Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / JOHN SAFRAN: Kanye, Jews & Satire

Transcript

JOHN SAFRAN: Kanye, Jews & Satire · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get A Humans, welcome to The Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas, and making people uncomfortable,
• 0:08
  including himself, is pretty much the job description of today's guest.
• 0:13
  He's a provocateur, he's a journalist, he's a comedian, he's a household name in Australia.
• 0:18
  When I was in my teens, he shot to incredible notoriety and superstardom in Australia.
• 0:26
  There's a contestant in an experimental television show called Race Around the World.
• 0:31
  The idea was you get ten ordinary people, young people, you give them a video camera,
• 0:36
  and you send them around the world, and each week they submit a four-minute long documentary
• 0:41
  that they have to shoot and host and voice and edit from the road.
• 0:46
  And they send it back and it gets judged both by a panel of judges in the studio and
• 0:50
  also by the Australian people, and then a winner is crowned.
• 0:54
  And remember, this is at a time in the late 90s when we didn't have smartphones,
• 0:58
  and we weren't used to the idea of filming ourselves, there was no such thing as a selfie.
• 1:02
  It was really the first moment where you could affordably,
• 1:06
  and with some sort of logistical capacity, have a small enough camera to just give a teenager this sort of technology.
• 1:13
  And John went around shocking Australia, shocking the world, shocking himself.
• 1:21
  He was smart, young, Jewish.
• 1:25
  He pushed back against taboos.
• 1:27
  It was quite groundbreaking.
• 1:29
  And for the rest of his career, he has always found things to prod and poke at.
• 1:34
  He did a television series called John Safran versus God.
• 1:37
  And I suppose he occupies a place in the Australian consciousness,
• 1:40
  a little akin to Louis Theroux in the United Kingdom, a smart fish out of water.
• 1:46
  His latest book is about his experience trying to figure out what's going on with anti-Semitism,
• 1:52
  specifically in the context of Kanye West, or yay.
• 1:57
  And John went to Los Angeles, tried to track down Kanye, ended up finding his house that was abandoned.
• 2:03
  And I asked that he currently lives in, but I asked that he owns.
• 2:05
  And John just squatted there and wrote a book about it.
• 2:09
  This is a wonderful conversation with a brilliant mind.
• 2:12
  He sort of has a go at me at one point in an interesting way
• 2:15
  for being insufficiently sensitive about anti-Semitism in Australia
• 2:20
  and sort of being too much of a brain and a vat when I bring my rational perspective to everything,
• 2:25
  instead of embracing a broader truth.
• 2:27
  But I just love this episode.
• 2:28
  I love rumbling with him.
• 2:30
  I love the spirit that he brings to conversation and creativity.
• 2:33
  I hope you enjoy as much as I did.
• 2:35
  Oh, I should mention, the book is called Squat.
• 2:38
  It's available at Auckland Bookstore now.
• 2:40
  Do I not only John Safran?
• 2:43
  Mr. Safran, it's been too long.
• 2:45
  I feel like I'm surprised this is the first time we've actually sat down and spoken.
• 2:49
  On a couch, I think you're on a phone.
• 2:51
  We've spoken on the phone.
• 2:52
  We've spoken vaguely socially.
• 2:54
  In fact, it's funny.
• 2:55
  The last time when we spoke on the phone,
• 2:57
  I remember that vividly because I was driving along icy roads in rural New Hampshire
• 3:03
  where there were no lights and you were in Australia.
• 3:06
  And we chatted for some time about various things,
• 3:09
  about cancel culture, and about bias in the media,
• 3:12
  and about consequences for speaking out,
• 3:14
  and about being a Jew in Australia.
• 3:16
  And I just so remember us saying,
• 3:19
  and you're saying, oh, but don't worry, John,
• 3:20
  this is all, you know, in confidence.
• 3:23
  Well, it is that the content is in confidence.
• 3:25
  Oh, yeah, sure.
• 3:26
  The existence of the, does the existence of the call have to be in confidence?
• 3:29
  No.
• 3:30
  Very like CIA.
• 3:31
  It's very massage.
• 3:32
  If even the fact that we spoke has to be a secret.
• 3:35
  Yeah, no, no, it doesn't have to be a secret.
• 3:37
  I mean, you know what Jews are like.
• 3:38
  We do with the cabal does hide on icy roads in rural New Hampshire.
• 3:43
  Yeah, there will be that concern.
• 3:45
  That's how it will be on one of those carousels on Instagram
• 3:49
  where they kind of like,
• 3:50
  trying to make the Jews look good.
• 3:51
  Yeah, it will be like,
• 3:53
  there will be like, and Zeps and Safran had a conversation.
• 3:57
  Yes, that's right.
• 3:58
  And somehow the icy road also will add some,
• 4:00
  like some little mystery lights.
• 4:03
  Also, I was in the, I was in the great Satan.
• 4:05
  I was in America at the time.
• 4:07
  Yeah.
• 4:08
  So two acolytes of the little Satan.
• 4:11
  Yes.
• 4:11
  One of them in the great Satan.
• 4:12
  Mm-hmm.
• 4:13
  Or, I was, and I'm in the,
• 4:15
  I'm arguably even the, the biggest Satan,
• 4:18
  which was in Eastern Kildar in Melbourne.
• 4:21
  Right.
• 4:21
  Where all the Jews and,
• 4:22
  yeah, a lot of Jews are very suspicious.
• 4:24
  There's a lot of money.
• 4:26
  So you do the math.
• 4:28
  Mm-hmm.
• 4:28
  A lot of money, a lot of Jews.
• 4:30
  Well, how are you doing?
• 4:31
  Anyway, this is a great book,
• 4:33
  Squat, a week squatting at Kanye's Mansion.
• 4:37
  How did you come to be squatting at Kanye's Mansion?
• 4:40
  Well, it's not my fault.
• 4:41
  And also, I didn't plan to squat there.
• 4:43
  It just, it, it unrolled in front of me.
• 4:45
  Was he planned?
• 4:46
  Of course, he planned it.
• 4:47
  No, it was.
• 4:48
  Have you always ended up accidentally finding yourself
• 4:50
  in absurd and provocative situations?
• 4:52
  It's a situation.
• 4:53
  So, so the starting point was,
• 4:55
  you know how in all these debates,
• 4:57
  in these geopolitical things,
• 4:58
  it's like they started it, right?
• 5:00
  Yes.
• 5:00
  I think it's fair for me to say
• 5:02
  that Kanye West was the one.
• 5:04
  He came out, if you don't know this,
• 5:07
  he came out in support of Adolf Hitler.
• 5:11
  And he went on the Alex Jones podcast.
• 5:13
  But did he, so what did he say though?
• 5:15
  Because he did he support?
• 5:17
  Do I suppose?
• 5:18
  You're still in a fight.
• 5:20
  You're still sitting there for a fight.
• 5:21
  So that's what he gets to be, you know,
• 5:23
  the devil's advocate.
• 5:24
  I'm both sizing.
• 5:26
  I'm both sizing Hitler.
• 5:27
  You're on Kanye Hitler's side anyway.
• 5:29
  But it was also, I'm so bad at arguing.
• 5:31
  I don't blame you.
• 5:31
  I can't hear how often.
• 5:33
  There's something about the way I argue
• 5:34
  that the other person always goes on the other side.
• 5:36
  Even if that's on my side.
• 5:37
  You know me, I'm always,
• 5:39
  I'm always trying to pick holes in things.
• 5:40
  You're already like all this poor little guy.
• 5:42
  Poor old Kanye.
• 5:44
  Kanye and Hitler, why are you picking on them, John?
• 5:46
  No, so he came, he said that
• 5:50
  everyone brings good to the world, especially Hitler.
• 5:54
  So, yes.
• 5:56
  So if you, especially, especially,
• 5:58
  so if you want to be really not even,
• 6:01
  if you want to even him, no, no, no, no.
• 6:02
  If you want to have, yeah, especially Hitler.
• 6:05
  And he'd also tweeted things like tomorrow,
• 6:08
  I'm going to go desk on three on the Jewish people.
• 6:13
  Yeah.
• 6:14
  And so he said that he was drunk when he,
• 6:17
  and I'm, I'm some kind of, I'm ready to finish.
• 6:19
  I have, I have not heard that he was drunk.
• 6:21
  Who among us has not, yeah, I know,
• 6:24
  tweeted silly things about killing Jews.
• 6:27
  So, yeah, so he was, and he was getting a bit excitable.
• 6:33
  And he was saying it's because he didn't like
• 6:36
  his various contracts that he had,
• 6:38
  like in the music industry.
• 6:39
  Yeah, in the fashion industry.
• 6:40
  Because Jews control it.
• 6:41
  And he was saying because the Jews control it or whatever.
• 6:44
  So he started that.
• 6:45
  And for me, this was just very,
• 6:48
  there are a lot of things in place for me to be curious
• 6:51
  and want to dig deep up.
• 6:54
  And before I went to LA, before I even had like this idea of
• 6:58
  sort of chasing it up in the real world,
• 7:00
  I did a little bit of investigation.
• 7:02
  And for instance, he on his Instagram account,
• 7:05
  he named these, by name, he named these three Jewish bankers
• 7:09
  from Chase Morgan to sort of, you know, name and shame.
• 7:14
  Right.
• 7:15
  And I will look into it.
• 7:17
  And none of the three would Jewish,
• 7:21
  the three Jewish bankers or two,
• 7:24
  which seems negligent because there are a lot of Jewish bankers.
• 7:27
  Yeah, exactly.
• 7:27
  But he's one's or two Greek Orthodox.
• 7:31
  It was like, it was really funny.
• 7:33
  Well, swarthy.
• 7:34
  Yeah.
• 7:34
  For one of them, like it's even, it's on the chase.
• 7:36
  Like, can I just need to do a simple Google?
• 7:40
  It's on the Chase Morgan website, like under his bio,
• 7:43
  he goes, I'm a proud deacon at my local Greek Orthodox church.
• 7:47
  You know, like that's in his bio on the Chase Morgan.
• 7:50
  Site.
• 7:51
  So I thought that was kind of interesting
• 7:53
  about how he sort of like a, he'd projected Jewishness
• 7:57
  onto these non-Jews to sort of have this story
• 8:00
  in his head that supported what he was feeling.
• 8:03
  So then I decided, I'm going to,
• 8:08
  and also the fact that he was a mainstream celebrity.
• 8:11
  Like, people who aren't familiar with my work,
• 8:14
  I've been for Yonks, been exploring.
• 8:16
  That means for a very long time.
• 8:18
  Yes, Australian.
• 8:19
  I've been exploring in the fringes.
• 8:22
  Maybe a bit like if you know like Louis Theroux
• 8:24
  or you know John Ronson, that kind of character in Australia.
• 8:27
  And like them, when we started off,
• 8:29
  you used to have to like get into a like a four-wheel drive
• 8:32
  and like drive through the woods of Mississippi
• 8:35
  for three hours to arrive at the kind of the Clansman's house
• 8:40
  to kind of get these stories.
• 8:41
  And then somehow around 2015,
• 8:45
  like all these fringes started getting dragged
• 8:48
  into the mainstream and all these like esoteric views
• 8:53
  on race and stuff that.
• 8:55
  And I also, I guess it's because of the internet
• 8:56
  and social media, just started being drawn more
• 8:58
  into the mainstream.
• 8:59
  And so I found it really interesting that this dude
• 9:01
  who couldn't have been more famous, Kanye West.
• 9:04
  He was the one who was like, if he was more sloppy about it
• 9:08
  and just like I don't like the Jews or whatever like that,
• 9:10
  but he was like draggy.
• 9:12
  He was dragging in like these quite esoteric things
• 9:15
  like from the Black Hebrew Israelites
• 9:18
  and from the protocols of the elders as well.
• 9:20
  So it's like, what the hell is a pop star doing that?
• 9:24
  Then on top of that, the fact that he was a Black American
• 9:26
  or he is a Black American,
• 9:28
  that made it interesting because a lot of other people,
• 9:32
  because everyone likes having to go at, you know,
• 9:35
  some, you know, text book now Nazi,
• 9:39
  like it's fun to find, like I'm sort of,
• 9:41
  and then I could just feel that there were a lot of people
• 9:43
  going, oh God, I'd love to have it.
• 9:45
  But why does he have to be Black?
• 9:47
  Right.
• 9:48
  You know, like it just be,
• 9:49
  can't it have been a white guy?
• 9:50
  I don't know.
• 9:51
  He's like a white, can't it have been McLean War?
• 9:54
  Or vanilla, why couldn't it be vanilla rice?
• 9:57
  Or Ad Rock from the Beast?
• 9:58
  But why didn't it have to be a black guy?
• 10:00
  All like us, country singer.
• 10:01
  Yeah, I've got to be a black country singer being found.
• 10:04
  But as you say, their anti-Semitism would be likely
• 10:07
  to be just a sort of generalized vague distaste
• 10:11
  for the Jew, whereas what is interesting about Kanye
• 10:14
  is that, as you say, it's quite specific.
• 10:16
  And like I just had Candace Owens on the show as well,
• 10:18
  where like there's a very detailed theory of the case
• 10:23
  about how there are subsects of like francasts
• 10:26
  and like people, people in the 19th century who did this
• 10:30
  and like them, you know, the libel and the,
• 10:32
  like they've got a, they've got a theory.
• 10:35
  They got theory, the one in the 9-11 truth that
• 10:38
  who she also happens to be has a theory.
• 10:40
  I'd also say, anyway, so closing my thought,
• 10:43
  it's like for other people would be like,
• 10:46
  but that's sort of drooming in more
• 10:47
  because I just found that more interesting to them.
• 10:49
  Because you want to critique black people
• 10:51
  because you're a flagrant racist.
• 10:52
  Ah, no, no, no, no, but it's like,
• 10:56
  and also for people don't know, like I'm Jewish myself.
• 10:59
  So therefore I was able to bring in my own personal story
• 11:02
  and sort of like stories more than like,
• 11:05
  it's not like I'm studying some academic theory of that
• 11:08
  or it's like, well, you know, in this way
• 11:10
  and that way over my life and you know,
• 11:12
  my grandparents said this, this person,
• 11:14
  and so it kind of just as storytelling,
• 11:17
  it made it super interesting.
