Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Jesse Singal and Coleman Hughes

Transcript

Jesse Singal and Coleman Hughes · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day, humans! Welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas,
• 0:03
  actually two dangerous ideas for the price of one, two guests today.
• 0:09
  Wrestling with terrifying notions, such as the heresy that your race may not be the most
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  important thing about you, or the controversial idea that not every young person with gender dysphoria
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  needs to be fast tracked into the opposite sex, these are ideas which today are being reasserted
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  by the radical center, which I regard myself as a prominent voice in. But their ideas, which
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  is recently as 12 months ago, let alone three years ago, would only be uttered by a journalist
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  who wanted to spend half a day replying to complaints that he'd engaged in hate speech
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  as I myself found myself doing. Or at worst, who wanted to be fired next communicated from the
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  industry and face various other horrendous public shaming back lashes as at least one of today's
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  guests has. This is the audio of a beautiful YouTube video shot on an early spring day in New York
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  City with two brilliant heretics, each of whom has dabbled in those ideas that I just mentioned.
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  We sat down at a table in a park. One of these gentlemen is coming to Australia, Colman Hughes,
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  joining me live in conversation at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney on the 25th of August,
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  then the two of us are heading to Melbourne on the 28th of August. Tickets are selling fast,
• 1:39
  but you can still get them at thejosh.show. Do not miss us live. There are also meet and great
• 1:44
  tickets. So for a little extra of your hard earned cash, just a few extra shackles, but still very
• 1:52
  reasonably priced, you can come and meet us and you can have a chat, have your photo taken,
• 1:57
  hang out with us, you can buy our friendship for approximately three to four minutes and then
• 2:03
  we'll boot you out, boot you out on your ear. But it'll be fun nonetheless if you're in Melbourne,
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  come along and I'll see you there. If you're not in Melbourne, go to the YouTube page and watch
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  this episode. The YouTube page is doing strangely sluggishly. We only launched it reasonably recently
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  in terms of actually putting proper video content on there and not just some icon of my face glaring
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  at you. But given how many of you listen to this podcast, the YouTube thing isn't happening.
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  So I want you to go there and subscribe. I mean, only if you use YouTube, I know how annoying
• 2:36
  it is when podcast is always banging on about you about how you click the subscribe button and
• 2:41
  don't forget to like us and you can convert. It's annoying. Just give me my stupid podcast. I get it.
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  But if you are a person who uses YouTube anyway, you know, from time to time reasonably often
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  and you're not subscribed to us there and you're listening to this and you like this show,
• 2:59
  but you haven't bothered to do it there. Just go and do it there. Like, do next time you're on
• 3:03
  YouTube, just think, oh, that's right, just told me. For some reason, the algorithm on YouTube is not
• 3:08
  catching our staff and given how many of you there are, that makes no sense. So go and I've made
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  you a nice pretty video of me sitting in a park with Jesse and Coleman and you get to look at it
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  as well, instead of just listening to this. So don't be a dumb dumb. Help a brother out is all I'm
• 3:24
  saying. Anyway, subscribe, don't subscribe, watch this, don't watch this, dress up like a kitten,
• 3:31
  hang out with a bunch of furries or don't do that one. Either way, enjoy this conversation
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  with the one, not the one, the two, the only, not only the pair, the two, the pair of intellectual
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  titans, Jesse single and Coleman use. I didn't bring this here. Coleman brought this here. That's
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  racist. White people are always going to credit for black people's work. Yep. Are we, where are we
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  going? Is it? Yeah, we're going. Can you start this by telling the urinal story you told before
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  we started recording? Okay, so there was this guy. No, I didn't think you'd answer that.
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  Of course, I'll take the bait of me and say no. I always get used to some of my budgets.
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  The first rule of improv. Incidentally, there was an iconic gentleman who would dress
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  himself in a witsuit and snorkel and goggles and go into the toilets of various gay bars and lie
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  down in the, in the communal urinal, one of those, you know, metal urinals that we get a trough
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  that we go out on the wall. Yeah. And he would lie there and ride around while other gentlemen
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  are pissed on him. That's like going on Twitter. I guess. I don't know. I don't know. You gave
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  you a lot of nowhere. It didn't come out. Coleman and I were like, let's keep this classy. We're in
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  Morningside Heights. Yeah, Morningside Park. Where are we? Morningside Park. It's like we're on
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  like a cable access. Yeah, give you proper credit. You brought us to this mess. I did. Yeah,
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  which it has a long history of homicide. What happened here? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. A girl got
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  killed here on the steps when I lived here. I lived here for two years. Actually, probably one
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  block from where we are right now. Okay. And as I was explaining, the park is kind of ergonomically
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  created for crime, which just leads to the NYPD to have an impossible task of policing it every night
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  because it's just, there's so many nooks in which to commit crime and so many hapless. And it has
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  a series of sort of stairways, like M.C. Escher, stairways to nowhere. Exactly. You can hide it.
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  It's a stairway to heaven because you're going to kill it on it. Yeah, stay away to heaven
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  or hell, depending. Well, thank you for bringing us here, Coleman, to give you due credit.
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  I've been out of the States for a little while. You can, you can Venmo me for my emotional
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  labor. Very good. I will. So what's been going on in America, guys? Well, good. Yeah. And
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  then I think nothing really notable. Yeah, things are good. Yeah, I think things are good. I mean,
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  yeah, we've got a podcast. Okay. There's like the fabric of like civil society's definitely not
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  spraying the, everyone's really happy about the election. Yeah, because we have two great candidates.
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  Yeah. One of whom is just a really mentally sharp guy and the other is just some morally unimpeachable
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  character just hasn't done anything wrong in his whole life. So we have some good options.
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  Right. And everyone's happy. How did that happen? That we have such good options that you have
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  such bad options, dropping me. Oh, Lord. I saw them for a moment. How has that happened?
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  I don't know. I mean, the, the Trump side, he just has completely taken over the Republican party.
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  You can at least explain it. Like he's just this bizarre, horrible force. The Biden side seems
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  like there's just like an accident. Like he was just accidentally the right guy for 2020.
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  And then once he was the right guy, who within the Democratic establishment is going to pull the
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  trigger and be like, maybe he's not the guy the next time. Well, him, him. I know. But if you
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  would step down, if it was 104, I would. Yeah. What you're lying in the piss trough. You're not
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  going to voluntarily. I think it's a catch 22 because the type of person who thinks they should be
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  president almost never volunteers to step down. Yeah. That's a characteristic of politicians.
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  I mean, we saw Diane Feinstein be practically catatonic and, you know, wouldn't admit to that,
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  right? Even if she could. So there's, it's a characteristic of politicians that they never
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  want to step down. What has to happen is the people in their immediate circle have to do the brave
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  thing and say, I'm sorry, Joe, you know, you are too old. You are right now too old. The problem
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  is that you come really do you mean do that? And there's no public, private and public, and there's
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  no incentive for anyone to break ranks like that. No one wants to be the first person to betray Joe
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  because he might get rid of that person, right? Well, also, it's like it's, I think it's maybe
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  trickier than it would be because like it's not like he's blocking some brilliant up-and-comer.
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  But like who's it going to be if it's not Harris? I think be a disaster. Mayor Pete, like who is it?
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  Well, I mean, isn't that the case that any generic Democrat beats Trump and any generic
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  Republican beats Biden? There's reasons to do that. Just go to the Midwest and find a democratic
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  governor of a reddish state and just put them in. That can't be worse. Gavin Newsom, but the problem
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  is, I mean, you can't do that. You can't remove the press. You can't run, you would have to run
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  against the president. The problem is that the, yeah, which is hard to do with it. Which you can't
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  do without destroying him. And then General Trump wins. It's like there's now, there's a whole
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  machine, I don't know, I don't know. I'm not trying to be conspiratorial, but there is like a
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  machine of the Democratic Party and there's a lot of people who's incentive is to, I guess have it
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  be Biden again. And you know, we can't say for sure that a replacement level, I mean, I think
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  a replacement level Democrat would be better, but I'm not sure about the machine thing. I actually
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  think the problem in America is that your parties aren't strong. The parties are, the parties here
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  are basically just a mailing list and a few administrative people like in a, in a European
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  country or a parliamentary democracy like Australia, the party selects the leader and can change
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  the leader in the middle of an administration if they want to. And the party is everything,
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  and the party is total and has complete authority. So the party just puts in whoever they think
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  has the best electoral shot. And there would be no problem. We're just swapping out the leader
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  into this close to an election. In fact, it happens all the time in a country like Australia.
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  If they're going to lose, you get them out, you get someone else in. And that someone else doesn't
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  have to go through a primary. They get handpicked in a, in the smoke-filled room by their colleagues.
