Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “Decoding the Gurus” with Chris Kavanagh and Matt Browne

Transcript

“Decoding the Gurus” with Chris Kavanagh and Matt Browne · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. I'm in Japan. This is a live.
• 0:09
  It's not live. Broadcast from a hotel in Osaka. I'm on vacation with the family. I'm
• 0:15
  not going to bang on about how great Japan is. Everyone knows Japan is great. I was going
• 0:19
  to say, oh, what a lovely place, lovely people, lovely scenery, lovely food. You know
• 0:24
  that. You know, you don't have to have been to Japan to know Japan is great. Nobody
• 0:28
  goes to Japan and comes back home. What a dump. What a shit hole that places. They need
• 0:31
  to get there. They need to get their act in order. They need to figure out how to do things
• 0:35
  with more discipline. So it's chaos is not chaos. It's lovely. Admittedly, the lack of chaos
• 0:44
  can be somewhat disorientingly like uniform and conformist and difficult to glean from
• 0:51
  the foreigners perspective. But that's on me. That's on me for being a dumb white boy child
• 0:56
  blundering into a very orderly place whose norms I don't know. I will say the one thing
• 1:03
  I've noticed is that Japanese culture, the Japanese people, great people, lovely people.
• 1:08
  They really revere simplicity in all things except for toilets. Very simple. You know,
• 1:16
  they love simple, delicate, petite little, not toilets. Huge. They have things blowing
• 1:24
  out everywhere and up here, wherever. It's complicated. For a simple people, they really
• 1:29
  need to simplify the toilets. That being said, let's move on to the topic of today's conversation
• 1:35
  because being in Japan, I found it incumbent upon myself to track down the best podcasters
• 1:42
  in the land and do a crossover episode with those people. Their podcast is called Decoding
• 1:49
  the Gurus. It's an anthropologist, Chris Kavanaugh, a psychologist, Matt Brown. They take
• 2:00
  the piss out of prominent public figures who are influential in public discourse, especially
• 2:08
  if they're influential for promoting unconventional ideas or controversial ideas. Matt and Chris
• 2:13
  take a big steaming dump on them and play clips of their appearances on various shows. We're
• 2:17
  talking about the Jordan Peterson's of the world, Joe Rogan's, the Eric Weinstein's,
• 2:21
  James Lindsay's, Peter Teal. They'll just pick a person and they'll go ham for like
• 2:27
  three hours. It's very entertaining. I love those guys. I've been on the show before,
• 2:33
  maybe twice. I'm not sure. Chris, who is a Northern Irish gentleman, lives in Tokyo. Matt
• 2:41
  happens to be Australian and lives in the middle of nowhere, frankly. He lives in some part
• 2:46
  of Australia that no Australian has ever been to. Nobody has ever heard of. It's a town
• 2:51
  called Bunderburg in regional Queensland. No offense to Bunderburgians, but it's no
• 2:58
  Osaka. Let's put it that way. The toilets are not complicated in Bunderburg. I sat
• 3:04
  down. Chris was kind enough to come over to my Airbnb in Tokyo and we sat down. We got
• 3:08
  Matt on. We dialed up. Matt on the big old audio machine. We wanted the dangerous idea
• 3:13
  that we wanted to broach was the idea that the people who bang on a lot about bravely
• 3:24
  talking about dangerous ideas, perhaps even yours truly, may just be actually conformists
• 3:31
  inside their own cocoons of cozy, anti-elite, dangerous idea, talking points. The talking
• 3:39
  about how much you talk about edgy ideas that the mainstream media won't touch is in fact
• 3:46
  its own echo chamber. We wanted to discuss what actually takes courage. What is genuinely
• 3:52
  heterodox? Who should you platform? Who should you not platform? What is just pandering to
• 3:57
  your base? Chris, as I mentioned, who's the anthropologist, is a specialist in conspiracy
• 4:03
  theories and radicalisation and religion and rituals and all that sort of stuff. Matt
• 4:09
  who's the psychologist is interested in social science and gambling and addiction, but
• 4:14
  the two of them really just sort of have a sense of left take on these sort of alt-right
• 4:19
  figures and I get in trouble when I call them alt-right. I use alt-right to mean like a
• 4:23
  kind of a new media right wing, bro, manosphere, podcast stand, but some people think it means
• 4:28
  fascist or neo-Nazi. Not that, but the kind of people who I'm talking about in podcast
• 4:36
  stand and it's something of a watershed moment at the moment. I mean, I'm glad that we're
• 4:39
  talking right now and I wanted to have this conversation with them right now. And by the way,
• 4:42
  this is a crossover episode on their podcast as well. So although their listeners won't hear
• 4:46
  this intro, they will hear the body of the conversation on their feed too. It's a watershed
• 4:51
  moment because some prominent people in the podcast alternative new media universe are breaking ranks
• 4:59
  with the rest of the cabal. Sam Harris has been doing it for a while. In January, he came out
• 5:06
  swinging against Elon Musk. He recently had a sub-stack live where his manager was sort of
• 5:14
  Jarron was sort of, you know, asking him questions about the rift between him and Rogan.
• 5:20
  And most recently, and I hadn't heard this episode when Chris and Matt and I spoke a couple of days
• 5:26
  ago, but it's definitely worth a listen and I've listened to it since Douglas Murray went on Joe
• 5:32
  Rogan's show with the comedian and libertarian commentator Dave Smith and spent the first half
• 5:38
  hour of the conversation really getting stuck into Joe and Dave for platforming people who have
• 5:46
  crazy theories about things. I've been texting with Douglas since then. My congratulations and
• 5:52
  here I've been trying to sort of, I guess, tease apart and wrestle through what our objection
• 5:57
  really is because it's not that we're saying that alternative podcasty people shouldn't talk to
• 6:02
  whoever they want to talk to or that we should only listen to elites. But rather, I think something
• 6:10
  closer to the Carl Sagan point, which originally in a different form is really David Humes point,
• 6:17
  that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And if you're going to be talking to a lot
• 6:24
  of guests who have highly unconventional beliefs about vaccine science, about the history of
• 6:33
  World War II and whether or not Churchill was culpable for starting it, about whether or not
• 6:38
  Putin is really the bad guy in Ukraine, about a whole bunch of things. If you're going to take
• 6:45
  really edge-lord stances, then you need to have or you ought to have very strong reasons for doing so.
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  If you're going to hold really provocative positions, you should have powerful defences for
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  them. And it's not enough to just lob some big gigantic claim about how actually the Ukrainians
• 7:04
  of the bad guys in Ukraine or Churchill was the bad guy in World War II. And then when people
• 7:09
  challenge you want to, you say, well, I'm just a comedian. I'm just a podcast or whatever.
• 7:13
  So that was basically Douglas's point on Joe Rogan's show. We don't talk specifically about that,
• 7:18
  but I just want you to understand that I think the changing layers of discourse that this particular
• 7:24
  conversation is feeding on and also dropping into. We talk quite a lot about Douglas Murray on
• 7:30
  Lex Friedman's show, which I hope is amusing. We mentioned Candace Owens, who is another person
• 7:35
  who comes up a lot on decoding the gurus. But most of all, we just have a lot of fun. And
• 7:40
  afterwards Chris and I went out and he fed me delicious sushi. So what's not to love? I hope
• 7:44
  you enjoy it. As much as I did, the one, the only Chris Kavanaugh matte brown of decoding the gurus.
