad guy in World War II. And then when people
71
00:07:09.120 --> 00:07:13.920
challenge you want to, you say, well, I'm just a comedian. I'm just a podcast or whatever.
72
00:07:13.920 --> 00:07:18.800
So that was basically Douglas's point on Joe Rogan's show. We don't talk specifically about that,
73
00:07:18.800 --> 00:07:24.400
but I just want you to understand that I think the changing layers of discourse that this particular
74
00:07:24.400 --> 00:07:30.400
conversation is feeding on and also dropping into. We talk quite a lot about Douglas Murray on
75
00:07:30.400 --> 00:07:35.520
Lex Friedman's show, which I hope is amusing. We mentioned Candace Owens, who is another person
76
00:07:35.520 --> 00:07:40.320
who comes up a lot on decoding the gurus. But most of all, we just have a lot of fun. And
77
00:07:40.400 --> 00:07:44.880
afterwards Chris and I went out and he fed me delicious sushi. So what's not to love? I hope
78
00:07:44.880 --> 00:07:51.440
you enjoy it. As much as I did, the one, the only Chris Kavanaugh matte brown of decoding the gurus.
79
00:07:55.200 --> 00:07:59.600
You guys recently did an episode of, well, you've done many an episode about Lex Friedman,
80
00:08:00.240 --> 00:08:07.200
which tickles my fancy. Because if there's one thing I don't understand about this new media
81
00:08:07.280 --> 00:08:15.600
landscape, it's Lex Friedman. It's, I don't understand how a person, I mean, I don't want to be
82
00:08:15.600 --> 00:08:26.080
uncommon. This is decoding the gurus. But there are various, look, there are various strands of
83
00:08:26.080 --> 00:08:34.000
this of the emerging new media landscape and podcast to stand and like bro tech culture and
84
00:08:34.000 --> 00:08:40.480
the decline of the legacy media and the rise of independent media, which are worth teasing a part
85
00:08:40.480 --> 00:08:47.520
and bringing together and analyzing in, I suppose, with greater clarity and specificity than maybe
86
00:08:47.520 --> 00:08:54.400
we sometimes do. And all of them are exhibited in their worst form by Lex Friedman. Like here's the
87
00:08:54.480 --> 00:09:04.640
apotheosis of motivated reasoning, blind spots, biased questioning. And what offends me the most
88
00:09:04.640 --> 00:09:11.120
as a craftsman of this form? It's just how bad an interviewer he is.
89
00:09:11.120 --> 00:09:17.920
You know, if he was, if he was violent, like his main offence is one of style, I agree. I mean,
90
00:09:18.000 --> 00:09:23.520
you take Joe Rogan. I hate the guy, but I understand why he is popular. I get it.
91
00:09:24.080 --> 00:09:29.840
With, you know, Lex Friedman will be sitting there talking to someone incredibly important and also
92
00:09:29.840 --> 00:09:33.520
we'll say, so do you like puppies?
93
00:09:38.720 --> 00:09:44.640
It's not that far from there. But, you know, Josh sent a clip mark. I think this is a good time
94
00:09:44.720 --> 00:09:51.760
to play because it illustrates Lex's interview technique. You know, people that might not be familiar.
95
00:09:51.760 --> 00:09:59.120
So, yeah, there's, I also have to say, you say that you hate Joe. Obviously, I love Joe.
96
00:09:59.120 --> 00:10:04.240
Even though I don't, I think he's a pernicious force in the world. I love him as like I love a
97
00:10:04.240 --> 00:10:09.600
puppy dog. And I think he's a immensely talented racon, tur, and conversationalist, which is what
98
00:10:09.600 --> 00:10:15.680
Lex is not, which is why Lex baffles me in a way that Rogan doesn't. But so this clip is,
99
00:10:15.680 --> 00:10:23.360
I actually played this on my show when I had the comic Mark Norman on my show. He's an increasingly
100
00:10:23.360 --> 00:10:29.680
successful American comic, very funny guy. And if you ever want an example of a guest who brings
101
00:10:29.680 --> 00:10:35.840
everything to an interview, he is, he is just coming out with the gags at like a machine gun
102
00:10:35.920 --> 00:10:42.000
fire pace. So if you're willing to dance and rumble with him, it can be an incredibly entertaining
103
00:10:42.000 --> 00:10:47.760
interview. And Mark had just been on Lex Friedman's show. And I listened to that as research before
104
00:10:47.760 --> 00:10:53.920
I'd interviewed Mark in case there was anything there. And it was so intriguing to hear the difference
105
00:10:53.920 --> 00:10:58.560
between what Mark was bringing to the conversation and what Lex was bringing to the conversation
106
00:10:58.640 --> 00:11:05.680
that I actually played this clip for Mark live on my show to hear his reaction because I wanted
107
00:11:05.680 --> 00:11:11.280
to understand what his impression of Lex was. So I haven't listened to Mark throwing some zingers
108
00:11:11.280 --> 00:11:19.280
at Lex and Lex definitely tap dancing away. Are you married? No, single virgin. Of course, yeah,
109
00:11:19.280 --> 00:11:23.520
I can't imagine. I bet you'd be great and bad. You're ripped. The best hairline in podcast.
110
00:11:24.480 --> 00:11:28.000
Yeah, I don't know. I haven't tried yet. So we'll have to see. All right. Well, let me know.
111
00:11:28.000 --> 00:11:34.960
Pretty big hog on you. Yeah, I could see you packing a crazy, crazy tool downtown.
112
00:11:34.960 --> 00:11:39.200
Mm-hmm. That matters to girls. Apparently. Yeah. That's all I hear about.
113
00:11:40.480 --> 00:11:44.160
Okay. New Orleans. You grew up in New Orleans? Yeah. Born and raised.
114
00:11:45.360 --> 00:11:49.680
Tramay outside the French Quarter. You ever been? Yeah. Don't remember it.
115
00:11:49.760 --> 00:11:54.160
Oh, you drink? Yeah, I drink. Of course I drink. I don't know. I can't tell if you have fun.
116
00:11:54.160 --> 00:11:58.640
No, not really, but Russia. I mean, Russia, of course, I drink all that kind of stuff.
117
00:11:58.640 --> 00:12:04.080
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Okay. Beer was just labeled an alcoholic beverage in 2011.
118
00:12:04.720 --> 00:12:10.080
Fun fact. What do you mean? In Russia. It was just drinks. It was just like apple juice before.
119
00:12:10.080 --> 00:12:13.120
It finally got declared legally as an alcoholic beverage.
120
00:12:15.680 --> 00:12:19.040
Which means you can regulate it. That kind of thing. I guess so. Yeah.
121
00:12:19.040 --> 00:12:23.760
See, that's where your brain goes. Yeah. I just go out of these fucking rustic. I didn't even know there's rules about drinking.
122
00:12:24.720 --> 00:12:31.120
Good. I'm learning about Russia from you. So, what's the difficult memory experience from childhood
123
00:12:31.120 --> 00:12:36.480
in New Orleans that made you the man you are today?
124
00:12:37.440 --> 00:12:45.200
So, so look, this speaks to the mystery that you were referring to, Josh. Like, why? Why?
125
00:12:45.280 --> 00:12:51.360
What is the appeal of that? I have a suggestion. Please. Please.
126
00:12:52.880 --> 00:13:00.560
I'm lost. I am a little, I'm a little sparrow at sea, like flailing around. I'm comprehending.
127
00:13:00.560 --> 00:13:08.720
I mean, I think there's the part of the aspect is your friend, Joe, and Elon Musk, villain of the
128
00:13:08.720 --> 00:13:18.080
R, but long before he, you know, was on his current villain arc, he, he gave Lexa a leg up because Lex
129
00:13:18.080 --> 00:13:22.400
wrote a paper saying that Tesla's were. Yeah, but lots of people have been on Joe's job. Don't show,
130
00:13:22.400 --> 00:13:29.440
Joe's show seven times. I'm not, I'm not, he's not answering my calls. So, you want,
131
00:13:29.440 --> 00:13:33.360
but did you have Elon Musk, right? So, you did Musk, Andrew, and the multiplying factor,
132
00:13:33.360 --> 00:13:38.240
but the other thing is, so that's the, like, initial thing, but that isn't going to take you, you
133
00:13:38.240 --> 00:13:43.520
know, to the heights that Lex has risen to. So, the other thing, and I think this is the key,
134
00:13:43.520 --> 00:13:52.800
my dick, is that it's unbridled sycophantcy, untold levels of sycophantcy, because, like,
135
00:13:52.800 --> 00:13:57.200
but that explains why people will do the show, why guests will do the show, but it doesn't explain
136
00:13:57.200 --> 00:14:01.840
why humans will listen to the show, or why I even, but I mean, I only listen to the show because of
137
00:14:02.000 --> 00:14:06.400
the guests. I suppose it's like a self, it's like pulling yourself up by your shoelaces. How does
138
00:14:06.400 --> 00:14:12.480
it happen? I listen because I want to hear the guests. Yeah. And the guests are there because
139
00:14:12.480 --> 00:14:17.040
people listen. Yeah. But it's a chicken and egg thing. How people listen, how were people listening
140
00:14:17.040 --> 00:14:21.440
before he was talking to Zelensky? Why does anyone want to listen to that conversation with Mark
141
00:14:21.440 --> 00:14:26.000
Norman when you can hear Mark Norman being interviewed by any number of human beings?
142
00:14:26.560 --> 00:14:33.040
No. Okay. So, this is the thing. The one is that the, I think you're underestimating the level
143
00:14:33.040 --> 00:14:37.680
of sycophantcy that people are going to be treated to. Like, that is, it's really high.
144
00:14:37.680 --> 00:14:42.960
You think people, you think the listener wants it? No, no, no. So, I think that explains,
145
00:14:42.960 --> 00:14:48.160
you know, the guests going on, but then the, we live in the culture, and this is like part of
146
00:14:48.160 --> 00:14:53.280
the thing that we might talk about, but other characters as well, where there's like a really
147
00:14:53.280 --> 00:15:01.120
pervasive atmosphere of admiration for like, you know, people that are successful,
148
00:15:01.120 --> 00:15:10.400
billionaires, podcasters, andrytid, whatever. Like, there's this desire for people to like
149
00:15:10.400 --> 00:15:14.960
receive wisdom from people who are to find out more about what makes them tick. So, if you see like,
150
00:15:14.960 --> 00:15:21.040
oh, there's a four-hour interview with this guy who's super successful and he's laying
151
00:15:21.440 --> 00:15:26.160
you know, his secrets. I think like, once upon a time, people would have been like more
152
00:15:26.160 --> 00:15:30.960
cynical and like, why the fuck do I want to hear from some like, billionaire about how, you know,
153
00:15:30.960 --> 00:15:36.320
his hard-knock life when, you know, he's sat around in jets, but the culture and I seems to be like,
154
00:15:36.880 --> 00:15:44.000
yeah, let's get the wisdom. Like, if we have a really, there's a hero worship that he's indulging
155
00:15:44.400 --> 00:15:50.480
in in a way. Yeah, I suppose it's true. Yeah, and I suppose it's true that if you, like,
156
00:15:51.200 --> 00:15:57.200
the best thing I can say about Lex is if you just removed him from the equation altogether,
157
00:15:57.920 --> 00:16:02.480
the interview wouldn't be much better if it was just a monologue. So, like, he's not doing any
158
00:16:02.480 --> 00:16:08.320
active harm in the sense that I could just like, if he has, I suppose I'm interested in hearing
159
00:16:08.400 --> 00:16:16.800
Zelensky talk for three hours about his worldview. And I guess what Lex's show gives you is three,
160
00:16:16.800 --> 00:16:21.840
it's like, it's like he's just collecting a bunch of people who can give their own master class,
161
00:16:21.840 --> 00:16:25.520
like he's not questioning them, he's not doing any journalism, he's giving, he's allowing the
162
00:16:25.520 --> 00:16:32.800
person the platform to espouse their worldview for three hours straight. And that's, I suppose there's
163
00:16:32.800 --> 00:16:36.160
a, there is a utility in that. If you want to hear the person talking for three hours and there's
164
00:16:36.160 --> 00:16:39.360
no other context in which they would sit down in front of an open microphone and just talk
165
00:16:39.360 --> 00:16:45.200
for three hours. Okay, Josh. I think I can answer your question because I think there's a reason
166
00:16:45.200 --> 00:16:53.120
that isn't apparent to cynical men of the world like us. And that is his style. You know, that
167
00:16:53.120 --> 00:17:02.160
foe, you know, like childlike wisdom that he sort of, you know, this sort of blatant signaling
168
00:17:02.160 --> 00:17:08.880
of humility, that kind of thing, you know, that, that, that light, like ultra philosophy light
169
00:17:08.880 --> 00:17:14.480
stuff that he injected in there, talking about love and identity and meaning and stuff like that.
