Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Josh’s Soap Box: Kanye, hijabs and Taylor Swift

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Josh’s Soap Box: Kanye, hijabs and Taylor Swift · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Good day, humans. Welcome to a little bit of extra additional content that I thought I'd
• 0:07
  provide you with this week. It's clearly an appetite for more on this show and so occasionally,
• 0:15
  I'm just going to start tipping my toe into rambling, ranting, whimsy thoughts, random pastiche,
• 0:22
  mosaic, jigsaw puzzle of Josh's mind. See, that was pretty good. I thought,
• 0:29
  although it was an excellent way of describing what we're doing here, a few stories that have been
• 0:33
  floating around this week that I found myself interviewing people about on my radio show,
• 0:37
  my excellent radio show, which I can't believe you don't listen to. Or do you? Are you wise? And you
• 0:42
  do. Congratulations. You're an excellent person for listening to ABC Radio Sydney between 12, 30 and
• 0:48
  30 p.m. of an afternoon, of a week down afternoon. Sydney time, obviously, be weird, wouldn't
• 0:54
  it? If my ABC Sydney show operated for some reason on Fiji and time, we were like, it's 12, 30 to
• 0:59
  3, 30 on ABC Radio Sydney. Just be aware that we, for some traditional reason, I don't quite
• 1:05
  understand, happen to operate on Fiji time. So adjust your watches beforehand. In fact, it might be
• 1:11
  simpler. If you just always adjust your watches and clocks to Fiji time, so you don't miss my show,
• 1:16
  it will mean that you're several hours later early to all of your meetings and appointments,
• 1:21
  but that's a small price to pay, isn't it, for making sure that come 12, 30. Fiji time,
• 1:27
  you and Sydney are always listening to what I have to say. Nonetheless, if you do miss me during the
• 1:33
  week, here's a little tidbit of some things that I've been talking about and thinking about throughout
• 1:38
  the week. I've got three cracking stories for you. I mean, hot off the press. I'm going to hold
• 1:45
  them right here in my whole little hand. Story number one, I feel like we need a drum roll.
• 1:51
  Maybe an announcer, maybe like Alan Calle used to be on the Dave Letterman show,
• 1:56
  it's for some of you who are of a certain age. Letter number three, story number one,
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  Taylor Swift. You didn't think I was going to go there, did you? You thought I was going to talk
• 2:08
  about something very fancy and important and intellectual. Well, maybe this could be fancy and
• 2:13
  important and intellectual because Taylor Swift has responded to her fan pushback to the outrage
• 2:22
  from her community. Well, maybe not so much from her community, but from people who like to get
• 2:28
  outraged about things like this. Over a fat phobic scene in her new music video,
• 2:35
  in her music video for anti-hero, there's a scene where she steps on scales and it shows her
• 2:43
  weight. And then she's singing about her eating disorder about the fact that she has struggled with
• 2:49
  anorexia in the past. Instead of showing a numerical weight, the scale just pings up and it says fat
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  and she sings the line I stared directly at the sun but never in the mirror. And she looks
• 3:01
  over to a kind of doppelganger of herself who's like artificially beautiful. And it's about her
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  clearly, obviously her own struggles with her own body image. Well, well, hell, you are not allowed
• 3:15
  to imply that there was anything wrong with being fat. Being fat is wonderful. Fat is beautiful.
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  We all know that. Tay-swee. As I call her, Tay-swee, Taylor Swift, Tay-swee, T.S.
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  So she wrote and directed that music video. She tweeted in her own defense that it represents her
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  own nightmare scenarios and intrusive thoughts. It's not meant to be an objective critique of fat
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  people. She's an artist. She's reflecting what's going on in her own head. She's communicating that
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  she's wrestling with her own internal demons, not external ones. She doesn't have a scene in
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  which she's pointing at fat people and like wiping her brow and going, whoa, thank goodness,
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  I'm not them. No, she's talking about her own self and herself image. Nonetheless, the pushback
• 4:14
  was swift. The pushback was severe. Fat people don't need to have it reiterated yet again.