• 7:55
  You guys recently did an episode of, well, you've done many an episode about Lex Friedman,
• 8:00
  which tickles my fancy. Because if there's one thing I don't understand about this new media
• 8:07
  landscape, it's Lex Friedman. It's, I don't understand how a person, I mean, I don't want to be
• 8:15
  uncommon. This is decoding the gurus. But there are various, look, there are various strands of
• 8:26
  this of the emerging new media landscape and podcast to stand and like bro tech culture and
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  the decline of the legacy media and the rise of independent media, which are worth teasing a part
• 8:40
  and bringing together and analyzing in, I suppose, with greater clarity and specificity than maybe
• 8:47
  we sometimes do. And all of them are exhibited in their worst form by Lex Friedman. Like here's the
• 8:54
  apotheosis of motivated reasoning, blind spots, biased questioning. And what offends me the most
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  as a craftsman of this form? It's just how bad an interviewer he is.
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  You know, if he was, if he was violent, like his main offence is one of style, I agree. I mean,
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  you take Joe Rogan. I hate the guy, but I understand why he is popular. I get it.
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  With, you know, Lex Friedman will be sitting there talking to someone incredibly important and also
• 9:29
  we'll say, so do you like puppies?
• 9:38
  It's not that far from there. But, you know, Josh sent a clip mark. I think this is a good time
• 9:44
  to play because it illustrates Lex's interview technique. You know, people that might not be familiar.
• 9:51
  So, yeah, there's, I also have to say, you say that you hate Joe. Obviously, I love Joe.
• 9:59
  Even though I don't, I think he's a pernicious force in the world. I love him as like I love a
• 10:04
  puppy dog. And I think he's a immensely talented racon, tur, and conversationalist, which is what
• 10:09
  Lex is not, which is why Lex baffles me in a way that Rogan doesn't. But so this clip is,
• 10:15
  I actually played this on my show when I had the comic Mark Norman on my show. He's an increasingly
• 10:23
  successful American comic, very funny guy. And if you ever want an example of a guest who brings
• 10:29
  everything to an interview, he is, he is just coming out with the gags at like a machine gun
• 10:35
  fire pace. So if you're willing to dance and rumble with him, it can be an incredibly entertaining
• 10:42
  interview. And Mark had just been on Lex Friedman's show. And I listened to that as research before
• 10:47
  I'd interviewed Mark in case there was anything there. And it was so intriguing to hear the difference
• 10:53
  between what Mark was bringing to the conversation and what Lex was bringing to the conversation
• 10:58
  that I actually played this clip for Mark live on my show to hear his reaction because I wanted
• 11:05
  to understand what his impression of Lex was. So I haven't listened to Mark throwing some zingers
• 11:11
  at Lex and Lex definitely tap dancing away. Are you married? No, single virgin. Of course, yeah,
• 11:19
  I can't imagine. I bet you'd be great and bad. You're ripped. The best hairline in podcast.
• 11:24
  Yeah, I don't know. I haven't tried yet. So we'll have to see. All right. Well, let me know.
• 11:28
  Pretty big hog on you. Yeah, I could see you packing a crazy, crazy tool downtown.
• 11:34
  Mm-hmm. That matters to girls. Apparently. Yeah. That's all I hear about.
• 11:40
  Okay. New Orleans. You grew up in New Orleans? Yeah. Born and raised.
• 11:45
  Tramay outside the French Quarter. You ever been? Yeah. Don't remember it.
• 11:49
  Oh, you drink? Yeah, I drink. Of course I drink. I don't know. I can't tell if you have fun.
• 11:54
  No, not really, but Russia. I mean, Russia, of course, I drink all that kind of stuff.
• 11:58
  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Okay. Beer was just labeled an alcoholic beverage in 2011.
• 12:04
  Fun fact. What do you mean? In Russia. It was just drinks. It was just like apple juice before.
• 12:10
  It finally got declared legally as an alcoholic beverage.
• 12:15
  Which means you can regulate it. That kind of thing. I guess so. Yeah.
• 12:19
  See, that's where your brain goes. Yeah. I just go out of these fucking rustic. I didn't even know there's rules about drinking.
• 12:24
  Good. I'm learning about Russia from you. So, what's the difficult memory experience from childhood
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  in New Orleans that made you the man you are today?
• 12:37
  So, so look, this speaks to the mystery that you were referring to, Josh. Like, why? Why?
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  What is the appeal of that? I have a suggestion. Please. Please.
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  I'm lost. I am a little, I'm a little sparrow at sea, like flailing around. I'm comprehending.
• 13:00
  I mean, I think there's the part of the aspect is your friend, Joe, and Elon Musk, villain of the
• 13:08
  R, but long before he, you know, was on his current villain arc, he, he gave Lexa a leg up because Lex
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  wrote a paper saying that Tesla's were. Yeah, but lots of people have been on Joe's job. Don't show,
• 13:22
  Joe's show seven times. I'm not, I'm not, he's not answering my calls. So, you want,
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  but did you have Elon Musk, right? So, you did Musk, Andrew, and the multiplying factor,
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  but the other thing is, so that's the, like, initial thing, but that isn't going to take you, you
• 13:38
  know, to the heights that Lex has risen to. So, the other thing, and I think this is the key,
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  my dick, is that it's unbridled sycophantcy, untold levels of sycophantcy, because, like,
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  but that explains why people will do the show, why guests will do the show, but it doesn't explain
• 13:57
  why humans will listen to the show, or why I even, but I mean, I only listen to the show because of
• 14:02
  the guests. I suppose it's like a self, it's like pulling yourself up by your shoelaces. How does
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  it happen? I listen because I want to hear the guests. Yeah. And the guests are there because
• 14:12
  people listen. Yeah. But it's a chicken and egg thing. How people listen, how were people listening
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  before he was talking to Zelensky? Why does anyone want to listen to that conversation with Mark
• 14:21
  Norman when you can hear Mark Norman being interviewed by any number of human beings?
• 14:26
  No. Okay. So, this is the thing. The one is that the, I think you're underestimating the level
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  of sycophantcy that people are going to be treated to. Like, that is, it's really high.