170
00:17:14.480 --> 00:17:19.040
And, and that kind of real like to us to me anyway, I don't want to speak for you guys,
171
00:17:19.040 --> 00:17:24.160
but it just sounds like out of saccharine bullshit. But to many people when he's talking about
172
00:17:24.800 --> 00:17:32.960
kindness and truth. And yeah, okay, they, they're going right on. I like it. It's a bit
173
00:17:32.960 --> 00:17:40.320
brain A brown. It's like, you know, it's like, brain A brown for men. Yeah, it's like, it's like,
174
00:17:40.320 --> 00:17:47.520
he's the person who can make you feel like there is a pursuit of, yeah, of comedy and togetherness
175
00:17:47.520 --> 00:17:54.320
amidst the turmoil. And why do we? I mean, his diagnosis of the problem with the media,
176
00:17:54.320 --> 00:18:00.480
with the mainstream legacy media, which you guys addressed a bit in your recent episode about him
177
00:18:01.360 --> 00:18:07.600
is almost exactly back to front. He seems to think that the problem with the legacy media
178
00:18:07.600 --> 00:18:13.840
is that everyone is too enthusiastic about being aggressive and negative. And in fact,
179
00:18:14.320 --> 00:18:20.640
that podcasting as well is too much about trying to go in for the, on the attack. And we need
180
00:18:20.640 --> 00:18:25.440
to be less judgmental of other people's ideas and more understanding and hear them out.
181
00:18:26.560 --> 00:18:30.640
What universe is, I mean, I understand that there's a problem of like, glib
182
00:18:32.640 --> 00:18:38.240
grandstanding journalists trying to ask gotcha questions in short eight minute interviews that
183
00:18:38.320 --> 00:18:42.720
they might get, you know, when they're interviewing the Treasury Secretary on, I don't know,
184
00:18:42.720 --> 00:18:46.160
you know, I was going to say 60 minutes, but it's actually 60 minutes doesn't do that, but like
185
00:18:46.160 --> 00:18:52.720
a one inferior version of 60 minutes. But the idea that the main hallmark of the media
186
00:18:52.720 --> 00:18:58.640
moment that we live in is that people are too rigorous in their intellectual disagreements. And
187
00:18:59.360 --> 00:19:09.520
and not too sycophantic and, you know, did he pay no attention to the interviews that Donald
188
00:19:09.520 --> 00:19:16.560
Trump was doing before the election? Did he pay no attention to the whole ecosystem of sort of
189
00:19:16.560 --> 00:19:25.120
back slapping, back scratching, you know, podcasts and I don't, I guess maybe I'm just like living in
190
00:19:25.120 --> 00:19:33.120
an echo chamber of my own media diet. But I think I'm like the only person in the universe who's
191
00:19:33.120 --> 00:19:42.000
making a serious attempt to engage agreeably but controversially with substantive intellectual
192
00:19:42.000 --> 00:19:48.080
points when the guest raises it and actually push back on them in the way that any one of us would
193
00:19:48.080 --> 00:19:53.760
if you were at the at a bar or a restaurant or a friend's place and someone said something that
194
00:19:53.760 --> 00:20:01.040
was patently stupid. Like we all in our I think social environments are much more tolerant of
195
00:20:01.040 --> 00:20:07.120
disagreeableness than we are in the media. It's like we have, we're wearing kid gloves and
196
00:20:07.120 --> 00:20:13.040
treading on egg shells and being and so afraid of offending people. I don't understand where his
197
00:20:13.040 --> 00:20:18.240
worldview comes from that he's this lone voice of friendliness in a sea of animosity.
198
00:20:19.200 --> 00:20:24.480
Yeah. Well, you know, the backstory to this is kind of the story of social media and the internet,
199
00:20:24.480 --> 00:20:31.600
right? So when social media first came along, it was obviously, you know, very nasty, a lot of,
200
00:20:31.600 --> 00:20:37.040
you know, aggression, people, you know, going off the handle, you know, for the same reason that
201
00:20:37.040 --> 00:20:42.080
people behave badly in cars, right? Because there's that social distancing. And you know,
202
00:20:42.080 --> 00:20:48.160
this became a trope at, you know, the the bad faith straw manning type, all that bad stuff that
203
00:20:48.160 --> 00:20:53.200
sort of happens on on the internet. And you know, that's all true. And then they sort of develop this
204
00:20:53.200 --> 00:20:59.280
kind of reverence for, you know, good faith conversations have, you know, always assuming the
205
00:20:59.280 --> 00:21:05.200
best of intentions from the person you're talking to is like this, it became a real virtue amongst
206
00:21:05.200 --> 00:21:11.680
a lot of people and having mixed amongst the, you know, the free speech and the heterodox crowd,
207
00:21:12.240 --> 00:21:19.680
online. Yeah, they still, and you know, they're right in a sense, but that virtue has become
208
00:21:20.640 --> 00:21:28.400
you know, almost a parody of itself. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure that good faith is precisely right.
209
00:21:28.400 --> 00:21:35.360
Like it's probably a couple of things being conflated here. One is granting as much as you
210
00:21:35.360 --> 00:21:40.560
possibly can to your opponent such that you can attack the strongest version of their argument,
211
00:21:40.560 --> 00:21:45.440
rather than the weakest one, you know, not straw manning them. And trying to be as conciliatory as
212
00:21:45.440 --> 00:21:49.920
you can and not needlessly antagonizing people. So you're saying being nice to Nazis basically,
213
00:21:49.920 --> 00:21:57.360
right? Being nice, yes, like, like, yes, in just a few months, the argument against that,
214
00:21:59.360 --> 00:22:07.760
let me put it this way, if I was arguing with a Nazi, in like the 1930s, I wouldn't start by saying
215
00:22:08.480 --> 00:22:14.640
you're a fucking Nazi. I would start by saying I understand that things are very difficult at the
216
00:22:14.640 --> 00:22:19.600
moment in your own land of Germany. And there are lots of complicated reasons for that. And you
217
00:22:19.600 --> 00:22:24.720
have an understandable desire to restore German greatness. However.
218
00:22:24.960 --> 00:22:29.680
So many people have criticized Mr. Hitler for going slightly too far.
219
00:22:32.320 --> 00:22:38.880
Josh, there's like the, you know, Lex often raises the question, this is like his go-to question,
220
00:22:38.880 --> 00:22:45.040
is can you steal man position for blah blah blah, right? And I'm in favor of what you said,
221
00:22:45.040 --> 00:22:50.000
like, you know, you shouldn't try to straw man someone's argument. And like you can even
222
00:22:50.080 --> 00:22:56.160
grant a little bit more charity than it deserves. And like, in some cases, to make the attack
223
00:22:56.160 --> 00:23:00.160
better, right? Because you can show that, look, I'm not, you know, if you want to criticize someone,
224
00:23:00.160 --> 00:23:05.680
and you are, if you're just presenting the weakest version of it, it's like, even if your goal is
225
00:23:05.680 --> 00:23:11.520
to take it down, it looks like you're kind of not doing a good job. But there's one,
226
00:23:12.480 --> 00:23:14.960
have you heard of the concept of star mining?
227
00:23:15.600 --> 00:23:22.880
No. So this is Eduardo. I forget this, Dean, but he's a head of darks version. He, he argued,
228
00:23:22.880 --> 00:23:29.280
a, I think, associated with fire, the organization, that we need to not just hang on, but we should
229
00:23:29.280 --> 00:23:36.400
actually elevate the argument to like the best possible form. So that like it's, so now we're
230
00:23:36.400 --> 00:23:42.000
super hero, we're super hero manning, we're super manning it. So like that, I thought that the
231
00:23:42.080 --> 00:23:47.760
issue is like, you might have to be often waffle on, but there's a perhaps too much like in terms of
232
00:23:47.760 --> 00:23:53.200
like, you know, we're saying it a bit too far in the positive direction. But like, there's a
233
00:23:53.200 --> 00:23:59.760
value in academia and I think in journalism as well of like the adversarial interaction.
234
00:23:59.760 --> 00:24:05.360
Yeah. Like the hard-nosed interview, right? Like I think the difference between like a caffeine
235
00:24:05.440 --> 00:24:09.920
Newman or it was a coffee young, the one who can't be young. Coffee young interviewed Jordan,
236
00:24:09.920 --> 00:24:13.760
Peter said, no, no, sorry. Coffee Newman. Coffee Newman interviewed Jordan Peterson.
237
00:24:13.760 --> 00:24:19.520
Right. That is in like, and I think with good reason, that's like a sort of a hit-beast attempt,
238
00:24:19.520 --> 00:24:24.160
right? Yes. It's kind of gotcha question. But Helen, Helen Lewis's was perfect. Yeah, absolutely
239
00:24:24.160 --> 00:24:29.520
perfect. But for a lot of people online, especially like, and I would say like for Lex Friedman or
240
00:24:29.600 --> 00:24:35.600
Jordan, and for Jordan Peterson themselves, he saw that the same way as like a brutal attempt to
241
00:24:35.600 --> 00:24:40.960
like, I don't think they do. I don't believe that they genuinely do. I mean, I don't believe that
242
00:24:40.960 --> 00:24:46.560
they don't see a difference between they just like the fact that he that Jordan won one and lost
243
00:24:46.560 --> 00:24:50.480
the other and he lost the other because Helen is formidable or any one may have her because
244
00:24:50.480 --> 00:24:55.920
coffee is not. But he's but Jordan and people like when I've heard Jordan talk about Helen
245
00:24:56.000 --> 00:25:01.360
multiple times, it sounds like he has a dartboard. Of course he does because he, he, you know,
246
00:25:01.360 --> 00:25:07.920
he's so caught in his own self-identity is that he's this sage and for him to be shown up as a bit
247
00:25:07.920 --> 00:25:15.040
of an emperor with not with no clothes by some uppity journalist is insulting to his, his self-identification.