• 4:22
  Wrote Shira Rosenbluth, a social worker with a specialization in eating disorder treatment
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  on Twitter. Fat people don't need to have it reiterated yet again that it's everyone's worst
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  nightmare to look like us, said Shira. Having an eating disorder doesn't excuse fat phobia.
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  Then everyone started piling on. She's being fat phobic. She is, she has the blood of fat people
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  on her hands and it can be a lot of blood. I'm afraid I don't know if you've tried slaughtering
• 4:54
  a fat person, but it is messy. I'll tell you from personal experience. So Tasey has decided to
• 5:01
  be a good Gen Zeter or is she a millennial? She's one of those. She's gone and she's changed the scene.
• 5:09
  She's altered her creative output. She has, yes, cancelled. Should we say that part of her soul,
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  that found expression in that, the part that was exposing its own vulnerability about her own
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  body image, her own struggles with her with the unreasonable expectations that society and the
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  patriarchy and the male gaze might be putting on her. She's cancelled that and has instead re-released it
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  without the bathroom scales hanging up to fat. Is it fat phobic to be honest about the fact
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  that you don't want to be fat? Is it fat phobic to reveal your own difficulty in achieving the
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  weight and the body image that you want? I mean, do the protesters want us to pretend to live in a
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  world in which we don't struggle, in which the idea that fat is worse than slim is not just a
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  misconception that we should all regard as a misconception, but is actually a fear that doesn't
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  even exist. So like it would be one thing to say, it would be one thing if Taylor Swift was saying,
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  I don't want to be fat and it's a good thing that I don't want to be fat and I'm right to not
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  want to be fat and that it's a core part of my personality that I'm comfortable with, that I'm not fat.
• 6:48
  But that's not what she's saying. She's an artist. She's a creative artist. She's exposing herself. She's
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  wrestling with the things in her own life, in her own mind, in her own psyche, in her own bones
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  that are motivating her in certain ways. And she's clearly doing this in the context of saying,
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  isn't it fucked up and perverted that even I, who many people regard as being beautiful,
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  still wrestle with the demons of body image. She's exposing that vulnerability about herself.
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  She's not passing judgment on whether or not that pathology that she's suffering from
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  is a good thing. In fact, the whole context of the song makes it seem that it's not a good thing
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  that anorexia is a bad thing. Of course, she doesn't want to be anorexic. She hasn't
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  wanted to have eating disorders. She doesn't want to fear fatness the way that she does.
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  But merely expressing the battle that she's having internally is being regarded as fat shaming
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  or being fat phobic. Now, this is all quite separate and apart from the question of whether or not
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  fat phobia is actually an evil thing. I mean, it's evil to shame people. It's evil to laugh at people.
• 7:59
  It's evil to be mean to people. But is it evil to say that all other variables being equal? You'd
• 8:06
  be better off not being obese. I mean, is that now something that we have to pretend is not true?
• 8:14
  I mean, I literally hear people saying that we do have to pretend that that's not true. And
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  that I'm being fat phobic for even calling it a pretense. That you can be just as healthy. Look,
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  you can be obese and healthy. You can be skinny and unhealthy. You can look skinny, but actually
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  you've got a needing disorder and you smoke two packs of cigarettes a day and you don't get a proper
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  diet, whereas there might be another person who's larger, who goes jogging along, bouncing along,
• 8:41
  and they're wobbling their way to great heart health. And that's true. That's absolutely true.
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  But when you're talking about averages and when you're talking about variables,
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  the variable of weight, all other things being equal, is something that you need to keep an eye on.