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  The problem here is that that doesn't happen. So it's too democratic in a way. Everyone has to
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  have a say. So Americans can have been in theory, but it tends not to, right? Right. Yeah.
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  All right. Well, now that we've solved American politics, how's the culture doing? Any,
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  any cultural wars going on? I mean, I think we're united on foreign policy. We're united on
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  issues of free speech. We finally got our college campuses together. We're united around
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  D.E.I. issues. So really not much to talk about. I mean, look,
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  yeah, black man, white man on the same white sitting together, breaking bread. We don't have any
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  bread to bread, but I think I actually think that overall in a lot of like neat institutions,
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  stuff, the stuff you've talked about, fifth column talks about my podcast. But I think a lot of it
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  has gotten a little bit better. Why did you leave Coleman's podcast out? Well, you talk about it too.
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  I think racism is the only possible. I figured, no, yeah, we all talk about it. Well,
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  Camille's not black. Why would you excuse me for a good point? It's all very confusing.
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  Identity. It's a rich tapestry. I think like it places like the New York Times,
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  it's actually gotten better. Like we found out about how dysfunctional things were. And I think
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  mostly the forces of like robust intellectual life and journalism have won. I think there's
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  pockets of craziness, especially when you go online. But yeah, I've actually somewhat, for example,
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  one sign of the New York Times getting better on your pet issue.
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  Uh, no, oh, yeah, exactly. Um, you know, the piece they did some three weeks ago about
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  rapid onset gender dysphoria. Emma Paul's recent transitioners. Yeah, I mean, it was,
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  it was as if someone who had just read you and Abigail Shryer and others over the past few years
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  just gave a summary and and really wrote it in very much the same way you would have wrote it.
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  And that was the fact that you could do that at the New York Times today says something about
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  how they progressed in a good way on that issue relative to where they were even two years ago,
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  much less five years ago. Well, we had, I mean, this is part of a project, um, trajectory for
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  them on this issue. I don't want us to get dominated by this issue, but Emily Bazelon did her
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  piece as well. And that Azeen Geraci has written some good pieces for the science desk. And the big
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  moment came, um, about a year ago when there was this huge uproar, contrived uproar based on
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  misinformation, spearheaded by glad and a bunch of journalists who are mad claiming the times had
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  acted transphobically and times management like careful as far as I can tell carefully review the
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  charges. And we're like, no, like you guys are activists, we're journalists. We do different things
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  them, uh, which was the right decision because it was the reporting has been, you know, even other
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  journalists who were saying that it was a responsible life for journalists. Yeah, it was very odd at
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  the time that there were journalists who were saying that because the New York Times had published a
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  piece about the controversy that exists within the psychiatric community, right? Not within the
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  cultural areas, not online, not on Twitter, but within the medical community about how to treat
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  juvenile trend like agendas for that reporting on that was hateful towards trans and could
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  they don't believe in gender could erase, you know, uh, trans people's identity. Um, the fact that
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  journalists signed on to that, not just culture, but sad. The journalists who mattered the most,
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  the ones who run the times weren't interested. And I think they would have probably responded
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  differently in 2020 as we know from the people who got fired. I mean, what's interesting and admirable
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  there is that there is a huge penalty even when you don't, uh, like there's a penalty for the times
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  and having to deal with the complaints. Yeah, put that way. Like, I mean, I've experienced that
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  firsthand when I had a radio show anytime we would touch this topic, which was incredibly rarely,
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  but on one occasion we did. And then you know that you're going to have to waste half a day
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  responding to extremely detailed complaints written by smart savvy activists who know what they're
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  doing. So they're not just rants. They're picking apart every single thing that you said off the cuff
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  and they're comparing it to data and they're claiming that you're spreading falsehoods. Yeah.
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  And so then you have to go back and find your, you know, source on absolutely everything.
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  For most people it's just not worth the hassle. Why would you put up with that bullshit? Like,
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  so it's essentially a tax on time and attention. Yeah. And most journalists can't be bothered paying
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  that tax. Yeah. Right. I mean, I think another example of progress is just the fact that
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  my book was covered in the New York Times and I was covered in the New York Times in a way that
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  wasn't sneering or unfair. I mean, this was Jeremy Peters piece from maybe a month ago.
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  It did describe me as a black conservative, which is, you know, I've never identified that way.
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  African American. But aside from that, the actual substance of the piece was quite fair to me
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  in a way that I'm not sure it would have been had they covered me three years ago. For example,
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  interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Since you mentioned your book, what's your book about,
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  Coleman? Yeah. My book is about, it's called the end of race politics arguments for a colorblind
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  America. And in the book, I don't try to. Yeah. Well, no, it's upset no one. No, it's upset some
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  folks. But the idea of the book is there's this idea of colorblindness, which is caricatured as
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  pretending not to notice race. But the version I argue for is, you know, obviously we all see race.
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  You can see that I'm not white. I can see that you are white, right? But he's Australian. Exactly.
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  I'm wild adjacent. But, you know, you and I, you know, in any way that matters would try to treat
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  each other without regard to race, right? That's what colorblindness means. And the more controversial
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  portion is to get race out of public policy, to have our public policy be race neutral.
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  And wherever we want to treat issues of disadvantage in society, to do that on the basis of class,
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  not race. So that's the basic thesis of the book. And there's a whole underneath of the iceberg
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  to all of those arguments, but that's that's the potted summary. Doesn't colorblindness also,
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  I mean, it's a tricky thing because when you say that, of course, you notice color,
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  it's true that like physiologically, your retina is observing, like color differences. But the
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  extent to which you, it actually lands as something that you would notice is contingent on the culture
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  that whether or not the culture has has heightened your sensitivity to that. I definitely remember
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  when one of my New York buddies came to visit me in Sydney when I was in my 20s, he would like,
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  be walking around and he'd go like, so is that, would they be Islander? Would that be an
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  Pacific Islander or a Māori? Or like, are they, you know, is that that's not, that's not an
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  Aboriginal person, is it? And like, he would say it after the person just walked past. And I would
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  actually be like, I don't remember, I'd have to go back and look at the person. Like it didn't,
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  it wasn't something that I noticed because the ethos of colorblindness, I mean, race just was
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  not a thing that was talked about other than racism is the worst thing in the world. So don't
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  do that thing. And apart from that, there was very little consciousness of it. If I were growing
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  up today, there would be extreme consciousness of it and I would be extremely conscious of my
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  white privilege. And so there's a class of people who say, I was naive, I was raised in a naive
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  society that didn't understand the experiences that traditionally disadvantaged minorities and
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  people of color were going through in Australia and I was walking through a world of privilege
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  without knowing it. There's probably some truth to that. And then there's another side that says,
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  actually, we'd be better off trying to aspire to go back to, I don't know, the 1990s and 2000s.
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  Well, I would, I would be firmly on the second side of that argument. You make a very good point.
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  This is one thing that separates race from gender. We're deeply biologically wired to notice
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  a person's gender that has fairly little to do with culture or how you're raised.
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  And if he'd said what he'd done studies a while ago, I'd be like a lot. You'd notice immediately
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  and it's actually so conscious. We're going to you, Jesse. You actually can't help but notice and
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  also children notice, right? With race, it actually is quite culturally influenced. And there's
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  a few different ways of seeing this, which is to compare your sensitivity with others,
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  people from other countries, but also to notice that children actually often don't notice race
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  in the sense that they don't think in racial categories. They obviously notice color,
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  but they actually, they could go a whole day not thinking that someone was one race or another
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  if they're not taught to think that way. And so, and this is why with every new generation of
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  kids, we have an opportunity to foster and in trying the colorblind ethos because kids aren't
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  born, you know, with all their flaws, selfishness being one of them. Kids need to be taught to share
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  often. They don't need to be taught not to be racist because it is broadly the default
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  unless they're educated into racism. But won't they find forms of tribalism as they
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  gang up on each other and won't the color of your skin be an inevitable cleavage?
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  Not necessarily. I don't, I don't see, so yeah, tribalism is certainly inevitable.
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  But why would that tribalism fall upon racial lines necessarily? It would be much more likely to
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  fall along the lines of like my T-ball team versus your T-ball team, right? Right, or some other
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  in-group or out-group metric as well. Or my school versus your school. Yeah. I mean, I just
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  figure that they'll pick on something and whether the kid is gay or black or living with a
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  disability or something, that's going to become silent when they get picked on.
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  It could, but if you know, if you raise kids with the Martin Luther King ethos understanding that
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  race, you know, you know, I'll tell you, I grew up in a town that was very racially diverse and
• 19:23
  it was a Montclair New Jersey. Oh, yeah. Just across the river. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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  And you know, it's not to say that there were no racists, but the racists were absolutely the
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  very rare exception to the rule. And I lived as a child, as colorblind as one possibly could. I
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  had kids of every race. I had rather friends of every race. And I was a young dad.