• 11:18
  I think another thing about Kanye
• 11:20
  and possibly your friend Candace,
• 11:24
  although I don't know too much about what?
• 11:26
  Friend? Yes.
• 11:27
  Is that American?
• 11:29
  And I think the Americanness of things
• 11:31
  is often left out when we kind of analyze things.
• 11:36
  It's almost considered, oh, it's just so,
• 11:38
  that's the norm and you don't even have to question
• 11:40
  the Americanness compared to the non-Americanness.
• 11:42
  And also this other thing.
• 11:44
  Wait, what do you mean about the Americanness?
• 11:46
  Well, for instance, thinking everything
• 11:51
  refracts off America or comes from America
• 11:54
  and is a very American thing.
• 11:56
  I'll give you an example of what I mean.
• 11:58
  Is that you have, Joseph Smith,
• 12:00
  who founded the Mormonism, you've got Charles Manson,
• 12:05
  famous cult leader.
• 12:07
  Okay.
• 12:08
  So let's just stick with those.
• 12:09
  They both thought Christ is going to return.
• 12:12
  Oh, sorry, in both cases, it's like Christ is central
• 12:14
  is in America.
• 12:16
  Charles Manson said, when Jesus Christ returns,
• 12:18
  it's going to be not only in America,
• 12:20
  but where I grew up in LA.
• 12:21
  Right, right.
• 12:22
  And Joseph Smith going against all archaeological
• 12:26
  historical evidence going, oh, you know, then Jesus
• 12:30
  take the lost triumphs of Israel
• 12:32
  or in America or in America or something.
• 12:33
  Compare that to Australia.
• 12:34
  And I, there was once these, somewhere,
• 12:37
  I think it was in far North Queensland,
• 12:39
  where it was in Queensland,
• 12:40
  and they thought they came out
• 12:43
  and they were telling everyone that Jesus
• 12:45
  was going to come to Queensland.
• 12:46
  And everyone in Australia just instinctively laughs.
• 12:51
  And I guess the reason they're laughing is they're going,
• 12:53
  like, well, why would Jesus go like it's so?
• 12:56
  We instinctively know it's like self-indulgent to someone.
• 12:59
  Yeah, right.
• 13:00
  And so Americans always think everything's America.
• 13:03
  And then on top of that, I've noticed,
• 13:05
  and this is by going, well, some American.
• 13:07
  Yeah, yes, I'm sorry, I didn't mean, I'll put it away.
• 13:09
  Yeah, I'm not saying, I'm not...
• 13:10
  hashtag, not all Americans.
• 13:12
  And also, obviously I love,
• 13:14
  and I love Americans for that and I love, or whatever.
• 13:17
  So I'm not having a go.
• 13:18
  I'm just trying to like add a layer of things, of course,
• 13:20
  blah, blah, blah.
• 13:21
  But I've also noticed hyphenated Americans,
• 13:24
  whether that's Jewish Americans, or Muslim,
• 13:28
  or black, or trans, or gay, or whatever,
• 13:30
  they're very hyper aware of one side of the hyphen.
• 13:34
  Yep.
• 13:34
  And they're not aware of the American.
• 13:37
  The American.
• 13:37
  So for instance, if you're going to have a conversation
• 13:39
  about who holds cultural sway, cultural power,
• 13:43
  like if you want that conversation,
• 13:44
  and at book festivals,
• 13:46
  at least all the ones I've gone to over the day,
• 13:48
  like that's a conversation who owns cultural power, right?
• 13:51
  And okay, cool.
• 13:52
  I reckon two of the big ones,
• 13:54
  maybe the two biggest ones, are Americans and English speakers.
• 13:58
  Like, and that's not like disgust at these book festivals.
• 14:03
  It's like, we're very concerned.
• 14:05
  There's kind of like,
• 14:07
  people are being left out of conversation
• 14:08
  for the cultural power.
• 14:09
  I've never been to one where it's like,
• 14:11
  well, yes, if you speak English.
• 14:13
  And also, do we have to worry about how English is being spread
• 14:17
  and becoming the norm through the internet at hyperspeed?
• 14:20
  So therefore, local languages are being kept.
• 14:21
  Like, that's the conversation that doesn't just really get,
• 14:25
  and I know also,
• 14:26
  and the whole American one,
• 14:27
  where if you're a high-finated American,
• 14:30
  and you're like, you write books, you're in a media,
• 14:32
  and you want to talk about who holds cultural power,
• 14:35
  and you leave out the bit, Americans,
• 14:37
  he's, I find that interesting.
• 14:41
  So, and I think that ties back in.
• 14:42
  So just, let me clarify this.
• 14:44
  Yes, in the hierarchy of like,
• 14:47
  oppression and power dynamics, right?
• 14:49
  Where you're supposed to be able to punch up,
• 14:51
  but not punch down,
• 14:52
  and we're supposed to elevate marginalized voices.
• 14:55
  Am I right in interpreting what you're saying
• 14:58
  as being like, we have a limited understanding of that hierarchy,
• 15:02
  because although we accept that there's a hierarchy of the sexes,
• 15:09
  in which men are supposedly on top,
• 15:11
  of the races in which white people are supposedly on top,
• 15:14
  of the gender identities,
• 15:17
  in which these people are supposedly on top,
• 15:20
  we don't extend the same logic to nationalities,
• 15:23
  and we don't extend, in which obviously,
• 15:26
  Americans are on top,
• 15:28
  even maybe a trans woman of color,
• 15:32
  American might wield more power in being heard globally.
• 15:37
  They know who white male,
• 15:39
  well, maybe she may,
• 15:40
  then a white male working class,
• 15:43
  Frenchman, right, it's possible.
• 15:47
  It's possible that she gets more book contracts
• 15:49
  than the white, working class, Frenchman.
• 15:51
  And then you've also got,
• 15:53
  I'm including in that,
• 15:54
  the English speaking component,
• 15:56
  where if you only speak Bangladesh-y,
• 15:58
  well, you're a bit fucked in terms of global cultural affairs.
• 16:02
  I kind of find it just interesting in the first place
• 16:04
  to like bring that up and let some other person kind of
• 16:08
  see where the cards fall.
• 16:09
  I mean, why don't you want to get cancelled?
• 16:11
  No, no, no, it's not that I don't want to be cancelled,
• 16:13
  it's that I don't know how to micromanage
• 16:15
  whether this trans-French speaker
• 16:18
  is kind of getting more cancelled than the other one.
• 16:20
  It's not a trans-French speaker.
• 16:22
  It's a cis-French speaker and a trans-American.
• 16:25
  Like, are you learning nothing from the past 30 seconds?
• 16:27
  I think it's interesting.
• 16:29
  Like, and I even notice this when I was young,
• 16:35
  when I was in high school,
• 16:37
  I was so obsessed with hip-hop, so obsessed.
• 16:40
  I went to this orthodox cultural appropriation school,
• 16:44
  and like we had Torah classes and everything,
• 16:46
  but my whole mindset, the whole time was not Torah
• 16:49
  or Kabbalah or anything like that.
• 16:51
  I was just, it was like the lyrics of public enemy
• 16:54
  and L.O. Cool J and stuff like that.
• 16:56
  So, anyway, and I loved the storytelling so much
• 17:00
  and it just opened up my mind so much.
• 17:02
  I was like, oh, this is great.
• 17:03
  There's like this art form where you can,
• 17:06
  like the storytelling can be witty and da, da, da, da, da,
• 17:09
  and it can have a beginning, middle, and end.
• 17:10
  God, I love this so much, but even then,
• 17:12
  I was kind of like, oh, isn't there this kind of,
• 17:14
  this cangel there where, for instance,
• 17:17
  I know Farmer's Boulevard, which is a street in New York
• 17:23
  because it's mentioned in L.O. Cool J songs,
• 17:27
  and I don't know the capital of Romania.
• 17:29
  And so therefore, when Chuck D from public enemy would come
• 17:33
  and say, hip-hop is black America's CNN and it was,
• 17:38
  and it was like, then it's true and it's like great
• 17:40
  and da, da, da, but there was this balance
• 17:42
  so it's like, oh, it's, that hip-hop is part of American culture.
• 17:47
  Cultural power, yeah.
• 17:48
  But having said that, I cannot stress enough.
• 17:50
  It deserves to be, it's in a meritocracy,
• 17:53
  absolutely hip-hop should, at least back then,
• 17:57
  the level of it should be on top.
• 17:59
  Yes, but the point of social justice is not that
• 18:01
  there is something unmerited,
• 18:03
  critic about inequality.
• 18:05
  It's that inequality in itself ought to be recognized
• 18:08
  and understood as a form of power, right?
• 18:10
  The power.
• 18:11
  I'm the victim.
• 18:12
  Well, no, but I think it's a legitimate point to make
• 18:15
  that the rest of the world lives in a world
• 18:18
  in which we all know Times Square, Venice Beach,
• 18:21
  Cape Canaveral, the Oval Office.
• 18:23
  You know, we know that.
• 18:25
  Thomas Boulevard in your case.
• 18:27
  Not being a hip-hop fan.
• 18:28
  Not my main New York, you know, touch point, cornerstone,
• 18:32
  but the Ed Sullivan Theatre where David Letterman
• 18:35
  taped his show, I could have pinpointed it on a map
• 18:38
  for you at the age of eight.
• 18:40
  So yes, and that counts for something,
• 18:42
  and you're right, that that counting for something
• 18:45
  is absent from the conversation about power.
• 18:49
  Okay, sure.
• 18:50
  Yeah.
• 18:51
  2015, you marked as a sort of a time when this whole
• 18:53
  kind of anti-Semitism like Jewish conspiracy thing
• 18:56
  started popping up in your feed.
• 18:58
  In the main industry?
• 18:59
  In the main industry.
• 19:00
  What happened?
• 19:02
  I don't know, there was sort of like a bubbling
• 19:05
  in the universe.
• 19:07
  That's when I actually,
• 19:11
  there was, I saw this thing on Facebook
• 19:13
  and it said that there was gonna be this
• 19:15
  skinnigate rally in Melbourne, in the Melbourne CBD.
• 19:19
  And this was the left who was putting that out there.
• 19:22
  And it said, come to the counter rally.
• 19:25
  And I was just so confused because again,
• 19:28
  like this whole thing of like costumed
• 19:30
  and visual far-right people,
• 19:32
  that had been at rest.
• 19:36
  It was more a bun for quite a while.
• 19:37
  Like that's not saying there wasn't racism
• 19:40
  and there wasn't right wingness and extreme right wingness,
• 19:42
  but it was like, you know, it wasn't theatrical people.
• 19:46
  Yeah, people weren't walking around with plans.
• 19:48
  Do you like the theatrical version?
• 19:50
  Well, the subtle version.
• 19:51
  I've not liked the theatrical.
• 19:52
  I'd like my anti-Semites, you know,
• 19:56
  in a group where I can see them waving things, chanting,
• 20:01
  I'm a far worse person than you
• 20:04
  because I, from my point of view,
• 20:07
  I've got this philosophy, it's my only philosophy is,
• 20:11
  bad for the world, good for the book.
• 20:13
  So obviously, from the point of view.
• 20:16
  Not an orcineckel.
• 20:17
  Yeah, it's not me, I mean, I'm obviously,
• 20:19
  it's like far more advantageous than me
• 20:21
  if those far-right people are...
• 20:23
  I'm not even sure that I can see
• 20:24
  that it's bad for the world.
• 20:25
  Yeah, if you're gonna have bigotry,
• 20:28
  I want it flagrant and loud and obvious
• 20:31
  and in a particular place.
• 20:33
  Okay. I don't want it.
• 20:34
  Like, isn't that the whole point about,
• 20:36
  like, structural inequality and, like, systemic racism
• 20:39
  and bigotry and stuff?
• 20:40
  Like, you don't want it bleeding through institutions
• 20:44
  in subtle ways and lingering in the back of people's minds.
• 20:47
  You want them all there, in Federation Square,
• 20:50
  some tiki torches, maybe some clansmen hoods.
• 20:53
  Oh, can I just stress that occasion?
• 20:54
  I'm going, that's more just general social lubricant
• 20:57
  in a conversation where it's like,
• 20:58
  okay, just a bit of fill up the space here or whatever.
• 21:00
  I'm not necessarily agreeing with everything here.
• 21:03
  But anyway, so I turned up,
• 21:05
  and for people around the world,
• 21:06
  Melbourne is considered like the,
• 21:08
  is seen as like the Portland of Australia,
• 21:12
  like where all the hipsters are.
• 21:14
  And it's really, and it's genuinely multi-cultural
• 21:18
  more than other places in Australia in some ways.
• 21:22
  And so it was just rattling that there was gonna be the...
• 21:24
  But it's also the most Jewish city.
• 21:27
  In Australia.
• 21:28
  Oh, yeah, part of it, yes.
• 21:31
  So, but having said that, put it in context,
• 21:34
  it's, there's not many Jews.
• 21:36
  In Australia, what was 0.4% of the fraction of the population?
• 21:41
  It's a fraction of a fraction.
• 21:42
  So there's not, I mean, you really have to localize and go to
• 21:46
  like, there's one suburb in Melbourne
• 21:48
  that you could kind of sort of say is equivalent of New York
• 21:53
  where you actually feel that there's like a Jewish home to there.
• 21:57
  And even there, it's...
• 21:58
  I don't think there's anywhere in Australia.
• 22:00
  And even there, it's kind of over-egged.
• 22:01
  Like when people would like talk about some electric being
• 22:05
  a Jewish electorate or whatever,
• 22:07
  like the one electorate that's that,
• 22:08
  when you actually look at it...
• 22:10
  It's 8%.
• 22:11
  Yeah, it's like a minority even there.
• 22:13
  But so, and that's when I,
• 22:16
  so I turned up to this,
• 22:17
  what was gonna be a raucous skinhead rally.
• 22:21
  And it was true.
• 22:21
  There were these far-right people that were classic
• 22:25
  that you'd usually only see like in a pub once a year.
• 22:29
  You know, like the far-right might,
• 22:32
  there might be eight of them in a pub once a year
• 22:36
  and they've got their neo-Nazi music and stuff like that.
• 22:41
  And they were there, but I did notice that the far-right
• 22:43
  had expanded since last time.