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  You think people, you think the listener wants it? No, no, no. So, I think that explains,
• 14:42
  you know, the guests going on, but then the, we live in the culture, and this is like part of
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  the thing that we might talk about, but other characters as well, where there's like a really
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  pervasive atmosphere of admiration for like, you know, people that are successful,
• 15:01
  billionaires, podcasters, andrytid, whatever. Like, there's this desire for people to like
• 15:10
  receive wisdom from people who are to find out more about what makes them tick. So, if you see like,
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  oh, there's a four-hour interview with this guy who's super successful and he's laying
• 15:21
  you know, his secrets. I think like, once upon a time, people would have been like more
• 15:26
  cynical and like, why the fuck do I want to hear from some like, billionaire about how, you know,
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  his hard-knock life when, you know, he's sat around in jets, but the culture and I seems to be like,
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  yeah, let's get the wisdom. Like, if we have a really, there's a hero worship that he's indulging
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  in in a way. Yeah, I suppose it's true. Yeah, and I suppose it's true that if you, like,
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  the best thing I can say about Lex is if you just removed him from the equation altogether,
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  the interview wouldn't be much better if it was just a monologue. So, like, he's not doing any
• 16:02
  active harm in the sense that I could just like, if he has, I suppose I'm interested in hearing
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  Zelensky talk for three hours about his worldview. And I guess what Lex's show gives you is three,
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  it's like, it's like he's just collecting a bunch of people who can give their own master class,
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  like he's not questioning them, he's not doing any journalism, he's giving, he's allowing the
• 16:25
  person the platform to espouse their worldview for three hours straight. And that's, I suppose there's
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  a, there is a utility in that. If you want to hear the person talking for three hours and there's
• 16:36
  no other context in which they would sit down in front of an open microphone and just talk
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  for three hours. Okay, Josh. I think I can answer your question because I think there's a reason
• 16:45
  that isn't apparent to cynical men of the world like us. And that is his style. You know, that
• 16:53
  foe, you know, like childlike wisdom that he sort of, you know, this sort of blatant signaling
• 17:02
  of humility, that kind of thing, you know, that, that, that light, like ultra philosophy light
• 17:08
  stuff that he injected in there, talking about love and identity and meaning and stuff like that.
• 17:14
  And, and that kind of real like to us to me anyway, I don't want to speak for you guys,
• 17:19
  but it just sounds like out of saccharine bullshit. But to many people when he's talking about
• 17:24
  kindness and truth. And yeah, okay, they, they're going right on. I like it. It's a bit
• 17:32
  brain A brown. It's like, you know, it's like, brain A brown for men. Yeah, it's like, it's like,
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  he's the person who can make you feel like there is a pursuit of, yeah, of comedy and togetherness
• 17:47
  amidst the turmoil. And why do we? I mean, his diagnosis of the problem with the media,
• 17:54
  with the mainstream legacy media, which you guys addressed a bit in your recent episode about him
• 18:01
  is almost exactly back to front. He seems to think that the problem with the legacy media
• 18:07
  is that everyone is too enthusiastic about being aggressive and negative. And in fact,
• 18:14
  that podcasting as well is too much about trying to go in for the, on the attack. And we need
• 18:20
  to be less judgmental of other people's ideas and more understanding and hear them out.
• 18:26
  What universe is, I mean, I understand that there's a problem of like, glib
• 18:32
  grandstanding journalists trying to ask gotcha questions in short eight minute interviews that
• 18:38
  they might get, you know, when they're interviewing the Treasury Secretary on, I don't know,
• 18:42
  you know, I was going to say 60 minutes, but it's actually 60 minutes doesn't do that, but like
• 18:46
  a one inferior version of 60 minutes. But the idea that the main hallmark of the media
• 18:52
  moment that we live in is that people are too rigorous in their intellectual disagreements. And
• 18:59
  and not too sycophantic and, you know, did he pay no attention to the interviews that Donald
• 19:09
  Trump was doing before the election? Did he pay no attention to the whole ecosystem of sort of
• 19:16
  back slapping, back scratching, you know, podcasts and I don't, I guess maybe I'm just like living in
• 19:25
  an echo chamber of my own media diet. But I think I'm like the only person in the universe who's
• 19:33
  making a serious attempt to engage agreeably but controversially with substantive intellectual
• 19:42
  points when the guest raises it and actually push back on them in the way that any one of us would
• 19:48
  if you were at the at a bar or a restaurant or a friend's place and someone said something that
• 19:53
  was patently stupid. Like we all in our I think social environments are much more tolerant of
• 20:01
  disagreeableness than we are in the media. It's like we have, we're wearing kid gloves and
• 20:07
  treading on egg shells and being and so afraid of offending people. I don't understand where his
• 20:13
  worldview comes from that he's this lone voice of friendliness in a sea of animosity.
• 20:19
  Yeah. Well, you know, the backstory to this is kind of the story of social media and the internet,
• 20:24
  right? So when social media first came along, it was obviously, you know, very nasty, a lot of,
• 20:31
  you know, aggression, people, you know, going off the handle, you know, for the same reason that
• 20:37
  people behave badly in cars, right? Because there's that social distancing. And you know,
• 20:42
  this became a trope at, you know, the the bad faith straw manning type, all that bad stuff that
• 20:48
  sort of happens on on the internet. And you know, that's all true. And then they sort of develop this
• 20:53
  kind of reverence for, you know, good faith conversations have, you know, always assuming the
• 20:59
  best of intentions from the person you're talking to is like this, it became a real virtue amongst
• 21:05
  a lot of people and having mixed amongst the, you know, the free speech and the heterodox crowd,
• 21:12
  online. Yeah, they still, and you know, they're right in a sense, but that virtue has become
• 21:20
  you know, almost a parody of itself. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure that good faith is precisely right.
• 21:28
  Like it's probably a couple of things being conflated here. One is granting as much as you
• 21:35
  possibly can to your opponent such that you can attack the strongest version of their argument,
• 21:40
  rather than the weakest one, you know, not straw manning them. And trying to be as conciliatory as
• 21:45
  you can and not needlessly antagonizing people. So you're saying being nice to Nazis basically,
• 21:49
  right? Being nice, yes, like, like, yes, in just a few months, the argument against that,
• 21:59
  let me put it this way, if I was arguing with a Nazi, in like the 1930s, I wouldn't start by saying
• 22:08
  you're a fucking Nazi. I would start by saying I understand that things are very difficult at the
• 22:14
  moment in your own land of Germany. And there are lots of complicated reasons for that. And you
• 22:19
  have an understandable desire to restore German greatness. However.
• 22:24
  So many people have criticized Mr. Hitler for going slightly too far.
• 22:32
  Josh, there's like the, you know, Lex often raises the question, this is like his go-to question,
• 22:38
  is can you steal man position for blah blah blah, right? And I'm in favor of what you said,
• 22:45
  like, you know, you shouldn't try to straw man someone's argument. And like you can even
• 22:50
  grant a little bit more charity than it deserves. And like, in some cases, to make the attack
• 22:56
  better, right? Because you can show that, look, I'm not, you know, if you want to criticize someone,
• 23:00
  and you are, if you're just presenting the weakest version of it, it's like, even if your goal is
• 23:05
  to take it down, it looks like you're kind of not doing a good job. But there's one,
• 23:12
  have you heard of the concept of star mining?
• 23:15
  No. So this is Eduardo. I forget this, Dean, but he's a head of darks version. He, he argued,
• 23:22
  a, I think, associated with fire, the organization, that we need to not just hang on, but we should
• 23:29
  actually elevate the argument to like the best possible form. So that like it's, so now we're
• 23:36
  super hero, we're super hero manning, we're super manning it. So like that, I thought that the
• 23:42
  issue is like, you might have to be often waffle on, but there's a perhaps too much like in terms of
• 23:47
  like, you know, we're saying it a bit too far in the positive direction. But like, there's a
• 23:53
  value in academia and I think in journalism as well of like the adversarial interaction.