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  Huge, if true, common fun. I didn't care what race my kids were. Okay. I had kids with women of
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  every race. No, I had friends of every race and I did not see them primarily as race individuals.
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  I saw them as people and was seen in turn by them. But isn't that because you lived in a world
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  of privilege? I mean, isn't the counter-argument to that that? Yeah, it's a different experience being
• 20:15
  a middle-class kid in Montclair, New Jersey than the average experience for the average black person
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  in America? Yeah, but that wouldn't, my experience wouldn't have been different how'd I been.
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  There were lots of, there were poor kids in my town too, right? In my brain, Montclair just has
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  a straights pipe with gold and there are trees made of candy. No, no, it's a mixed income.
• 20:37
  It's a mixed income environment too. Look, if there are, if there's a huge cultural differences
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  between kids, if there's a language barrier between kids, okay, these are things that are going to
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  naturally create friction. But in so far as you speak the same language and you share enough culture,
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  it doesn't, it doesn't follow from the fact that I'm poor in your middle class or upper middle class
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  that that's going to transform into a racial barrier between us, right? Well, Jesse, you're a famous
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  racist. What do you think? I mean, other than thinking Coleman is very clean-cut, eloquent,
• 21:11
  articulate, articulate, that's what Obama said about, no, that's what Joe Biden said about
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  Obama, is that right? Well, Obama is articulate. He is articulate. He's clean-cut. Yeah, I think the,
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  yeah, the erasure of a classroom, this is sort of what it all comes down to. I mean, to say,
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  it's like, you have privileged to not see race. I mean, I don't know. We also have, as Coleman
• 21:32
  saying, we have some ability to sort of manufacture our own truth there. Do we want race to be at the
• 21:38
  center of every interpersonal interaction? I think a lot of the meltdowns from 2020 and 2021
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  occurred between elites who did not face much material hardship and were made worse by the fact
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  that the assumption was like, any problem has to be seen in racial terms. I mean, I think Coleman
• 21:55
  seems to be offering, like, proposing a reasonable middle where we don't pretend we can't see
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  color, because it's impossible to not see color, but we also don't inject it in everything.
• 22:04
  It strikes me as correct. Is it naive to expect that we won't? I mean, the counter-argument is that
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  what you're saying is admirable, but the reality is that we'll never get to that. So Claudine Gay is
• 22:14
  a good example. Claudine Gay appears to have plagiarized. I mean, she did plagiarize. We can
• 22:19
  argue how bad the plagiarism was, but it became a big part of the discourse that she was being
• 22:23
  treated unfairly as a black woman. This is the head of Yael.
• 22:26
  Oh, come on, man. Sorry. I'm not the cross-blanded American culture war.
• 22:31
  Stories. I mean, the irony with that, of course, was that for the same congressional testimony,
• 22:36
  Liz McGill, who was white, was essentially canned at UPEN, but Claudine Gay, a black woman,
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  survived that same offense in so far as you agree it was offense. And only once the added,
• 22:49
  once you added almost 50 examples of plagiarism, did she then get...
• 22:53
  And she wasn't fired. She's no longer president. She makes $900,000 as a professor.
• 22:57
  I don't want to be really offensive, but was she properly qualified for that job in the first?
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  Probably not. I mean, I won't pretend to be an expert on the standards for hiring a university
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  president, but she had very... She actually had rather few publications even just to have gotten tenure.
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  I mean, this happens again. This is the same thing has happened in Australia recently where there
• 23:24
  was a big bruja over somebody getting fired and they claimed that it was because of their...
• 23:31
  because they're a person of color. And the thing you're not allowed to ask is like,
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  hey, quite a part, set aside the question if we don't know if that's true because if it's true,
• 23:40
  it's horrible, but it's probably not true. But B, would you have been hired for that position in
• 23:45
  the first place if you weren't a person of color? I think in Claudine's... Claudine Gay's case,
• 23:50
  it's almost a certainty she wouldn't have been hired, where she not a black woman.
• 23:55
  I mean, you can never prove the counterfactual, but if you look at the number of citations she has
• 24:01
  versus the number of citations your average tenure professor has versus the number of citations
• 24:06
  that your average Harvard University president has had over the past 20 years, you're going to find
• 24:11
  a rather large discrepancy there. And we know that... I mean, what else does DEI mean except to give
• 24:19
  consideration to outside the frame of meritocracy over and above meritocratic considerations to
• 24:28
  consider race and gender? So this is often defenders of DEI or affirmative action want to have it
• 24:34
  both ways. They want to claim on the one hand that DEI and affirmative action are perfectly
• 24:39
  compatible with meritocracy. In other words, no one is being hired as a but for cause of their
• 24:44
  hiring, being their race or their gender, but then they also want to say that we are giving
• 24:51
  consideration to race and gender, right? I almost want to ask these kinds of people, what do you think
• 24:56
  the policy does? What does the policy do if not admit people who would not otherwise have been
• 25:03
  admitted due to their race? When they talk, it strikes me that what they're saying is that there
• 25:08
  is such an overabundance of perfectly equally qualified people that you can use diversity considerations
• 25:14
  as a way of tipping the scale, but you're not actually changing. You're not lowering the bar,
• 25:20
  you're not giving it to them because of that. You're just saying that amongst a selection of equally
• 25:24
  valid candidates, you might want a 501. So that's an empirical question and it's not empirically
• 25:31
  true of affirmative action because when you, you know, like Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade,
• 25:36
  Epsenshade, I often mispronounced his last name. He's looked into this and found that when you hold
• 25:43
  all the variables equal of who gets admitted to elite colleges, to be black is worth an extra
• 25:49
  several hundred SAT points. To be Asian is the equivalent of being docked several hundred SAT points.
• 25:57
  So, you know, it's not a thumb on the scale. It's admitting people who otherwise wouldn't be
• 26:02
  admitting admitted. It's rejecting students who wouldn't otherwise be rejected, but for the variable
• 26:08
  of race. Jesse, were you going to jump in there? I mean, I know less about the specifics of the
• 26:14
  policy dispute. I just know that in journalism and academia, there's this like uncomfortable thing
• 26:20
  where like everybody knows that like we're trying to diversify newsrooms and to hire people and
• 26:25
  that we do give a like up to people from certain backgrounds, but Freddie DeBore has made this point.
• 26:29
  If you then like say that out loud, you're not supposed to and I think it's bred a lot of resentment.
• 26:33
  Like I've talked to like otherwise liberal, you know, white people in journalism and academia
• 26:39
  who really feel like if they get fired from their current job, they won't be able to get hired
• 26:42
  again. I don't know if that's true, but I do know that like I've been in the room when people are
• 26:46
  hired and absolutely it's like. Of course it is. I mean in some cases you know that you're not going
• 26:50
  to be able to be hired again because they're not talking about journalism now, but I have a friend
• 26:54
  who works in a big multinational company whose targets for women in senior roles are so high
• 27:00
  that there's no way they can like and it's by it's so so quick by like 2030 that there's no way
• 27:06
  that a male can be hired because there isn't enough churn at the top end basically. So all of the
• 27:11
  next highest for the next decade have to be one of them. So I get to what Coleman was saying is
• 27:14
  like you just you should I myself I'm torn on some of these questions, but like you need to at least
• 27:19
  be honest about the impact of the policy and it can't both be the case that the policy doesn't do
• 27:24
  that and that we need affirmative action to make. Yeah, it'd be nice if there was just less bullshit
• 27:29
  about it. You know what? We're only going to hire women for the next 10 years because men have
• 27:33
  had it too good. So sorry to hold all those. I think what happens is just that you know in private
• 27:38
  conversations over a beer and hush tones over pillow talk, people quietly know that certain
• 27:44
  individuals were hired as a result of their race. That's always a surprise for my dog or it was
• 27:50
  like a one-night stand. I just started ranting about how different races are black lady at black.