• 22:45
  And there was like a Sri Lankan minister
• 22:50
  and he was there on the side with the other far-right people.
• 22:53
  So he's a, and then there was some African
• 22:55
  and there was some Asian, but I was like so thrown,
• 22:58
  that this new far-right,
• 23:01
  because the rally wasn't,
• 23:02
  the rally was an anti-multicultural rally.
• 23:05
  Oh.
• 23:06
  And it was particularly targeted at Muslims,
• 23:09
  at a strong Muslim right.
• 23:11
  And so I was so confused, I'm going,
• 23:13
  how come this anti-multicultural rally
• 23:15
  on the side of the anti-multicultural
• 23:18
  as well as having these far-right people,
• 23:20
  far-right white Australians.
• 23:22
  You've also got some Sri Lankans and Indians and Asians.
• 23:26
  And that's where I started,
• 23:30
  by going to understand, oh, there are two things.
• 23:34
  There are lots of them are evangelical Christians
• 23:37
  and so they kind of don't like the Muslims
• 23:40
  from this kind of other angle to the white nationalist.
• 23:44
  But then on top of that,
• 23:45
  there were recent immigrants to Australia,
• 23:48
  relatively recent.
• 23:49
  So they'd come to Australia
• 23:51
  after the last time there was a real outburst
• 23:54
  with Paul in Hanson.
• 23:57
  It was a right-wing anti-immigrant polity in the 90s.
• 23:59
  So these people have kind of immigrated since then,
• 24:02
  so they kind of missed out.
• 24:03
  On the first wave of anti-immigrant sentiment.
• 24:05
  Yeah, and they sort of,
• 24:07
  they had their perception of Australia
• 24:10
  and what Australia was.
• 24:11
  I would say it was like different to what,
• 24:15
  in their heads,
• 24:16
  I was trying to be normal Australia.
• 24:17
  Yes, not like white.
• 24:18
  And then, but I'd say they kind of got it a bit,
• 24:21
  they had this misconception.
• 24:22
  So for instance, they thought Christianity
• 24:24
  was way more part of it.
• 24:27
  So I went to the Sri Lankan Ministers Church, for instance,
• 24:31
  and they had the Australian flags,
• 24:33
  but with Jesus and prayer hands,
• 24:36
  and in brood it in it.
• 24:38
  And that, and it's not crime to deface the national flag.
• 24:41
  And that's fine.
• 24:42
  I'm not having a go at that,
• 24:43
  but what I am saying,
• 24:44
  what I am saying is that normal,
• 24:48
  like they put the Australian flags up
• 24:50
  because they thought it would make them look more like normal Australians.
• 24:53
  Yeah. And like, oh, I'm not,
• 24:55
  I'm not like the wood.
• 24:56
  And they're like, you know what else will make us look normal,
• 24:57
  like normal Australians, Jesus hands.
• 24:59
  Yeah, and it's like there's so not what,
• 25:02
  like one of the most secular countries in the world.
• 25:05
  Yeah, but I think you may also be overthinking this,
• 25:09
  which is one of John Safran's many charms,
• 25:11
  in the sense that it's not at all uncommon for migrants
• 25:15
  of a generation ago to be concerned about immigration
• 25:19
  in the present day, because they feel,
• 25:21
  I mean, look at the fact that Donald Trump has higher support
• 25:24
  among blacks and Latinos than any Republican candidate
• 25:28
  in decades or generations, I think.
• 25:30
  Okay.
• 25:31
  Like people come in, they think we obeyed the rules,
• 25:34
  we did the right thing, we assimilated,
• 25:36
  we came here because we're fans of liberal democracy,
• 25:39
  we were fans of Australia or America or something.
• 25:41
  Now there are these new ways of people
• 25:43
  who don't want to speak the language.
• 25:44
  I mean, I'm not saying this is a true characterisation
• 25:47
  of what's taking place,
• 25:48
  but from their perspectives of those new migrant communities,
• 25:51
  they think these new guys aren't playing
• 25:52
  by the rules the way that we did.
• 25:53
  They're getting all these handouts that we never got.
• 25:55
  They're creating sub-communities of their own
• 25:58
  that we never hid inside.
• 26:00
  Like, yeah, okay, so two things.
• 26:02
  One, there's like, there's a sliding scale of things.
• 26:05
  So there, of course, there's immigrant people,
• 26:08
  like why wouldn't they be who are like liberal voters
• 26:10
  or a bit right wing or a bit conservative?
• 26:12
  Then there's kind of hanging out on the streets
• 26:15
  with the uniformed far right, white nationalist.
• 26:18
  So that's sort of, that's definitely interesting.
• 26:20
  Because the white nationalists who are there,
• 26:23
  they might be thinking, oh, this is good for our look
• 26:26
  to have a sort of people of color here,
• 26:28
  but they are white nationalists
• 26:30
  and they're in genetics and everything.
• 26:32
  So therefore that makes it interesting.
• 26:34
  Then the other thing, they've got a quota,
• 26:35
  they've got a quota for people of color just to make sure
• 26:38
  that diversity metrics are met.
• 26:40
  Yeah, it was kind of interesting
• 26:41
  because they're both using each other
• 26:43
  to try to present themselves as normal.
• 26:45
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 26:46
  So the white nationalists were like,
• 26:47
  oh, this is a good look for us.
• 26:49
  And then, then like the, the, the pox,
• 26:53
  they're going to be able to see the peoples of color.
• 26:55
  Oh, we look normal now because we're with these normal white
• 26:58
  Australians not realizing that most white Australians
• 27:01
  don't think, don't think the way that they do.
• 27:03
  You don't think the uniformed, I don't know,
• 27:06
  Nazis are like, ah, basically Aussies.
• 27:08
  But then, and the second thing is that,
• 27:12
  kind of writing about it is other writers
• 27:15
  would just dodge around that.
• 27:17
  Other writers would have been a bit uncomfortable going,
• 27:20
  oh, no, I want the story to be about these white,
• 27:22
  far-right people.
• 27:24
  So I'm almost not going to see that these,
• 27:27
  these other people have kind of been absorbed into it.
• 27:30
  Whilst, because I'm in a good way,
• 27:32
  I defend myself, you know, a bit of a troll,
• 27:34
  like a bit of like, oh, people don't want that.
• 27:37
  No, I think this, I think troll is, too, is unfair.
• 27:40
  I think you and I both share an instinct to just call,
• 27:44
  to just speak the truth that we see,
• 27:45
  regardless of the, instead of tip-toe.
• 27:47
  Yeah, and also just seeing things that are interesting
• 27:49
  and therefore putting it on, on the page or whatever.
• 27:52
  So, yeah, so therefore in that book,
• 27:54
  like I wrote about that.
• 27:55
  And I kind of feel like that's on the record now.
• 27:59
  And that's on the record because I went down there
• 28:02
  and saw this new thing and wrote about it
• 28:04
  when like other people would have been like,
• 28:06
  those have all not turned up there in the first place.
• 28:09
  And then kind of they would have looked past
• 28:12
  all the little tangles because they're not trolls.
• 28:15
  Yeah, and so then the, don't say trolls.
• 28:17
  Okay, sure.
• 28:18
  You know, fearless interrogator of the truth.
• 28:22
  Yeah, and I think I like,
• 28:25
  I like where total fault lines where they don't quite fit.
• 28:28
  Yes, that's right, yeah.
• 28:29
  I think a lot of my work is about looking at that.
• 28:33
  And then you can put it in a sense of proportion
• 28:35
  because I'm not making out like,
• 28:35
  oh, that's the whole thing above everything else.
• 28:38
  But it's like, it is something.
• 28:39
  No, I mean, noting.
• 28:40
  There was an interesting line that I once heard
• 28:43
  when we were talking about minorities,
• 28:44
  which was that the smallest minority is the individual.
• 28:48
  Oh, yes.
• 28:48
  Right, the smallest minority is a minority of one.
• 28:50
  And actually the individuals who are aberrant
• 28:55
  within the context of their minority
• 28:58
  are super interesting stories.
• 28:59
  Yeah, totally.
• 29:00
  So the, yes, the Sikh South Asian person
• 29:03
  who does not behave like a normal Sikh South Asian person
• 29:06
  but is in bed with the white nationalists.
• 29:08
  Yeah, that's fascinating and worth interrogating
• 29:11
  a lot of them crossing over.
• 29:12
  And if you're a storyteller,
• 29:14
  it's worth telling just on that sense
• 29:16
  in the sense you just said that.
• 29:17
  And of course someone can go,
• 29:18
  well, oh, he's such an aberrant.
• 29:20
  It's like, yeah, but that's not,
• 29:22
  I'm not like from polling company.
• 29:23
  I'm not a politician.
• 29:25
  I'm a storyteller.
• 29:26
  And the stories of individual people
• 29:28
  is like can be, yeah.
• 29:30
  And also in order to understand phenomena,
• 29:33
  I think you need to understand the edges of the phenomena.
• 29:35
  Like it's not good enough to just take an average
• 29:37
  of the, like you don't learn a lot.
• 29:39
  It's only, it's like in a philosophy class
• 29:41
  when, you know, the lecturer comes in and goes,
• 29:43
  so why don't we eat babies?
• 29:45
  Like what's wrong with eating babies?
• 29:46
  There are dead babies die every day.
• 29:48
  Why don't we eat dead babies?
• 29:50
  Like it's only by asking a ridiculous question like that
• 29:53
  that you come to understand
• 29:54
  why it is that we have the ethics that we do.
• 29:57
  If you just only take the sort of median ethical position,
• 30:01
  then you never actually understand where you stand,
• 30:03
  you never understand the world.
• 30:04
  So go take me on the journey from that neo-Nazi rally
• 30:09
  in Melbourne to the inflation of this ideology,
• 30:14
  this anti-Semitism into a kind of a conspiratorial,
• 30:18
  ideological online thing that then ends up captivating Kanye
• 30:23
  and his ilk to such an extent that you get on a plane
• 30:25
  and fly to California.
• 30:27
  Yeah, well, I guess I could see how easily
• 30:30
  people would bring together strands,
• 30:32
  even like local strands, like in Australia,
• 30:34
  we had the Port Arthur massacre.
• 30:37
  Where was that?
• 30:38
  That was in the 90s, maybe no, 90s.
• 30:40
  That was in the 90s because Jon Howard was the prime minister
• 30:43
  and he implemented the very controversial gun
• 30:46
  model reform after that.
• 30:48
  That was the worst massacre in history.
• 30:49
  And I started seeing things online where
• 30:51
  they just take these international things,
• 30:53
  like the protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
• 30:57
  and they talk, takes them like Ron Paul,
• 31:00
  individual, libertarian rights.
• 31:03
  And they'd kind of like mulch it together in New South Wales
• 31:08
  as or in Australia, they'd mulch it together as like,
• 31:11
  did you know that both the actual massacre was like,
• 31:16
  it was coordinated by Mossad
• 31:19
  and to try to get rid of the guns.
• 31:21
  And I just saw how you could just use
• 31:23
  this blueprint of the Jews.
• 31:25
  And wait, you were seeing this at the time
• 31:26
  or you're seeing this within the past five years?
• 31:29
  No, no, at the time, sort of like, really?
• 31:31
  Yeah, sort of online.
• 31:32
  And I just saw how you can just put this blueprint
• 31:34
  of Jewish power and the Jewish octopus
• 31:37
  and you can just, you can franchise it
• 31:39
  and just apply it locally to the Port Arthur massacre
• 31:43
  and kind of go, oh, that was Mossad or whatever.
• 31:46
  Then, so I guess it's not surprising that in that sense
• 31:50
  that Kanye was able to like pull these things together
• 31:54
  and create a big conspiracy about.
• 31:57
  Yeah, but I mean, the Mossad being behind Port Arthur
• 32:00
  is such a fringe claim that I've never even heard
• 32:04
  of its existence until this moment.
• 32:06
  But the things that Kanye is talking about
• 32:09
  now, you know, they occupy a significant minority
• 32:13
  of public consciousness online.
• 32:15
  Yeah, sure, and he was the one who helped bring it
• 32:18
  to a new generation.
• 32:21
  But anyway, so basically, I was just,
• 32:23
  in the same way I was drawn to what the hell
• 32:26
  there's gonna be a skinhead rally in multi-cultural Melbourne.
• 32:30
  I was drawn, I was going, I'm gonna go to Los Angeles
• 32:33
  and try to chase up this thing about like,
• 32:36
  what's up with Kanye?
• 32:38
  And yeah, so take us to the squatting.
• 32:42
  Yeah, so I spent about a week and a half, two weeks,
• 32:48
  going around New York, NLA, and hearing,
• 32:52
  and at least when I'm writing a book that's not always,
• 32:55
  I'm not always sure what I'm doing at the start
• 32:57
  and it's like just slowly congeals.
• 32:59
  So for all I knew when I went over there,
• 33:01
  it was gonna be, I was gonna use Kanye's story
• 33:04
  to tell the story of how, you know, through the ages
• 33:07
  from Michael Angelo to Taylor Swift, artists have claimed,
• 33:11
  have had uneasy relationships with their benefactors
• 33:14
  and I'm gonna look into that or whatever.
• 33:16
  But then it started to be more about using the history
• 33:21
  of Jewish Americans and Black Americans
• 33:24
  and how they sometimes allies, but also sometimes prickly
• 33:28
  to kind of tell the story of how, of identity
• 33:34
  and how it's so important to us or to most of us.
• 33:37
  Yes, yet it's kind of so arbitrary
• 33:40
  and it's so fickle, so yeah, so that's, yeah,
• 33:44
  I started talking to a lot of, I don't,
• 33:47
  like people have like interesting colorful
• 33:50
  eccentric points of view about that.
• 33:53
  And, you know, like I talked at Professor Griff
• 33:56
  who was from Public Enemy, so that was awesome,
• 33:59
  because, you know, childhood hero,
• 34:01
  I spoke to a rabbi in Monty in New York State
• 34:07
  who a Black Hebrew is relighted,
• 34:09
  had come into their Hanukkah ceremony
• 34:12
  only a few weeks earlier, brandishing a machete,
• 34:17
  actually I shouldn't say a Black Hebrew.
• 34:19
  A man who the FBI later found out
• 34:22
  had Black Hebrew is relight teaching.