• 23:59
  Yeah. Like the hard-nosed interview, right? Like I think the difference between like a caffeine
• 24:05
  Newman or it was a coffee young, the one who can't be young. Coffee young interviewed Jordan,
• 24:09
  Peter said, no, no, sorry. Coffee Newman. Coffee Newman interviewed Jordan Peterson.
• 24:13
  Right. That is in like, and I think with good reason, that's like a sort of a hit-beast attempt,
• 24:19
  right? Yes. It's kind of gotcha question. But Helen, Helen Lewis's was perfect. Yeah, absolutely
• 24:24
  perfect. But for a lot of people online, especially like, and I would say like for Lex Friedman or
• 24:29
  Jordan, and for Jordan Peterson themselves, he saw that the same way as like a brutal attempt to
• 24:35
  like, I don't think they do. I don't believe that they genuinely do. I mean, I don't believe that
• 24:40
  they don't see a difference between they just like the fact that he that Jordan won one and lost
• 24:46
  the other and he lost the other because Helen is formidable or any one may have her because
• 24:50
  coffee is not. But he's but Jordan and people like when I've heard Jordan talk about Helen
• 24:56
  multiple times, it sounds like he has a dartboard. Of course he does because he, he, you know,
• 25:01
  he's so caught in his own self-identity is that he's this sage and for him to be shown up as a bit
• 25:07
  of an emperor with not with no clothes by some uppity journalist is insulting to his, his self-identification.
• 25:15
  Right. Perhaps especially a feminist journalist, but the in not case though, for Jordan,
• 25:20
  I don't think he's pretending that he thinks Helen is a bad fief interlocutor with like, you
• 25:27
  know, a kind of agenda that they came down like that she was acting maliciously by asking her
• 25:33
  questions and whatnot. He seems generally very upset with her as a person and the way she approaches
• 25:39
  things. He's talked about her like being possessed by the, I don't know, the demon of anger or
• 25:44
  something like this when he talks about that. And so it seems to me that like not just the audience
• 25:50
  but them and this applies to a lot of heterodox forecasters as well. They genuinely take like that
• 25:57
  as an attack and attempt to besmirch them like, you know, asking those kind of questions is like
• 26:05
  doing the same thing as coffee human. And to me, there's like a big guy just say that.
• 26:13
  I think they just say that because they're embarrassed. I think if you got drunk with Jordan
• 26:16
  Peterson or a high on Hollywood or whatever else he was addicted to. And I think if you really
• 26:24
  interrogated him about it and asked him what he thinks that Helen was doing, I don't think that he
• 26:30
  would, I don't know, I doubt that he would be saying that she's demonically possessed and has the
• 26:34
  heart of an angry woman. I think you're wrong, Josh. We should get Jordan Peterson and get him
• 26:42
  drunk and see what? You know, the thing that this made me think of is like, so your interaction
• 26:49
  with Rogen, famously the myocarditis one, Matt, do you remember that? Yeah, I remember that.
• 26:54
  Okay, I have a clip here which I'll play for the whole time. Okay, so if people don't know
• 27:01
  in January of 2021, I went back on Rogen's show for the seventh time since 2014. And it was while he was
• 27:09
  in that snafu that people may remember the controversy about vaccine misinformation. And he said
• 27:15
  something that was not true. And it then became briefly a very viral moment. And everyone sort of
• 27:22
  like CNN was reporting it as if he got owned on his own show, which completely baffled me.
• 27:27
  But it was, he did kind of well. You can let the, let the list of it. I'll play the clip,
• 27:33
  not just the remind us for young boys in particular, there's an adverse risk associated with the
• 27:40
  vaccine. It's two to four fold increase in the instances of myocarditis. Yes, but you know what
• 27:47
  the, you know that there's an increased risk of myocarditis in among that age cohort from
• 27:52
  getting COVID as well, which exceeds the risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. I don't think that's
• 27:56
  true. I don't think it's true. I don't, no, no, I don't think it's true that there's an increased
• 28:00
  risk of myocarditis from people catching COVID that are young versus increased risk of myocarditis
• 28:06
  from the vaccine. No, there is. There's bodies. Well, let's look that up because I don't think that's
• 28:10
  true. There's bio carditis more common after COVID-19 infection than vaccination. But is this with
• 28:14
  children? Yeah, we're talking about young people and boys aged under 30 after there's this what says
• 28:23
  with children is the issue. Well, no, we were talking about 15 year olds. Well, we're talking about
• 28:27
  young children. So yes, 12 to 17, 12 to 17, more like to build myocarditis with three months of
• 28:33
  catching COVID at a rate of 450 cases per million infection. This compares to 67 cases of myocarditis
• 28:41
  per million of the same time, following their second dose of Pfizer. Yes, so you're about eight
• 28:46
  times likely to get myocarditis from getting COVID than from getting the vaccine. That's interesting.
• 28:51
  No, that's not what I've read before. But also, it's like, well, even when we're reading these
• 28:57
  things, it's like, what are we getting this from? It was this from the VAERS report. But even
• 29:02
  from the VAERS reports, when they report this stuff, it's like the amount of people that report,
• 29:07
  the I'm like, it's the under reporting. Josh, before you eat the fan joke, I know that you
• 29:17
  interviewed a relevant professional and like kind of highlighted the actual, you know, like issues
• 29:23
  around that topic after. But the reason I wanted to mention this is because, regardless of how you
• 29:29
  frame that unframed like Joe's follow up reactions to it, that is like a case where you are disagree,
• 29:37
  with Joe, right? Friendly, but you're saying, no, I think that's wrong. And wait, no, but we were
• 29:41
  talking about 15 year olds, right? That's not. So you are like kind of, not, not, you're calling
• 29:48
  right the way you were to friend, right? If you argue with them. But I'm very recently, I don't know
• 29:52
  if you'll have time to, or you have had time to hear it, yeah, but Douglas Murray just went on
• 29:58
  Jerome with, no, no, I didn't hear that. I heard Douglas on legs. Oh, Douglas went on with Steve Smith.
• 30:05
  I saw that that happened. I haven't heard it yet. So it starts off and I just explain who Dave Smith is.
• 30:12
  So Dave Smith is a libertarian in America, but he's a comic, right? He's a comic and he basically
• 30:19
  got a profile boost from Rogen as well, appearances there. But and he's libertarian, very pro-Palestine
• 30:29
  in the like, Israel Gaza conflict and has also like was kind of endorsing Trump before the
• 30:37
  election, right? So and he's quite isolationist and this sort of yeah, kind of like in the VN of the,
• 30:43
  you know, norm Chomsky version of like Western imperialism is a lot of the problems in the world,
• 30:51
  right? Yeah. So there's overlaps, right? Right. But poor, poor Putin was just back into a corner.