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  In males, if you have a waist circumference of more than 100 centimeters, your risk of heart
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  disease, stroke, dementia, cancer, they all go up a lot. Obesity is a killer. In fact, it's probably
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  the biggest killer in the United States at the moment when you look at the impact that it has
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  on all of the other underlying reasons why people die. All of those chronic diseases that people
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  get as they waddle around eating fast food. To say that there are fat people who are healthy
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  and skinny people who are unhealthy is a bit like saying that there are smokers who are healthy
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  and there are non-smokers who are unhealthy. It's true. You could be a smoker who is in much better
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  shape than a non-smoker. If that non-smoker is, for example, really fat. But you have to hold
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  the other variables constant in order to understand whether what you're talking about is a good or
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  bad thing. All other things being equal, being a normal body weight is better than being either
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  too skinny or too fat. Can we at least say that? Apparently we can't, but let's assume that if
• 10:07
  you're a reasonable person, you're willing to concede that point, then the question becomes,
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  so are we allowed to have conversations about the way that we internally struggle with our
• 10:17
  aim of achieving some kind of beauty standard? And maybe the whole health thing is a distraction.
• 10:23
  You hear a lot of fat champions and fat phobia activists saying stuff like,
• 10:31
  oh, you always come back to conversations about health and how obesity is bad for your health,
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  but that's not what it really is. You're just trying to retroactively justify your own prejudices
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  towards what is regarded as being an attractive body image. Let's even grant them that.
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  Let's even grant them that we don't even have to talk about health. Let's ignore the question.
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  Let's ignore the fact that being fat is less healthy than not being fat, and let's ignore the fact
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  that even Taylor Swift or anyone who's aspiring to a leaner body weight is doing so for reasons of
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  health. Let's exclude all health from the equation and all self-judgment about being unhealthy
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  from the equation and look only at the self-judgment that comes from not being pretty
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  healthy. And even still, in a free society, in a wide-ranging, capacious, rambunctious culture
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  where people can produce whatever art they want to and bear their souls for us, what we love
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  about us, artists who get their hands dirty, is that they really do delve in those vulnerable
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  nasty little places of their own soul that maybe they wouldn't want to talk about in public,
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  if they were giving a decree to social activists at some fat-shaming conference.
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  Art is not about proclamations, about tribal identity, about towing particular ideological lines.
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  Art is about digging inside your soul and trying to expose what's there. And if what's there
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  inside the soul of one of the most revered and looked up to and idolized women in the world,
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  a young woman with an enormous amount on her shoulders and on her plate, who is trying to articulate
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  what it's like to be perceived as a sex icon by so many people, and what it's like to be perceived
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  as having a body that so many other girls want to have. If what that's like is that you're constantly
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  pathologizing yourself in a climate in which there are unreasonable expectations placed on
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  what you should look like, and that one of the ways in which you're acting out on that is
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  through an eating disorder, then fuck yeah, it's relevant for you to talk about your fear of being fat.
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  Fuck anyone who thinks that that's you being fat phobic. Why did she have to change the damn video?
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  I mean, it's a small thing on such amendments to Taylor Swift's music videos. Civilization will not
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  rise or fall, but cumulatively it does produce a chilling effect on other artists. If they see that
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  the one of the most important artists in the world is constantly pairing back and scaling back and
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  self-sensoring on the basis of the fact that a loud minority of people get angry at her online
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  for being mean to them when she's only being mean to the pathological bit of her soul that she
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  was bearing. Well, now she's not going to bear that bit of her soul anymore and many other bits
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  as well. Then many, many other artists, if this keeps happening over and over again, these little
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  minor walkbacks changing a word here, changing a scene there because they're perceived to denigrate
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  some minority. If that becomes the cultural climate, then that is frankly a little bit
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  Stalinist. It is frankly, it just shaves the edge of creative freedom, intellectual freedom.
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  I don't know what this achieves, except basically for giving people who shriek the loudest a win.