• 34:24
  And just explain to people who aren't familiar
• 34:26
  with that terminology what a Black Hebrew is relight means.
• 34:29
  Yes, so there, they look at the Torah, the Old Testament
• 34:34
  and they say when it's mentioned in there,
• 34:37
  like the Jews or the Hebrews or whatever, that's us.
• 34:41
  That's us.
• 34:42
  It's actually Black and Black and American.
• 34:44
  Yeah, like and that white Jews, European Jews or whatever,
• 34:53
  they've stolen that from us,
• 34:54
  like I don't know whether it's a thousand years ago,
• 34:56
  I don't know exactly where, but it's like,
• 34:57
  in that maniacal way that Jews are always up to something,
• 35:00
  somehow the white Jews stole the identity,
• 35:06
  even though they're not the ones mentioned in the Torah.
• 35:08
  So they're extra furious at the Jews,
• 35:11
  because they're, so just I asked you to clarify
• 35:14
  because the name can sound misleading
• 35:15
  when you say Black Hebrew Israelites,
• 35:17
  it sounds like they might be pro-Jew,
• 35:19
  but they're actually one of the most anti-Semitic groups
• 35:21
  in the world.
• 35:22
  Yeah, and but it's such a tangled way
• 35:23
  because they take the symbols of the Jews.
• 35:26
  So for instance at the Black Hebrew Israelite center in Harlem,
• 35:29
  there's a star of David on the outside,
• 35:31
  and usually if you're running an anti-Jewish organization,
• 35:34
  usually that's a bit chewy.
• 35:35
  It's a good clue you're a bit jewy.
• 35:36
  And they have the list of,
• 35:38
  because in the Old Testament, the Torah,
• 35:43
  they name these tribes of Israel, like the Jewish tribes,
• 35:48
  and most of them of, we no longer know who they are
• 35:53
  or where they went or whatever.
• 35:54
  And so you have people say,
• 35:56
  Oh, I'm, you know, I'm one of the lost,
• 35:58
  my people are one of the lost tribes.
• 35:59
  So yeah, outside the Black Hebrew Israelite center,
• 36:02
  they name the 12 lost tribes,
• 36:04
  and they match it up with either these are Puerto Ricans,
• 36:07
  these are Negroes, these are Venezuela.
• 36:10
  I forget what all that.
• 36:12
  And but none of them are,
• 36:13
  our identity gets complicated.
• 36:14
  Oh yeah, none of them are like European Jews.
• 36:17
  No, and sometimes Jews will get attacked on the New York subway
• 36:21
  or something by some of these people who are convinced
• 36:25
  that they are interlopers taking over there.
• 36:27
  So I spoke to a lot of,
• 36:29
  people had interesting views on,
• 36:31
  and sometimes with more of a connection to Kanye
• 36:35
  and sometimes, but now like everyone's connected
• 36:37
  to Kanye in a way,
• 36:39
  like, you know, like I spoke to he's like pastor,
• 36:41
  I spoke to, you know, Gavin McGinnis,
• 36:46
  McGinnis, I know he gets very angry
• 36:48
  if you get his surname wrong or whatever.
• 36:50
  Why, how would you get it wrong?
• 36:52
  McGinnis, I don't know, he just seems to be,
• 36:54
  like he's very tolerant of a lot of things
• 36:55
  except mispronouncing his surname.
• 36:57
  Is he very tolerant of a lot of things?
• 36:59
  He doesn't strike me as very tolerant of a lot of things.
• 37:02
  Anyway, because he coordinated,
• 37:04
  he coordinated him.
• 37:05
  He was the founder of the Proud Boys,
• 37:07
  yes, far right.
• 37:09
  Yes, and he's, yeah, he's kind of seen as far right.
• 37:13
  And he's got a real being,
• 37:15
  he's wanted about trans people and about feminists
• 37:20
  and what else.
• 37:21
  But you know how, like, people extreme,
• 37:24
  sometimes I've just got interesting little...
• 37:26
  Yeah, they wouldn't say far right.
• 37:28
  I should clarify, because we're talking about wild anti-Semites.
• 37:32
  Gavin is not a skinhead who goes around beating up Jews and stuff.
• 37:37
  No, but Gavin is a...
• 37:38
  Far from it, he, even though he doesn't like all these other people,
• 37:41
  he says and that he really likes the Jews, right?
• 37:46
  Right. And so he's kind of...
• 37:48
  I mean, he doesn't go around,
• 37:49
  he's not a skinhead who goes around beating up anybody.
• 37:51
  He's a, as far as I'm aware, right?
• 37:53
  Gavin is like an intellectual guy
• 37:57
  who founded this kind of like drinking club,
• 38:01
  broy sort of collection of young guys
• 38:06
  who were fed up with political correctness
• 38:07
  and wanted to assert a more robust kind of white vision
• 38:11
  of masculinity.
• 38:12
  Would that be fair?
• 38:14
  I mean, there's little tangles in it.
• 38:15
  Like, for instance, the dude who replaced him,
• 38:19
  seeing we're so obsessed with identity,
• 38:21
  the Afro-Cuban American who replaced him,
• 38:25
  got busted in that January 16th,
• 38:27
  and I think he's in prison, so...
• 38:30
  And no, they definitely got involved in street fights or whatever,
• 38:32
  but I, the thing with Gavin that was interesting for my story is that
• 38:36
  he just, even though he's got these problems with all these other people
• 38:40
  that you just associated with a right-wing figure to have,
• 38:42
  he says he likes the Jews, he loves the Jews,
• 38:44
  so he actually tried to convince Kanye to knock it off
• 38:48
  with his Jew hatred,
• 38:52
  and he met up with Kanye
• 38:54
  and pitched the case for the Jews,
• 38:57
  and he just said he couldn't get there,
• 38:59
  like he just said that Kanye is just...
• 39:02
  He said it was, like it's a combo of an uneasy,
• 39:05
  or a hard-to-pin-down combination of things.
• 39:07
  One was he's just stuck in his ways,
• 39:10
  and the other was how much is Kanye being an artist
• 39:14
  and a provoking artist,
• 39:17
  compared with he literally believes in the teachings of Hitler?
• 39:22
  And Gavin says he can't quite unpick where it starts and where it ends,
• 39:28
  and I found that interesting,
• 39:29
  and I write about that about how David Bowie in the 70s
• 39:33
  used to play with Nazi iconography,
• 39:37
  and the sex pistols did,
• 39:40
  and like in the case of the sex pistols,
• 39:44
  it was absolutely more complicated than,
• 39:47
  hey, where are the sex pistols?
• 39:49
  We believe in Nazism,
• 39:51
  so therefore Sid Vicious is gonna wear a swastika.
• 39:53
  Like it was using it as this symbol of transgression,
• 39:57
  and also it was more,
• 39:59
  I think in the case of the sex pistols,
• 40:00
  it was more this upsets the English establishment,
• 40:04
  and this is far closer to the end of World War II than now,
• 40:08
  and they wanted to upset the British English establishment,
• 40:13
  England of course fought against the Nazis,
• 40:15
  so therefore,
• 40:18
  and also when it comes to the artists and stuff,
• 40:21
  they're not all that bright,
• 40:23
  and it's like, that's another point of the day.
• 40:25
  No, I don't mean bright, that's really the wrong way.
• 40:27
  Let me give you an answer here.
• 40:28
  They're not informed, they give you an answer here.
• 40:30
  So they're not even connecting the dots as much
• 40:32
  that they're just going a bit like when I was young,
• 40:37
  I was attracted to the skeletons
• 40:39
  on the heavy metal album covers.
• 40:41
  They're kind of getting attracted to the swastika
• 40:43
  as young people who don't really know the context of things.
• 40:46
  Well, there may also be another thing going on
• 40:47
  with the sex pistols in the 70s,
• 40:49
  which I may be reading too much into this,
• 40:52
  but British society was still very anti-Semitic,
• 40:55
  and so there may have been a, you guys won the war,
• 40:59
  but you're actually fucking hypocrites
• 41:01
  when it comes to Jews,
• 41:02
  and we're gonna wear swastikers not only to upset you,
• 41:05
  but to call you on, you know, I may be overthinking that,
• 41:08
  but it would be a kind of an interesting
• 41:10
  satirical point to make,
• 41:11
  to shock an anti-Semitic British establishment
• 41:14
  by going full Nazi on the point about,
• 41:18
  you know, these people,
• 41:19
  not necessarily being the most intelligent people.
• 41:22
  I, one thing that I'm finding really interesting
• 41:24
  in this moment of our informational space
• 41:27
  and social media and everything,
• 41:28
  it is, and sort of make America great again,
• 41:31
  and like the far right in Europe,
• 41:33
  is what fidelity people have to what they claim to believe,
• 41:38
  and how much they actually believe what they claim they believe,
• 41:41
  and how much, what they believe,
• 41:44
  or what they profess to believe is actually just a sort of a
• 41:47
  social or cultural game, sometimes a tribal,
• 41:50
  sometimes an expression of tribal allegiance.
• 41:53
  You know, how much did the people who claimed to believe
• 41:56
  that Hillary Clinton had pedophiles in a pizza parlor
• 41:59
  in Washington, DC actually believe that that was literally true,
• 42:02
  and how much was it a marker of a tribe?
• 42:05
  How much did the people who...
• 42:06
  Yeah, I think not very much of a big thing.
• 42:08
  Is it a big thing?
• 42:09
  Is it like with footy where you just sit there
• 42:13
  and you notice and make a big deal
• 42:14
  whenever the umpire makes a decision against you,
• 42:17
  but you just kind of ignore and...
• 42:20
  And you go with the...
• 42:21
  During the recent, I don't know if you followed any
• 42:22
  of the conspiracy theories during the recent hurricanes
• 42:25
  in the United States, but there was a deluge of misinformation,
• 42:31
  often retweeted by Elon Musk or even by elected representatives
• 42:35
  about how the Federal Emergency Management Agency
• 42:37
  was intentionally forwarding people's rescue efforts,
• 42:41
  making things worse at the extremes.
• 42:43
  Some of these conspiracy theories were alleging
• 42:46
  that the federal government was controlling the weather
• 42:48
  and pushing the hurricanes into areas
• 42:52
  where they would exert maximum devastation
• 42:54
  on communities, on what,
• 42:56
  working class, Trump supporting communities,
• 42:58
  stuff like that.
• 43:00
  And when called on this kind of rumor mongering,
• 43:05
  some of the, you know, the Congress people
• 43:07
  who had been peddling it are sort of like,
• 43:09
  well, that may not be literally true,
• 43:11
  but it does point to a broader, you know,
• 43:13
  concern that a lot of people have
• 43:15
  about the unelected unaccountability of our deep state
• 43:19
  and like what they're doing.
• 43:20
  So it's like, so what you claim to believe
• 43:23
  is actually not really a belief.
• 43:25
  It's more like it speaks to either a greater truth
• 43:28
  or what group you, what side you wanna be on.
• 43:31
  And so when it comes to Kanye,
• 43:34
  I suspect some of it might just be like,
• 43:38
  I don't like being put in a box where I'm supposed to,
• 43:41
  where I'm expected to think a certain way
• 43:43
  because I'm a black man.
• 43:44
  And therefore I'm just gonna say a bunch of things
• 43:46
  that I profess to believe about race.
• 43:50
  And then sometimes I'll, you know,
• 43:52
  I'll also just spit ball.
• 43:53
  It's the same with Trump, like to people say.
• 43:55
  I spoke to you before I'd ridden this book.
• 43:56
  My book would be more clear.
• 43:58
  But that's the things of markers of the tribe.
• 44:01
  Like you are right.
• 44:01
  Like it seems, and you know, Kanye West,
• 44:05
  as well as being an American,
• 44:07
  as well as being a black American,
• 44:09
  as well as being a, he's Gen X, like Gavin Beginness.
• 44:13
  And so when he's doing his wearing a white lies matter,
• 44:18
  T-shirt and putting that on his models
• 44:20
  at the French fashion show,
• 44:21
  that is like in the context of now,
• 44:24
  that's like, oh my God, or whatever.
• 44:26
  In the context of like some Gen X, or 20 years ago,
• 44:28
  that would just be such a classic Gen X troll.
• 44:31
  That's like, that you could kind of soak out
• 44:35
  or not have it have all this heightened,
• 44:38
  you know, like racial meaning or whatever.
• 44:39
  It'd just be like, like you said,
• 44:41
  it's like, I'm not meant to say this.
• 44:43
  That seems a bit, I'm just, I'm, yeah.
• 44:44
  Sort of like Trey Parker and Matt Stone
• 44:46
  wearing dresses to the Emmys or whatever.
• 44:48
  It's just like being a provocateur.
• 44:50
  By the way, Matt Stone makes a very special guest appearance
• 44:52
  in my book, Squat.
• 44:54
  I like how my book has very special guest stars.
• 44:58
  It's fabulous.
• 44:58
  It's like Elvis Kiss fellow is in the elevator
• 45:00
  and you're waiting for like,
• 45:02
  why is he in the, oh, John's now gonna go out
• 45:04
  to dinner with Elvis Kiss fellow.
• 45:05
  And it's like, just because I don't know how books work.
• 45:08
  I just thought, I love a cameo appearance.
• 45:11
  But, and I was thinking about cultural markers
• 45:13
  and politics I've thought about is just a Trump
• 45:17
  when COVID started came in.
• 45:19
  Just said, you know, the authorities
• 45:21
  they're trying to keep the masks away from you.
• 45:23
  They're trying to keep all the masks to themselves
• 45:26
  and cause they're trying to kill you with this thing, right?
• 45:29
  And then masks, sort of.
• 45:31
  Which was briefly true.
• 45:32
  Yeah, but masks could have been the opposite.
• 45:33
  Like Trump could have pitched the case.
• 45:35
  Yeah.
• 45:36
  That like the mask is like us protecting,
• 45:39
  it's like the mask.
• 45:40
  Protect yourself against the deep state.
• 45:42
  Protect yourself against the deep state.
• 45:43
  And then the same, all these companies
• 45:45
  that always advertise on Alex Jones that put out,
• 45:48
  I don't know, guns and, whatever,
• 45:50
  they could have put out these cool looking, more dark places.
• 45:53
  Yeah.
• 45:54
  And the whole thing could have been...