• 30:56
  Exactly. Yeah. So you predicted that, but here. So Douglas Murray,
• 31:01
  apparently to say holds like a lot of different geopolitical opinions on that, right? Very
• 31:07
  strong advocate for Israel. Some might say propaganda. I think we would all say it too strongly,
• 31:16
  the advocate for Israel. But and also as we played in the recent thing, very strongly critical
• 31:23
  of Putin and people that offer apologetics to him. Now in the Rogen episode that you haven't heard,
• 31:30
  remarkably at the start, he specifically calls out Joe at the very start of the interview and
• 31:37
  directly says you've been having people on that aren't experts that are very skewed to one side
• 31:44
  and it's been going on for multiple years and they they have a 40 minute near well back and forth.
• 31:50
  With Douglas Murray being quite strong and direct at times like and it gets relatively heated
• 31:57
  including with Rogen and Deep Smith. It was obviously going to get heated between them, but yeah,
• 32:02
  right. He calls out Rogen. Now Douglas Murray being Douglas Murray, he ends up like in a kind of
• 32:10
  difficult position because he saying you should have more people with actual expertise who have
• 32:15
  been to the region who understand this conflict at the same time that he's saying experts are
• 32:21
  consistently wrong about it. He then goes on the lab lake and he talks about you know and they are
• 32:25
  saying well this is inconsistent so you're saying we should keep that right. So he gets in trouble.
• 32:30
  But the whole thing for me was that I the first part was very cathartic because it's one of the
• 32:36
  really rare times I've heard someone directly, you know, read criticism to Joe directly to his
• 32:43
  the same thing that happened with when you were talking about the myocarditis and I'm curious
• 32:50
  for your kick as somebody that is like more, you know, broadly sympathetic to the the heterodox
• 32:56
  like kind of ecosystem. Why that is so verboten like given all the values that they say, you know,
• 33:03
  that we are for the marketplace of ideas we're here. Criticism is okay and yet anytime it happens
• 33:09
  you can see online now. Everybody is in that absolute tezzy about like the saying, you know,
• 33:15
  Douglas Murray will never be invited back and so on. And the same thing happens of course with
• 33:19
  Sam Harris, right? When Sam Harris has a temerity to disagree publicly with any of them,
• 33:26
  everybody melts down and there are these you know essays being written on the what's what's
• 33:32
  happened to Sam. So yeah, like it is the thing, right? Yeah, I mean, but people, I mean,
• 33:39
  firstly, I would not ascribe too much, I don't know how representative people yelling online are
• 33:44
  about like the what's relevant to me as a player in the space rather than like someone who's just
• 33:52
  topping away on Twitter about what Joe Rogan is doing is that is the cowardice of the average
• 34:00
  guest. Really, I mean, what's remarkable is not that Douglas and I are willing to talk to Rogan
• 34:06
  as if he was a friend and colleague. What's remarkable is that so few people do.
• 34:11
  They're like, it's incredible the reaction that I got after that exchange with people saying,
• 34:18
  oh, that was like so bright. And like, honestly, I remember, I remember coming out of the
• 34:23
  studio and waiting for my Uber to go to the airport and doing a mental catalog of, is any of this
• 34:35
  going to get me in the shit with my employer? Is any of this going to blow up? And like I sort of
• 34:40
  mentally went through the three hours thinking like, is there are there any landmines here that I
• 34:45
  should be mindful of? And there were a few that I identified that didn't cause any kind of
• 34:51
  a ripple. And that one, I remember, did not come up at all in my brain. I like that didn't land.
• 34:58
  That didn't code for me at the time as being anything, what remarkable, whatsoever. And then
• 35:04
  that was the one that became a shit storm. I think just because people, then this may be partly an
• 35:10
  American thing. It may just be a cultural difference between Aussies and Americans. Americans are
• 35:16
  polite. Like Americans don't think they're polite. They think they're uncouth. But they're actually
• 35:20
  super polite. Like which people think they think that British people are polite and that Americans
• 35:26
  are swaggering boobs. But actually, in which country would you be more likely to find a family
• 35:32
  sitting down and saying grace before a meal or holding the door open for somebody behind them as
• 35:37
  they walk, you know, as they walk through or vomiting in the street or like, Brits and Aussies
• 35:44
  were much more likely to interrupt, were much more likely to call people out. And I think there's
• 35:48
  a certain decorum that has developed in American podcasting where the norms are quite gracious,
• 35:55
  actually. And especially when a person has power, I guess they're also starfuckers more than we are.
• 35:59
  So they're more intimidated by the king in his lair and coming in and not wanting to, you know,
• 36:05
  challenge him in some way. And it maybe it's not a coincidence that Douglas is a Brit and that
• 36:09
  I'm an Aussie in the sense that yeah, like who gives a shit? Aren't we here to have like an
• 36:14
  interesting conversation the way that you would with colleagues and friends in any other context?
• 36:18
  Constantinist and Kissin is doing a good job of adopting culture as a British person.
• 36:25
  Him and Andrew Gold, they're holding up the British side of the sycophantics.
• 36:31
  Yeah, I mean, I'm also sometimes it's interesting that people, you know, in terms of platforming
• 36:35
  controversial people and like the and date wise Dave Smith, you know, being listened to and
• 36:40
  shouldn't we be listening to experts and stuff. I obviously copped the critique of why do I have
• 36:47
  Douglas Murray on the edge. Can someone's on the show? Why do I have Douglas Murray on the show?
• 36:50
  And every time I say anything about Israel or Palestine, someone will get into my mentions and say,
• 36:56
  this coming from the man who platforms the likes of Douglas Murray. And it's not even worth
• 37:02
  replying. Well, what about the Palestinians who I platform? Like, do you not see it?
• 37:08
  There's something contradictory about thinking that I endorse the views of every person who's on
• 37:13
  when I have people on who have wildly different views. Or Anthony Lowenstein, who was just on the
• 37:18
  show, who's the most anti-Israeli, anti-zyonist, journalist I can think of. And sort of balancing the,
• 37:28
  I'm basically just interested in people who have interesting ideas. And I'm interested in
• 37:33
  interrogating why those people have those ideas. That doesn't mean that I would have an
• 37:37
  unreconstructed fascist on the show because those ideas probably wouldn't be very interesting.
• 37:42
  Candace would be the closest, right? I mean, Candace, that's the borderline case.
• 37:47
  I have a question about that because like this would be my criticism of listening to that
• 37:53
  with Candace. It's like, I can understand, you know, I also, I even can understand Lex's
• 38:00
  argument for having Kanye. I look like there, I think there's much bigger like, you know, mental
• 38:08
  possible issues as well, right? Because Kanye generally seems unhinged. But there is an aspect
• 38:14
  which overlaps. And it's like Candace Lowen's, as you covered in the episode, a couple of times
• 38:20
  when you reference things for her. It's not like she's just on the block and we don't know what her
• 38:26
  perspective is, right? Like we know from Candace being in the discourse sphere for many years,
• 38:32
  that she is a conspiracy theorist. She is a, like, polemical partisan, very, like,
• 38:41
  loquacious, but she endorses, like, all manner of conspiracy theories and of a particular
• 38:47
  stripe, right? In a particular anti-jury stripe more recently. But, but she's not a, like,
• 38:54
  I would say somebody who demonstrates, like, a capacity for doing detailed research or for,
• 39:01
  she's good at talking, she's good at getting an audience. So if you talk there and you also know
• 39:08
  that she's like, she's a polished media person, so she can give answers, right? It's not the first
• 39:14
  time she's heard someone say, aren't you an extremist? Like, aren't you a conspiracy prone person?