248
00:25:15.040 --> 00:25:20.720
Right. Perhaps especially a feminist journalist, but the in not case though, for Jordan,
249
00:25:20.720 --> 00:25:27.280
I don't think he's pretending that he thinks Helen is a bad fief interlocutor with like, you
250
00:25:27.280 --> 00:25:33.520
know, a kind of agenda that they came down like that she was acting maliciously by asking her
251
00:25:33.520 --> 00:25:39.840
questions and whatnot. He seems generally very upset with her as a person and the way she approaches
252
00:25:39.840 --> 00:25:44.160
things. He's talked about her like being possessed by the, I don't know, the demon of anger or
253
00:25:44.160 --> 00:25:50.640
something like this when he talks about that. And so it seems to me that like not just the audience
254
00:25:50.640 --> 00:25:57.200
but them and this applies to a lot of heterodox forecasters as well. They genuinely take like that
255
00:25:57.200 --> 00:26:05.680
as an attack and attempt to besmirch them like, you know, asking those kind of questions is like
256
00:26:05.680 --> 00:26:12.480
doing the same thing as coffee human. And to me, there's like a big guy just say that.
257
00:26:13.120 --> 00:26:16.960
I think they just say that because they're embarrassed. I think if you got drunk with Jordan
258
00:26:16.960 --> 00:26:24.960
Peterson or a high on Hollywood or whatever else he was addicted to. And I think if you really
259
00:26:24.960 --> 00:26:30.000
interrogated him about it and asked him what he thinks that Helen was doing, I don't think that he
260
00:26:30.000 --> 00:26:34.720
would, I don't know, I doubt that he would be saying that she's demonically possessed and has the
261
00:26:34.720 --> 00:26:42.880
heart of an angry woman. I think you're wrong, Josh. We should get Jordan Peterson and get him
262
00:26:42.880 --> 00:26:49.360
drunk and see what? You know, the thing that this made me think of is like, so your interaction
263
00:26:49.360 --> 00:26:54.560
with Rogen, famously the myocarditis one, Matt, do you remember that? Yeah, I remember that.
264
00:26:54.560 --> 00:27:00.800
Okay, I have a clip here which I'll play for the whole time. Okay, so if people don't know
265
00:27:01.760 --> 00:27:09.920
in January of 2021, I went back on Rogen's show for the seventh time since 2014. And it was while he was
266
00:27:09.920 --> 00:27:15.920
in that snafu that people may remember the controversy about vaccine misinformation. And he said
267
00:27:15.920 --> 00:27:22.240
something that was not true. And it then became briefly a very viral moment. And everyone sort of
268
00:27:22.240 --> 00:27:27.200
like CNN was reporting it as if he got owned on his own show, which completely baffled me.
269
00:27:27.280 --> 00:27:33.520
But it was, he did kind of well. You can let the, let the list of it. I'll play the clip,
270
00:27:33.520 --> 00:27:40.480
not just the remind us for young boys in particular, there's an adverse risk associated with the
271
00:27:40.480 --> 00:27:47.120
vaccine. It's two to four fold increase in the instances of myocarditis. Yes, but you know what
272
00:27:47.120 --> 00:27:52.000
the, you know that there's an increased risk of myocarditis in among that age cohort from
273
00:27:52.000 --> 00:27:56.800
getting COVID as well, which exceeds the risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. I don't think that's
274
00:27:56.800 --> 00:28:00.320
true. I don't think it's true. I don't, no, no, I don't think it's true that there's an increased
275
00:28:00.320 --> 00:28:06.000
risk of myocarditis from people catching COVID that are young versus increased risk of myocarditis
276
00:28:06.000 --> 00:28:10.000
from the vaccine. No, there is. There's bodies. Well, let's look that up because I don't think that's
277
00:28:10.000 --> 00:28:14.640
true. There's bio carditis more common after COVID-19 infection than vaccination. But is this with
278
00:28:14.640 --> 00:28:22.800
children? Yeah, we're talking about young people and boys aged under 30 after there's this what says
279
00:28:23.200 --> 00:28:27.840
with children is the issue. Well, no, we were talking about 15 year olds. Well, we're talking about
280
00:28:27.840 --> 00:28:33.360
young children. So yes, 12 to 17, 12 to 17, more like to build myocarditis with three months of
281
00:28:33.360 --> 00:28:41.040
catching COVID at a rate of 450 cases per million infection. This compares to 67 cases of myocarditis
282
00:28:41.040 --> 00:28:46.720
per million of the same time, following their second dose of Pfizer. Yes, so you're about eight
283
00:28:46.720 --> 00:28:51.760
times likely to get myocarditis from getting COVID than from getting the vaccine. That's interesting.
284
00:28:51.760 --> 00:28:57.360
No, that's not what I've read before. But also, it's like, well, even when we're reading these
285
00:28:57.360 --> 00:29:01.440
things, it's like, what are we getting this from? It was this from the VAERS report. But even
286
00:29:02.160 --> 00:29:07.360
from the VAERS reports, when they report this stuff, it's like the amount of people that report,
287
00:29:07.360 --> 00:29:17.120
the I'm like, it's the under reporting. Josh, before you eat the fan joke, I know that you
288
00:29:17.120 --> 00:29:23.120
interviewed a relevant professional and like kind of highlighted the actual, you know, like issues
289
00:29:23.120 --> 00:29:29.440
around that topic after. But the reason I wanted to mention this is because, regardless of how you
290
00:29:29.440 --> 00:29:37.520
frame that unframed like Joe's follow up reactions to it, that is like a case where you are disagree,
291
00:29:37.520 --> 00:29:41.760
with Joe, right? Friendly, but you're saying, no, I think that's wrong. And wait, no, but we were
292
00:29:41.840 --> 00:29:48.080
talking about 15 year olds, right? That's not. So you are like kind of, not, not, you're calling
293
00:29:48.080 --> 00:29:52.400
right the way you were to friend, right? If you argue with them. But I'm very recently, I don't know
294
00:29:52.400 --> 00:29:58.480
if you'll have time to, or you have had time to hear it, yeah, but Douglas Murray just went on
295
00:29:58.480 --> 00:30:04.160
Jerome with, no, no, I didn't hear that. I heard Douglas on legs. Oh, Douglas went on with Steve Smith.
296
00:30:05.040 --> 00:30:12.720
I saw that that happened. I haven't heard it yet. So it starts off and I just explain who Dave Smith is.
297
00:30:12.720 --> 00:30:19.440
So Dave Smith is a libertarian in America, but he's a comic, right? He's a comic and he basically
298
00:30:19.440 --> 00:30:29.280
got a profile boost from Rogen as well, appearances there. But and he's libertarian, very pro-Palestine
299
00:30:29.280 --> 00:30:37.360
in the like, Israel Gaza conflict and has also like was kind of endorsing Trump before the
300
00:30:37.360 --> 00:30:43.600
election, right? So and he's quite isolationist and this sort of yeah, kind of like in the VN of the,
301
00:30:43.600 --> 00:30:51.120
you know, norm Chomsky version of like Western imperialism is a lot of the problems in the world,
302
00:30:51.120 --> 00:30:56.320
right? Yeah. So there's overlaps, right? Right. But poor, poor Putin was just back into a corner.
303
00:30:56.320 --> 00:31:01.680
Exactly. Yeah. So you predicted that, but here. So Douglas Murray,
304
00:31:01.680 --> 00:31:07.680
apparently to say holds like a lot of different geopolitical opinions on that, right? Very
305
00:31:07.680 --> 00:31:14.880
strong advocate for Israel. Some might say propaganda. I think we would all say it too strongly,
306
00:31:16.160 --> 00:31:23.440
the advocate for Israel. But and also as we played in the recent thing, very strongly critical
307
00:31:23.440 --> 00:31:29.040
of Putin and people that offer apologetics to him. Now in the Rogen episode that you haven't heard,
308
00:31:30.560 --> 00:31:37.600
remarkably at the start, he specifically calls out Joe at the very start of the interview and
309
00:31:37.600 --> 00:31:44.320
directly says you've been having people on that aren't experts that are very skewed to one side
310
00:31:44.320 --> 00:31:50.320
and it's been going on for multiple years and they they have a 40 minute near well back and forth.
311
00:31:50.320 --> 00:31:57.520
With Douglas Murray being quite strong and direct at times like and it gets relatively heated
312
00:31:57.520 --> 00:32:02.880
including with Rogen and Deep Smith. It was obviously going to get heated between them, but yeah,
313
00:32:02.880 --> 00:32:10.560
right. He calls out Rogen. Now Douglas Murray being Douglas Murray, he ends up like in a kind of
314
00:32:10.560 --> 00:32:15.120
difficult position because he saying you should have more people with actual expertise who have
315
00:32:15.120 --> 00:32:21.040
been to the region who understand this conflict at the same time that he's saying experts are
316
00:32:21.040 --> 00:32:25.680
consistently wrong about it. He then goes on the lab lake and he talks about you know and they are
317
00:32:25.680 --> 00:32:30.320
saying well this is inconsistent so you're saying we should keep that right. So he gets in trouble.
318
00:32:30.320 --> 00:32:36.320
But the whole thing for me was that I the first part was very cathartic because it's one of the
319
00:32:36.320 --> 00:32:43.200
really rare times I've heard someone directly, you know, read criticism to Joe directly to his
320
00:32:43.680 --> 00:32:50.000
the same thing that happened with when you were talking about the myocarditis and I'm curious
321
00:32:50.000 --> 00:32:56.000
for your kick as somebody that is like more, you know, broadly sympathetic to the the heterodox
322
00:32:56.000 --> 00:33:03.040
like kind of ecosystem. Why that is so verboten like given all the values that they say, you know,
323
00:33:03.040 --> 00:33:09.280
that we are for the marketplace of ideas we're here. Criticism is okay and yet anytime it happens
324
00:33:09.360 --> 00:33:15.040
you can see online now. Everybody is in that absolute tezzy about like the saying, you know,
325
00:33:15.040 --> 00:33:19.840
Douglas Murray will never be invited back and so on. And the same thing happens of course with
326
00:33:19.840 --> 00:33:26.080
Sam Harris, right? When Sam Harris has a temerity to disagree publicly with any of them,
327
00:33:26.080 --> 00:33:32.080
everybody melts down and there are these you know essays being written on the what's what's
328
00:33:32.160 --> 00:33:39.760
happened to Sam. So yeah, like it is the thing, right? Yeah, I mean, but people, I mean,
329
00:33:39.760 --> 00:33:44.800
firstly, I would not ascribe too much, I don't know how representative people yelling online are
330
00:33:44.800 --> 00:33:52.320
about like the what's relevant to me as a player in the space rather than like someone who's just
331
00:33:52.320 --> 00:34:00.240
topping away on Twitter about what Joe Rogan is doing is that is the cowardice of the average
332
00:34:00.240 --> 00:34:06.160
guest. Really, I mean, what's remarkable is not that Douglas and I are willing to talk to Rogan
333
00:34:06.160 --> 00:34:11.040
as if he was a friend and colleague. What's remarkable is that so few people do.