• 45:55
  The problem is you need a mask mandate.
• 45:57
  Yeah.
• 45:58
  And so with the one,
• 45:59
  the moment the government is imposing a mask mandate,
• 46:01
  they're that narrative no longer works.
• 46:02
  But I know what you're saying.
• 46:03
  You could have done the same with vaccines as well.
• 46:05
  Like you could have, but yeah, it gets tricky
• 46:07
  because if part of the,
• 46:09
  if part of the make America greater again,
• 46:12
  ethos is a certain rugged individualism
• 46:14
  and libertarianism,
• 46:15
  then that bumps into problems whenever you come
• 46:17
  to collective action or group coercion.
• 46:21
  But I mean, Trump is an interesting person
• 46:22
  on this question of like how much do people believe
• 46:25
  the things that they say they believe?
• 46:26
  Because I can fully imagine
• 46:28
  Gavin McGinn is sitting down with Kanye,
• 46:31
  persuading him that the Jews are not a nefarious cabal
• 46:35
  running the world.
• 46:36
  Kanye being persuaded in the moment
• 46:38
  and then walking away and five minutes later,
• 46:41
  reading something online and completely flipping back again.
• 46:44
  In the same way that I think Trump does,
• 46:45
  like people often ask me, do you think that Trump believes
• 46:48
  the things that he says that he believes?
• 46:49
  And I think that's kind of the wrong question.
• 46:52
  I don't think belief is really salient
• 46:56
  for a person like Trump.
• 46:58
  Does something work?
• 47:00
  Does the profession of belief achieve goals?
• 47:02
  It's almost like Jordan Peterson sometimes talks about this
• 47:05
  in kind of like higher, more epistemic sort of ways,
• 47:08
  which is like what is true is what works.
• 47:12
  Like if a religion, for example, to channel Jordan Peterson
• 47:16
  works to create like a fulfilled spiritual life
• 47:21
  and a cohesive culture,
• 47:22
  then to what does it mean to say that it's not true?
• 47:26
  Like it's a very kind of pragmatic utilitarian attitude
• 47:29
  towards truth and at the risk of getting
• 47:32
  totally philosophically sidetracked,
• 47:34
  I think there's something there in like the minds
• 47:37
  of a Kanye or a Trump where they're not hyper intelligent
• 47:41
  guys necessarily in a book loan and kind of way.
• 47:43
  So they're not super concerned
• 47:45
  with what is literally true or false.
• 47:47
  What they're concerned with is like,
• 47:49
  how does this make me feel?
• 47:51
  How does it make people around me feel?
• 47:52
  How does it make them react to me
• 47:54
  and does it achieve the things that I want to get done?
• 47:56
  Yeah, that's really good.
• 47:57
  And then with Kanye, there'd be all that
• 48:00
  and then the extra layer because he's an artist
• 48:03
  and he's into aesthetics
• 48:06
  and some of these far-right conspiracy stuff
• 48:09
  just has interesting aesthetics that sort of...
• 48:12
  Like what?
• 48:13
  The, you know, like,
• 48:14
  gee, he's like wearing like the black balaclava,
• 48:17
  militaristic stuff,
• 48:19
  fascist stuff can have and it provokes people
• 48:22
  and then it's like,
• 48:23
  him as an artist, this is provoking people,
• 48:25
  like my music provokes people.
• 48:29
  So yeah, it gets very tricky.
• 48:31
  So you're probably wondering how I ended up in his mansion.
• 48:34
  Yeah.
• 48:35
  So what happened was,
• 48:38
  well, first of all,
• 48:40
  I found out that there was this homeless dude
• 48:44
  who, he'd been thrown out,
• 48:46
  but he'd moved into one of Kanye's school houses.
• 48:50
  Kanye, Kanye's a bit like, you know, like you might say,
• 48:53
  I've got to build a shelf and then you start
• 48:55
  and then it's all too hard and you just leave it.
• 48:56
  And Kanye's that but with millions of dollars
• 49:02
  and people will just do it.
• 49:03
  So he'll say, I need to set up a school
• 49:06
  and then next thing you know,
• 49:08
  there's a schoolhouse painted matte black
• 49:11
  that's in the middle of the woods in Simmy Valley.
• 49:13
  With an Australian flag and to Jesus' cray hands.
• 49:16
  Yeah.
• 49:17
  That's in the middle of Simmy Valley,
• 49:19
  which is sort of like a more woody and a tree area
• 49:24
  of Los Angeles.
• 49:25
  And then anyway, so I went there and he'd been bored.
• 49:32
  I think that was the explanation.
• 49:33
  Like he'd kind of set up this school
• 49:35
  and then just like, are there any students at the school?
• 49:37
  No, there were no students at the school.
• 49:39
  The reason I knew it was his school though
• 49:41
  was because all over the floor were these
• 49:46
  unpaid, unopened utility bills
• 49:48
  addressed to the Donda Academy,
• 49:50
  which was the name of the school named after his mother
• 49:53
  and also personally to Kanye West.
• 49:55
  So it's like, this is definitely a school.
• 49:56
  And there were just little signs of things.
• 49:58
  There was some kids pictures with finger painting
• 50:01
  and it had Chicago and Sam,
• 50:04
  which is the name of him and Kim's kids there.
• 50:06
  So it was that, but I got the impression,
• 50:09
  one of two things that happened,
• 50:10
  there was an active school here
• 50:12
  and everything had been moved out
• 50:14
  or that you know, he'd started to see
• 50:17
  up this one and then just bored.
• 50:18
  And then I think it was more of the latter.
• 50:21
  So anyway, at this abandoned school,
• 50:24
  there was this shiny new bicycle
• 50:26
  and this piece of card next to it,
• 50:30
  a brown cardboard and said, Kanye,
• 50:33
  yee, where are you?
• 50:36
  If you see this ring this number,
• 50:38
  we're all looking for you or whatever like that.
• 50:40
  Anyway, so of course I rang the number.
• 50:43
  And then I mean, they could just email his Jew manager
• 50:46
  or I'm sure would be able to put them in touch.
• 50:48
  So I rang this guy and he was sort of,
• 50:51
  he was being a bit like, you go,
• 50:53
  oh, yes, I know Kanye and I work with him or whatever,
• 50:56
  then I was like.
• 50:57
  This is the person who wrote the notes?
• 50:58
  Yes, yes, yes.
• 50:59
  So then I caught up with him and he turned up with his,
• 51:02
  and he had like plastic bags filled with,
• 51:06
  like his clothes that he was walking around with
• 51:08
  and he had his business partner with him
• 51:10
  who was this other guy carrying his belongings
• 51:13
  in these plastic bags.
• 51:14
  And he had one of his eyes was missing
• 51:16
  and it's kind of the skin had grown over it.
• 51:18
  Anyway, so I met up with these two people
• 51:20
  who were like behind the...
• 51:21
  What was the heck?
• 51:22
  Are they homeless people?
• 51:24
  Yeah, right.
• 51:25
  So they were the ones who ridden the sign.
• 51:28
  And so I was talking to the guy
• 51:29
  and he was like a big Christian.
• 51:31
  And when he found out I was Jewish,
• 51:32
  he was trying to convert me to Jesus.
• 51:34
  Of course, in the most defensive way possible.
• 51:36
  You know, like, you know, you're stupid religion
• 51:39
  and all this stuff.
• 51:39
  Anyway, the longer the shorter it is...
• 51:41
  It's my religion, the guy's birth to your religion.
• 51:43
  And the guy with the two eyes,
• 51:45
  he had, he was from Connecticut just had a normal job
• 51:50
  and then either God or Kanye or some combo spoke to him
• 51:53
  and said, you have to come and meet me.
• 51:55
  So he went on them from Connecticut
• 51:57
  all the way to that Simmy Valley schoolhouse.
• 51:59
  He found out where it was.
• 52:00
  Right.
• 52:01
  And then Kanye wasn't there.
• 52:03
  And so he didn't know what to do,
• 52:04
  but he didn't have places.
• 52:05
  So he stayed there for like a month
• 52:09
  until Kanye's people came and kicked him out.
• 52:10
  Anyway, so they're gonna planted in my head
• 52:13
  like, you know, in that subtle way.
• 52:14
  So you were like, if it's good enough
• 52:16
  for a one-eyed homeless Christian?
• 52:17
  Yes.
• 52:18
  It's good enough for John Saffron.
• 52:19
  Yes. So then one of his other mansions,
• 52:21
  he's got a few mansions.
• 52:23
  And this one was in Calabassus, which is rural.
• 52:26
  And not how much people imagine LA.
• 52:29
  So in this street, for instance,
• 52:32
  one of the houses has a horse stable in it.
• 52:34
  And it's very quiet or whatever.
• 52:36
  Like the northern outskirts of Los Angeles?
• 52:38
  Yeah, I'm bad, it's not southeast and west.
• 52:40
  I want to say it's a real wealthy area.
• 52:44
  For instance, that's where the gated community
• 52:47
  hidden hills is where like Kim Kardashian
• 52:49
  and Drake all have places.
• 52:51
  But separate from that, he's got this big mansion there.
• 52:54
  And you know, wandering around and talking to neighbors
• 52:57
  and I found out that neighbor across the road,
• 52:59
  I said, oh, is it nice living here with Kanye and he goes,
• 53:02
  ah, hey, that's, and it's like, he said that Kanye
• 53:07
  had this Sunday service and all the cars
• 53:09
  would come blocking in everything.
• 53:11
  And he goes, but you know, haven't seen Kanye here
• 53:13
  for months and months and months and months.
• 53:15
  And then he said, on top of that, which when Bing in my brain,
• 53:18
  he said, oh, and he used to have these security people,
• 53:22
  you know, one would drive out at night
• 53:23
  and the other would drive in.
• 53:25
  When the gates open and close and he goes,
• 53:28
  but even that wrapped up about two weeks ago.
• 53:30
  So now I kind of, I'd heard that there was this mansion,
• 53:34
  Kanye's mansion and also probably not security.
• 53:37
  So then I in my head, I was going, I need like a,
• 53:40
  right is a treat.
• 53:41
  So that's not all these interviews with all these people
• 53:44
  with Matt Stone with Gavin McGinnifson,
• 53:46
  with Professor Griffith, all this different,
• 53:48
  and the standard West Hollywood is expensive
• 53:50
  when you're paying Australian dollars.
• 53:52
  Yeah. So I thought, why not just move into Kanye's mansion
• 53:55
  in Calabasas and use it as my, right is a treat.
• 53:58
  So that's why the book called Squat,
• 54:00
  a week squatting at Kanye's mansion.
• 54:01
  So yeah.
• 54:02
  So I mean, you subsequently sent him a check for value
• 54:06
  of your stay.
• 54:07
  If he sees watching this, this might be the first time
• 54:09
  he hears about it.
• 54:11
  I did it.
• 54:11
  All right. Yeah.
• 54:12
  Maybe Candace will send it on to him.
• 54:14
  And you said earlier that you're Jewish,
• 54:17
  I'm interested in what that means to you.
• 54:20
  Like what does that mean to you?
• 54:22
  Like does that just mean that you're just
• 54:23
  sanded from Jews?
• 54:24
  Or is there a religious component?
• 54:26
  Or is there a ethnic, yeah, more ethnic?
• 54:28
  Like it's just kind of the next thing you know,
• 54:32
  your culture upbringing,
• 54:34
  because when you're little, you don't think about it that hard.
• 54:36
  And the next thing you know, you just have a,
• 54:38
  well, not if you're not religious.
• 54:40
  I mean, I suppose if you were an Orthodox Jewish kid,
• 54:42
  you'd probably think about it.
• 54:43
  Yeah, maybe.
• 54:44
  But what I'm saying is you just kind of,
• 54:46
  it just happens and it just is.
• 54:48
  And then the next thing you've had these experiences.
• 54:50
  So for instance, I lived with my grandparents
• 54:53
  and they escaped Poland from the Nazis,
• 54:58
  as I had to live with them.
• 55:00
  And they never said anything directly,
• 55:02
  but there was definitely a vibe and stuff like that.
• 55:05
  So all that kind of gets...
• 55:06
  Did they come to Australia as refugees during the war
• 55:08
  or after the war?
• 55:10
  Yeah, no, they fled as Poland as the war started.
• 55:13
  Yeah.
• 55:14
  And then they went, they kind of did a bit of a data about
• 55:16
  where the Soviet Union and Switzerland
• 55:20
  and I think, you know, stop over in Italy.
• 55:22
  But yeah, then they ended up coming on a boat to Australia.
• 55:25
  Exactly the same as my grandparents.
• 55:27
  Yeah.
• 55:28
  So you have that.
• 55:28
  And then like I went to Sunday school,
• 55:29
  I went to synagogue,
• 55:31
  but it wasn't quite my...
• 55:33
  I had the two sides in my family,
• 55:35
  or at least one and a half sides on my mother's side.
• 55:39
  And she was the one with the grandparents or whatever,
• 55:41
  who I just talked about.
• 55:43
  And they just thought God was dead.
• 55:45
  Like they came from a real, really just family in Europe
• 55:48
  because of the Holocaust.
• 55:49
  They were like, God is dead.
• 55:51
  They were more against viscerally kind of challenging of God
• 55:56
  than like Richard Dawkins,
• 55:57
  but just in a slightly different way.
• 55:59
  They're on my dad's side.
• 56:00
  We're better reasons, really.
• 56:01
  I mean, you know.
• 56:03
  But then you can come out of the Holocaust
• 56:04
  and like, yeah, God's great.
• 56:07
  But so Jewish in other ways.
• 56:09
  Like for instance, that's really,
• 56:10
  Yiddish was really important to them, the Yiddish language
• 56:13
  and not like all the books in the house
• 56:14
  and then their social life,
• 56:17
  their social groups with Yiddish speakers.
• 56:18
  And so he's like Jewish-ness ethnically, I guess,
• 56:22
  or whatever, was really important to them that way.
• 56:24
  And on my dad's side,
• 56:25
  he kept these cards close to his chest,
• 56:28
  but now realized he wasn't a magical mystical thinker
• 56:31
  or whatever.
• 56:32
  So he'd take me to like regular synagogue.
• 56:34
  So I had like the two sides going on.