• 27:56
  You wonder why you don't get second dates. It just you know it just ends up being a thought and
• 28:03
  a suspicion in everyone's head and certainly some people may be unfairly suspected of having
• 28:10
  been hired as a result of their race and all of it just happens covertly and we can't talk about
• 28:17
  it and the whole it creates a kind of toxicity and workplace politics element that is you know it's
• 28:26
  never talked about because it can't be talked about but it's a hidden cost of this. And it's a
• 28:31
  hidden cost to the people of color who deserve to be there as well because they're always there's
• 28:36
  always a question. I'm sure I'm sure that every time I I get on TV at CNN there are certain people
• 28:42
  who assume that I'm I was hired because I was black and that or that that was one factor certainly
• 28:48
  in my hiring and it's possible that it was and I suggest to Robby Swave for this little scene and
• 28:53
  you said no we need the taken black guy and I'll never know if it was or wasn't because again it's
• 28:59
  all done covertly and you know some some people of color have the attitude that you know I'm going
• 29:06
  to insist I was hired meritocratically and I'm going to call you a racist if you wonder whether
• 29:11
  I was hired because of my race which is a quite dishonest attitude because the truth is
• 29:18
  we because of the policy all of us might have been hired yeah because of our race that's the only
• 29:23
  person who wasn't is the white person surely yeah yeah unless it's from systemic bias or like
• 29:29
  unconscious bias or something like that yeah my friend of mine was speaking with a colleague of
• 29:35
  his and she's a South Asian and extremely highly educated highly successful South Asian woman
• 29:41
  Pakistani woman in Australia and she was saying I was talking about maybe you know doing this
• 29:47
  or doing that and maybe she'd lose her job and she was like well I mean I don't care about losing
• 29:50
  my job I'll get hired in an instant look at me and my friend said well you'd also get hired
• 29:55
  in an instant because you're brilliant and she was like oh yeah that too I'm like blushed yeah
• 30:02
  and I was I thought it's what a corrosive thing also something people color me ahead
• 30:06
  privately know we know like if any smart aware person of color knows that they have an advantage
• 30:13
  in many particular industries right and that's what's so dishonest about calling people a racist
• 30:18
  who notice it from the outside is that we all know this when we're applying to jobs we
• 30:24
  uh it's it's it's clear yeah so I mean even people who are on the margins you know we'll
• 30:30
  I know someone who has a double barrel name who dropped the angler sized name and just used
• 30:35
  the more ethnic sounding name on a job application because you know that's it's gonna be better to
• 30:40
  sound like a right you know someone who's who's non-white but I mean my point about that woman
• 30:45
  is not that she knows it it's that it's not true in her case yeah it's that she'd get the job if
• 30:49
  she was a white man because she's brilliant and qualified right and so she's inherited this
• 30:55
  jigsaw piece of corrosive bullshit in her head like any job especially in media there's
• 31:02
  probably even a high ranking job 50 150 people who can do it I mean that's the problem so for
• 31:08
  example when I was uh I don't remember how old I was I might have been seventh or eighth grade
• 31:13
  I was trying to get into this summer camp for gifted kids and they had you take the SAT
• 31:19
  and whatever score I got was good enough that the teacher said given what the score you got
• 31:25
  and you know your race you're gonna get into any college you want and you know my it's not like I
• 31:30
  had a 1,500 or 1,600 in those days you're just saying I had a good score that's fun right I had
• 31:37
  a good score for a seventh grader right and so she just said based on that and you're gonna get
• 31:42
  into any college that you want and she was right okay so you're just settled for one of the worst
• 31:47
  diving reglands but this is something that smart people of color know we understand the incentives
• 31:55
  created by diversity equity inclusion affirmative action and the wider ethos of
• 32:01
  of wanting whether or not those policies are explicitly there the wider ethos of institutions
• 32:08
  not wanting to be predominantly white so on inclusion like the diversity equity inclusion pace
• 32:15
  Jesse there's been part of there's been like this movement towards making workspaces more tolerant
• 32:22
  right more inclusive more welcoming like bring your whole self to work is one of the slogans that
• 32:27
  you hear from HR department say so if you are you know if you want to let your freak flag fly
• 32:35
  and then come to work and everyone will respect that I have sorry which employers this is just
• 32:42
  me now if I'm independent my producer can let his friends I will take this job for my entire
• 32:49
  freak flag can I bring a snorkel to work you can bring a snorkel the asless chaps are optional
• 32:55
  so the but part of this is that I've heard from like Christians who are like I can't I mean I
• 33:03
  can't bring my whole self to work like it's selective about the the whole selves that can be
• 33:08
  brought to work yeah right you know it's fine it's fine for me as a gay man to come to work and
• 33:14
  like talk about you know gay shit it's not necessarily I don't know what case I'm so I'm so I'm
• 33:20
  such a bad gay I couldn't even finish the end of sentence with a clear example yeah so anyway
• 33:28
  I had a dick in my mouth let me tell you it works but but the you know there was description
• 33:33
  who was saying like that they're opposition for example to gay marriage or like their belief
• 33:38
  that it might be desirable to the family structure is a more desirable way to structure society
• 33:43
  than for everyone to be off promiscuous in their wetsuits with their snorkels in a urinal trough
• 33:49
  that isn't actually part of the inclusion policy so it's not actually an inclusion policy it's
• 33:54
  kind of a join our particular club instead of the old white guys club that used to exist yeah
• 34:00
  I mean again I'm not to make everything about class but like it's only a very small set of
• 34:05
  workplaces where anyone would imagine that discussing politics at work would be a good idea
• 34:10
  I mean you've had these blowups in the tech industry in the media industry where people
• 34:13
  basically demand company time be spent you know letting them do activism and that strikes me
• 34:19
  as a just a crazy idea because that's not what work is for well so the the but the activists would
• 34:25
  say we're at a moment where the stakes are extremely high and like if you were in Nazi Germany you
• 34:32
  wouldn't be like let's not do activism you'd be like wow there's an existential threat to the
• 34:36
  way they believe in the contract you'd be leaving the country yeah exactly so I mean the fact
• 34:40
  that people aren't I mean you heard of all the people who are gonna move to Canada and they never
• 34:45
  do and we're just saying that like blue sky is like the the the Canada of the internet because
• 34:50
  some people have moved from Twitter to blue sky this is a Twitter alternative for yeah
• 34:54
  progressives but no one actually moves to Canada there's a massive gap between
• 35:03
  things being bad enough that they warrant everybody getting on deck and chipping in to try to save
• 35:10
  the republic and things being so bad that you leave the country no no if you if you make a
• 35:15
  quarter million dollars at Google engineer and you're saying things are so bad Google needs to
• 35:20
  take time and resources and spend them on my personal political preferences I would argue things
• 35:26
  are so we need to put our mission as a company on the back burner and now front load a political
• 35:32
  conversation where employees may disagree I don't see how that is I mean that you'd have to get
• 35:38
  to a pretty high level to to warrant that yeah well but I'm just saying that that level exists
• 35:42
  and so the fact that like concede to me that there is a point at which things could get
• 35:48
  bad enough that it became legitimate for a workplace to yes yeah to certainly to to talk about
• 35:54
  rallying itself together you know especially if the vast majority of employees are on board I mean
• 35:59
  isn't a workplace allowed to be like yeah the most most of us you know don't want to see January
• 36:04
  6th happen again let me like imagine Trump wins again and things go pear shaped and then we're
• 36:08
  talking about you know we're in 2028 or whatever you can imagine a and Joe Biden is the nominee
• 36:14
  you can imagine a nightmare scenario in which one might we got it as being justifiable a little
• 36:19
  worth price allows you say it's just different than for the political opinion the people who hold
• 36:24
  that opinion don't say it as a political opinion I hold the opinion too I just don't think work is
• 36:28
  like the anyway in the summer of 2020 when half the countries in America half the cities in
• 36:35
  America were on fire you know riots everywhere you know you had a city like Minneapolis where like
• 36:42
  1500 businesses were damaged or destroyed if you wanted to come into work and just announce the
• 36:49
  riots well how would those same people feel those same people would say oh well now you're bringing
• 36:53
  politics into work you sound like a conservative and on your argument this would be justified because
• 37:00
  you know there's a crisis going on there's a legitimate crisis going on and the problem is you
• 37:06
  know if you have a company you should be allowed to pursue the mission of that company and put
• 37:11
  politics on the back burner up until the point that you have a legitimate crisis threatening the
• 37:16
  existence of the company itself the company can but what if the company chooses not to because
• 37:20
  there's no they choose not you can do whatever you want with your company you can have an explicitly
• 37:24
  you can have a neo-nazi company for for you know you can have a leftist company you can have a
• 37:29
  rightist or right-wing company if you make that explicit and you can you can have company values