• 39:19
  So, like, isn't it the case that, like, you're basically just, you know, giving her, like, a little
• 39:28
  bit of a platform and giving her another chance to say the same shit that she's been saying for
• 39:34
  years? Well, hopefully not. Hopefully not, right? I think there is a craft. This is where, sort of,
• 39:41
  like, without wanting to sound like a total wanker craft does come into some extent in the sense that
• 39:47
  it's very, there's no, you're right that there's no point in doing a gotcha with a person like
• 39:52
  Candace because she's so good in an adversarial debating environment that she will, she can own
• 39:57
  anybody. But I do think there's something interesting about a person who started out very far
• 40:02
  left. She was like, she found it a website that was apparently going to dox anybody who wasn't,
• 40:09
  you know, a social justice warrior. And then that fell apart because she didn't understand
• 40:14
  the internal logic of the social justice movement and she thought she was being an ally when
• 40:18
  in fact she wasn't and they turned on her. And so then she became, she started sort of flirting
• 40:25
  with this, you know, I'm a black person who stands up to black people orthodoxy and then
• 40:32
  became an anti-Semite. And like, that's a really weird trajectory and she has one of the most
• 40:37
  popular podcasts in the world. And so I think it's interesting a to interrogate what it's like
• 40:44
  to go on that journey and then be to try to expose her in ways that she's not going to find
• 40:51
  confrontational or that she might not even be bright enough to understand are happening
• 40:55
  in the conversation. Like there's a good maximum in journalism, which I think podcasters could do
• 41:01
  more to appreciate, which is if you want to, if you suspect that your guest is a liar or you
• 41:10
  suspect that your guest is a hypocrite or you suspect that your guest is operating in bad faith
• 41:15
  or is mistaken. Don't say to your guest, are you a liar? Why are you a liar, sir? That is
• 41:25
  probably what Lex Friedman is responding to when he's saying that there are bad versions of
• 41:29
  gotcha questions. That's just not a very good question. The best thing you could do if you suspect
• 41:35
  your guest is a liar is to reveal to the listener that they're lying in some way. If you think
• 41:41
  they're a hypocrite, then find a way of constructing a conversation such that the listener will go,
• 41:46
  huh, that guess sounds like a hypocrite or if you think they're mistaken, have a conversation in which
• 41:51
  the guest is going to go surely that which the listener is going to go surely that guest is mistaken.
• 41:56
  So my job with someone like Candace is to get as close as I can to making the accusation so that
• 42:03
  the listener understands that the accusation is being made and to get her to reveal something about
• 42:07
  herself at the same time as not overtly alienating her so that she just shuts the conversation down
• 42:13
  or goes into antagonistic mode. And there is a craft so that we should only get from tens of
• 42:17
  thousands of hours of interviewing, I think. I have a clip of Josh. He's always going to
• 42:24
  Candace that will maybe be relevant at this point. So I'll play it for you to hear. Don't you
• 42:29
  sort of find what you're looking for and if you keep hunting for ways in which the mainstream
• 42:34
  narrative about everything is corrupt, it could sort of send you around the bend. No, I just
• 42:41
  think that that's not like a small inconsistency, like whether you were born a man or a woman,
• 42:47
  I don't know, I feel like that. But this isn't just the only thing, Candace. I mean, we could
• 42:51
  play a bazillion clips or talk about a bazillion different things that whether it's about 9-11
• 42:56
  or about Frankus or the Jews or COVID epidemiology or vaccine medicine or online doxing or
• 43:04
  transgenderism or World War II, there would be a number of things that we could talk about where
• 43:10
  it strikes me that with the greatest respect, it might be a little bit like the experience you
• 43:15
  had initially with the social bullying thing where there's a whole ecosystem that has its own
• 43:23
  internal rules and ways of operating. You come in unaware of them. I mean, you said at the
• 43:29
  beginning of this conversation that you were sort of blindsided by the way that that whole doxing
• 43:34
  and harassment, game-a-gate ecosystem worked. You proudly call things as you see them to your
• 43:43
  credit because you're powerful and independent-minded, but you're sort of unfamiliar with the soup
• 43:51
  that you're swimming in and then the people who are familiar with it point out to you the ways
• 43:56
  in which you're unfamiliar with it and the reasons why you're wrong and you regard them as being
• 44:01
  conspired, you know, as imposing upon you speech codes and, you know, harassment and then you get
• 44:09
  to sort of play the victim when an actual fact is just that you don't really know what you're talking
• 44:13
  about. I don't think that's a fair assessment. I like that. I feel embarrassed even listening
• 44:22
  back to that because you can hear me just trying to not say the thing for so long. I'm like,
• 44:28
  you're very intelligent and powerful, but also, okay, I'll just say it. You don't know what you're talking
• 44:32
  about. Have you considered that you kind of what you're talking about? Yeah, you know the point you
• 44:35
  made about like the well or or not, you come from someone or not, like, you know, well or it's
• 44:44
  useful to do that in an interview. And I think that point because like I think that question
• 44:48
  now is a good illustration of it, but, you know, the streamer Destiny, yeah, he had Candace Owens on
• 44:55
  a bit before and it was back when he was like more inclined to kind of reach across the island,
• 45:01
  try to, you know, speak to some people on the hard right knee, we'd argue with them, but we'd do
• 45:06
  it politely, right? And he's he sensibly moved away from that because he said that like the way
• 45:11
  he took it was like he could have a conversation with them, but it was always him extending the kind
• 45:17
  of nice word or saying, you know, you are a thoughtful person. And like then they would still endorse
• 45:25
  all their conspiracies, they would still do the thing and they would still present like the left
• 45:29
  constantly as a caricature. So it was all on his side. And then before the election, he had
• 45:34
  Bacha Ungar Sagan on, I think that's open onto him from the free press. And she this is when it kind
• 45:43
  of had lost patience with that, right? And she was, she's a very Trump, she's the opinion editor
• 45:47
  of Newsweek. I had her on the show before the election as well on my show. And she is, yeah,
• 45:52
  probably the most articulate pro Trump. Yeah, well, yeah, in journalism. Yeah, articulate, but like
• 45:59
  today, just today, she wrote out a thing about high bad Barack Obama was and all the stuff that they
• 46:04
  did in 2008, one year before he became the president. He was like, remember when he passed all this
• 46:10
  legislation to five years, but in any case, she went off with destiny. And she just before
• 46:17
  a week before the election or something, she presented herself as, I'm a liberal. I don't know her
• 46:21
  I'm voting for it. And he, he said, no, you know, you're not like you are. And he was rude like
• 46:28
  she, he was basically said, you're, you do know who you're voting for? You're absolutely voting
• 46:33
  for Trump. We are not the same. We're not on the same team. And you know, subsequently, as
• 46:39
  it's went on, it's very clear. She is, like you said, a very strong advocate from Aga. So destiny
• 46:45
  could have, you know, kind of been more interpersonally receptive there and said, oh, yeah, look,
• 46:51
  we all agree, you know, that it is important. I mean, I would say two things about that and
• 46:56
  remember what you're going to say. One is destiny is playing in a different space. I think of destiny
• 47:02
  as being like a left wing version of Ben Shapiro or something where the whole, the argumentation
• 47:07
  is the point. Like, I love destiny. I love destiny's content. I think he's really interesting.