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  It's sort of the the terrorist veto in a way in a sense that the more terrorizing you are,
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  the more of a hubbub you create, the more you punish transgressors, the louder your voice
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  is able to be amplified. Then the more of an impact you have, it doesn't really matter whether
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  or whether your ideas are logical or coherent. It just matters that you're able to shout them
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  loud enough and send slurs publicly enough that the target of the slur goes, oh,
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  shit, I might actually, maybe that is wrong. Maybe I shouldn't have revealed that about myself
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  because I'm revealing something too ugly. But where do we end up in art if we're not revealing
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  ugly truths about ourselves? Because somebody else who wants that not to be something that you
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  worry about wants to create the illusion of a world in which it's not something that's frowned on
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  and not something that's bad. I don't know. Anyway, do I really care about this? No,
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  not as an individual thing, but it gets my goat, young listener, that there are so many, I mean,
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  one of the people I interviewed this week about this is a Gen Z cultural critic who thought it was
• 15:37
  just wonderful who thinks, you know, Taylor Swift is a model for all artists in the way that she
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  listens and she cares. And when she realizes that she's done the wrong thing, she will accept and
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  she'll realize that it's time for her to think about herself and really to take a good look in the
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  mirror and think about the impact that she's having on disadvantaged, disenfranchised communities
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  of fatties. You know, that's not what the Gen Z said. I just added that last bit about fatties,
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  which is not kind and I find I've been a fatty throughout my life. I'm not right now. I've
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  experienced that. That might not be exactly the same as, you know, a woman who's wildly overweight
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  in a climate in which females are expected to conform to a more perfect physical stereotype
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  than men are. You know, you can have a slubby sort of dad bod and girls might think you're cute,
• 16:30
  but it is true that the expectations on women are much higher. You can't just be kind of cute.
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  I mean, this is a point that Dolly Alderson makes in her fantastic memoir, everything I know about love,
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  which I loved I read it on holiday a couple months ago. And she makes the point that, you know,
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  a guy can get by a lot on just being sort of charming and cracking the odd dad joke. Whereas the,
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  you know, women really, really feel like they have to conform to beauty standards. So I'm not denying
• 17:02
  any of that. I'm just saying that that's precisely what Taylor Swift was wrestling with in the way
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  in which she creatively chose to wrestle with it. And to then say, no, you didn't do it right
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  because you used the word fat. And you told us that you actually don't like being fat and therefore
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  that means that there's something wrong with being fat and therefore it means that I as a fat person
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  feel shame. Well, come on. Taylor Swift is reflecting the culture that she's in.
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  We live in a culture. And frankly, also a physical and biological universe in which obesity
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  is less preferable than being a normal weight. So deal with that before you cancel Tasty.
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  My good old Tasty. No one else calls it Tasty. She knows that she knows that it's only me
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  in the many, many letters that I send her, which were all scrawled on parchment featuring
• 17:59
  grotesque images of Taylor Swift weighing 500 pounds. Anyway, the other story I want to talk about
• 18:05
  is the is Iran. And only in order to say that I don't really want to talk about it because I don't
• 18:09
  think that the West should be getting too involved except to say it's enormously heartening what's
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  happening in Iran. I mean, it's obviously not heartening what happened just within the past few
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  days, which is that Iranian security forces have opened fire at the grave of Masa Amini 40 days after
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  she died in custody. Police clashing with mourners Iranian media says 10,000 mourners gathered at the
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  cemetery where she's buried. Internet access was cut off in Iran after clashes between protesters
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  and security forces. This is the woman who died in custody last month after being arrested
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  for inappropriate attire for improperly wearing her headscarf. And this has led to a massive
• 18:54
  upswell of opposition to the Iranian regime, largely from women. I applaud them. I don't tweet about
• 19:02
  this. I don't go on social about this because I'm just skeptical about the ability of people
• 19:07
  outside of Iran, especially in Western countries to do much about it, other than to
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  shut down those of us in our midst who might sort of try to apologize for the Iranian regime or
• 19:21
  apologize for, you know, headscarves, not that not that every wearing of a headscarf is an active
• 19:29
  oppression. But I always roll my eyes a little bit when people in the West who do wear headscarves,
• 19:34
  including friends of mine, try to portray it as being an active female empowerment. This is
• 19:38
  something that I choose to do to which I always say that's fantastic. And the reason why you're
• 19:42
  able to choose to do it is because you are one of the vanishingly small number of Muslim women
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  around the world who have the good fortune to not live in a Muslim majority country. And therefore
• 19:52
  you have the rights to be able to choose to wear it or not wear it. The vast, vast, vast majority
• 19:57
  of Muslim women in the world live in the theocratic states where they don't have the choice.