• 37:36
  and only hire people that meet those values whatever those values are that's not a legal in
• 37:42
  America but most companies don't try to be a political right most companies they have a fiduciary
• 37:49
  duty to the shareholders and they're they're not really political entities well they have to do
• 37:53
  superficial signaling stuff especially since 2020 they have been yeah though they need not
• 37:59
  no I agree they knew I mean okay it's not it's not alike I know in fact there's certain companies
• 38:03
  where that works at cross purposes with the aim of the company of course so for example the Netflix
• 38:08
  example Netflix is trying to create content for the entire country essentially right that means they
• 38:13
  want non-Christians they want LGBTQ people to watch their they want Christians to watch and they
• 38:20
  need to create content that appeals to everyone so if you have a problem with certain values
• 38:25
  it's gonna be difficult to work at the company right and that's what they said to their to their
• 38:29
  employees at one point Jesse will finish the thought no I mean Netflix is it was also
• 38:36
  the views in question are often held by very small number of people Netflix was a really good
• 38:40
  example the group of employees were mad about Dave Chappelle so even though you can go on Netflix and
• 38:46
  watch two hours of teenagers being brutally murdered that's not offensive Dave Chappelle making
• 38:52
  jokes about trends like the song movies or something I'm just making that up they decided they decided
• 38:59
  nothing else on Netflix warranted this response but Dave Chappelle making a few jokes about
• 39:04
  trends well you can put it straight you can certainly see lots of movies where there are trans people
• 39:08
  portrayed in a positive light having a great time or being deemed or being historically disadvantaged
• 39:12
  so if the counterpoint is that like you know there's something for every way yeah there's something
• 39:16
  for the point is it was it turned out this got blanket sympathetic media coverage everywhere this
• 39:22
  this uprising within Netflix it turned out it was a very small number of people and I suspect especially
• 39:26
  the company like Google there's this distortion effect where an outlet like the Times is going to
• 39:32
  cover it sympathetically and they're basically first of all like if you're a skeptic within Google you're
• 39:37
  not going to talk to a Times Tech reporter but they do have good contacts the reporters do with
• 39:41
  the activists so I think we have very confused notions of how popular these movements are even
• 39:47
  within these companies and most people just want to work completely and then there's the question
• 39:51
  of the corporation cynically jumping onto bandwagon of course it can you know appeal like you know
• 39:56
  it's ridiculous to me when gay pride happens and every brand has a little rainbow flag on it
• 40:02
  because it's ridiculous to me when gay pride happens well that is also ridiculous to me but I have
• 40:07
  for slightly different reasons although they overlap but the you know the fact that you'll have
• 40:12
  I don't know Toyota put a rainbow flag on its you know it's Twitter account and then you know
• 40:19
  when I will respect them I'll respect them when they put a rainbow flag on the Twitter on their
• 40:24
  Twitter account in the Gulf States and in their south on their Saudi Twitter account right
• 40:28
  I'll respect them when I believe they're allies I'll respect them when they make a male car that
• 40:31
  can fuck another male car that's exactly right Elon get on to it so Jesse how's your hobby horse
• 40:38
  of gender going what's happening in that space I'm writing a book on the youth gender medicine
• 40:44
  movie of course you are I know it's it's like a really I think it's a really interesting subject it
• 40:48
  just gets to like interesting questions about medical ethics and identity and adolescents I also like
• 40:53
  I'm excited to write this book it will be exciting to maybe move on to other stuff because this
• 40:59
  as you know like from whenever you've touched it it just you get a lot of back on thing yeah
• 41:05
  one of the things that irks me most is when people criticize you for being interested in the subject
• 41:11
  I know so it's like if you if you if you children general you just look from like a 10,000
• 41:17
  foot point of view for all of human history we basically have two genders most people take it for
• 41:22
  granted that this is a biological thing and then they're you know bit by bit you have people
• 41:28
  changing their gender saying I feel like the other gender and then taking medical steps you know
• 41:34
  hormones and surgeries to to transition themselves and then you have children doing it gender being
• 41:39
  one of the basic facts of humanity and actually life and and and so anyone who's interested in this
• 41:48
  who is not themselves trans must have some kind of quote weird obsession with children as opposed to
• 41:54
  this being one of the most interesting phenomenon that is happening in the modern era regardless of
• 41:59
  what you think of it whether you're four or against it you cannot doubt that this is one of the most
• 42:04
  interesting phenomena happening so so to be interested in it like there could be no other explanation
• 42:10
  other than that you have some weird obsession is patently absurd was also absurd because they they
• 42:15
  this issue has got in blanket positive coverage like a lot of magazine covers and I always push back
• 42:21
  and say it's interest that's what I'm saying yeah I always push back and say have you seen Fox news
• 42:25
  have you seen what republican legislatures are doing in southern states like there is a war on
• 42:29
  trans people you can't say that the coverage is all positive just because it's the New York Times
• 42:33
  and the Washington Post is covered I think the situations complicated where their states that are
• 42:38
  passing legislation that seems aggressive and I don't think banding these treatments is the right
• 42:42
  idea trans people also do have a fair degree of political power in blue places and and there
• 42:48
  have been a lot of blue states passing laws that are very protective of them so I sort of think
• 42:54
  of they shouldn't they're being in their perspective would be like everyone has a of course out
• 42:57
  human rights oh thank you so much for giving us a human rights if by human rights you I mean there's
• 43:02
  there's complicated examples and not all them have passed but like California considering a law
• 43:06
  that would make not respecting your child's gender identity a strike against you in custody
• 43:12
  proceedings like without any further complex stuff like that is like to me arguably too far or
• 43:17
  some of the seat school secrecy stuff but the point is at the end of the day it's like I'm more
• 43:21
  a science writer than a political pundit and I think it's a really interesting scientific debate
• 43:25
  and the idea that sure we can have that scientific debate when there's no more transphobia or when
• 43:30
  there's no more republicans I've been hearing versions of that since like 2017 and then we went
• 43:36
  from Trump to Biden and it's not like people stops you know the original justification for why
• 43:41
  you can't write about this is Trump and then there's the laws tomorrow there'll be something else
• 43:45
  and I think there's a way to stand up for people's dignity and rights without ignoring like a really
• 43:50
  interesting medical debate yeah I'm curious what you think of this Jesse because the you bring up
• 43:56
  the point about conservative laws and there's this has been mirrored in the CRT debate you know laws
• 44:02
  trying to ban see our team in their critical race theory it strikes me that a lot of the conservative
• 44:08
  laws which on paper paint conservatives as a powerful political block which they are are a reaction
• 44:16
  to having lost the culture on this issue right so it's um it's actually it in some way a signal
• 44:23
  of weakness that these laws are being passed rather than a signal of strength or at least it's a
• 44:28
  signal of weakness in the cultural domain in in other words conservatives have lost the majority
• 44:33
  of American classrooms in terms of what is actually coming out of teachers mouths that's a
• 44:38
  fea complete the fact that they pass a law in response to it is not a signal that they're so powerful
• 44:45
  they're able to pass a law it's their last ditch attempt to respond in the legal domain what
• 44:51
  they've lost in the cultural domain right also the claim which is not adjusted it's not defense of
• 44:55
  the laws not necessarily saying the laws are a good idea I'm saying they're not a signal of
• 44:59
  strength overall yes and the claim that you shouldn't wrestle with the messy gray areas of these
• 45:06
  ideas because you might give sucker to people who want to misuse your work like conservative
• 45:12
  republicans who might want to pass anti trans laws fails I think to understand that there's also
• 45:18
  a feedback loop going on where if everyone hunkers down and just parrots the same hyper progressive
• 45:24
  talking points and pretends that there's no there there then conservatives feel like they're
• 45:29
  being gasslet and reach for more extreme laws to try to protect themselves so the extreme laws
• 45:36
  don't come out of the vacuum they're in part caused by the sort of stifling like hyper social
• 45:43
  justice sensorious there's also opportunities agenda it's both so it's both I mean in the
• 45:48
  same way I feel about you know the far right like the left will say we have to be more aggressive
• 45:54
  than ever now and we have to not tolerate any dissent within our community because we have to put
• 46:00
  up a unified front against the right yeah not noticing that that actually just inflames the right
• 46:06
  even more and the absence of moderate left wing voices alienates people who would be winnable well
• 46:11
  I mean a couple of these first of all like there there are a lot of moderate liberal voices they
• 46:16
  just like they've had a pretty bad time in the last few years and I think they're reasserting
• 46:20
