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Premium: Josh's First Podcast - The Dawn of #WeThePeople LIVE · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  G'day, this is an abridged version of the episode that you can hear in full by signing up
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  at uncomfortableconversations.substac.com slash subscribe. Enjoy the freebie.
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  G'day, humans. Imagine if you were, you're walking down a street on an evening in Brooklyn
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  in New York. It's an early summer's night. It's hot and it's muggy and a little cobblestone
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  streets you hear from coming inside a pub, a bar, a dive bar, some laughter and you push
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  open the door and you go inside and you can smell the stale vodka. And in a back room
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  of this bar are four people on a stage. One of them, some Australian hosts, three of them,
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  fabulous, smart, funny individuals, bantering about the week's news. You get yourself a cocktail
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  and you purchase off down on a bar stool and you listen to them banter. That was the vision
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  for We The People Live, the first podcast I ever did. It launched in June of 2015 and it was my
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  attempt to just think, well, if I was going to do like a panel show about the news with the smart,
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  funny people bantering about the news, what would I do? The podcast then evolved into just being
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  my version of an interview show, which became a precursor, I suppose, to this show. But this is
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  from the archives, never before heard since the We The People Live went extinct some years ago,
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  episode one of We The People. My producer at the time had reached out to Jim Norton, who is
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  a legend and icon of the New York comedy scene, a radio titan and a stand-up god. And Bizarrely,
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  he said, yeah, I'll do it for free. I'll come down to your rinky dinky little pub and banter. You can
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  just buy me some drinks. He joined Abbey Crutchfield and Kevin Allison. They were fantastic. The whole
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  thing is rough around the edges as hell. But it's just interesting. If you're interested in what was
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  going through our minds and what we were trying to do at the time, it is surreal to hear what our
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  attitude was towards the news as well. This is June of 2015. So Obama is the president. Trump is not
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  yet by far the nominee. Believe it or not, this is the week that Donald Trump announced his
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  candidacy for the Republican nomination for the presidency. And you will hear from the way that we
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  discuss it and how little time we give to it. What a joke. It was perceived to be. Where are we? We're
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  talking about Ted Cruz. We're talking about Marco Rubio. We're talking about Jeb Bush. And Trump
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  is a footnote. This also happens to take place in the week of, do you remember the Charleston,
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  South Carolina shooting a white supremacist shot up a black Methodist church? So this is directly
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  off the back of one of these horrendous tragedies that taints this a bit. But it's also just a beautiful
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  time capsule. I hope you find this interesting as an artifact the first episode of We The People
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  Life. We are living in a time of change. Do you realize when Benjamin Franklin was born, the
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  internet did not even exist? But today, information travels around the web at literally hundreds
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  of miles an hour. It used to be that journalists decided what was true, based merely on what was
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  true. Today, thanks to social media, the people decide what's true for the people are always right
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  and always will be and always have be. It was the people who supported the abolition of slavery.
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  And before that, just slavery. It's the people who got us out of the war in Iraq and the people who
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  got us in. There's no such thing as the truth, but there is such a thing as popularity.
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  That's why you're here. You are the people. I am the people, single person really. And this is We The People Life.
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  And interview show between me and the guests. This is a conversation between me and them.
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  Them and you here, you here and the listeners at home and the listeners at home and me and them
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  and you and the listeners at home. It's just like the internet. It is a gigantic circle check.
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  So I want you to get your phones out, make sure you're following at WTP,
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  underscore live. And we'll be asking questions throughout the show that you can use to engage with us.
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  And at the end of the show, you'll be able to vote for which panelist won the news.
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  If you'd rather communicate using your mouth instead of your fingers, please feel free to do so.
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  You really don't need to be recording this. So you recording this? We're already recording this.
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  I don't need that. Okay, that's fine. Put it away.
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  If you want to ask a question live, then please feel free to put out your hand and I'll try to
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  well. I'll try to come to you. If you're listening to the podcast, still follow us at WTP,
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  underscore live. Send us your comments and questions for upcoming shows and top coming guests.
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  When we were devising this show originally, my producer Grant said to me,
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  what would be the ideal news events that would happen in the week leading up to the launching
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  of your comedy news shot? And I said, I'd like a really, really slow news week with one massive
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  murderous tragedy for best comic effect. Well, we got our wish on Tuesday, a young white supremacist
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  in South Carolina, of course, drove to the oldest African American congregation in the South
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  and sat with an intimate Bible study group for an hour before murdering nine of them.
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  We will talk about racism and guns and confederacy, but I want to touch briefly on the responsibility
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  of the media in lionizing these guys in a way. His picture has been everywhere. His name has been
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  everywhere. There have been profiles. I can't count the number of times that I've seen photos of him.