334
00:34:11.920 --> 00:34:18.480
They're like, it's incredible the reaction that I got after that exchange with people saying,
335
00:34:18.480 --> 00:34:23.520
oh, that was like so bright. And like, honestly, I remember, I remember coming out of the
336
00:34:23.680 --> 00:34:35.760
studio and waiting for my Uber to go to the airport and doing a mental catalog of, is any of this
337
00:34:35.760 --> 00:34:40.000
going to get me in the shit with my employer? Is any of this going to blow up? And like I sort of
338
00:34:40.000 --> 00:34:45.680
mentally went through the three hours thinking like, is there are there any landmines here that I
339
00:34:45.680 --> 00:34:51.760
should be mindful of? And there were a few that I identified that didn't cause any kind of
340
00:34:51.760 --> 00:34:58.560
a ripple. And that one, I remember, did not come up at all in my brain. I like that didn't land.
341
00:34:58.560 --> 00:35:04.160
That didn't code for me at the time as being anything, what remarkable, whatsoever. And then
342
00:35:04.160 --> 00:35:10.640
that was the one that became a shit storm. I think just because people, then this may be partly an
343
00:35:10.640 --> 00:35:15.360
American thing. It may just be a cultural difference between Aussies and Americans. Americans are
344
00:35:16.000 --> 00:35:20.720
polite. Like Americans don't think they're polite. They think they're uncouth. But they're actually
345
00:35:20.720 --> 00:35:26.160
super polite. Like which people think they think that British people are polite and that Americans
346
00:35:26.160 --> 00:35:32.320
are swaggering boobs. But actually, in which country would you be more likely to find a family
347
00:35:32.320 --> 00:35:37.680
sitting down and saying grace before a meal or holding the door open for somebody behind them as
348
00:35:37.680 --> 00:35:44.480
they walk, you know, as they walk through or vomiting in the street or like, Brits and Aussies
349
00:35:44.480 --> 00:35:48.960
were much more likely to interrupt, were much more likely to call people out. And I think there's
350
00:35:48.960 --> 00:35:55.680
a certain decorum that has developed in American podcasting where the norms are quite gracious,
351
00:35:55.680 --> 00:35:59.920
actually. And especially when a person has power, I guess they're also starfuckers more than we are.
352
00:35:59.920 --> 00:36:05.680
So they're more intimidated by the king in his lair and coming in and not wanting to, you know,
353
00:36:05.680 --> 00:36:09.840
challenge him in some way. And it maybe it's not a coincidence that Douglas is a Brit and that
354
00:36:09.840 --> 00:36:14.880
I'm an Aussie in the sense that yeah, like who gives a shit? Aren't we here to have like an
355
00:36:14.880 --> 00:36:18.560
interesting conversation the way that you would with colleagues and friends in any other context?
356
00:36:18.560 --> 00:36:23.600
Constantinist and Kissin is doing a good job of adopting culture as a British person.
357
00:36:25.120 --> 00:36:29.760
Him and Andrew Gold, they're holding up the British side of the sycophantics.
358
00:36:31.200 --> 00:36:35.680
Yeah, I mean, I'm also sometimes it's interesting that people, you know, in terms of platforming
359
00:36:35.680 --> 00:36:40.800
controversial people and like the and date wise Dave Smith, you know, being listened to and
360
00:36:40.800 --> 00:36:46.320
shouldn't we be listening to experts and stuff. I obviously copped the critique of why do I have
361
00:36:47.040 --> 00:36:50.800
Douglas Murray on the edge. Can someone's on the show? Why do I have Douglas Murray on the show?
362
00:36:50.800 --> 00:36:56.880
And every time I say anything about Israel or Palestine, someone will get into my mentions and say,
363
00:36:56.880 --> 00:37:02.800
this coming from the man who platforms the likes of Douglas Murray. And it's not even worth
364
00:37:02.800 --> 00:37:07.200
replying. Well, what about the Palestinians who I platform? Like, do you not see it?
365
00:37:08.800 --> 00:37:13.440
There's something contradictory about thinking that I endorse the views of every person who's on
366
00:37:13.440 --> 00:37:18.320
when I have people on who have wildly different views. Or Anthony Lowenstein, who was just on the
367
00:37:18.320 --> 00:37:27.760
show, who's the most anti-Israeli, anti-zyonist, journalist I can think of. And sort of balancing the,
368
00:37:28.480 --> 00:37:33.280
I'm basically just interested in people who have interesting ideas. And I'm interested in
369
00:37:33.280 --> 00:37:37.120
interrogating why those people have those ideas. That doesn't mean that I would have an
370
00:37:37.120 --> 00:37:42.000
unreconstructed fascist on the show because those ideas probably wouldn't be very interesting.
371
00:37:42.800 --> 00:37:47.520
Candace would be the closest, right? I mean, Candace, that's the borderline case.
372
00:37:47.520 --> 00:37:53.760
I have a question about that because like this would be my criticism of listening to that
373
00:37:53.760 --> 00:38:00.880
with Candace. It's like, I can understand, you know, I also, I even can understand Lex's
374
00:38:00.880 --> 00:38:07.440
argument for having Kanye. I look like there, I think there's much bigger like, you know, mental
375
00:38:08.080 --> 00:38:14.800
possible issues as well, right? Because Kanye generally seems unhinged. But there is an aspect
376
00:38:14.800 --> 00:38:20.320
which overlaps. And it's like Candace Lowen's, as you covered in the episode, a couple of times
377
00:38:20.320 --> 00:38:26.480
when you reference things for her. It's not like she's just on the block and we don't know what her
378
00:38:26.480 --> 00:38:32.880
perspective is, right? Like we know from Candace being in the discourse sphere for many years,
379
00:38:32.960 --> 00:38:41.040
that she is a conspiracy theorist. She is a, like, polemical partisan, very, like,
380
00:38:41.040 --> 00:38:47.120
loquacious, but she endorses, like, all manner of conspiracy theories and of a particular
381
00:38:47.120 --> 00:38:53.600
stripe, right? In a particular anti-jury stripe more recently. But, but she's not a, like,
382
00:38:54.560 --> 00:39:01.200
I would say somebody who demonstrates, like, a capacity for doing detailed research or for,
383
00:39:01.200 --> 00:39:08.480
she's good at talking, she's good at getting an audience. So if you talk there and you also know
384
00:39:08.480 --> 00:39:14.400
that she's like, she's a polished media person, so she can give answers, right? It's not the first
385
00:39:14.400 --> 00:39:19.920
time she's heard someone say, aren't you an extremist? Like, aren't you a conspiracy prone person?
386
00:39:19.920 --> 00:39:28.880
So, like, isn't it the case that, like, you're basically just, you know, giving her, like, a little
387
00:39:28.880 --> 00:39:34.400
bit of a platform and giving her another chance to say the same shit that she's been saying for
388
00:39:34.400 --> 00:39:41.440
years? Well, hopefully not. Hopefully not, right? I think there is a craft. This is where, sort of,
389
00:39:41.440 --> 00:39:47.600
like, without wanting to sound like a total wanker craft does come into some extent in the sense that
390
00:39:47.600 --> 00:39:52.000
it's very, there's no, you're right that there's no point in doing a gotcha with a person like
391
00:39:52.000 --> 00:39:56.720
Candace because she's so good in an adversarial debating environment that she will, she can own
392
00:39:57.360 --> 00:40:02.400
anybody. But I do think there's something interesting about a person who started out very far
393
00:40:02.400 --> 00:40:09.920
left. She was like, she found it a website that was apparently going to dox anybody who wasn't,
394
00:40:09.920 --> 00:40:14.800
you know, a social justice warrior. And then that fell apart because she didn't understand
395
00:40:14.800 --> 00:40:18.960
the internal logic of the social justice movement and she thought she was being an ally when
396
00:40:18.960 --> 00:40:25.200
in fact she wasn't and they turned on her. And so then she became, she started sort of flirting
397
00:40:25.280 --> 00:40:32.000
with this, you know, I'm a black person who stands up to black people orthodoxy and then
398
00:40:32.000 --> 00:40:37.120
became an anti-Semite. And like, that's a really weird trajectory and she has one of the most
399
00:40:37.120 --> 00:40:44.480
popular podcasts in the world. And so I think it's interesting a to interrogate what it's like
400
00:40:44.480 --> 00:40:51.520
to go on that journey and then be to try to expose her in ways that she's not going to find
401
00:40:51.600 --> 00:40:55.920
confrontational or that she might not even be bright enough to understand are happening
402
00:40:55.920 --> 00:41:01.280
in the conversation. Like there's a good maximum in journalism, which I think podcasters could do
403
00:41:01.280 --> 00:41:10.000
more to appreciate, which is if you want to, if you suspect that your guest is a liar or you
404
00:41:10.000 --> 00:41:15.680
suspect that your guest is a hypocrite or you suspect that your guest is operating in bad faith
405
00:41:15.760 --> 00:41:25.200
or is mistaken. Don't say to your guest, are you a liar? Why are you a liar, sir? That is
406
00:41:25.200 --> 00:41:29.680
probably what Lex Friedman is responding to when he's saying that there are bad versions of
407
00:41:29.680 --> 00:41:35.520
gotcha questions. That's just not a very good question. The best thing you could do if you suspect
408
00:41:35.520 --> 00:41:41.920
your guest is a liar is to reveal to the listener that they're lying in some way. If you think
409
00:41:41.920 --> 00:41:46.320
they're a hypocrite, then find a way of constructing a conversation such that the listener will go,
410
00:41:46.320 --> 00:41:51.680
huh, that guess sounds like a hypocrite or if you think they're mistaken, have a conversation in which
411
00:41:51.680 --> 00:41:56.640
the guest is going to go surely that which the listener is going to go surely that guest is mistaken.