  themselves including a place is like the times of the Atlantic but I mean to me the example I would
• 46:24
  I would need a good argument against the following example which is during the repressed memory
• 46:29
  craze which is when all these people are coming forward and saying they'd been molested on the
• 46:32
  basis of recovered memories by me like in the 90s or something whenever I'm thought they'd
• 46:37
  been sexually assaulted and at the time a small group of like scientists and experts said
• 46:43
  these reasons not to believe repressed memories and they were brutally attacked as not listening
• 46:47
  to victims or caring about victims or people would literally say you know actual sex abusers
• 46:55
  are going to use your scientific arguments against victims and you know it turns out it's good
• 47:00
  these people came forward because the science was really shoddy I don't think this is a direct
• 47:04
  comparison but I think the same logic applies you can't just say you're not allowed to say that
• 47:08
  or you're not allowed to look into that because what if bad people do something bad with what you
• 47:13
  just it doesn't work until we see how things shake out we don't know the argument is never made
• 47:18
  in the other direction too I'd never heard anyone say you shouldn't make the argument for BLM
• 47:23
  and against the cops because some people might use that and go out and shoot cops right which happens
• 47:28
  once which which happened multiple times but no one blamed that on the people that weren't
• 47:34
  directly advocating but we're just well conservatives did some did some did but they were wrong to
• 47:38
  and that's the point the the argument is rarely the people who would make it in that direction
• 47:44
  would not accept it if it were made at them both sides are very like picking shoes wet so it's like
• 47:50
  if someone expresses an opinion that's six out of ten on the radicalism scale oh you can't say
• 47:55
  that because that'll give someone who's a ten yeah and that just doesn't work in either direction
• 48:00
  right yeah I mean that there's also there's a kind of a circling of wagons or like a
• 48:06
  and particularly on your topic Jesse where the what I always forget the the the analogy that's
• 48:13
  about like the it's got to do with a mocha scuba diver and the scuba diver and the wetsuit and the
• 48:19
  the mountain Bailey that's right yeah like there's this phenomenon where a very reasonable position
• 48:25
  will be conflated with a more extreme position and when you attack the extreme position they claim
• 48:30
  that you're attacking the reasonable position so on the trans issue this would be that there are
• 48:36
  as a certain minority of people who from a very very young age feel like they are in the opposite
• 48:41
  sex body and these people need to transition and they need our support and they need to not be
• 48:46
  discriminated against for their own mental health and they should be treated exactly the same as
• 48:51
  everybody else and they should face no discrimination and everybody except a bigger agrees with that
• 48:58
  claim I think then there's what you see amongst like middle school and high school kids at the moment
• 49:07
  where two-thirds of the class are all gender fluid and non-binary and it's actually a lot there's
• 49:14
  a lot more social capital and kudos in being for example if you're an a-feet gay boy it might
• 49:22
  actually be cooler to be a trans girl then it is to be an a-feet gay boy and if you're a girl
• 49:30
  who's awkward and on the spectrum and you're a lesbian it may actually be cooler to be a trans
• 49:38
  boy in your class than to be who you are and it's very difficult to wrestle with those
• 49:45
  phenomena of social contagion without being accused of being someone who denies the former
• 49:51
  right claim that's right and I mean yeah and I think everyone knows a virgin of that is
• 49:57
  happening in some communities no one saying it happens in like rural Mississippi but obviously
• 50:02
  I mean yeah it's a lot of communities in progressive in big progressive cities and there's
• 50:06
  not and this idea that if you ask any questions about where a 13-year-old got their sense of
• 50:12
  identity you're attacking them is just crazy because they're 13 like you can do it in a compassionate
• 50:18
  way you can try to figure out what their social media habits are and there might be a subset of
• 50:22
  these kids who in the long run really might benefit from transitioning but they're it's just
• 50:28
  been interesting because even the argument that these there should be careful assessment in these
• 50:33
  cases is met with like fewer although I do think things have improved and especially because like
• 50:39
  Reuters has a team on this the times did good reporting the Washington Postes run a couple things so
• 50:43
  but as the mainstream comes around to this is there a risk that the people who were the most
• 50:50
  sensorious and captured by the ideology gas lightest and pretend that they never were and yeah
• 50:57
  and they're like we were never saying that like we were always more reasonable and then you
• 51:01
  become the demon for having raised it in the first place and like oh Jesse was just a transphobic
• 51:06
  bigot but like we were never the unreasonable people who are here have acclaimed I think in the
• 51:10
  social media age it'll be harder for them to do that but I suspect I think there's already
• 51:14
  a version of that happening a version that happened it's a whole other rabbit hole but in the UK
• 51:18
  with like this debate over reforming the Gender Recognition Act of basically moving in a direction
• 51:23
  towards self-idee you know Helen Lewis who's been on our podcast lost a voice acting gig
• 51:28
  merely for having asked questions about whether self-idee was the right approach and then years
• 51:32
  later that's basically mainstream labor party policy is like yeah we maybe went too far on that but
• 51:37
  no one is apologizing or reflecting but I'm not really looking for that I just want to try to do
• 51:44
  you decent reporting on it and Helen Lewis is the most reasonable person in the way too nice
• 51:48
  anyway I know he was like Helen Lewis is a rigid dig it is psychotic yeah where do you see the
• 51:55
  the heat of the culture was at the moment Coleman I mean not what particular issue but like what
• 51:59
  velocity and what temperature I'm sort of wrestling with social media the onset of AI what it's all
• 52:06
  doing to our heads the radicalization of people who I knew who were reasonable you know who are
• 52:11
  mutual friends and colleagues of ours what's happening yeah well I think we're we're living it so
• 52:19
  it can be hard to view from a 10,000 foot perspective but just the advent of social media and
• 52:27
  smartphones starting around the early 2010s is going to end up being a major societal technological
• 52:36
  change you know on the order of the the television or you know I don't know maybe the printing press maybe
• 52:43
  not quite that but it's it's I think it's going to be looked back on as kind of break in history
• 52:50
  that led to all kinds of downstream trends of a kind that we may not fully understand for a long time
• 52:59
  but you know in the middle of it there's a lot of craziness happening just the the possibility of
• 53:06
  echo chambers the the siloing of information that what wouldn't have been possible in say 2005
• 53:14
  the speed with which information could travel I mean these I'm hardly the first person to to tell
• 53:20
  you this but these are massive sea changes in the way that human beings absorb information and
• 53:28
  communicate that are going to have really and have already had you know dangerous and wacky
• 53:34
  downstream consequences and and of course there have been good aspects to it as well
• 53:39
  Jesse how do you avoid the echo chamberification of your mind um you know I found it's helpful just
• 53:48
  to like view all people as pretty similar like there's a small subset of like genuine psychopaths
• 53:53
  but most people are really influenced by in group out group stuff and they'll defend their friends
• 53:57
  different from how they'll defend their enemies in the case of wrongful accusations I think
• 54:01
  it's like basic social psychological principles and a lot of people come to believe their tribe
• 54:07
  is inherently good and the other tribes are inherently bad if you view things in a more
• 54:11
  universal light I think that helps prevent you from going crazy but I will say like I don't know
• 54:15
  sub-stack has been absolutely life-changing for me and has put me in a much more secure position
• 54:20
  than I was but the downside is you do hear the most from the folks who might subject you to audience
• 54:26
  capture like on the gender thing you hear from people with like pretty intense views on it or
• 54:31
  you know I'm sure with you you hear from all your racist buddies like from your clan rallies
• 54:37
  uh no like whenever you're whatever the issue is you've written the most about you'll probably hear
• 54:41
  from a subset of like very intense people I get people very mad at me that I use preferred pronouns
• 54:46
  who like really think that that makes me a traitor to their cause and it's like I'm not I understand
• 54:51
  I'm an opinion journalist sometimes but I'm not on I don't view myself as on a team yeah I think
• 54:56
  that's important to not end yourself as I think it's a very valuable thing that you just said about
• 55:01
  like distinguishing between what your audience needs and what you hear from your audience because
• 55:06
  the kinds of people who are most likely to hit you up are not necessarily representative yeah and
• 55:13
  I mean I'm very conscious of this as I just embark on my sub-stack adventure the the I really have
• 55:18
  to whilst I welcome feedback from the audience I'm always going to temper that with the reality
• 55:25
  that there are a lot of people rushing around on busy lives who don't have time to send me a
• 55:28
  message yeah and I have like the ultimate arbiter of what I produce has to be my own
• 55:34
  instinct for integrity and you know interest and credibility and authenticity and you just hope
• 55:41
  them that the audience for that is large enough that it's lucrative um but it seems like a lot of