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  Isn't that Jim sort of what these people want? Yeah, and the press kind of knows they're doing it,
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  but they don't care. So it's just, what are you going to do? I just, I don't read it. I didn't
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  read the manifesto. I'm not interested in what he has to say. There's nothing he's going to say
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  where I'm going to go like, oh, that makes sense. That's why you killed everybody. He has nothing of
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  value to add. So when they print his manifesto, I find it irrelevant. His motive, if he picked up
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  shit and ate it, I wouldn't wonder why he did it. I'd say he's crazy. I don't care why he did that.
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  Well, I mean, we know why he did it, but also just because of, I mean, the whole context, right?
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  I mean, you know, the one of the South Carolina governors of Hailey Barber, or anyway,
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  Nikki, Nikki Hailey, that's right. She said we can't possibly fathom why anyone would do something
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  like this. He was wearing like racist flags on his lapel. It was literally, he was wearing his
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  reasons on his sleeve in a very, very literal sense. That's why he did it, though. That's why he
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  chose black people. But why did Daniel Johnson choose kids? Why did James Holmes choose random people
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  in a movie theater? That's the thing they all have in common. They're crazy. Like who they choose
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  maybe has something to do with their inner hatred. Lonson maybe hated his mother and wanted to kill
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  kids or this guy hates black people so he killed black people. But the thing they have in common is
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  they're all back shit crazy. That's what they have in common. It has nothing to do with the other
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  stuff. It's all about their mental illness. That's why they do stuff like this. Yeah, in terms of,
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  yeah. Well, I know Twitter was up in arms about like, stop saying his name, you know, don't
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  really show anything, but then the media of course has to not only show his picture, but also dark
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  in the edges to make him look a little weird. Like you said, really semifesto. And I
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  cynically feel like we are going to get that movie that shows the steps that led up to this decision
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  because people want to know why. They want to know what led to it. One thing that there have
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  been lots of scientific studies that we also know is that when you publish the names and identities
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  of people who commit suicide, you get an uptick and suicide. When you publish the names and the
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  identities of people who do stuff like this, then it feeds into the glorification complex and
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  you can't, it makes it more likely. So I don't, why do we even need to have his name? Why do we
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  even need to have his face? Isn't everything that's relevant about this obtainable from the event
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  itself without knowing who he is? Well, at least paint them as the little worm that he is.
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  Right. I don't think we should hide his name. I mean, you know, Oswald killed Ken. The name
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  is not going to make people go out and do it. But you don't, like you said, you don't have to lie
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  that I don't make him an anti hero. Just show him, show it a broken empty little nothing he was
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  and concentrate on those facts. Don't concentrate on what a frightening demon he was,
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  or show those stupid photos of him sitting there with a flag and it's just, you know,
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  yeah, the fifth hero that gives him like powers. I think that one thing that I question is that we
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  do often say, oh, it's mental illness, mental illness. But how many of these people are clinically
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  considered mentally ill in some way? I think a lot of these people, like I did read parts of his
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  manifesto. This guy is speaking very clearly as a plan wants to be lionized and is working
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  right into the media's story that we do over and over again. And I think that, you know,
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  some of these people, I think that bigger issues over maybe mental illness because a lot of the
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  mentally ill, like the vast majority of the mentally ill, harm no one are actually quite vulnerable.
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  And I think that he, the instances like this, it's really the racism, the misogyny, the hate,
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  that we have to focus on in the society as well as the way that the media loves this narrative.
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  Sociopaths, you know, I'm a high school dropout, but I don't know what lionizing means,
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  I'm learning it. I would never said lionizing if you didn't say, I stole, I hijacked that to sound
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  sorry. I would have said, made him tough looking. But, you know, it's sociopaths are apparently like
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  Ted Bundy, you can't deny it was a mentally ill person, but they're sociopaths and a lot of psych
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  psychotics are very smart people, they're smooth people. But, you know, sometimes we just understand
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  things about, look at his stupid haircut, every picture they show, he looks like wanted,
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  they all have that stupid bug-eyed look. Sometimes you can just, we understand things about
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  each other because we're animals. When you're on the train, you don't need a psychologist to
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  tell you who's fucking crazy. If you could sit there, even though this guy is an eraser,
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  the ability, I don't know, you're right, most mental ill people are not murderous psychopaths.
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  Most racists don't go out and kill people either. But, even a hardcore racist, to be able to sit
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  there with nine people and humanize them, like he said, he actually liked them and then still be
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  able to kill them. I mean, that's amazing. That's a new love, that's completely and you're crazy
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  if you can do that. I was reading a stat today that said that, that said, it's three to five percent
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  of violent crimes committed by the mentally ill, which so 95 to 97 percent of violent crimes
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  committed by mentally otherwise stable people. Obviously, this guy is in some sense a sociopath,
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  because as you say, he was able to feel empathy for people and then completely ignore it.