412
00:41:56.640 --> 00:42:03.200
So my job with someone like Candace is to get as close as I can to making the accusation so that
413
00:42:03.200 --> 00:42:07.840
the listener understands that the accusation is being made and to get her to reveal something about
414
00:42:07.840 --> 00:42:13.040
herself at the same time as not overtly alienating her so that she just shuts the conversation down
415
00:42:13.040 --> 00:42:17.840
or goes into antagonistic mode. And there is a craft so that we should only get from tens of
416
00:42:17.840 --> 00:42:22.640
thousands of hours of interviewing, I think. I have a clip of Josh. He's always going to
417
00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:29.600
Candace that will maybe be relevant at this point. So I'll play it for you to hear. Don't you
418
00:42:29.600 --> 00:42:34.720
sort of find what you're looking for and if you keep hunting for ways in which the mainstream
419
00:42:34.720 --> 00:42:41.840
narrative about everything is corrupt, it could sort of send you around the bend. No, I just
420
00:42:41.840 --> 00:42:47.040
think that that's not like a small inconsistency, like whether you were born a man or a woman,
421
00:42:47.040 --> 00:42:51.040
I don't know, I feel like that. But this isn't just the only thing, Candace. I mean, we could
422
00:42:51.040 --> 00:42:56.960
play a bazillion clips or talk about a bazillion different things that whether it's about 9-11
423
00:42:56.960 --> 00:43:03.840
or about Frankus or the Jews or COVID epidemiology or vaccine medicine or online doxing or
424
00:43:04.400 --> 00:43:09.520
transgenderism or World War II, there would be a number of things that we could talk about where
425
00:43:10.320 --> 00:43:15.600
it strikes me that with the greatest respect, it might be a little bit like the experience you
426
00:43:15.600 --> 00:43:23.120
had initially with the social bullying thing where there's a whole ecosystem that has its own
427
00:43:23.120 --> 00:43:29.840
internal rules and ways of operating. You come in unaware of them. I mean, you said at the
428
00:43:29.840 --> 00:43:34.560
beginning of this conversation that you were sort of blindsided by the way that that whole doxing
429
00:43:34.560 --> 00:43:43.600
and harassment, game-a-gate ecosystem worked. You proudly call things as you see them to your
430
00:43:43.600 --> 00:43:51.520
credit because you're powerful and independent-minded, but you're sort of unfamiliar with the soup
431
00:43:51.520 --> 00:43:56.080
that you're swimming in and then the people who are familiar with it point out to you the ways
432
00:43:56.080 --> 00:44:01.040
in which you're unfamiliar with it and the reasons why you're wrong and you regard them as being
433
00:44:01.040 --> 00:44:09.680
conspired, you know, as imposing upon you speech codes and, you know, harassment and then you get
434
00:44:09.680 --> 00:44:13.680
to sort of play the victim when an actual fact is just that you don't really know what you're talking
435
00:44:13.680 --> 00:44:22.560
about. I don't think that's a fair assessment. I like that. I feel embarrassed even listening
436
00:44:22.640 --> 00:44:28.400
back to that because you can hear me just trying to not say the thing for so long. I'm like,
437
00:44:28.400 --> 00:44:32.720
you're very intelligent and powerful, but also, okay, I'll just say it. You don't know what you're talking
438
00:44:32.720 --> 00:44:35.760
about. Have you considered that you kind of what you're talking about? Yeah, you know the point you
439
00:44:35.760 --> 00:44:44.880
made about like the well or or not, you come from someone or not, like, you know, well or it's
440
00:44:44.880 --> 00:44:48.640
useful to do that in an interview. And I think that point because like I think that question
441
00:44:48.720 --> 00:44:55.600
now is a good illustration of it, but, you know, the streamer Destiny, yeah, he had Candace Owens on
442
00:44:55.600 --> 00:45:01.360
a bit before and it was back when he was like more inclined to kind of reach across the island,
443
00:45:01.360 --> 00:45:06.080
try to, you know, speak to some people on the hard right knee, we'd argue with them, but we'd do
444
00:45:06.080 --> 00:45:11.200
it politely, right? And he's he sensibly moved away from that because he said that like the way
445
00:45:11.200 --> 00:45:17.520
he took it was like he could have a conversation with them, but it was always him extending the kind
446
00:45:17.520 --> 00:45:25.200
of nice word or saying, you know, you are a thoughtful person. And like then they would still endorse
447
00:45:25.200 --> 00:45:29.120
all their conspiracies, they would still do the thing and they would still present like the left
448
00:45:29.120 --> 00:45:34.400
constantly as a caricature. So it was all on his side. And then before the election, he had
449
00:45:34.400 --> 00:45:42.880
Bacha Ungar Sagan on, I think that's open onto him from the free press. And she this is when it kind
450
00:45:43.040 --> 00:45:47.920
of had lost patience with that, right? And she was, she's a very Trump, she's the opinion editor
451
00:45:47.920 --> 00:45:52.720
of Newsweek. I had her on the show before the election as well on my show. And she is, yeah,
452
00:45:52.720 --> 00:45:59.520
probably the most articulate pro Trump. Yeah, well, yeah, in journalism. Yeah, articulate, but like
453
00:45:59.520 --> 00:46:04.400
today, just today, she wrote out a thing about high bad Barack Obama was and all the stuff that they
454
00:46:04.400 --> 00:46:10.560
did in 2008, one year before he became the president. He was like, remember when he passed all this
455
00:46:10.560 --> 00:46:17.280
legislation to five years, but in any case, she went off with destiny. And she just before
456
00:46:17.280 --> 00:46:21.520
a week before the election or something, she presented herself as, I'm a liberal. I don't know her
457
00:46:21.520 --> 00:46:28.160
I'm voting for it. And he, he said, no, you know, you're not like you are. And he was rude like
458
00:46:28.160 --> 00:46:33.360
she, he was basically said, you're, you do know who you're voting for? You're absolutely voting
459
00:46:33.360 --> 00:46:39.040
for Trump. We are not the same. We're not on the same team. And you know, subsequently, as
460
00:46:39.200 --> 00:46:45.200
it's went on, it's very clear. She is, like you said, a very strong advocate from Aga. So destiny
461
00:46:45.200 --> 00:46:51.440
could have, you know, kind of been more interpersonally receptive there and said, oh, yeah, look,
462
00:46:51.440 --> 00:46:56.160
we all agree, you know, that it is important. I mean, I would say two things about that and
463
00:46:56.160 --> 00:47:02.000
remember what you're going to say. One is destiny is playing in a different space. I think of destiny
464
00:47:02.000 --> 00:47:07.200
as being like a left wing version of Ben Shapiro or something where the whole, the argumentation
465
00:47:07.360 --> 00:47:12.080
is the point. Like, I love destiny. I love destiny's content. I think he's really interesting.
466
00:47:12.080 --> 00:47:17.440
And he's a fascinating debater, but he's really not about, I don't think teasing out truth.
467
00:47:17.440 --> 00:47:22.560
Or like he's about owning, he's about owning the destiny, disagreeing them. Secondly,
468
00:47:22.560 --> 00:47:28.160
there is a time and a place for, for going in hard. When I had Batia on my show before the
469
00:47:28.160 --> 00:47:34.800
election, I kept asking her about things that, to defend things that she supported in Donald
470
00:47:35.600 --> 00:47:39.360
Trump. And she kept saying, she kept doing this rhetorical move that really irritates me,
471
00:47:39.360 --> 00:47:44.080
where she would say, like, if you go and talk to people in, you know, rural Pennsylvania,
472
00:47:44.080 --> 00:47:49.200
then what, then they feel betrayed. And I said, butchette, like, and I went in. And I was like, at
473
00:47:49.200 --> 00:47:53.520
some point, you have to give up this stick about saying, like, the Hoiti Toiti, a leader's
474
00:47:53.520 --> 00:47:58.080
podcast, it doesn't understand the little man. I'm asking you why you support this policy.
475
00:47:58.080 --> 00:48:02.800
I'm not asking you to be a suitsayer who can, who's like a, a little man whisperer to whisper
476
00:48:02.880 --> 00:48:07.280
to me, like, why the, you know, what the, what the people, what the populace is, is feeling.
477
00:48:07.280 --> 00:48:11.680
I'm asking, I'm having an intellectual conversation with you about tariffs. Stop telling me what
478
00:48:11.680 --> 00:48:16.080
people in Middle America think about tariffs and start talking about tariffs. So like, yes,
479
00:48:16.080 --> 00:48:20.240
you sometimes need to course correct and go, like, this is not what, this conversation is not
480
00:48:20.240 --> 00:48:25.120
working for me because we're not on an agreed, you know. But I don't think that this is rocket
481
00:48:25.120 --> 00:48:30.880
science if you just take it out of the universe of an interview and put it into the universe of a pub.
482
00:48:31.600 --> 00:48:34.560
Like, I just don't think that they said, I think we all know how to do this into
483
00:48:34.560 --> 00:48:39.680
personally. Like, well, most of us who are good at, I mean, some of us don't, some of us just
484
00:48:39.680 --> 00:48:45.120
smash a glass and stab the broken glass into someone's face. But many of us know how to sort of,
485
00:48:45.120 --> 00:48:50.080
you know, gently navigate and negotiate disagreements with friends and colleagues. It's just we assume
486
00:48:50.080 --> 00:48:53.920
that the moment you turn the microphone on, it's verboten. Well, I was going to say, I think
487
00:48:53.920 --> 00:48:59.600
broadly, we totally agree because in the general principle of showing rather the telling.
488
00:49:00.160 --> 00:49:05.680
And it's far better if the people that are listening are coming to the conclusions
489
00:49:05.680 --> 00:49:10.800
themselves rather than being lectured to. So even with that stuff, I mean, we let it slip heat,
490
00:49:10.800 --> 00:49:15.920
but we know what we ought to do, which is, you know, you show the material, show the evidence,
491
00:49:15.920 --> 00:49:24.960
make the extremely uncontrovertual deductions from that and let people, you know, decide for
492
00:49:25.040 --> 00:49:29.840
themselves. I mean, we could, I mean, we ultimately often do just, you know, let it rip just for fun.
493
00:49:29.840 --> 00:49:34.400
But, but that is much stronger than getting up on your high horse and and ranting and raving.
494
00:49:34.400 --> 00:49:40.560
And what we found is a lot of the other people who criticize the same people that we criticize.
495
00:49:41.440 --> 00:49:44.880
Firstly, they're often doing it for different reasons, usually because they just don't like their
496
00:49:44.880 --> 00:49:49.520
politics. So, you know, they're the enemy. We don't like that they're stupid, mainly.
497
00:49:49.600 --> 00:49:58.800
And also, I feel like like they're only preaching to the choir, you know what I mean? Like,
498
00:49:58.800 --> 00:50:03.200
if you've got your little dedicated audience of haters, then they will love to hear you
499
00:50:03.920 --> 00:50:10.880
get very striving, but you're not convincing anyone else. So, yeah, you know, I'm all laid back
500
00:50:10.880 --> 00:50:15.600
approach generally with. I was just thinking that like something that we've noticed,
501
00:50:15.600 --> 00:50:19.760
right, is obviously because of the people who we usually cover our audience cues left,
502
00:50:19.760 --> 00:50:25.920
right? Like, obviously, Matt and I are academics, you know, to the, like, left leaning academics,
503
00:50:25.920 --> 00:50:32.240
right? So, that will inevitably attract an audience that skews that way. But as a result,
504
00:50:33.040 --> 00:50:39.200
any, like if we cover Yvonne or Harari or someone like that, not really any issue,
505
00:50:39.200 --> 00:50:45.520
also even Jonathan Hayd people didn't care that much. But it like us being critical, right?
506
00:50:45.520 --> 00:50:53.120
That's, that's fine. If we cover Nome Chomsky, Slava Gisek, the, who's the most recent one,
507
00:50:53.120 --> 00:51:02.080
now we climb, right? Like every time that happens, people are beautiful. But like, this
508
00:51:02.080 --> 00:51:06.560
one of the differences is that, you know, there's various friends on Reddit or these people, Matt
509
00:51:06.560 --> 00:51:12.480
and Chris haven't studied Marxist academics. They, like, the system, the thing works except when
510
00:51:12.480 --> 00:51:19.760
they cover people that we like, but it's the, it's the thing that I find is, like, people are talking,
511
00:51:19.760 --> 00:51:24.720
you know, when that happens, does that make you not want to, like, you know, cover those kind of
512
00:51:24.720 --> 00:51:29.200
people because you're going to get blowback or whatever. And it might be Matt and I personality
513
00:51:29.200 --> 00:51:34.000
or character, but when that happens, I'm like, I'm going to do this little bit more.