• 55:46
  people haven't noticed that because there are a lot of people who have listened to the loudest voices
• 55:51
  at the farthest edges of their audience yeah or they'll see them relentlessly on the rabbit hole
• 55:56
  side talked over but they've let or they've let those voices um influence the worst parts of
• 56:01
  their own personalities like there's some extremely successful people who are conspiracy theorists
• 56:06
  at this point and I might agree with them on like a small subset of things but they've they've
• 56:10
  really got off the deep end and I think it's because unfortunately that's the revenue and audience
• 56:15
  maximizing strategies to go off the deep end it may be and I don't think it's done consciously by
• 56:20
  those people I think it's um it's it's it's done subconsciously and it this is a point
• 56:27
  I think I made before which is that intelligence and let's say fair mindedness or or temperament
• 56:34
  are two separable traits there are people that are highly intelligent but don't have an even or
• 56:42
  cool headed temperament such that they can easily be swayed by emotion into rabbit holes
• 56:50
  and conspiracy thinking and there are people that are not all that intelligent but just have
• 56:56
  extremely cool temperaments such that they don't they're not likely to you know get caught up
• 57:02
  in a wave of a frenzy that will take them to it's like I think EQ might be fake but imagine like
• 57:11
  IQ and EQ like quadrants right you can be higher low on either them totally and and what determines
• 57:17
  whether you know I think some of the people you're thinking of that are extremely smart people
• 57:22
  it's like when they were making sense you loved them and then it's not like they got dumb overnight
• 57:27
  it's just that the audience capture and the pushback led them because for reasons of temperament
• 57:36
  to go in directions that are that are essentially crazy and now all the intelligence is applied to
• 57:44
  craziness I think I've got the covid vaccine in that destroyed their brain it could be that
• 57:48
  most of them didn't get the cup vaccine they didn't get the chip update right yeah
• 57:53
  yeah you have to get them Microsoft update that makes you yeah I went with that so I was like
• 57:57
  after we like they caught other crazy experiences one day it's like firmware update
• 58:01
  actually holy shit they were right but I think there is something more than just that
• 58:06
  common which is that there's something about the just the media landscape and the information
• 58:11
  environment that is making it easier to become crazy because the facts that you're ingesting
• 58:18
  so selected by this is back to my point you know it's really hard social media and smartphones
• 58:23
  you just have a different worldview like there you're just everything you're consuming encourages you
• 58:30
  believe that Joe Biden didn't win the last election or that you know there was something
• 58:35
  it particularly nefarious about what the vaccines did to your DNA or whatever and you know I feel
• 58:43
  like the typical middle-aged guy like railing against the world at the moment and fearing the future
• 58:49
  but it does strike me that when everybody read the same newspaper and at least had a baseline
• 58:54
  grounding of kind of here and consistent facts it was probably easier for everyone to feel like
• 59:02
  they were participants in a single demo absolutely I mean I think I think there's this notion of
• 59:06
  the water cooler conversation which is you know in the year let's say 2005 or something everyone
• 59:13
  saw the season finale of the sopranos whenever that was and was talking about it at the water
• 59:18
  cooler at work or whatever the season finale of lost or you know and even earlier
• 59:25
  era when there were fewer channels the set of people that just all saw the same thing and to
• 59:30
  now talk about it was much wider or Ed Sullivan and people like that and so even in obviously we're
• 59:37
  talking about news and politics but even in the domain of entertainment the likelihood that you
• 59:44
  seen that you watch the same shows as the person you're going on a first date with is much lower
• 59:49
  I would assume today than it was yeah everybody watch some some some cut through but actually
• 59:55
  no you never seen honestly no but this is actually telling I'm curious what percentage of the
• 1:00:01
  American public watch succession as opposed to watch whatever it was the most popular show 20 years
• 1:00:06
  ago for you and I might seem like everyone but we're you know the prestige shows have tiny
• 1:00:11
  audience yeah tiny and that's a perfect example we're in the same bubble so everyone we know
• 1:00:17
  watch succession in white lotus but those compared to whatever was popular in the 1990s or 80s are
• 1:00:24
  tiny shows you know my only real access to like normal TV and normal commercial breaks is when I
• 1:00:31
  watch sports they're always advertising some CBS or ABC sitcom that I've never heard of but given
• 1:00:36
  the prime time that has 40 million viewers there's no one in my bubble watches compare compare
• 1:00:44
  succession to two and a half men I guarantee you there's just like no comparison yeah I'm sure
• 1:00:48
  I'm sure and you know we're going back again like the finale of cheers and the finale of mash
• 1:00:53
  they have like a hundred million yeah that's right yeah and there were only 101 million Americans at
• 1:00:59
  the time right now that you know there were 300 and some million and nobody watches anything like
• 1:01:03
  that except for sports so maybe the only maybe we need to invest more in sport and reality television
• 1:01:08
  there was those the only two things that everybody watches yeah except for Jesse who doesn't watch
• 1:01:13
  white lotus why didn't you watch white lotus I don't know everyone says it's really good not enough kids
• 1:01:17
  not enough kids enough kids in it I also have never seen white children in the portion loose lists somehow
• 1:01:22
  I should lose this is great what was the other one wine wine king wine king how the big
• 1:01:28
  laden guy growing up well even when you have children you will watch the Lion King
• 1:01:33
  okay great okay uh shindles list also fantastic great for a five year old not as funny
• 1:01:40
  through white moments the lion King's that funny either the guy dies that's true but it's inspiring
• 1:01:45
  and it's inspiring a heartwarming mind you so is shindles list very similar films actually
• 1:01:50
  basically I've never seen there will be blood it's excellent I only saw one space oh I saw it
• 1:01:57
  it's good it's good everyone raves about it a little bit overrated in my opinion I went in fantastic
• 1:02:02
  acting I bought a ticket and I sat through the first like eight minutes of it and I was like
• 1:02:10
  I'm just I'm not on this life you know I'm sorry I went in with a bad attitude anyway
• 1:02:15
  because I like and so you just saw them like the first eight minutes where they're just like
• 1:02:19
  getting oil out of the ground and you're like what is this yeah it was just like and it was
• 1:02:23
  this big dry I was like yeah yeah that's crazy you walked out of there will be all getting oil
• 1:02:29
  and I was like this is gonna be three hours of a pool Thomas Anderson masturbating on my face
• 1:02:34
  and I don't even have a snorkel what's it did you even get into the milkshake dude did you drink
• 1:02:39
  your milkshake I mean what's that I drink your milkshake you should watch it you should watch it
• 1:02:43
  I mean that's the preacher character is it Paul Dana what's his name yeah Paul Dana
• 1:02:49
  yeah I mean that his performance alone is hauntingly hauntingly interesting I never do that it was
• 1:02:56
  just one of those things yeah were you like in a bad mood before I was I hated Magnolia which was
• 1:03:02
  I think that was never seen in a minute he was a very long and Tom Cruise yeah
• 1:03:07
  Philip Seymour Hoffman the only one I ever walked out of was M. Night Shyamalan's Avatar
• 1:03:13
  Avatar yeah like the children's well I didn't know there's no one I was called Avatar
• 1:03:18
  what is the Avatar the last airbender oh it was a Nickelodeon show when I was a kid
• 1:03:23
  okay M. Night Shyamalan did a horrible I forget that you were born in the 2020s
• 1:03:28
  he did a horrible remake of it and it was just oh true just I walk I think I was too
• 1:03:32
  old to watch that I've never watched you I'm surprised you didn't watch it Jesse giving you a
• 1:03:36
  fixation on children I read too many of your critics who like really do say that about you
• 1:03:45
  so now I just think it's so funny I do love like obsessed with children's genitals because like
• 1:03:50
  first of all there's so much right there's so many people have actually said that about you
• 1:03:58
  yeah I mean Twitter people they have actually said that the only reason why you would be
• 1:04:01
  interested in children yeah like children's gender dysphoria and transitioning is because you
• 1:04:06
  are obsessed with children's which is true but totally unrelated exactly what are you guys
• 1:04:15
  watching all this into anything interesting at the moment do you want to flag for me I'm rewatching
• 1:04:19
  house oh cool MD that's a good thing to rewatch great show it's it's great because like Lauren
• 1:04:27
  order each episode is a perfectly satisfying little movie yep yeah a lot of jokes in there I think
• 1:04:34
  you probably couldn't make nowadays similar to rewatching like the first season of the office there
• 1:04:38
  are certain things yeah diversity day certain things that are hilarious and just more hilarious because
• 1:04:45
  you you don't really see those kinds of jokes anymore yeah right and they're not the kinds of
• 1:04:50
  jokes to be ashamed of they're just edgy in a way that you couldn't get away with right I rewatched
• 1:04:59
  the West Wing which is hilarious you will now because it's so good the cry it's a fabulous
• 1:05:05
  you never seen it but you're not I mean you both know the West Wing is
• 1:05:15
  fabulous yeah you don't like inspiring and talking no it's not it's not it's not inspiring and talk
• 1:05:22
  it's clever and erudite Aaron Sorkin has the you know famous dialogue style of just whip fast