• 56:37
  But then once you reached adulthood,
• 56:39
  let's say, you know, your teenage years,
• 56:42
  how did living in a sort of secular,
• 56:45
  very non-Jewish country interact with your Judaism?
• 56:50
  Was there ever a point at which it became an identity?
• 56:54
  Well, I just, so I went to a normal state primary school
• 56:59
  and then first year of high school,
• 57:00
  a normal state high school.
• 57:02
  But I mucked around too much, got really bad marks.
• 57:04
  So my parents sent me to this strict Jewish school
• 57:06
  called Dishiva College.
• 57:08
  Even though that wasn't their background at all,
• 57:10
  this was like, you know, side locks and skull caps and six hits.
• 57:13
  Wow.
• 57:14
  But it was a bit like, if I was Catholic
• 57:16
  and my parents weren't that Catholic of religious or whatever,
• 57:19
  and they sent me to the nuns
• 57:21
  because they thought I was going to get a strict.
• 57:22
  Yeah, sure. It was a strict, yeah.
• 57:23
  But it wasn't that strict.
• 57:25
  Right.
• 57:25
  So they really got it wrong.
• 57:26
  It's like being sent to military school or something.
• 57:28
  Well, that's what they thought it was going to be.
• 57:30
  But the problem was Dishiva is the Melbourne outskirt
• 57:34
  of 770 Crown Heights, New York.
• 57:38
  It's like this missionary thing with the Rebbe
• 57:40
  and they send out, you know, rabbis everywhere.
• 57:44
  And so it was just like a loudmouth.
• 57:46
  It had a real loudmouth New York atmosphere to it.
• 57:49
  So there was lots of squawking
• 57:50
  and you were allowed to like just squawking.
• 57:52
  Yeah, you were allowed to like be a smart ass in class
• 57:56
  and really just like, as long as you're funny, you know what I mean?
• 57:58
  So I mean, that's Jewish I guess I'm for you.
• 58:01
  It is.
• 58:02
  So you can be a smart ass as long as you're funny.
• 58:04
  And I never really had a, I found it interesting
• 58:08
  the, all the religious stuff.
• 58:10
  Like I didn't find it annoying.
• 58:12
  I found everything I didn't like about Dishiva
• 58:14
  is just what I would have not liked about any high school.
• 58:18
  And I just thought it was a bit, all this was,
• 58:19
  I kind of got all this kind of interesting.
• 58:21
  Yeah, right.
• 58:22
  And so then I'm trying to get to like,
• 58:24
  sort of Israel like Palestine, like anti-Semitism
• 58:29
  and pro-Palestinianism and like so at what point
• 58:32
  after all that you start to wrestle with what it means
• 58:35
  to do it.
• 58:36
  Just incidentally, as opposed to like making some political
• 58:40
  statement, like Dishiva at that time,
• 58:43
  my whole Jewish high school life, they weren't like 770.
• 58:48
  Why is that in New York, not in Jerusalem,
• 58:50
  which was the home of school?
• 58:51
  It's because at that point, I don't know where they are now.
• 58:54
  At that point, they weren't a pro-Zionist school.
• 58:59
  And so, and it was notable, like on Israeli Independence Day,
• 59:03
  I'd get the tram and the other Jewish schools in the area,
• 59:06
  like the kids would have their Israeli flags.
• 59:08
  And Dishiva, we didn't say anything about it
• 59:10
  because they believed that it was like,
• 59:12
  fine if you happen to be a Jew living in Israel,
• 59:14
  like that was fine.
• 59:15
  They weren't that hard-lined, but they were like,
• 59:18
  you really, you have to wait for the Messiah,
• 59:20
  the Jewish Messiah to come, and then he'll take us to Israel
• 59:25
  and you're sort of preempting it and being a bit-
• 59:27
  Oh, interesting, bless me or whatever.
• 59:29
  So, incidentally, that was my school life.
• 59:31
  And incidentally, my grandparents, the one who said God was dead,
• 59:35
  they were part of the Bund, which was in Eastern Europe.
• 59:38
  So, before the Holocaust, and they were like,
• 59:39
  oh, they were like the competitors to the Zionists.
• 59:42
  And they said, oh, listen, you should be able to be a Jew wherever you are.
• 59:45
  You don't have to go to Israel, right?
• 59:47
  Anyway, then the Holocaust happened.
• 59:48
  And then all the Bundists were like, oh, well, that didn't work, did it?
• 59:52
  And they all became Zionists,
• 59:54
  except in this weird way, there was this group of Bundists.
• 59:58
  And they came to Melbourne, including my grandparents,
• 1:00:00
  and they set up the Bund in Melbourne.
• 1:00:02
  And when I was younger, I thought this was like something that was everywhere.
• 1:00:06
  Right, right.
• 1:00:07
  But it wasn't even like in London and New York, let alone Sydney.
• 1:00:10
  You know, and it was like, there's absolute weird work
• 1:00:13
  that the Bund, because of the Holocaust,
• 1:00:16
  and the Bundists were either literally killed by the Nazis,
• 1:00:19
  or their ideology was killed because they were like,
• 1:00:23
  oh, that did not work.
• 1:00:24
  We thought we could be Jews wherever we wanted,
• 1:00:26
  and our little, you know, Polish socialist brothers would stand up for us or whatever,
• 1:00:32
  and that didn't happen right.
• 1:00:33
  So I kind of grew up in this, I wasn't like anti-Zionist at all,
• 1:00:37
  but it was the two things, the family and the school,
• 1:00:42
  for their weird historical quirks,
• 1:00:44
  where not like, big on talking about Israel, so...
• 1:00:48
  And once you became a grown up,
• 1:00:50
  and interested in international politics,
• 1:00:52
  like the time when you're doing rights around the world,
• 1:00:54
  you become a celebrity.
• 1:00:56
  Like, what is that?
• 1:00:57
  You laugh when I say that.
• 1:00:59
  But you were a big celebrity quite young.
• 1:01:01
  And then what happens?
• 1:01:04
  Well, generally in the context of Australia back then,
• 1:01:09
  people weren't weird about Jews.
• 1:01:12
  And especially, the history of Jews in Australia
• 1:01:17
  is not as heated as in other places.
• 1:01:20
  Like, you know, just in Poland or Hungary,
• 1:01:23
  it's like, you're still a bit bitter that we killed Christ or whatever.
• 1:01:27
  And like, that's just, in the same way,
• 1:01:31
  it's weird to have the prayer things on the Australian flag.
• 1:01:35
  It's not really this Australian thing,
• 1:01:38
  it's just the Bible, the Jews killed Jesus,
• 1:01:41
  and the blood of Christ is going to be on their hands.
• 1:01:44
  Like, that's not really an Australian thing.
• 1:01:46
  And we don't have a very long old class system
• 1:01:49
  with all kinds of complicated rules like the Brits do,
• 1:01:53
  where there are in clubs and outclubs
• 1:01:55
  from particular names and heritages and families
• 1:01:58
  and stuff like that.
• 1:01:59
  But one interesting thing about that,
• 1:02:01
  that's why it's been turned against the Jews,
• 1:02:03
  is the Jews, when they came to Australia,
• 1:02:05
  they would set up, they were sort of a bit kind of more active
• 1:02:09
  in like setting up things like charities
• 1:02:11
  and contributing to philanthropy,
• 1:02:13
  because that seemed to be part of their history back then or whatever.
• 1:02:16
  And they're even more aggressive with that.
• 1:02:19
  And not only, you know, not just Jewish charities or whatever,
• 1:02:22
  they don't own your hospitals and everything like that
• 1:02:24
  because that was just the culture in a good way.
• 1:02:27
  But that's recently been turned against the Jews,
• 1:02:29
  like that long history of philanthropy in Australia.
• 1:02:32
  So now it's become like,
• 1:02:33
  wow, look at the long history of this,
• 1:02:36
  of this family and they've donated.
• 1:02:39
  It is mind blowing.
• 1:02:42
  There'll be like a family that's contributed
• 1:02:44
  to like medical research in Australia
• 1:02:47
  for the longest time.
• 1:02:50
  And that somehow is meant to be a long game plan
• 1:02:53
  by the Jews to kind of like...
• 1:02:55
  To influence, to embed sympathetic people and institutions.
• 1:02:59
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:03:00
  And it's so wild this twist, I only,
• 1:03:02
  like whatever two years ago,
• 1:03:04
  because my last book was about,
• 1:03:06
  called Puffpeace and was about the cigarette industry
• 1:03:09
  getting into vaping and whatever.
• 1:03:11
  So I ended up in this conversation with this guy
• 1:03:14
  who heads up this NGO around public health
• 1:03:17
  and because he wanted to do a podcast or something like that.
• 1:03:21
  And he said to me,
• 1:03:22
  he goes, John, you're Jewish.
• 1:03:23
  He goes, can you tell me why this is?
• 1:03:25
  Because this guy wasn't Jewish.
• 1:03:26
  He goes, like when we,
• 1:03:28
  when it comes to like donations to like,
• 1:03:30
  because I've always worked in like public health
• 1:03:32
  and science and medical research in Australia.
• 1:03:34
  And he goes, like the Jewish community
• 1:03:37
  is so overrepresented in like, whatever.
• 1:03:40
  And this is like, I can't stress this enough.
• 1:03:42
  This is a, this isn't like Jewish medical research.
• 1:03:45
  You see it's like for the Australia.
• 1:03:47
  Yeah, whatever.
• 1:03:48
  And he said to me, he goes,
• 1:03:49
  I don't understand it.
• 1:03:50
  He goes, first of all,
• 1:03:51
  they're so overrepresented in wanting to.
• 1:03:53
  And then secondly, he goes,
• 1:03:54
  you know, when other people are non Jews,
• 1:03:56
  if we manage to get money off then,
• 1:03:57
  it's like to check this goes up in the bank account.
• 1:04:00
  He goes, when Jewish people like make a donate,
• 1:04:02
  they want to catch up and they're so curious
• 1:04:05
  about the latest, you know, research.
• 1:04:08
  I want to know how everything's operating
• 1:04:10
  like the medicine.
• 1:04:11
  They want to know more.
• 1:04:12
  They want to learn more and more.
• 1:04:13
  We're nerds.
• 1:04:14
  Yeah.
• 1:04:15
  We're Talmudic little nerds.
• 1:04:16
  So I was feeling proud of being in Australian Jew
• 1:04:18
  when I heard this thing happen.
• 1:04:19
  And then it's like two years ago,
• 1:04:21
  all that's been twisted around.
• 1:04:23
  And it's become like,
• 1:04:24
  like, oh, yes.
• 1:04:26
  And then they give a lot of money to this
• 1:04:29
  because that means they can then.
• 1:04:32
  Well, yeah.
• 1:04:33
  I mean, it doesn't help also
• 1:04:34
  that prominent Jews give like all billionaires
• 1:04:37
  give money to political parties
• 1:04:39
  and curry favor.
• 1:04:40
  I mean, that's just part of, you know,
• 1:04:42
  unfortunately, the political game
• 1:04:44
  in Western democracies.
• 1:04:45
  Oh, Jewish Australia.
• 1:04:46
  All I can say,
• 1:04:47
  I tried really hard to make you look good,
• 1:04:48
  but look at this guy.
• 1:04:49
  Is it really like pulling the rug out in front of me?
• 1:04:52
  No, but I mean,
• 1:04:53
  I'm just acknowledging that it's always a bad look
• 1:04:56
  when billionaires give money to political parties
• 1:04:58
  because then it enables people
• 1:04:59
  who don't know what they're talking about on social media
• 1:05:02
  like, did you know that this Jewish billionaire
• 1:05:05
  paid all this money to Australia?
• 1:05:06
  And that's why we're sending them bombs
• 1:05:08
  to bomb innocent Palestinian babies.
• 1:05:10
  Well, I'll say this.
• 1:05:11
  He says there are powerful people
• 1:05:15
  of different persuasions in Australia
• 1:05:18
  and it is very interesting how
• 1:05:20
  it doesn't have meaning
• 1:05:22
  if it's someone who's not Jewish.
• 1:05:24
  I don't want to inflame things or whatever.
• 1:05:26
  But sometimes like,
• 1:05:27
  do you look at things like property developers
• 1:05:29
  like, oh, well, is that property forever?
• 1:05:31
  And he's of that persuasion.
• 1:05:33
  And but it has no meaning
• 1:05:35
  because they're not Jewish.
• 1:05:37
  I think this is something that non-Jews,
• 1:05:40
  it would be helpful for them to understand
• 1:05:43
  about the nature of anti-Semitism
• 1:05:45
  because there's a lot of,
• 1:05:47
  there's a lot of bloviating
• 1:05:48
  from like Israeli hawk types
• 1:05:51
  about that try to denounce anybody,
• 1:05:53
  for example, who criticizes right-wing Israeli policies
• 1:05:56
  as being anti-Semitic.
• 1:05:57
  And so the term anti-Semitic
• 1:05:59
  has, I think, somewhat justifiably
• 1:06:01
  come to be tarnished
• 1:06:03
  with a disingenuousness
• 1:06:05
  that like every single time
• 1:06:07
  you criticize any Israeli
• 1:06:09
  or Jew for doing anything,
• 1:06:10
  they throw their arms up
• 1:06:12
  and plead anti-Semitism.
• 1:06:13
  Please, like Crimea fucking river,
• 1:06:15
  like sometimes you actually
• 1:06:17
  can be criticized for doing bad things.
• 1:06:19
  At the same time,
• 1:06:21
  the strong version of the definition
• 1:06:23
  of anti-Semitism is just that
• 1:06:26
  you should notice the ways
• 1:06:28
  in which the national conversation
• 1:06:30
  co-he is so easily
• 1:06:32
  around criticism of people
• 1:06:34
  when they happen to be Jewish
• 1:06:36
  and a double-standard gets imposed.
• 1:06:38
  Like you say with the property developers,
• 1:06:40
  like the sniveling, greedy property developer
• 1:06:44
  is likely to be Jewish
• 1:06:48
  than not Jewish
• 1:06:50
  in the national narrative
• 1:06:52
  and in the way that the media portrays it.
• 1:06:54
  And the nefarious
• 1:06:56
  political donor pulling strings
• 1:06:58
  behind the scenes of political parties
• 1:07:00
  frequently will be disproportionately
• 1:07:02
  Jewish in the way we tell the story.