514
00:51:34.000 --> 00:51:41.360
Yeah, it's going to be Gary's economics. I know it's going to annoy people, but I kind of like,
515
00:51:41.440 --> 00:51:47.040
because there are for us, it isn't in 10th, there's like, you know, like a political
516
00:51:47.040 --> 00:51:53.520
podcast. No, no. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I mean, why does everything have to be politicized? It's,
517
00:51:53.520 --> 00:51:58.880
it is interesting. I mean, I am, I don't have quite that luxury, I suppose. I do have to be more
518
00:51:58.880 --> 00:52:06.800
mindful of it now a bit because I, I just find that there are, in my guest selection, there are
519
00:52:06.800 --> 00:52:13.200
frequently more interesting people who are more willing to say more provocative and unusual things
520
00:52:13.200 --> 00:52:20.320
who are, who I'm drawn to getting in the ring with, who are on the right, then on the left. Like,
521
00:52:20.320 --> 00:52:29.600
I think maybe the social justice sort of ethos of hyper caution and sensoriousness and fear of
522
00:52:29.600 --> 00:52:35.840
being pilloried has led people to be much less keen to like even in politics, like there's an
523
00:52:35.840 --> 00:52:41.280
Australian election coming up and, you know, I'm the conservative side of the aisle of fairly
524
00:52:41.280 --> 00:52:48.640
willing to come on the show and, you know, the governing Labor Party don't seem to be quite so keen.
525
00:52:48.640 --> 00:52:54.320
And I don't know what that split is, but it does make me wary. Like one newspaper called me an
526
00:52:54.320 --> 00:53:03.760
edge lord. I really offended me last year because I was like, I think I want to be Helen Lewis,
527
00:53:03.760 --> 00:53:07.760
I don't want to be an edge lord, you know, I don't want to be, I don't, I don't, I don't,
528
00:53:07.760 --> 00:53:12.960
are you going to make my shoes or that's not right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, because, because I,
529
00:53:12.960 --> 00:53:17.600
I sympathise with you, but on the other hand, it could be the case that the more interesting
530
00:53:18.320 --> 00:53:27.280
and fun types of views are just wrong, right? Like, like, yeah, often the truth is boring,
531
00:53:27.280 --> 00:53:31.840
right? And, you know, this is, this is one thing, you know, just in research and science and stuff,
532
00:53:32.320 --> 00:53:36.240
like we have a little replication crisis and stuff like that. And, you know, if you're a psychologist,
533
00:53:36.240 --> 00:53:40.480
you want to get something published. And it's going to be sexy, it's going to be amazing,
534
00:53:40.480 --> 00:53:45.920
this changes everything, you know, it's a bright, sparkling, exciting thing. And you just read
535
00:53:45.920 --> 00:53:52.560
the title and you go, I'm 99 percent sure this is bullshit. Before you even, before you even
536
00:53:52.560 --> 00:53:57.120
look at the methods, right? Did you confirm that? So, I mean, I think, you know, and I think
537
00:53:57.360 --> 00:54:02.560
I hang on, but you're, but you're embedding in that critique and assumption that a wrong,
538
00:54:02.560 --> 00:54:09.760
a person who holds a wrong idea is a less, that conversation with that person who's going to be
539
00:54:09.760 --> 00:54:14.640
a less constructive, less illuminating conversation than a conversation with someone who's right.
540
00:54:14.640 --> 00:54:19.040
It may be the reverse. Yeah, no, I wouldn't, yeah, I wouldn't go as far as that. I wouldn't say this,
541
00:54:19.040 --> 00:54:24.720
that's bad to talk to them. Just pointing out that, like, good more often, the
542
00:54:24.720 --> 00:54:28.560
crazy people, crazy people. Right, but I mean, take the, you know, take the Douglas Murray example,
543
00:54:28.560 --> 00:54:33.280
just because, you know, you'd raise him Chris, you know, I did a tour in Australia with him,
544
00:54:33.280 --> 00:54:37.440
because, and we booked it before October 7th. Some people thought it was in response to October 7th,
545
00:54:37.440 --> 00:54:43.280
but, you know, he was, I think he's interesting. Like, we also invited Slavo Gishek,
546
00:54:43.280 --> 00:54:49.440
who was going to come and then had health problems on a tour, right? And so, like, yeah,
547
00:54:49.840 --> 00:54:52.480
both of those people, I think, are really interesting. Anthony Lawrence,
548
00:54:52.560 --> 00:54:59.040
also, is a really interesting journalist, lived in East Jerusalem, is in, you know, a fiercely
549
00:54:59.040 --> 00:55:07.600
anti-zionist critic of Israel. These are interesting people who, it's interesting for me to talk to,
550
00:55:07.600 --> 00:55:13.280
and one of the most interesting things about my tour with Douglas was every night him and me arguing
551
00:55:13.280 --> 00:55:18.000
in a slightly different way about Israel. No, it's not like I was sitting there like Lex Friedman,
552
00:55:18.000 --> 00:55:22.160
just saying, the floor is yours. You know, what's New Orleans like?
553
00:55:25.520 --> 00:55:28.720
Yeah, I was pushing back. I was like, how can you say that it's in the interest, you know,
554
00:55:28.720 --> 00:55:32.400
the long-term interests of the Jewish people to have this, this state hanging around the
555
00:55:32.400 --> 00:55:38.000
neck like an albatross? You know, anyway. So, yeah. Yeah, there. Look, I just think we need to get
556
00:55:38.000 --> 00:55:42.720
you back on Rogen, and you can talk to him about the massive structures underneath the pyramids.
557
00:55:42.720 --> 00:55:49.280
That's all he was talking about this morning when I met him. I mean, I heard the news.
558
00:55:49.280 --> 00:55:52.880
I was like, come on, listen to the bad guys.
559
00:55:54.880 --> 00:55:59.440
George, that's a question. It's probably, yeah, but that feeling, this is the comfortable question.
560
00:55:59.440 --> 00:56:06.240
Yes, but you haven't been back on Rogen since that interaction. No, that's true. But I don't live
561
00:56:06.240 --> 00:56:12.400
in the United States anymore, and I've only been back there once since, at which point I did send
562
00:56:12.400 --> 00:56:18.960
him a text, but I mean, he's gone from, when I was first on the show in 2014, he was a big
563
00:56:18.960 --> 00:56:24.480
fucking deal, but he wasn't like the most powerful person in media. I think, and I get asked
564
00:56:24.480 --> 00:56:28.800
this sometimes, like, would he have me back on the show or has he blackballed me or banned me?
565
00:56:28.800 --> 00:56:38.080
Um, blacklisted me. What's blacklisted me? Is that a term? Is that just my romantic fantasy about
566
00:56:38.160 --> 00:56:44.720
and about Jeremy? Um, it's, but I think that if I had, I suspect that if like I had a book out
567
00:56:44.720 --> 00:56:50.480
that was, you know, that he found interesting, and if I, if he still checks the phone, his number,
568
00:56:50.480 --> 00:56:55.440
I have, then he would have me back on. I don't think he's petty. He tweeted after that thing,
569
00:56:55.440 --> 00:56:59.360
something very nice about me and said, like, he thinks the whole blow up is silly.
570
00:57:00.400 --> 00:57:04.560
Yeah, hello here. Who knows? Who knows? I mean, it's impossible to say.
571
00:57:04.640 --> 00:57:10.480
Yeah, they, um, the Douglas Murray with the Smeth, there is a bit in that. I mean,
572
00:57:10.480 --> 00:57:13.600
this was the thing because like, we have this experience already with Douglas Murray when he was
573
00:57:13.600 --> 00:57:17.840
talking to Lex, because like, he was very good on pushing back on you. Hello, he did that thing
574
00:57:19.200 --> 00:57:24.960
where what you're talking about with politeness that like, you can't say directly to Lex, Lex,
575
00:57:24.960 --> 00:57:30.240
your opinion on this is naive. You're the things that you have said, like Russia joining
576
00:57:30.240 --> 00:57:36.160
NATO is ridiculous, right? And you're, and so what Douglas does for right, that interview is
577
00:57:36.960 --> 00:57:44.080
some people have argued, you know, and this is a naive position, right? And then Lex is also
578
00:57:44.080 --> 00:57:49.840
responding saying, but there are people who always call naive. You're actually very smart,
579
00:57:49.840 --> 00:57:56.960
and literally saying that I actually very smart. And we'll, yeah, at the moment we prove in the
580
00:57:56.960 --> 00:58:01.520
logo that we corrected that kind of thing. But like Douglas Murray said to Rogan and the Smeth,
581
00:58:01.520 --> 00:58:06.320
when they were talking about the mainstream media and the power that the mainstream media has
582
00:58:06.320 --> 00:58:09.840
these experts on, they're doing all these things and they get things wrong. And Douglas Murray said
583
00:58:09.840 --> 00:58:16.240
to them, you guys have power. This is power. You have the biggest podcast. You have an influential
584
00:58:16.240 --> 00:58:21.360
podcast. You have power now. And we are often talking about, you know, the alternative media is
585
00:58:21.440 --> 00:58:27.840
better than the legacy. But we have to then admit that what we do makes, you know, I'm starting to
586
00:58:27.840 --> 00:58:34.720
talk like, but I was like, yes, yes, that's right. You know, that's, that's the thing that like,
587
00:58:35.280 --> 00:58:41.280
if you are going to talk every episode, we just covered Chris Williamson and Joe Rogan. And
588
00:58:41.280 --> 00:58:46.480
I'm friendly with Chris Williamson, but I said this to him, interpersonally as well, that they,
589
00:58:46.480 --> 00:58:52.800
they were like, the alternative, the legacy media is dying. And it's got, it just spends all
590
00:58:52.800 --> 00:58:58.080
its time talking about alternative media. And they're like, we are the, you know, the kind of new
591
00:58:58.080 --> 00:59:03.200
king dex on the street. That was the general message. And I consume a lot of alternative media.
592
00:59:03.200 --> 00:59:10.000
I think it is rare that I hear an alternative media episode that doesn't mention the mainstream media
593
00:59:10.000 --> 00:59:16.480
in some part to complain about it or to cover stories from them. So like, they presented it
594
00:59:16.480 --> 00:59:20.720
that the mainstream media is parasitic on the alternative media. But like, from my perspective,
595
00:59:21.280 --> 00:59:28.400
the alternative media cannot shut up about mainstream media. But even as it steals stories
596
00:59:28.400 --> 00:59:33.920
completely, yeah. I mean, look at the whole, you know, the way that that controversy about the
597
00:59:34.560 --> 00:59:40.160
the British Pakistani grooming gangs went down where like Elon basically co-opted that and was
598
00:59:40.160 --> 00:59:44.720
talking as if this was a story that nobody had ever covered, even though it was the tireless
599
00:59:44.720 --> 00:59:50.480
work of legacy media journalists in the UK who have official government like reviews on the topic
600
00:59:50.480 --> 00:59:55.440
as well. So this happens all the time. I mean, I think one thing that's important to note in this
601
00:59:55.440 --> 01:00:01.760
whole conversation about the fate of the legacy media and the rise of new media is the importance
602
01:00:01.760 --> 01:00:07.360
of investigative journalism from legacy media sources. There is just no substitute in the new
603
01:00:07.360 --> 01:00:12.560
media for the kind of investment that you need to hold politicians accountable by investigating
604
01:00:12.560 --> 01:00:17.280
like possible corruption or, you know, having a foreign bureau who can actually be on the ground.