• 1:05:29
  yes witty every one is the most clever every of the most super clever in the room yeah it's just
• 1:05:33
  exactly like this like that stuff uh but I got to say the season finale of like seasons it's
• 1:05:39
  probably three and four or two and three of the West Wing are like two of the best hours of
• 1:05:44
  television like every watch that ever seen uh it punches you in the gut as well as being
• 1:05:49
  heady but what I was gonna say about it but I won't spoil it now is that it started in like
• 1:05:54
  98 or 99 and the geopolitical crises and the political crises that they're dealing with
• 1:06:01
  which were like really pushing the envelope yeah then are so tame I know now it's like we're
• 1:06:09
  worried there might be an assassination of somebody in the Middle East it's like the whole
• 1:06:14
  Middle East is on fire like yeah Donald Trump running for like these one of our boats might get
• 1:06:19
  a single missile yes it's exactly it's like that it's like no seriously like you know Israel is
• 1:06:25
  dealing with a really difficult negotiation with the Saudis or something like not it got invaded
• 1:06:29
  like they've it's amazing to watch over the past 20 years how much higher the stakes well it's
• 1:06:35
  like the whole like sign for everything like you can only have a show about nothing during a
• 1:06:38
  period where the country was like fairly fat and happy yeah you couldn't do that probably fat and
• 1:06:43
  now give us credit which I'll be fatter now yeah uh so what happens in the future then uh we
• 1:06:47
  it's a general trajectory from the West Wing to hear possible what knowledge 20 years and like
• 1:06:53
  I don't know like Kanye's president Kanye's president if we still have president I think
• 1:06:58
  sort of the like epistemic crisis to use a high fluid in turn for it I only see that getting
• 1:07:04
  worse I don't see how that kind of stuff's gonna get better because like it's interesting
• 1:07:09
  me that even because I cover online bullshit me and another group of people who are in the general
• 1:07:15
  you know Obama I don't know Liz Warren to Barry Sanders like we actually with Warren is a Liz to you
• 1:07:21
  are you that close yeah we have a thing right all right your pillow talk was all about exactly
• 1:07:27
  like even people who really occupy a narrow band of political spectrum and agree on a lot of stuff
• 1:07:32
  are tearing one another's threats out and have completely different views of reality like basic
• 1:07:36
  questions so I don't see what is gonna sew us back together I think all that stuff's gonna get
• 1:07:41
  worse and I don't think Americans can like fall to fascism or civil war I could just see like a
• 1:07:45
  really long slow shitty decline if I had to predict well that's a best case scenario because
• 1:07:51
  the decline of some kind is coming much more colorful there's another power that will
• 1:07:56
  also just China is plotting an invasion through the dairy and gap so I'm really worried about that
• 1:08:02
  I heard that on a podcast and they're they're having more the weakening us with vaccines
• 1:08:06
  they're women are more science the fact that the Brett Weinstein god bless him hybrid is
• 1:08:22
  but has become something somewhat convinced of a number of shall we say
• 1:08:26
  well he's not convinced he's just saying would it be so crazy to suggest that the Chinese are
• 1:08:35
  now genetically predisposed I believe to having more males because the one child policy has created
• 1:08:41
  more males or maybe it's just that they now fortuitously do have more males which is so they're
• 1:08:46
  gonna have to use them up in a war because they now have an army I thought it was that they're
• 1:08:52
  having more males because they're preparing for war because they're preparing some kind of hive
• 1:09:01
  mind shift where the women's bodies of the women's bodies know that war is coming and so have more
• 1:09:09
  sons is that theory that is what it sounded to me signals to their body I listened to three
• 1:09:14
  minutes of the clip on Tucker Carlson and that was what that was the strong implication if that's
• 1:09:19
  not what he might go back and listen to the whole thing sorry Brett if Jesse just maligned you
• 1:09:23
  by talking about Chinese people in the Panama in Panama was that it yeah through the dairy
• 1:09:29
  because that's where they're going to invite the China the most like as I point out one of the most
• 1:09:34
  sophisticated civilizations ever has decided to do a slow invasion not by as we were discussing
• 1:09:40
  putting a bunch of people on planes and having them overstay their traveler work visas but
• 1:09:45
  subjecting the soldier the sleeper cell agents to this horrifically difficult jungle crossing
• 1:09:51
  that they might not survive the border of South America Central America Colombia to
• 1:09:55
  a border I think Mexico where maybe they'll get in and brought with it went down to Panama
• 1:10:01
  so he's not for himself to take out the cartels first which might be good that could be
• 1:10:05
  is that actually could be good yeah I maybe it's better if the you know the whole regions of
• 1:10:09
  Mexico's that are like that are dominated by the cartel yeah maybe they should be conquered by
• 1:10:13
  China the Chinese the Chinese Communist power can they be worse than the cartels they're
• 1:10:18
  white until China's on the border and then we should do a regular foreign policy podcast that'd
• 1:10:22
  be good wouldn't I know I'm thinking about interesting foreign policy questions
• 1:10:29
  that don't have to do with Israel oh okay no I'm thinking about China I said my one China fact
• 1:10:35
  I there was crosstalk but China Africa did you know about that the China is like
• 1:10:40
  bribing you know there's like business stuff there yeah did you know that there's Chinese business
• 1:10:48
  stuff in Africa it actually raises an interesting
• 1:10:52
  to be the title of your nest of stuff like Chinese business breaking Chinese business stuff in Africa
• 1:11:01
  I'm here in Africa there is Chinese business stuff in Africa
• 1:11:06
  and who said they saw men who appeared to be Chinese and they were not discussing
• 1:11:11
  Africa's main language which is African in this continent four times larger than these United
• 1:11:17
  States Chinese people have been spotted okay it's interesting it's actually an interesting debate
• 1:11:25
  about aid at the moment in the South Pacific because Australia has the you know although funny
• 1:11:31
  as it may sound to an American who thinks that Australia is a small piddling power but to the
• 1:11:35
  South Pacific Australia is like the super the regional superpower and so we're heavily involved in
• 1:11:41
  you know there's a whole bunch of small South Pacific island nations and over which Australia
• 1:11:47
  provides military sport a lot of aid and so on and there's interesting debate in foreign policy
• 1:11:52
  circles because of the past few decades the idea has been don't show off what you're giving
• 1:12:01
  like give it quietly let local people decide what they want to spend it on so give it to local
• 1:12:07
  authorities and just funnel the aid in there and just do good that way now the Chinese have come
• 1:12:12
  parachuting in in the past 20 years with gigantic uh you know with compliments from China
• 1:12:18
  written in the local language on every bridge and everything that they fund so although Australia
• 1:12:23
  far outstrips China in aid to most Pacific Island countries yeah stolen valor bro a lot of the locals
• 1:12:30
  are like oh the Chinese great they give us all this stuff and the Australians are like well in terms
• 1:12:34
  of the geopolitical tussle that is probably inevitably coming between China and the West don't
• 1:12:38
  want locals to be aware of the fact that we're giving them tons and tons of shit and maybe we
• 1:12:43
  shouldn't give all of that shit to governments that are occasionally corrupt and siphon those funds
• 1:12:47
  off maybe we should just because they were we used to just build shit and then we were like no
• 1:12:51
  no no no let the locals do it yeah now we're like actually maybe we should just build a whole bunch
• 1:12:55
  of shit and put Australia stamp is there any aspect to it where the locals see Australian aid as
• 1:13:01
  more colonial than they would see Chinese aid interesting question Chinese aren't their historical
• 1:13:04
  colonizers well we're not most of these places have never been colonized by the West uh uh
• 1:13:10
  well some of them have American somehow uh by places like Tonga haven't so when American
• 1:13:17
  Samoa is colonized by Americans I'm joking it's the way you drive Jews probably Jewish Samoa yeah no
• 1:13:25
  that's interesting that's an interesting question yeah does do yes probably probably never the last
• 1:13:29
  guess the percept there might be perception of the rich white person giving wouldn't have to be a
• 1:13:33
  fact yeah yeah that's as opposed to you know Chinese which are kind of a to most people in the
• 1:13:41
  world of like a foreign abstract yeah they may not have opinions about China yeah that's right
• 1:13:47
  where they probably have opinions about white Europeans yeah they also probably have a lot more
• 1:13:53
  aspiration to to be will come to Australia and the United States and Europe than they do to
• 1:13:58
  what China so there's that we've got cultural capital sure spend it sure spend it all right Josh
• 1:14:05
  thank you for joining me on this podcast I host Coleman I don't know where you came from but you
• 1:14:09
  did okay thank you thank you that's a good sign off uh thanks Josh thank you Josh I hope you
• 1:14:15
  enjoy New York did you what's it cool to do in New York well I mean you may be forgetting I
• 1:14:21
  lived in New York for quite some time I think once you do that's once you do a decade here then
• 1:14:26
  yeah then you you can take the boy out of New York Jesse but you can't take the New York out of the
• 1:14:30
  boy wow you know what they say what happens in New York sees in New York I mean on this particular
• 1:14:36
  24 hour period nothing has happened to me apart from talking to you guys and uh what which feels
• 1:14:42
  very much like being mugged oh they're not nice so that's yeah that's good good for morning so thank you