• 47:12
  And he's a fascinating debater, but he's really not about, I don't think teasing out truth.
• 47:17
  Or like he's about owning, he's about owning the destiny, disagreeing them. Secondly,
• 47:22
  there is a time and a place for, for going in hard. When I had Batia on my show before the
• 47:28
  election, I kept asking her about things that, to defend things that she supported in Donald
• 47:35
  Trump. And she kept saying, she kept doing this rhetorical move that really irritates me,
• 47:39
  where she would say, like, if you go and talk to people in, you know, rural Pennsylvania,
• 47:44
  then what, then they feel betrayed. And I said, butchette, like, and I went in. And I was like, at
• 47:49
  some point, you have to give up this stick about saying, like, the Hoiti Toiti, a leader's
• 47:53
  podcast, it doesn't understand the little man. I'm asking you why you support this policy.
• 47:58
  I'm not asking you to be a suitsayer who can, who's like a, a little man whisperer to whisper
• 48:02
  to me, like, why the, you know, what the, what the people, what the populace is, is feeling.
• 48:07
  I'm asking, I'm having an intellectual conversation with you about tariffs. Stop telling me what
• 48:11
  people in Middle America think about tariffs and start talking about tariffs. So like, yes,
• 48:16
  you sometimes need to course correct and go, like, this is not what, this conversation is not
• 48:20
  working for me because we're not on an agreed, you know. But I don't think that this is rocket
• 48:25
  science if you just take it out of the universe of an interview and put it into the universe of a pub.
• 48:31
  Like, I just don't think that they said, I think we all know how to do this into
• 48:34
  personally. Like, well, most of us who are good at, I mean, some of us don't, some of us just
• 48:39
  smash a glass and stab the broken glass into someone's face. But many of us know how to sort of,
• 48:45
  you know, gently navigate and negotiate disagreements with friends and colleagues. It's just we assume
• 48:50
  that the moment you turn the microphone on, it's verboten. Well, I was going to say, I think
• 48:53
  broadly, we totally agree because in the general principle of showing rather the telling.
• 49:00
  And it's far better if the people that are listening are coming to the conclusions
• 49:05
  themselves rather than being lectured to. So even with that stuff, I mean, we let it slip heat,
• 49:10
  but we know what we ought to do, which is, you know, you show the material, show the evidence,
• 49:15
  make the extremely uncontrovertual deductions from that and let people, you know, decide for
• 49:25
  themselves. I mean, we could, I mean, we ultimately often do just, you know, let it rip just for fun.
• 49:29
  But, but that is much stronger than getting up on your high horse and and ranting and raving.
• 49:34
  And what we found is a lot of the other people who criticize the same people that we criticize.
• 49:41
  Firstly, they're often doing it for different reasons, usually because they just don't like their
• 49:44
  politics. So, you know, they're the enemy. We don't like that they're stupid, mainly.
• 49:49
  And also, I feel like like they're only preaching to the choir, you know what I mean? Like,
• 49:58
  if you've got your little dedicated audience of haters, then they will love to hear you
• 50:03
  get very striving, but you're not convincing anyone else. So, yeah, you know, I'm all laid back
• 50:10
  approach generally with. I was just thinking that like something that we've noticed,
• 50:15
  right, is obviously because of the people who we usually cover our audience cues left,
• 50:19
  right? Like, obviously, Matt and I are academics, you know, to the, like, left leaning academics,
• 50:25
  right? So, that will inevitably attract an audience that skews that way. But as a result,
• 50:33
  any, like if we cover Yvonne or Harari or someone like that, not really any issue,
• 50:39
  also even Jonathan Hayd people didn't care that much. But it like us being critical, right?
• 50:45
  That's, that's fine. If we cover Nome Chomsky, Slava Gisek, the, who's the most recent one,
• 50:53
  now we climb, right? Like every time that happens, people are beautiful. But like, this
• 51:02
  one of the differences is that, you know, there's various friends on Reddit or these people, Matt
• 51:06
  and Chris haven't studied Marxist academics. They, like, the system, the thing works except when
• 51:12
  they cover people that we like, but it's the, it's the thing that I find is, like, people are talking,
• 51:19
  you know, when that happens, does that make you not want to, like, you know, cover those kind of
• 51:24
  people because you're going to get blowback or whatever. And it might be Matt and I personality
• 51:29
  or character, but when that happens, I'm like, I'm going to do this little bit more.
• 51:34
  Yeah, it's going to be Gary's economics. I know it's going to annoy people, but I kind of like,
• 51:41
  because there are for us, it isn't in 10th, there's like, you know, like a political
• 51:47
  podcast. No, no. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I mean, why does everything have to be politicized? It's,
• 51:53
  it is interesting. I mean, I am, I don't have quite that luxury, I suppose. I do have to be more
• 51:58
  mindful of it now a bit because I, I just find that there are, in my guest selection, there are
• 52:06
  frequently more interesting people who are more willing to say more provocative and unusual things
• 52:13
  who are, who I'm drawn to getting in the ring with, who are on the right, then on the left. Like,
• 52:20
  I think maybe the social justice sort of ethos of hyper caution and sensoriousness and fear of
• 52:29
  being pilloried has led people to be much less keen to like even in politics, like there's an
• 52:35
  Australian election coming up and, you know, I'm the conservative side of the aisle of fairly
• 52:41
  willing to come on the show and, you know, the governing Labor Party don't seem to be quite so keen.
• 52:48
  And I don't know what that split is, but it does make me wary. Like one newspaper called me an
• 52:54
  edge lord. I really offended me last year because I was like, I think I want to be Helen Lewis,
• 53:03
  I don't want to be an edge lord, you know, I don't want to be, I don't, I don't, I don't,
• 53:07
  are you going to make my shoes or that's not right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, because, because I,
• 53:12
  I sympathise with you, but on the other hand, it could be the case that the more interesting
• 53:18
  and fun types of views are just wrong, right? Like, like, yeah, often the truth is boring,
• 53:27
  right? And, you know, this is, this is one thing, you know, just in research and science and stuff,
• 53:32
  like we have a little replication crisis and stuff like that. And, you know, if you're a psychologist,
• 53:36
  you want to get something published. And it's going to be sexy, it's going to be amazing,
• 53:40
  this changes everything, you know, it's a bright, sparkling, exciting thing. And you just read
• 53:45
  the title and you go, I'm 99 percent sure this is bullshit. Before you even, before you even
• 53:52
  look at the methods, right? Did you confirm that? So, I mean, I think, you know, and I think
• 53:57
  I hang on, but you're, but you're embedding in that critique and assumption that a wrong,
• 54:02
  a person who holds a wrong idea is a less, that conversation with that person who's going to be
• 54:09
  a less constructive, less illuminating conversation than a conversation with someone who's right.