• 1:07:04
  More so than is true in reality.
• 1:07:06
  I kind of feel like
• 1:07:08
  if someone's stick
• 1:07:10
  is that they've got a problem
• 1:07:12
  with Israel and Jews and Israel
• 1:07:14
  they can't bend over backwards
• 1:07:16
  to try to
• 1:07:18
  then have a problem
• 1:07:20
  with Jews and Australia.
• 1:07:22
  Like obviously everything is open
• 1:07:24
  for criticism or whatever.
• 1:07:26
  But if you're...
• 1:07:28
  By the way, if you don't have a problem,
• 1:07:30
  if you just want to be in a...
• 1:07:32
  Does that make sense when I said so?
• 1:07:34
  No. No, okay, so...
• 1:07:36
  Not to me, but to me to someone.
• 1:07:38
  Yeah, so for instance, if you're going,
• 1:07:40
  oh, I don't have a problem with Jews,
• 1:07:42
  I only have a problem with everything
• 1:07:44
  around Israel or whatever.
• 1:07:46
  It's like, okay,
• 1:07:48
  we're an Australia here.
• 1:07:50
  Jewish people.
• 1:07:52
  But they claim that they don't.
• 1:07:54
  No, they claim that they have a problem with Zionists
• 1:07:56
  which often becomes a code word for Jews.
• 1:07:58
  But they will quite emphatically say,
• 1:08:02
  I'm not anti-Semitic.
• 1:08:04
  I don't have a problem with Jews.
• 1:08:06
  I have a problem with a settler-colonial
• 1:08:08
  genocidal state.
• 1:08:10
  And so Zionists in Australia
• 1:08:12
  have to be held accountable for the...
• 1:08:14
  Okay, so I'll give you one example
• 1:08:16
  because we're just going to go...
• 1:08:18
  And they say,
• 1:08:20
  actually Jews are actually functionally white.
• 1:08:24
  And so therefore, in the context of Australia,
• 1:08:26
  that has its...
• 1:08:28
  Suddenly it's like, okay, fine.
• 1:08:30
  Maybe you're right.
• 1:08:32
  But then stop saying you just have a problem with Jews in Israel
• 1:08:34
  because suddenly you've come up with this little bit of rhetoric
• 1:08:38
  which means you can just like,
• 1:08:40
  Jews are a problem everywhere in the world.
• 1:08:42
  So it's like that Jews are white
• 1:08:44
  is not to say that they're a problem.
• 1:08:46
  Why it is to say that they...
• 1:08:48
  You really like a fight.
• 1:08:50
  To say that Jews...
• 1:08:52
  I like to give...
• 1:08:54
  No, no, what I'm saying is,
• 1:08:56
  I'm not having an argument with them saying,
• 1:08:58
  maybe they're right. Maybe it is a problem that Jews are white.
• 1:09:00
  What I'm saying is,
• 1:09:02
  stop saying you just have a problem with Jews in Israel.
• 1:09:04
  Or yeah, just have a problem.
• 1:09:06
  As soon as you say,
• 1:09:08
  I also on top of that, Jews are white
• 1:09:10
  and therefore that has this meaning all over the world.
• 1:09:12
  Suddenly it's like,
• 1:09:14
  there's a problem with Jews in Israel.
• 1:09:16
  But they're problem with Jews out of Israel as they see it.
• 1:09:18
  And I'm just trying to unpick this so that we can,
• 1:09:22
  you know, laser our critique as,
• 1:09:24
  and hone it as,
• 1:09:26
  as, uh,
• 1:09:27
  definitely as possible.
• 1:09:29
  The claim would be that the problem they have with Jews outside of Israel
• 1:09:32
  is Jews outside of Israel playing the anti-Semitism card,
• 1:09:36
  playing the disadvantaged minority card,
• 1:09:38
  playing the history of the Holocaust
• 1:09:40
  and thousands of years of dispossession card.
• 1:09:42
  In order to give them a pass
• 1:09:44
  to do things to Palestinians
• 1:09:46
  that no other group of people
• 1:09:48
  would be permitted to do without criticism.
• 1:09:50
  That they can hide behind it.
• 1:09:52
  I think there's just so much,
• 1:09:54
  like most minorities say that, you know, people, um,
• 1:09:58
  and rightly so, you know,
• 1:10:00
  there'd be Muslims that say there's Islamophobia
• 1:10:02
  and there'd be examples where they're over-egging it.
• 1:10:04
  There'd be black people trans,
• 1:10:06
  every, like so it's just sort of a bit weird
• 1:10:08
  to kind of just focus on the Jews
• 1:10:10
  and just not mention it in the broader context.
• 1:10:12
  Yeah, I mean, that, exactly.
• 1:10:14
  I think that is the more laser pointed critique,
• 1:10:16
  which is the double standard,
• 1:10:18
  which is the point that David Bedel makes well
• 1:10:20
  and his, his book Jews don't count,
• 1:10:22
  where his, his basic point is.
• 1:10:24
  They're asking you all the problem too.
• 1:10:26
  I know you don't consider yourself, um, technically Jewish,
• 1:10:28
  you say you've got to Jewish background
• 1:10:30
  because you want to be in this kind of razor sharp thing
• 1:10:32
  you want to go, I don't,
• 1:10:34
  I don't, I don't want people to think I believe
• 1:10:36
  in like the supernatural Jewish stuff or whatever.
• 1:10:38
  Yeah, but Jews just like,
• 1:10:40
  overthink everything in the,
• 1:10:42
  you know, the light of blah blah,
• 1:10:44
  in a way that then, um,
• 1:10:46
  other people aren't applying the same razor sharpness to themselves.
• 1:10:50
  No, but they have,
• 1:10:52
  the world would be about a place if they did.
• 1:10:54
  So one can only lead by example, sure.
• 1:10:56
  Okay, sure. Okay.
• 1:10:58
  You know what I mean? I mean,
• 1:11:00
  it's a bit like what you were saying
• 1:11:02
  about the, the Sikh person,
• 1:11:04
  the neo-Nazi rally or what I was saying about, you know,
• 1:11:06
  why don't we eat babies?
• 1:11:08
  You sort of have to get to the,
• 1:11:10
  really, you have to start doing it,
• 1:11:12
  get that, get the scalpel instead of the sledgehammer
• 1:11:14
  and start really trying to figure out what's going on.
• 1:11:16
  And I think what's going on,
• 1:11:18
  and correctly if I'm wrong,
• 1:11:20
  but I think what you might be saying too.
• 1:11:22
  I think you're just getting the world's best,
• 1:11:24
  if you're talking about Jews in Australia,
• 1:11:26
  I think you're giving the best faith interpretation
• 1:11:28
  of PA and like,
• 1:11:30
  you're picking together these little things
• 1:11:32
  to make it sort of sound like
• 1:12:02
  then suddenly come up with these secondary problems
• 1:12:06
  about Jews in Australia.
• 1:12:08
  Like, I mean, another one.
• 1:12:10
  But what, yeah, give me those secondary problems.
• 1:12:12
  So another one is where someone immigrates
• 1:12:16
  from Israel to Australia
• 1:12:18
  and then they set up a small business here,
• 1:12:20
  a little restaurant or whatever,
• 1:12:22
  and then they get attacked,
• 1:12:24
  you know, they're banned.
• 1:12:26
  And this all happens, happens this week.
• 1:12:28
  And then it becomes like, hang on.
• 1:12:30
  With Jews in Israel.
• 1:12:32
  Here we've got not only a Jew,
• 1:12:34
  not in Israel,
• 1:12:36
  we've got a Jew that has left Israel
• 1:12:38
  and come here.
• 1:12:40
  And then you're vandalizing each other.
• 1:12:42
  And this is all true this week,
• 1:12:44
  this is not whatever.
• 1:12:46
  And so then I kind of go, well,
• 1:12:48
  like, and you can do your little pulling this
• 1:12:50
  from this to this to this to say,
• 1:12:52
  why? But then I just kind of go,
• 1:12:54
  no, no, no, you lied.
• 1:12:56
  You said you only have a problem
• 1:12:58
  with this and this and this and this.
• 1:13:00
  I mean, I do think it's important to,
• 1:13:02
  I think you're being slightly unfair
• 1:13:04
  in the sense that I'm trying to,
• 1:13:06
  I'm trying to unpack exactly what it is that we're talking about.
• 1:13:08
  So hang on, hang on.
• 1:13:10
  An attack on a Jewish,
• 1:13:12
  you know, Delhi,
• 1:13:14
  for example, and defacing the Delhi.
• 1:13:16
  That is anti-Semitism.
• 1:13:18
  Right? That is a clear case
• 1:13:20
  of discriminating against somebody
• 1:13:22
  because of their ethnicity or their,
• 1:13:24
  so I would completely agree with you
• 1:13:26
  that the person who condones that attack
• 1:13:28
  cannot make the claim
• 1:13:30
  that they're only against
• 1:13:32
  the Israeli government.
• 1:13:34
  They actually are against Jews.
• 1:13:36
  But there is,
• 1:13:38
  I don't think it helps
• 1:13:40
  our understanding of anti-Semitism
• 1:13:42
  to just to say that here.
• 1:13:44
  I'll give you two other examples
• 1:13:46
  about why I'm right in your wrong right.
• 1:13:48
  Please. Imagine some
• 1:13:50
  Australian who's a black Australian
• 1:13:54
  or whatever,
• 1:13:56
  and he wants to tell a story.
• 1:13:58
  He goes, listen, just over my life,
• 1:14:00
  I've noticed, and I don't know about all the way.
• 1:14:02
  He goes, I'll be going through a shopping center
• 1:14:04
  and I'll be targeted
• 1:14:06
  because of my vaccine.
• 1:14:08
  I can tell the security guard.
• 1:14:10
  I can feel it.
• 1:14:12
  And it's like, it happens to me more than other people.
• 1:14:14
  And then you get there with your little
• 1:14:16
  traumatic thing and going,
• 1:14:18
  oh, hang on.
• 1:14:20
  Yes, but maybe they were following you
• 1:14:22
  because of your skin color.
• 1:14:24
  It was like, you're dressed in a way
• 1:14:26
  that suggested that you were poor.
• 1:14:28
  So they were worried about that.
• 1:14:30
  And it had nothing to do with you.
• 1:14:32
  It's like, you can just go on,
• 1:14:34
  but for God's sake, just let the guy,
• 1:14:36
  it tell his story.
• 1:14:38
  And there's truth to it.
• 1:14:40
  Or if someone said to like Waleed Ali,
• 1:14:42
  a Muslim Australian and said,
• 1:14:44
  someone said to him,
• 1:14:46
  hey, I bet you, you forced your wife to wear the hijab
• 1:14:48
  because you followed the Quran
• 1:14:50
  and it's like, we could unpick it.
• 1:14:52
  And kind of go, well,
• 1:14:54
  people do have a right to say things about the crime.
• 1:14:56
  Oh, it is true that this thing.
• 1:14:58
  But it's like the context of them attacking him
• 1:15:00
  is to try to use him as a totem
• 1:15:02
  to kind of like spread a message
• 1:15:04
  of Muslim to dangers in Australia.
• 1:15:06
  And he's a, so I just feel like
• 1:15:08
  you're doing that with this whole picking apart.
• 1:15:10
  There's sort of like a,
• 1:15:12
  there's an easier, smoother exploration.
• 1:15:16
  Yes, but you just have to put flesh on the bones
• 1:15:18
  of that explanation, which you just did.
• 1:15:20
  Yeah, but you can't, yeah, you can't,
• 1:15:22
  until you've put the flesh on the bones
• 1:15:24
  and like made the, so the point you just made
• 1:15:26
  about the black person being profiled
• 1:15:28
  is the point that I was alluding to
• 1:15:30
  when I mentioned David Badeel's book,
• 1:15:32
  Jews Don't Count, which is
• 1:15:34
  we have all agreed on the left
• 1:15:36
  in the past five or ten years
• 1:15:38
  that the claims of the victimized party
• 1:15:42
  are paramount.
• 1:15:44
  The man does not get to say in the workplace
• 1:15:46
  seriously, babe, I wasn't being sexist,
• 1:15:48
  you know, you're overreacting.
• 1:15:50
  Yeah, it's the woman who gets to declare
• 1:15:52
  that what she experienced was sexism
• 1:15:54
  and the man has to respect that.
• 1:15:56
  Similarly, the black person who thinks they're being profiled
• 1:15:58
  has standing to claim that that's the case
• 1:16:02
  without having the caricature of Josh Seps,
• 1:16:04
  which I'm not, which you think I am,
• 1:16:06
  pull it all apart and go like, oh, hang on,
• 1:16:08
  but maybe it was this or maybe it was that.
• 1:16:10
  The only minority group, according to Badeel
• 1:16:12
  that doesn't get that benefit of the doubt
• 1:16:14
  is Jews.
• 1:16:16
  And that's how anti-Semitism works
• 1:16:18
  in modern Western liberal democracies.
• 1:16:20
  It's the double standard in which Jews
• 1:16:22
  don't get the same standing as other people.
• 1:16:24
  They don't get, you know,
• 1:16:26
  if I say to people who attack me on Twitter,
• 1:16:30
  as I did many times after in the month,
• 1:16:32
  after October 7th, when I found myself
• 1:16:34
  on the Jewish side of this,
• 1:16:36
  that's a bit anti-Semitic.
• 1:16:38
  The way you're talking about
• 1:16:40
  Zionists loving the blood
• 1:16:42
  of Palestinian babies,
• 1:16:44
  and, you know,
• 1:16:46
  Zionists hiding behind their whiteness
• 1:16:48
  to cry fake tears,
• 1:16:50
  you know, while actually
• 1:16:52
  holding the reins of power,
• 1:16:54
  smells a bit like anti-Semitism.
• 1:16:56
  When those colleagues of mine
• 1:16:58
  would then turn around and say,
• 1:17:00
  no, no, no, you're being silly.
• 1:17:02
  You're overreacting. I didn't say Jews.
• 1:17:04
  I'm not being anti-Semitic.
• 1:17:06
  I'm talking specifically about Zionists.
• 1:17:08
  They are depriving me of the benefit of the doubt
• 1:17:10
  that we give to every other minority.
• 1:17:12
  So I completely agree with that.