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  I don't think you can look past the ideological content, the cognitive content of what these people
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  are trying to do. I mean, it's a bit like jihadis or Islamists, right? Yes, they are kind of
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  crazy in order to be able to be a head people, but they wouldn't be doing it, and they wouldn't
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  be doing it in the way that they're doing it, if it wasn't wrapped up in an ideology that motivates
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  them to do it, where they actually think they're fighting for something worthwhile.
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  Let's say that he had done it a week earlier, like he said while he was drinking with his,
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  his buddy is a black guy, they're drinking together and he said, I want to go shoot up for college.
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  That was what he said a week earlier. So if he had done this a week earlier, nobody would be
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  saying, well, you know, this guy happened to be racist, but then he went and shot up a college.
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  To me, it doesn't matter, I must say it doesn't matter the victims, but the people you choose to kill
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  is not the issue. It's who you are that makes you do that. This is the exact same person as James
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  Holmes and he's the exact same person as Daniel Johnson. They're all three of them are the exact
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  same person. So what's the difference? We don't know. We don't know whether or not in the absence of
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  his intense racism and the culture that he was brought up in and the crazy ideologies that he
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  was reading, whether or not he would have killed people, do it. I mean, it's a counterfactual.
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  No, and if he didn't have a gun, he wouldn't have killed people. I mean, there's always.
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  Well, let's talk about it. Where'd you raise it? The gun debate's going to come up again and
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  nothing's going to happen again. The day after the shooting, President Obama gave his 14th
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  post-mast shooting speech. Let's just take a listen to a clip of it.
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  I've had to make statements like this too many times. Communities like this have had to endure
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  tragedies like this too many times. We don't have all the facts, but we do know that once again,
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  innocent people were killed in part because someone who won and flicked harm had no trouble getting
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  their hands on a gun. At some point, we, as a country, will have to reckon with the fact that
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  this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. Kevin, does America have to
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  reckon with that fact? I mean, it's never going to shoot about what other countries do with their
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  pansy gun, little pansy communist gun laws in the past. Why does one start now? Yeah, it's really
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  troubling to me because I understand the argument that the situation in the Revolutionary War,
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  where they wanted everyone to have arms, was also very immediately important to them in order to
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  found the country. Now we're a very well-established nation and the idea that if you have a gun and
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  and the government all of a sudden becomes a fascist totalitarian, you're not going to be able to do
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  anything anyway, you know? I mean, the government has nukes in the however first amp on. What are you
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  doing? I mean, I really do feel that it should be harder to get a gun that some of these guns that
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  you actually are built to take out like dozens and dozens of people at a time. No one needs that.
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  The people who get guns in order to for their own safety, not hunting, just safety, end up
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  much more likely to be killed in a gun accident. It's funny, we always look for like the one reason,
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  but you know, the gun lobby will automatically come out and go like they should have been having
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  a gun in their bible and they would have shot, you know, no matter what happens, nobody can
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  agree that it's a combination of factors. Like, you know, I mean, I've had it, racism is of course
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  a part of why he did this. Mental illness is a part of why he did this and the fact that he could
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  just get a gun from his stupid thought. His father, by the way, is shit because his father knew
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  that he had a dud of his son. There's no way you raise someone for 21 years and don't realize that
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  he's a dud and he still gave him a gun. So there's a whole lot of factors, not just one thing.
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  Yeah, and somewhere where the parents, and there's a lot of issues exactly what you're saying.
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  I thought when you're talking about mental illness, it was going to detract from the race comment or
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  like the institutionalized racism dialogue that's been created and then we can run up the gun lobbyists.
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  I don't think it's, yeah, if you were saying, I don't think it's one issue and I think if it raises
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  all the issues, then good. Let's just talk about all of them. Let's let everybody who thinks
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  they know what the reason was, talk about it. Obama tweeted this here are the stats. Per population,
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  we kill each other with guns at a rate of 297 times more than Japan, 49 times more than France, 33
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  times more than Israel. I want to touch briefly on the Confederacy as well. Obviously, the
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  Confederate flag is still flying on the state capital, on the grounds of the state capital,
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  in Colombia. Senator Cruz was asked about this and he disagreed that they should change in
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  anything. He said, I understand those who want to remember the sacrifices of their ancestors
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  and the traditions of their states, not the racial oppression, but the historical traditions.
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  I love that. What are there? Is it the finally polished wooden like long-drock toilets that are
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  full of shit? Is it the dysentery? One of the historical traditions of the Confederacy that
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  is so remarkable, other than slavery. The Confederates, when they established what their
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  government was to be founded on, they said that the bedrock, the first and foremost principle
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  of their government was that black people were unequal. So that is officially what that flag
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  symbolizes and what so many people who died in that war were fighting for or against,
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  and we now have the ability to look back and say that was super fucked up. You were dead wrong.
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  Let's get rid of that.