605
01:00:18.080 --> 01:00:24.960
So investigative journalism reporting like all that stuff, I think, will never be replaced or
606
01:00:25.040 --> 01:00:32.320
not anytime soon by any like the legacy media excels there. The concern is that in the opinion,
607
01:00:32.320 --> 01:00:40.240
analysis, commentary, panel conversation, interview space that there it has become a bit
608
01:00:40.240 --> 01:00:45.680
stale, a bit too talking pointy. Everyone is like everyone sort of knows you can basically predict
609
01:00:45.680 --> 01:00:51.200
if I give you the name of a news outlet and then I give you the particular topic, be that
610
01:00:52.000 --> 01:00:57.680
transgender athletes or the MeToo movement or Indigenous rights in Australia or climate change
611
01:00:57.680 --> 01:01:01.920
or something like that, you can jot on the back of a napkin in advance what roughly you're going to
612
01:01:01.920 --> 01:01:05.120
hear, the kind of talking points that you're going to hear, and that's what people are rejecting
613
01:01:05.120 --> 01:01:11.040
and why they tune into shows like mine, I suppose. Yeah, I got a question for you actually about
614
01:01:11.040 --> 01:01:18.240
the ABC and the BBC, but I just have to mention to yes Andrew a bit, like I, it's unpleasant,
615
01:01:18.240 --> 01:01:22.880
but often I find that when I'm reading an article from a standard newspaper,
616
01:01:24.080 --> 01:01:28.480
yeah, it's often like, like when they're talking about something I know about, like, you know,
617
01:01:28.480 --> 01:01:35.840
this sort of generally a bit more online, it's kind of embarrassing how lazy it is and just
618
01:01:35.840 --> 01:01:42.240
have so many things have gotten, gotten wrong. Like one example was a Guardian article I read and
619
01:01:42.240 --> 01:01:48.160
it was about the, it was about AI, right? AI, you know, the AI wars and, you know, destroying artists
620
01:01:48.160 --> 01:01:54.880
and stuff like that and you know, the Hayao Miyazaki quote, very, he talks about the, you know, the AI
621
01:01:55.520 --> 01:02:00.400
as being like a, you know, like a threat to human dignity or something like that, right?
622
01:02:01.040 --> 01:02:05.920
And the thing is that like the quote was completely taken out of context, which you can,
623
01:02:05.920 --> 01:02:10.000
you can find out, there's no mention of the fact that Hayao Miyazaki is a bit of a freak,
624
01:02:10.000 --> 01:02:13.680
frankly, this is my reason why. Anyway, there's a barb moment.
625
01:02:15.680 --> 01:02:24.160
Any general that the summary was just this sort of like, like by the numbers, like, you know,
626
01:02:24.160 --> 01:02:29.200
basically AI, anything to do with AI, AI, AI, AI, it was bad, you know, think of the poor artists,
627
01:02:29.200 --> 01:02:35.760
it was just a boring, conventional take. So yeah, there's that, but I wanted to ask you,
628
01:02:36.640 --> 01:02:41.280
so what do you think about the, like, publicly funded outlets, like the D.D.?
629
01:02:41.280 --> 01:02:45.680
I think it's, I think it's, well, I think they're crucial. I think they have to, I don't think I
630
01:02:45.680 --> 01:02:50.640
absolutely disagree with people who think that they've lost so much credibility that we should
631
01:02:50.640 --> 01:02:56.640
defund them or do it with them. I think we should reform them and reinvigorate them and fund them
632
01:02:56.640 --> 01:03:00.800
properly, because I think a lot of the problem is that they've suffered so many funding cuts and
633
01:03:00.800 --> 01:03:06.480
so many attacks from the Murdoch press and from others and from unscrupulous politicians that
634
01:03:06.480 --> 01:03:11.600
they've ended up hunkering down. I mean, I think this was why my tenure at the ABC Left was that
635
01:03:11.600 --> 01:03:15.440
there was just a management structure that was extremely risk averse and was exhausted by,
636
01:03:16.800 --> 01:03:21.840
you know, and was just in a mode of hypercautiousness. And so people who were a little bit more spicy,
637
01:03:21.840 --> 01:03:27.600
like me, you know, triggered the immune system of the organization. But I think you need to,
638
01:03:27.680 --> 01:03:31.360
I don't think that means that you punish the organization and strip away its funding. It means that,
639
01:03:31.360 --> 01:03:34.960
like, that's part of the problem is that you've been punishing it and stripping away its funding.
640
01:03:34.960 --> 01:03:39.440
Like, I think it needs, I don't, I look at the landscape in the United States and I just think,
641
01:03:40.240 --> 01:03:44.720
like, they're but for the grace of God, I do not want to go there in terms of how divided the
642
01:03:44.720 --> 01:03:51.040
media is. I think everyone having a, having a common source of news of just information,
643
01:03:51.600 --> 01:03:54.880
you know, you can go out and you can talk about all that, I think there needs to be a much,
644
01:03:54.880 --> 01:04:01.440
so, I mean, my advice to public broadcasters is re-institute a firewall between news and
645
01:04:01.440 --> 01:04:06.800
opinion, clamp down hard on activists journalists, especially younger activists journalists,
646
01:04:06.800 --> 01:04:12.960
usually of color, keep talking, or like from the LGBTQIA plus community who keep talking about,
647
01:04:12.960 --> 01:04:17.040
you know, how we have to share the stories of the lived experiences of people in the new, no,
648
01:04:17.040 --> 01:04:22.960
that's not for news, that's not for news. Get back the, the light on the hill as being like some kind
649
01:04:22.960 --> 01:04:30.880
of objective journalism in the news pages. Do away with jargon, don't allow yourself,
650
01:04:30.880 --> 01:04:37.200
like in the news pages of the ABC, I mean, the most obvious example lately is just LGBTQIA plus
651
01:04:37.200 --> 01:04:43.600
stuff. It's so obviously, in the, in the push for diversity and it's important to diversify
652
01:04:43.600 --> 01:04:48.160
newsrooms and it's good, it's a good thing that they're not all staffed by middle-aged white
653
01:04:48.240 --> 01:04:56.160
straight males anymore, but my argument, I wrote a piece recently, arguing that diversity should
654
01:04:56.160 --> 01:05:01.840
be done in a story agnostic way, so that you should hire a diverse newsroom and then be agnostic
655
01:05:01.840 --> 01:05:07.680
about the stories that an editor assigns, whereas what's happened is that it's inconceivable that
656
01:05:07.680 --> 01:05:15.200
you would have a like quote unquote queer story written by anyone other than the queer staffers,
657
01:05:15.200 --> 01:05:18.640
and it's inconceivable that you would have a story about race written by anyone other than
658
01:05:19.840 --> 01:05:25.040
journalists of color. And I think that has got to stop. I think that is just leading.
659
01:05:25.040 --> 01:05:31.520
It's pushing audiences away because so much of the coverage is written in a jargonistic style that
660
01:05:31.520 --> 01:05:36.160
doesn't actually raise any of the little niggling concerns that the reader might have if they're
661
01:05:36.160 --> 01:05:41.920
not already on the team. So it actually makes it harder to be critical, for example, of President
662
01:05:41.920 --> 01:05:46.720
Trump's executive order on gender, because the reporting is written from such an obviously
663
01:05:46.720 --> 01:05:54.560
partisan perspective using terms like affirmation, care, you know, instead of I don't know gender transition
664
01:05:54.560 --> 01:05:58.320
or something like that, it's just not written the way that human beings talk. It's written the way
665
01:05:58.320 --> 01:06:03.360
that activists talk. And so I think stripping that out of newsrooms, getting newsrooms back to being
666
01:06:03.360 --> 01:06:08.160
just about the bread and butter of what happened, and then having actually a much more generous
667
01:06:08.720 --> 01:06:14.960
first person attitude towards commentary towards what's technically called content, which is a
668
01:06:14.960 --> 01:06:21.520
horrible word, but that's what the ABC calls it at least, where there's like my fate was sealed
669
01:06:21.520 --> 01:06:26.240
because I was straddling those two worlds where technically I was in the content division because
670
01:06:26.240 --> 01:06:31.440
I was hosting a three hour a day talk back radio show, which is not in the news division. So you're
671
01:06:31.440 --> 01:06:37.120
supposed to have more latitude, but there's an informal assumption that you're gonna pull your neck in
672
01:06:37.760 --> 01:06:45.120
and tow a certain line of caution. And I think the muddiness of exactly of the rules around that,
673
01:06:45.120 --> 01:06:50.960
and you know, the uncertainty on the part of a viewer or a listener or a reader about like,
674
01:06:50.960 --> 01:06:57.280
is what I'm reading or watching supposed to be just the facts, ma'am, or is this also allowed
675
01:06:57.280 --> 01:07:01.280
to have some spin? And if it's allowed to have some spin, then it should be allowed to have tons
676
01:07:01.280 --> 01:07:05.680
of spin for more kinds of different directions. And I think the public broadcaster should be more
677
01:07:05.680 --> 01:07:10.880
courageous about allowing a much wider range of views, whether that's against COVID lockdowns or,
678
01:07:10.880 --> 01:07:14.880
you know, floating ideas about the lab leak or whatever it might be. It should be a much more
679
01:07:14.880 --> 01:07:24.000
rambunctious space in the commentary realm, and a much less like personal feels the kind of activist
680
01:07:24.000 --> 01:07:29.360
space in the news realm. That would be my, that would be what I would do if I was emperor of the
681
01:07:29.360 --> 01:07:34.560
world. Yeah, yeah, that sounds fair, that sounds fair. Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of universities
682
01:07:34.560 --> 01:07:41.120
where they've kind of, they've become more corporatized, become more cautious and riskabuse.
683
01:07:41.760 --> 01:07:49.840
And I think I like little, scared little puppies rather than sort of independent institutions
684
01:07:49.840 --> 01:07:56.880
with a strong voice. And I actually more keen to clamp down on academics who are inconvenient
685
01:07:57.840 --> 01:08:12.480
in terms of the reputation of the off-beat boy. Actually, I saw, like, I guess you may
686
01:08:12.480 --> 01:08:18.000
be thinking about, like, I guess sometimes the messaging around that the activists and stuff
687
01:08:18.000 --> 01:08:23.600
can be counterproductive. I think that kind of cross-month be recently, which was, it was
688
01:08:24.240 --> 01:08:29.600
from an activist organization that was pro, you know, gay adoption and parenting,
689
01:08:29.600 --> 01:08:34.640
but the graphic was too, like it was probably AI generated or something, but it was too
690
01:08:34.640 --> 01:08:43.360
extremely muskly, oiled up, shaved. Like naked, like holding a head, holding a baby, and I like,
691
01:08:44.080 --> 01:08:50.640
they don't look like any, I mean, you haven't seen my partner and I never met.
692
01:08:53.600 --> 01:09:00.400
I've got to show if you want. We'll be giving Chris a private dance later on.
693
01:09:00.400 --> 01:09:05.200
How many of you guys roll? How many of you guys roll?
694
01:09:05.200 --> 01:09:12.000
Like, I thought, you know, the things like, you know, the Flint, I don't know if you know him,
695
01:09:12.000 --> 01:09:15.680
but like the archaeologist that had to be up with Graham Hancock on Joe Rogan's show,
696
01:09:15.680 --> 01:09:18.960
and it was like a three-hour thing. He gave a, like a PowerPoint presentation.