• 1:17:14
  But I think you need to listen to more of my podcast
• 1:17:16
  and read more of my columns to understand
• 1:17:18
  what the actual picking apart is here.
• 1:17:20
  Because I'm not just playing a dancing game
• 1:17:22
  of like, oh, how many fairies stand on the head of a pin
• 1:17:26
  and we can never say anything
• 1:17:28
  because we have to get so bogged down
• 1:17:30
  in details that we can never make a generalization.
• 1:17:32
  What I am doing is ensuring
• 1:17:34
  that our generalizations are grounded
• 1:17:36
  in realities that could be understood
• 1:17:38
  by the other side.
• 1:17:40
  So that when we have conversations,
• 1:17:42
  everybody can find some kind of common ground
• 1:17:44
  up to which they can grasp
• 1:17:46
  and it doesn't just sound like people are speaking
• 1:17:48
  inside their echo chambers of hysteria
• 1:17:50
  by waving their arms and going away.
• 1:17:52
  That's fair enough.
• 1:17:54
  I could sound like a lunatic.
• 1:17:56
  Well, not a lunatic. It just could sound like
• 1:17:58
  you've got a story about the way Jews get treated
• 1:18:02
  and until it actually lands with specifics,
• 1:18:06
  but virulently pro-Palestinian anti-Zionist could say,
• 1:18:10
  well, all very well for you to feel that way.
• 1:18:12
  I feel differently.
• 1:18:14
  Okay. That makes sense.
• 1:18:16
  So this is, you had the score
• 1:18:18
  at the end of your podcast where it's like,
• 1:18:20
  you know, it was my podcast.
• 1:18:22
  So I would always win.
• 1:18:24
  You're also going to do a voiceover.
• 1:18:26
  You'll get the footage of me leaving
• 1:18:28
  and in a voiceover going in.
• 1:18:30
  And after we left,
• 1:18:32
  John turned to me and said,
• 1:18:34
  you were right and I was wrong.
• 1:18:36
  And that's when I realized I disumped him.
• 1:18:40
  But I mean, it is fun.
• 1:18:42
  The reason I asked about your Jewishness
• 1:18:44
  and your Jewish identity,
• 1:18:46
  and maybe we can wrap up by talking about your Jewishness
• 1:18:48
  since October, since the October 7th attacks,
• 1:18:50
  is that it's been a wild ride, I think,
• 1:18:54
  to be a Jew in the past year,
• 1:18:56
  in the sense that I have,
• 1:18:58
  I mean, I was by a mitzvah.
• 1:19:00
  Like, I, you know, you say,
• 1:19:02
  it's commonly Jewish, but yeah,
• 1:19:04
  I'm more Jewish.
• 1:19:06
  I'm more fact-checking.
• 1:19:08
  I say, I say, I have to be like,
• 1:19:10
  I just have fact-checking things.
• 1:19:12
  I am, I am, I look, I'm Jewish,
• 1:19:16
  and I have to head out.
• 1:19:18
  Well, I mean,
• 1:19:20
  I think it's forced a lot of Jews
• 1:19:22
  to realize the depth and scope
• 1:19:26
  of the conundrum that they're in.
• 1:19:30
  It was all very good
• 1:19:32
  to kind of prance through culture,
• 1:19:34
  feeling like, you know,
• 1:19:36
  a member of a, a member of society,
• 1:19:38
  but noticing how quick
• 1:19:42
  the mainstream narrative is
• 1:19:46
  to pounce on Jews as part of a,
• 1:19:50
  as being members of, or let's call them Zionists,
• 1:19:52
  as being members of a,
• 1:19:54
  a nefarious group that is doing the world ill,
• 1:19:58
  has been bracing.
• 1:20:00
  The, yeah, I've noticed in Australia,
• 1:20:04
  my brain's not as expect,
• 1:20:06
  I can't solve all the world's problems,
• 1:20:08
  but I did live in Australia,
• 1:20:10
  and so I can, I can hold that in my head.
• 1:20:14
  And, yeah, there's,
• 1:20:16
  there, I have noticed this thing
• 1:20:18
  through cherry picking and omissions
• 1:20:20
  to kind of build a story in Australia
• 1:20:22
  of, you know, Jewish power.
• 1:20:26
  That just doesn't add up
• 1:20:28
  when you start expanding it
• 1:20:30
  and start going, okay,
• 1:20:32
  let's look at all, all the examples
• 1:20:34
  of when a non-Jewish group,
• 1:20:36
  or someone from a non-Jewish group,
• 1:20:38
  kind of puts their hands up,
• 1:20:40
  and tries to shut someone down.
• 1:20:42
  And so this is, can I explain it this way?
• 1:20:44
  You have to accept this,
• 1:20:46
  I can't explain this any simpler.
• 1:20:48
  So just say yes at the end of this.
• 1:20:50
  So if you,
• 1:20:52
  so if you, um,
• 1:20:54
  accept the record every time
• 1:20:56
  a Jew in Australia ran a red light,
• 1:21:00
  you'd have data to support
• 1:21:02
  the claim that Australia
• 1:21:04
  has a Jews running red light problem.
• 1:21:06
  But then if you start taking note
• 1:21:08
  of everyone who's running a red light
• 1:21:10
  in Australia,
• 1:21:12
  not just Jews,
• 1:21:14
  but suddenly you would not have data
• 1:21:16
  to support the claim
• 1:21:18
  that Australia has Jews running a red light problem.
• 1:21:20
  And so does that make,
• 1:21:22
  yes, and so I'm talking about like in the,
• 1:21:24
  in the arts sphere, in the creative sphere,
• 1:21:26
  um,
• 1:21:28
  which most people watching won't be part of.
• 1:21:30
  So this might just sound ill be confusing
• 1:21:32
  about why you don't know.
• 1:21:34
  Well, no, but a lot of the flare-ups have been in that.
• 1:21:36
  A lot of the shitstorms, right?
• 1:21:38
  From the, um,
• 1:21:40
  Sydney Theatre Company people wearing the Palestinian stars.
• 1:21:42
  If you have a story of ABC Manage,
• 1:21:44
  I do not build on this.
• 1:21:46
  Please do me a favor of not building on this.
• 1:21:48
  Just take this.
• 1:21:50
  I just want to give you an example.
• 1:21:52
  Yes.
• 1:21:54
  If you hear a story of
• 1:21:56
  there was someone who said something critical of,
• 1:21:58
  of Israel or Jews who worked for the AB,
• 1:22:00
  Shush, who worked for the ABC.
• 1:22:02
  I didn't even open up.
• 1:22:04
  And then they got reprimanded by, uh,
• 1:22:06
  ABC Management.
• 1:22:08
  Hypothetically.
• 1:22:10
  Hypothetically.
• 1:22:12
  You can kind of go, oh, that's, oh,
• 1:22:14
  then the bit that they're leaving out,
• 1:22:16
  which is absolutely true.
• 1:22:18
  So I, ABC Management and told to watch what they say.
• 1:22:20
  And right.
• 1:22:22
  And so suddenly it's like it's not,
• 1:22:24
  ABC Management is something on the side of the Jews or whatever.
• 1:22:26
  But they've reprimanded the Jews.
• 1:22:28
  Just like they've reprimanded, um,
• 1:22:30
  you know, the non-Jews or whatever.
• 1:22:32
  So anyway, don't add in.
• 1:22:34
  No, no, no. Well, I think I can add something
• 1:22:36
  which is positive and constructive and non-critical,
• 1:22:38
  which is to say that different forces act in different ways.
• 1:22:42
  And I think sometimes what makes it easy to, um,
• 1:22:46
  pedal anti-Semitic narratives is that the way that pro-Israeli
• 1:22:50
  influence can manifest itself will be through powerful rich people
• 1:22:54
  on like a WhatsApp group,
• 1:22:56
  coordinating an overt pressure campaign to try to,
• 1:23:00
  to try to persuade like a media board of directors to, you know, take action.
• 1:23:04
  But the way that the anti-Jewish, the anti-Semitic, uh,
• 1:23:09
  pressure occurs is much more grassroots.
• 1:23:12
  It's much more a groundswell.
• 1:23:14
  And that's often, I think, manipulated by social media algorithms
• 1:23:18
  that, where, you know,
• 1:23:20
  Hezbollah and China and Iran have their thumbs on the scales
• 1:23:24
  of what we see.
• 1:23:26
  And so people don't really notice it as much.
• 1:23:28
  But it's a messier thing to try to get your head around the way
• 1:23:32
  that like a pro-Jihadist pro-death cult
• 1:23:36
  Jew-hating my asthma can manifest itself
• 1:23:40
  than it is to go.
• 1:23:42
  The anti-Israeli, look at these pro-Israelis.
• 1:23:44
  Can I just say a moment?
• 1:23:46
  My book's really fun.
• 1:23:48
  Like it is a set venture.
• 1:23:50
  Does it have like, doesn't taste like I've come across,
• 1:23:52
  I can't make it.
• 1:23:54
  You're on the wrong show, John.
• 1:23:56
  I can't imagine why I would have come across this like overly,
• 1:23:58
  like an academic or whatever.
• 1:24:00
  But it is like a role.
• 1:24:02
  It's a fun, it's fun.
• 1:24:04
  But all your stuff is fun.
• 1:24:06
  There are a goofball.
• 1:24:08
  I break into, not breaking into what's the lowest point.
• 1:24:10
  Yeah, there's no, yeah, God knows.
• 1:24:12
  No.
• 1:24:14
  So anyway, get it before it's poked.
• 1:24:16
  It's never going to be poked.
• 1:24:18
  It's going to be recommissioned for a second.
• 1:24:20
  I mean, I'm in fourth and fifth.
• 1:24:22
  I'm in fourth and fifth.
• 1:24:24
  Oh, by the power of the powers that be.
• 1:24:26
  And so lastly, on that,
• 1:24:28
  the thing about the ABC,
• 1:24:30
  you're just broadening that conversation.
• 1:24:32
  What have you made of all of the various flare-ups and skirmishes
• 1:24:34
  that have happened?
• 1:24:36
  Not just in Australia, but all around the world in the past year
• 1:24:38
  where I mean, this sort of takes us into like,
• 1:24:40
  I suppose, cancel culture and our tolerance for different ideas and so on.
• 1:24:44
  Like, you know, people being in the demoted or.
• 1:24:46
  So, so, so, okay, you talk about cancel culture.
• 1:24:50
  And so the sort of the struggle I have or the tangles I have,
• 1:24:54
  is that for the past 10 or so years,
• 1:24:56
  it's been a reality has been set up and accepted by most people.
• 1:25:00
  That if you're offended by something,
• 1:25:02
  you know, try to screw them over.
• 1:25:06
  You know, conduct their advertisers,
• 1:25:08
  conduct their boss, you know,
• 1:25:10
  code of fuss and hopefully they'll kind of be de-platform right.
• 1:25:12
  So that's kind of been happening for 10 to 15 years right.
• 1:25:16
  So then since October 7th,
• 1:25:18
  that's kind of continued from both sides of pro-Israel,
• 1:25:22
  and they've been continuing this thing that has been set up for 10 years
• 1:25:26
  of like trying to screw over someone that they disagree with.
• 1:25:30
  And so I kind of say,
• 1:25:32
  listen, I'm against de-platforming people.
• 1:25:36
  And not only that, I, you know, my work,
• 1:25:40
  I'm a platform, but damn,
• 1:25:42
  in this Gavin McGinnis is in the world.
• 1:25:44
  I don't think Gavin McGinnis and professor,
• 1:25:46
  like professor Griff was canceled for being at it.
• 1:25:48
  So I'm like, I've got, so I'm against that.
• 1:25:50
  But if you set up a society in which that's the norm,
• 1:25:54
  that there's, you can't complain when like people sort of practice it.
• 1:26:00
  Yeah, so I feel like a lot of the stuff since October 7th,
• 1:26:04
  where I'm from both sides where they're trying to cancel each other.
• 1:26:08
  It's just like, well, what did you expect?
• 1:26:10
  That's what you have tolerated,
• 1:26:12
  and as said is a good thing for the past 10 to 15 years.
• 1:26:16
  Maybe not your audience, but I'm talking about.
• 1:26:18
  Certainly not my audience. I mean, I'm talking about people in the art space
• 1:26:20
  who might be a bit more progressive and whatever.
• 1:26:24
  It's like, if you didn't want people to starting trying to cancel people
• 1:26:28
  over whichever side over Israel, Palestine, or now,
• 1:26:30
  you shouldn't have for the past 10 to 15 years,
• 1:26:32
  set up a reality where that's the reality of the progressive space
• 1:26:36
  of like, and it's a good thing,
• 1:26:38
  is like, when you're upset or you're offended,
• 1:26:40
  then try to, you know, contact the person's commission editors
• 1:26:44
  or their bosses or their advertisers,
• 1:26:46
  which is like, which absolutely has been the norm.
• 1:26:48
  And it's like, so, so I kind of disagree
• 1:26:52
  that looking at this thing since October 7th,
• 1:26:56
  and everyone trying to cancel each other,
• 1:26:58
  as being this sort of like stand-alone thing,
• 1:27:00
  that is, that we have to look at as a stand-alone thing.
• 1:27:04
  Yeah, no, here, here. I mean,
• 1:27:06
  but I think what's happened is that the starkness
• 1:27:08
  of the reality of the consequence of using that tactic
• 1:27:12
  has been elevated on both sides,
• 1:27:14
  and both sides can see how painful
• 1:27:18
  and ultimately counterproductive it is
• 1:27:20
  to just try to get each other fired or drag through the mud.
• 1:27:24
  Instead of, you know, the correct response,
• 1:27:26
  and I've made this case privately and publicly
• 1:27:30
  to people who I disagree with,
• 1:27:32
  and who I agree with since October 7th,
• 1:27:34
  which is to attack people's ideas
• 1:27:36
  rather than to attack the person and their livelihood.
• 1:27:40
  Jon Safran's book is Squat,
• 1:27:44
  A Week Squatting, a Kanye's Mansion.
• 1:27:46
  It's funny.
• 1:27:48
  It's not at all as boring as this conversation.
• 1:27:50
  It's funny.
• 1:27:52
  It's funny.
• 1:27:54
  Thank you, Jon.
• 1:27:56
  Thanks. That was great.