• 20:04
  So let's just recognize that for you, it might be a symbol of freedom for many, many women.
• 20:10
  It is not. Iran is decrying the West for paving the way for Islamophobia. In June,
• 20:18
  Iran's ambassador to the United Nations gave a speech saying that critics of Iran are just
• 20:24
  Islamophobes. He says this is an environment conducive to violence and violent extremism.
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  It's the representative of one of the most violent and extremist regimes in the world.
• 20:36
  Of course, he's single out Israel because everyone's favorite little whipping boy.
• 20:40
  He said, we reject outrageous allegations made by the representative of the Zionist regime
• 20:48
  against my country. These are made to deflect attention from Israeli crimes and atrocities
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  in our region. The Zionist regime is well known for its racist policies and spread of hate speech
• 20:57
  and propaganda. So if you hear anyone saying, oh, look, it's Islamophobic or it's prejudiced or
• 21:08
  it's a misunderstanding of the burqa or the hijab to throw our support behind the Iranian
• 21:17
  female protesters too much. Well, you know, let's not allow our opposition to the Iranian regime to
• 21:25
  bleed into Islamophobia. Just shut that right down. I mean, just shut it down. Unless there is
• 21:33
  someone who's saying that Muslims are this or Muslims are that, then it's not Islamophobia.
• 21:39
  It's not Islamophobia to criticize the tenets of Islam or the behavior of that regime.
• 21:47
  And lastly, ye. If we talk about ye, Kanye West, now known as ye, not a billionaire anymore.
• 21:56
  Apparently, he was dropped not only by CAA, one of the biggest talent agencies in the world
• 22:02
  and most prestigious. So now he doesn't have representation. Although I think he's going to do
• 22:07
  okay by himself, Bill Murray doesn't have an agent. I think Kanye can work without an agent.
• 22:11
  And if he can't work without an agent, then it's for reasons that the agent wouldn't have been
• 22:15
  able to do anything about. His Adidas deal or Adidas, as Americans say, was worth about $1.4 billion.
• 22:23
  So now ye's only worth about 400 million without the Adidas deal. They dropped him.
• 22:29
  Valencia August dropped him. Vogue's dropped him. Everyone's basically dropped him. And now the
• 22:35
  latest news is he's been escorted out of the global headquarters of sketches. Well, the Los Angeles
• 22:42
  headquarters of sketches, the comfortable footwear company, when he showed up unannounced and
• 22:49
  uninvited on Wednesday, presumably trying to get a deal saying, hey, Adidas doesn't want me,
• 22:56
  but how about the comfortable and affordable footwear of sketcher? I'm willing to spout my anti-Semitic
• 23:03
  ideas. Have you heard about my thoughts about Kim Kardashian and her new bow? Because I can spray
• 23:11
  those wherever you want. If you want me to on behalf of sketches and they're politely declined.
• 23:16
  So where does all this come from? Earlier this month, he presented t-shirts at a Paris fashion show
• 23:24
  with the slogan white lives matter on it. Now, the guardians says this is a phrase associated
• 23:30
  with white supremacists. White supremacists, they say. It is associated with white supremacists.
• 23:36
  It's also associated with a lot of people who just have problems with black lives matter because
• 23:40
  they don't like identity politics and they want all lives to matter. Or maybe people who have
• 23:48
  family members who are in the police force. So that's one thing that irks me when publications
• 23:54
  just take something and then they say, oh, you know what? Yeah, Jordan Peterson's very popular
• 24:00
  with Nazis. Yeah, he's also popular with a lot of non-Nazis. You could mention that as well.
• 24:05
  Anywho, this is not to justify what Kanye West has been saying. What we're clearly seeing is
• 24:11
  the descent of someone who's suffering from some kind of mental health problems. I don't think
• 24:17
  there's anything illegitimate about him being dropped just in case you're not across all of this.