697
01:09:19.120 --> 01:09:25.760
And I've regularly enjoyed it because he made Graham Hancock look like a fool, but that would
698
01:09:25.760 --> 01:09:30.880
not be a format that fits, you know, like a BBC, I know the ABC, but I'm thinking to BBC,
699
01:09:30.880 --> 01:09:35.840
but there's no reason it couldn't be. It would be something, right? And they, especially if they
700
01:09:35.840 --> 01:09:41.040
gave like, you know, Flint the time to present his things, but they wouldn't like that format,
701
01:09:41.040 --> 01:09:47.760
because of, you know, I think Graham Hancock alone, they did give him a series before Channel 4,
702
01:09:47.760 --> 01:09:53.200
but the thing to me is like, when people talk about the podcasting space and they'll turn
703
01:09:53.200 --> 01:10:00.800
to medium, whatever, they are usually like singly night that they mean they don't like Joe Rogan,
704
01:10:00.800 --> 01:10:06.560
they don't like Sam Harris, they don't like Tim Poole, you know, this, the kind of ecosystem there,
705
01:10:06.560 --> 01:10:10.400
but like what they do like if they're critical of those kind of things is they will like
706
01:10:10.400 --> 01:10:15.920
Cune on Anonymous, Conspirituality, they might like Mary Hassan's channel, you know,
707
01:10:15.920 --> 01:10:20.400
and they're not, they're not kind of putting them into the same bracket. I'm not saying they're
708
01:10:20.400 --> 01:10:26.960
all of equal like levels of, you know, standards or quality, but I mean that the independent media
709
01:10:26.960 --> 01:10:32.960
is a big wide array of things that a lot is like a whole bunch of things that we like, you know,
710
01:10:32.960 --> 01:10:38.800
history podcasts or like random podcasts like ours, the coding, the girls or, or yours, right?
711
01:10:39.280 --> 01:10:45.840
But the, I don't see why, I mean, I guess I see from the viewing things as a zero something,
712
01:10:45.840 --> 01:10:52.560
but like madamee make a podcast about gurus, we talk for hours, about obscure people,
713
01:10:52.560 --> 01:10:57.040
and like they're, I'm playing clips of them, right? And there's an audience for that,
714
01:10:57.040 --> 01:11:03.680
but I've never been like, you know, the mainstream media, they can't do, I'm doing, I'm just like,
715
01:11:03.680 --> 01:11:09.600
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there's a whole stick, isn't there? Of which I've probably been
716
01:11:09.600 --> 01:11:13.280
guilty, like three or four years ago, because I think it needed to be said then, but now it's
717
01:11:13.280 --> 01:11:18.240
become a tiresome cliche about elites, you know, sort of not listening and not being responsive.
718
01:11:18.240 --> 01:11:24.880
Like, I think there was a real thing in 2021 where, you know, the school closures during COVID
719
01:11:24.880 --> 01:11:32.320
in the United States, the kind of punitive attitude of the post George Floyd moment on race relations,
720
01:11:33.040 --> 01:11:38.960
the sensoriousness of the trans ideology, you know, that those things really did need to be
721
01:11:38.960 --> 01:11:48.000
called out. And elites did a bad job and the media did a bad job in being upfront and, you know,
722
01:11:48.000 --> 01:11:52.400
nonsense free about calling out those things. And there was a lack of courage and people
723
01:11:52.400 --> 01:11:58.400
were losing their jobs if they did call them out in many cases. Now, that's just become a trope.
724
01:11:59.040 --> 01:12:04.960
It's just like, you know, the claim that the elites are betraying us and don't know anything
725
01:12:04.960 --> 01:12:10.640
has just become, you're not allowed to talk about this, Joe. A stupid, stupid, stupid point that
726
01:12:11.440 --> 01:12:16.400
that people make usually to feather their own nests or give increased credibility to their
727
01:12:16.400 --> 01:12:21.600
independent media, media sphere. So I don't, I don't bang on, I mean, people regular listens
728
01:12:21.600 --> 01:12:26.000
of my will notice that I don't bang on about that anymore. I mean, I don't talk about how elites
729
01:12:26.000 --> 01:12:30.160
have lost the trust of the little man or something like that. I think we need more elites,
730
01:12:30.160 --> 01:12:35.600
not less. And I mean, even as you say, Chris, the difference in the media landscape is
731
01:12:35.600 --> 01:12:41.040
fast in podcast to stand. Even the three people who you mentioned, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris and
732
01:12:41.040 --> 01:12:45.280
Tim Poole, I mean, could not be more different. You know, Tim Poole's a fucking idiot.
733
01:12:46.480 --> 01:12:53.520
Joe Rogan is a, Joe Rogan is a really, is a really curious and talented conversationalist.
734
01:12:54.480 --> 01:12:58.720
And Sam Harris is like a rigorous and courageous genius. Absolutely.
735
01:13:01.920 --> 01:13:09.040
And none of them is without their flaws as a great, but yes, it's a very large landscape.
736
01:13:09.040 --> 01:13:12.960
I think what people are talking about when they're talking about podcasts to stand as a
737
01:13:12.960 --> 01:13:17.600
phenomenon is a particular type of, I mean, you guys cover this well on your show, which is like
738
01:13:17.600 --> 01:13:25.280
the weird combination of conspiracy mindedness mixed with credulity, mixed with skepticism,
739
01:13:25.280 --> 01:13:29.120
like intense skeptic, like, you know how the conspiracy theorist is also really
740
01:13:29.120 --> 01:13:34.240
credulous about certain things. And I think that's just that's kind of what we're talking about,
741
01:13:34.240 --> 01:13:43.680
like a kind of dude, bro, podcaster, dumb guy, smart guy, like what a dumb person thinks a smart
742
01:13:43.680 --> 01:13:50.000
person is talking to people in a really uncritical, but professorial kind of contemplative
743
01:13:50.720 --> 01:13:57.600
way about bullshit without much cheap pushback. There's one thing that I meant to mention that
744
01:13:57.600 --> 01:14:02.640
like it plays this. I know we should wrap up soon, Mark, because we're going to go, like,
745
01:14:02.640 --> 01:14:07.520
you know, sushi, we're going to go eat food that's better than Australian and American food.
746
01:14:08.000 --> 01:14:12.000
That's not a standard picture. Don't send me pictures. I don't like pictures.
747
01:14:12.720 --> 01:14:16.640
It's going to be pearls before swine. He wouldn't even recognize. He'd be like, this isn't just
748
01:14:16.640 --> 01:14:24.640
good as my local, wonderful job. Let me uh, so we did, we recently covered the
749
01:14:24.640 --> 01:14:29.840
Chris Williams appearance on Rogan. And one of the things that got me a lot, I've expressed it
750
01:14:29.840 --> 01:14:36.640
quite clearly on the episodes, but was that there was this lamenting about how partisan people
751
01:14:36.800 --> 01:14:42.000
got high, people born together over hundreds of art groups and how, you know, kind of like Lex,
752
01:14:42.000 --> 01:14:46.480
you know, the, the platitude and this shouldn't we all be more charitable, shouldn't we be,
753
01:14:46.480 --> 01:14:53.760
and within one minute, they had moved to talk about high, the Tesla attacks were being funded by
754
01:14:53.760 --> 01:15:01.360
USC and NGOs and the academics were like corrupted by China to promote communism. And they were,
755
01:15:01.360 --> 01:15:06.160
then they would switch back and be like, yeah, and these guys just demonize our groups and they
756
01:15:06.160 --> 01:15:12.400
they bond over hatred. And I was like, you can't do this. You can't be like, you have to
757
01:15:12.400 --> 01:15:19.120
need at least five minutes. Right. What I want is like someone there like in that case,
758
01:15:19.120 --> 01:15:24.560
it happened to be Douglas Murray, not about a super fond of, but he, you know, someone that says,
759
01:15:24.560 --> 01:15:31.920
hold up guys, aren't we bonding over hatred of my group? And it just seems like that is
760
01:15:31.920 --> 01:15:41.360
unfortunately like rare. And yeah, so if you could do that. It's also, it's particularly
761
01:15:41.360 --> 01:15:46.160
fatuous because it's true that we are bonding over. I mean, you guys literally have a show in
762
01:15:46.160 --> 01:15:51.360
which you just shit on other people like, you know, it's like, we are, but that's fine. Like,
763
01:15:51.360 --> 01:15:56.480
that's fine. There's a place in the world for that. And that and analysis analysis does often
764
01:15:56.480 --> 01:16:00.800
involve shooting on other people. That's why it's analysis and not secrecy. Yeah.
765
01:16:02.160 --> 01:16:11.520
But yeah, I mean, it's like the style. Anyway, yes, I think I think the point has been made.
766
01:16:11.520 --> 01:16:15.520
Should we go and eat sushi then? Yes. Oh, though, the very last thing there,
767
01:16:15.520 --> 01:16:21.040
at last time that we had you on, he had like this really important question that he wanted to ask.
768
01:16:21.040 --> 01:16:25.680
He wrote it down. He forgot to ask it. Okay. Okay. He's not shaking his head. No, no,
769
01:16:25.680 --> 01:16:29.680
no, I got it for you. I know you were talking to me about it on the front. I didn't bring this up
770
01:16:29.680 --> 01:16:34.880
to Josh. I didn't like, wasn't there a cook up era that you wanted to ask him a fight?
771
01:16:36.640 --> 01:16:40.560
What the mask got from the Olympics? What?
772
01:16:41.520 --> 01:16:48.800
What? I'll explain it to you. I can explain it to you. Just be on the basis of the word
773
01:16:48.800 --> 01:16:55.840
cook up era during the 2000 Olympic in the 1990s when I was in high school, I was a voice actor
774
01:16:55.840 --> 01:17:00.800
and I got cast as one of the mascots in the Sydney Olympic as the voice of one of the mascots
775
01:17:00.800 --> 01:17:07.440
in the Sydney Olympic Games whose name was Oli the cook up era for the 2000 Olympics as a teenager
776
01:17:07.440 --> 01:17:13.520
and then they kind of just sideline. By the way, you don't get in the suit. There are dancers,
777
01:17:13.520 --> 01:17:18.240
they could dance in the suit and then the voice actors are in the studio pre-recording it
778
01:17:18.240 --> 01:17:23.520
and the only thing that we, they kind of shied away from the idea of using mascots at all because
779
01:17:23.520 --> 01:17:27.040
it was a bit cheesy so they didn't really appear. I don't even think they appeared in the opening
780
01:17:27.040 --> 01:17:34.800
ceremony but you know the biggest thing that we ever did was an album called Sid Millie and Oli
781
01:17:34.800 --> 01:17:42.320
who were the three mascots sing your favorite Olympic tunes and the one country where it sold
782
01:17:42.320 --> 01:17:50.000
massively was Japan. The Japanese love Sid Millie and Oli sing your favorite Olympic tunes
783
01:17:50.000 --> 01:17:56.720
because it was a platypus, a cookabara and a kidna in front of a cartoon opera house and hungry.
784
01:17:56.720 --> 01:18:01.840
Maybe the sushi restaurant they should ask if they have it. I remember I only remember one
785
01:18:01.840 --> 01:18:07.840
track which went Olympic Games, Olympic Games were having fun at the Olympic Games, Olympic Games,
786
01:18:07.840 --> 01:18:14.320
Olympic Games, Sydney Olympic Games. Those were the likes. That's a remarkable career you've
787
01:18:14.320 --> 01:18:23.760
had, Josh. You picked it. Who would have thought that high school student who was singing as a
788
01:18:23.760 --> 01:18:28.640
cookabara about the Olympic Games would someday go on to be sitting with the likes of YouTube?
789
01:18:28.720 --> 01:18:36.160
Yes, in the Japanese and in the UK. My dreams can come true kids.
790
01:18:38.400 --> 01:18:41.920
All right, enjoy the sushi guys. Thank you very much.
791
01:18:41.920 --> 01:18:45.200
Lovely thanks for having me or me having you. I don't know what this is.