• 24:23
  So there was the white lives matter t-shirt thing. Then he was on a podcast on the 15th of October
• 24:28
  called The Drink Champs podcast, which I hadn't heard of, on which he blamed Jewish media
• 24:35
  and Jewish Zionists for various wrongdoings. He said, Jewish people have owned the black voice
• 24:44
  and that the Jewish community, especially in the music industry, they'll take us and milk us till
• 24:48
  we die. He said, he said, the George Floyd didn't really, wasn't really killed by the cops. He
• 24:57
  died from fentanyl, the drug, and that police officers knee wasn't even on his neck like that. He said,
• 25:04
  and then the mother of George Floyd's daughter is suing Yee for $250 million. That episode's been
• 25:12
  taken down unsurprisingly. On the same day, Kanye also said that he doesn't believe in the term
• 25:20
  anti-semitism. Then that night, he wrote the tweet that said, he was going to go Defcon 3 on Jewish
• 25:30
  people. Defcon 3 is like one of those Defcon levels that the US military has. It's not even the
• 25:37
  highest. Why wouldn't you say Defcon 1? Come on, Defcon 1 is maximum readiness with an imminent nuclear
• 25:43
  war. Defcon 2 is six hours or less to deploy and engage near nuclear war. Defcon 3 is merely
• 25:50
  forced readiness increased above normal levels. Come on, Kanye, if you're going to take me and my
• 25:54
  fellow Jews on, you got to go better than Defcon 3. Hitler pretty much went all the way to
• 25:59
  Defcon 1. He was serious about things. Bring it. Nonetheless, he says Defcon 3, and then he
• 26:07
  says, and then he says he stood by those comments because he was on Piers Morgan's show on the 19th
• 26:15
  of October. There's four days after he had said all this. And Piers Morgan said, did he know that
• 26:21
  the comments were racist? And Kanye said, yeah, that's why I said it. I fought fire with fire. I'm
• 26:26
  not here to get hosed down. And then he said, I will say I'm sorry for the people that I hurt with
• 26:31
  the Defcon, the confusion that I caused. I feel like I caused hurt and confusion. And I'm sorry for
• 26:35
  the families that had nothing to do with the trauma that I'd been through hurt people hurt people
• 26:39
  and I was hurt. So that's his justification for saying that. And then there's the whole throwing
• 26:48
  racial slurs at Trevor Noah thing. So Trevor Noah on the Daily Show, this is John Stuart's
• 26:56
  successor, who's also black. He took some time to discuss the situation about Kim Kardashian and
• 27:03
  Kanye West and Pete Davidson, who is Kim Kardashian's newer boyfriend. And Trevor Noah was saying
• 27:13
  Kanye has been mistreating his ex, Kim Kardashian. And Trevor Noah said what Kardashian is going
• 27:19
  through is terrifying to watch and it shines a spotlight on what so many women go through when they
• 27:23
  choose to leave. And Trevor Noah knows a thing or two about this. He witnessed abuse when he
• 27:30
  was a kid. He said that people had told his mother that she was overreacting. And then his stepfather
• 27:37
  shot her in the head. She survived. Nonetheless, Trevor Noah is saying as a society we have to
• 27:44
  ask ourselves questions. Do we want to stand by and watch a car crash when we thought we saw it coming?
• 27:51
  And he ended the segment saying all I'm saying about this story is if Kim can't escape this,
• 27:55
  Kim Kardashian, if she can't escape this, then what chance do normal women have?
• 27:59
  So, Yee decides that it would be ready to go on Twitter and respond to Trevor Noah
• 28:09
  for the insults. And actually it was on Instagram not Twitter. And he gets on Instagram and he
• 28:16
  posts a picture of Trevor Noah and he writes the caption and I'm about to say a racially
• 28:23
  a racial slur. He writes all together now, Kuhn Bayer, my Lord Kuhn Bayer, Kuhn Bayer, my Lord Kuhn
• 28:31
  Bayer, Uuh Lord Kuhn Bayer. That's what Kanye wrote about Trevor Noah.
• 28:41
  And then Trevor Noah replied to Kanye in the comments before the Instagram post was taken down.
• 28:47
  Very politely saying that this behavior breaks his heart. He said there are a few artists who have
• 28:54
  had more of an impact on me than you Yee. You took samples and turned them into symphonies. You
• 28:59
  took your pain and through the wire turned it into performance perfection. I thought differently
• 29:04
  about how I spend my money because of you. I learned to protect my child like creativity from
• 29:08
  grown thoughts because of you. Shit, I still smile every time I put on my seatbelt because of you.
• 29:13
  You're an indelible part of my life Yee, which is why it breaks my heart to see you like this.
• 29:19
  Trevor Noah wrote, I don't care if you support Trump and I don't care if you roast Pete.
• 29:23
  I do however care when I see you on a path that's dangerously close to peril and pain.
• 29:27
  You have every right to fight for your family, but you have to know the difference between that
• 29:32
  and fighting your family. If you're just joking about it all, Trevor Noah wrote,
• 29:36
  and I'm an idiot for caring, then so be it, but I'd rather be the idiot who spoke up.
• 29:41
  And then he wrote, Oh, and as for Koon, clearly some people graduate, but we still stupid. Don't
• 29:47
  ever forget the biggest trick racists ever played on blank people was teaching us to strip each other
• 29:51
  of our blackness whenever we disagree, tricking us into dividing ourselves up into splinters so that
• 29:57
  we would never unite into a powerful rod. So Kanye was banned from Instagram, banned from Twitter,
• 30:05
  well suspended. I don't know what that means. And you know, some people on the right are saying
• 30:12
  that there's a free speech issue that he's been canceled, that it's canceled culture. I don't know,
• 30:18
  not really. Is it over the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, neo-Nazi's hunger banner that said Kanye
• 30:28
  is right and they raised their arms in a Nazi salute and said like, honk if you agree,
• 30:33
  Kanye is right about the Jews and said, it's not pretty stuff. I am normally, as you may know,
• 30:42
  if you're a regular listener, extremely liberal in my ideas about what people should be able to say
• 30:48
  on social media. And I don't think it's right to say that social media companies are just private
• 30:52
  companies and they should be able to make any decisions they want to about who they kick off
• 30:56
  or who they allow to speak because they have become de facto town squares. It's very difficult to
• 31:02
  be part of the culture if you're not on social media. I mean, you can choose to step out of
• 31:08
  that and I think that's a wise thing to do to not spend too much time on social.
• 31:14
  But if you want to be part of it, if you want to be part of that conversation,
• 31:17
  then it is a legitimate imposition on your freedom of action to not be able to. But there comes
• 31:24
  a point at which if you're a total train wreck spouting gibberish that is not just a different
• 31:31
  as of opinion, but genuine hate speech. I mean, you know, the legal definition of hate speech in
• 31:37
  many countries, vilifying groups of people saying that you need to, you're going to arm up and
• 31:44
  essentially militarize yourself against a group of people who you say are conspiring to bring down
• 31:51
  like people. Yeah, no, no, you don't get to broadcast that. I mean, why would any private
• 31:59
  company want you to broadcast that? You have a legal right to say it in the United States.
• 32:04
  You're not to say whatever you want, but you can't be going around broadcasting it. So that's
• 32:09
  my thoughts about the tragedy of of you, you know, two things can be true at once. It can be true
• 32:14
  that you can't really hold him sort of responsible morally for what he's saying because he's
• 32:19
  clearly in some kind of a mental and psychic self-implosion. And also at the same time that
• 32:28
  regardless of whether that's true, you can't be going around broadcasting that. So those are my
• 32:33
  thoughts. I hope this is useful. I hope this is thought provoking. I hope it's just nice to have
• 32:39
  my voice in your ears. It's nice to be talking to you. It's nice to have you here. So stay tuned
• 32:44
  for next time when we'll bring you another regular installment of a fascinating interview
• 32:48
  on Uncomfortable Conversations. Uncomfortable Conversations is produced by Stephen Postuma.
• 32:58
  Follow me, Josh Zeps on Twitter and Instagram for all the latest. May your day be fruitful,
• 33:03
  your mind humble, your enemies generous and your conversations perfectly, sparklingly,
• 33:09
  collectively, uncomfortable.