• 54:14
  It may be the reverse. Yeah, no, I wouldn't, yeah, I wouldn't go as far as that. I wouldn't say this,
• 54:19
  that's bad to talk to them. Just pointing out that, like, good more often, the
• 54:24
  crazy people, crazy people. Right, but I mean, take the, you know, take the Douglas Murray example,
• 54:28
  just because, you know, you'd raise him Chris, you know, I did a tour in Australia with him,
• 54:33
  because, and we booked it before October 7th. Some people thought it was in response to October 7th,
• 54:37
  but, you know, he was, I think he's interesting. Like, we also invited Slavo Gishek,
• 54:43
  who was going to come and then had health problems on a tour, right? And so, like, yeah,
• 54:49
  both of those people, I think, are really interesting. Anthony Lawrence,
• 54:52
  also, is a really interesting journalist, lived in East Jerusalem, is in, you know, a fiercely
• 54:59
  anti-zionist critic of Israel. These are interesting people who, it's interesting for me to talk to,
• 55:07
  and one of the most interesting things about my tour with Douglas was every night him and me arguing
• 55:13
  in a slightly different way about Israel. No, it's not like I was sitting there like Lex Friedman,
• 55:18
  just saying, the floor is yours. You know, what's New Orleans like?
• 55:25
  Yeah, I was pushing back. I was like, how can you say that it's in the interest, you know,
• 55:28
  the long-term interests of the Jewish people to have this, this state hanging around the
• 55:32
  neck like an albatross? You know, anyway. So, yeah. Yeah, there. Look, I just think we need to get
• 55:38
  you back on Rogen, and you can talk to him about the massive structures underneath the pyramids.
• 55:42
  That's all he was talking about this morning when I met him. I mean, I heard the news.
• 55:49
  I was like, come on, listen to the bad guys.
• 55:54
  George, that's a question. It's probably, yeah, but that feeling, this is the comfortable question.
• 55:59
  Yes, but you haven't been back on Rogen since that interaction. No, that's true. But I don't live
• 56:06
  in the United States anymore, and I've only been back there once since, at which point I did send
• 56:12
  him a text, but I mean, he's gone from, when I was first on the show in 2014, he was a big
• 56:18
  fucking deal, but he wasn't like the most powerful person in media. I think, and I get asked
• 56:24
  this sometimes, like, would he have me back on the show or has he blackballed me or banned me?
• 56:28
  Um, blacklisted me. What's blacklisted me? Is that a term? Is that just my romantic fantasy about
• 56:38
  and about Jeremy? Um, it's, but I think that if I had, I suspect that if like I had a book out
• 56:44
  that was, you know, that he found interesting, and if I, if he still checks the phone, his number,
• 56:50
  I have, then he would have me back on. I don't think he's petty. He tweeted after that thing,
• 56:55
  something very nice about me and said, like, he thinks the whole blow up is silly.
• 57:00
  Yeah, hello here. Who knows? Who knows? I mean, it's impossible to say.
• 57:04
  Yeah, they, um, the Douglas Murray with the Smeth, there is a bit in that. I mean,
• 57:10
  this was the thing because like, we have this experience already with Douglas Murray when he was
• 57:13
  talking to Lex, because like, he was very good on pushing back on you. Hello, he did that thing
• 57:19
  where what you're talking about with politeness that like, you can't say directly to Lex, Lex,
• 57:24
  your opinion on this is naive. You're the things that you have said, like Russia joining
• 57:30
  NATO is ridiculous, right? And you're, and so what Douglas does for right, that interview is
• 57:36
  some people have argued, you know, and this is a naive position, right? And then Lex is also
• 57:44
  responding saying, but there are people who always call naive. You're actually very smart,
• 57:49
  and literally saying that I actually very smart. And we'll, yeah, at the moment we prove in the
• 57:56
  logo that we corrected that kind of thing. But like Douglas Murray said to Rogan and the Smeth,
• 58:01
  when they were talking about the mainstream media and the power that the mainstream media has
• 58:06
  these experts on, they're doing all these things and they get things wrong. And Douglas Murray said
• 58:09
  to them, you guys have power. This is power. You have the biggest podcast. You have an influential
• 58:16
  podcast. You have power now. And we are often talking about, you know, the alternative media is
• 58:21
  better than the legacy. But we have to then admit that what we do makes, you know, I'm starting to
• 58:27
  talk like, but I was like, yes, yes, that's right. You know, that's, that's the thing that like,
• 58:35
  if you are going to talk every episode, we just covered Chris Williamson and Joe Rogan. And
• 58:41
  I'm friendly with Chris Williamson, but I said this to him, interpersonally as well, that they,
• 58:46
  they were like, the alternative, the legacy media is dying. And it's got, it just spends all
• 58:52
  its time talking about alternative media. And they're like, we are the, you know, the kind of new
• 58:58
  king dex on the street. That was the general message. And I consume a lot of alternative media.
• 59:03
  I think it is rare that I hear an alternative media episode that doesn't mention the mainstream media
• 59:10
  in some part to complain about it or to cover stories from them. So like, they presented it
• 59:16
  that the mainstream media is parasitic on the alternative media. But like, from my perspective,
• 59:21
  the alternative media cannot shut up about mainstream media. But even as it steals stories
• 59:28
  completely, yeah. I mean, look at the whole, you know, the way that that controversy about the
• 59:34
  the British Pakistani grooming gangs went down where like Elon basically co-opted that and was
• 59:40
  talking as if this was a story that nobody had ever covered, even though it was the tireless
• 59:44
  work of legacy media journalists in the UK who have official government like reviews on the topic
• 59:50
  as well. So this happens all the time. I mean, I think one thing that's important to note in this
• 59:55
  whole conversation about the fate of the legacy media and the rise of new media is the importance
• 1:00:01
  of investigative journalism from legacy media sources. There is just no substitute in the new
• 1:00:07
  media for the kind of investment that you need to hold politicians accountable by investigating
• 1:00:12
  like possible corruption or, you know, having a foreign bureau who can actually be on the ground.
• 1:00:18
  So investigative journalism reporting like all that stuff, I think, will never be replaced or
• 1:00:25
  not anytime soon by any like the legacy media excels there. The concern is that in the opinion,
• 1:00:32
  analysis, commentary, panel conversation, interview space that there it has become a bit
• 1:00:40
  stale, a bit too talking pointy. Everyone is like everyone sort of knows you can basically predict
• 1:00:45
  if I give you the name of a news outlet and then I give you the particular topic, be that
• 1:00:52
  transgender athletes or the MeToo movement or Indigenous rights in Australia or climate change
• 1:00:57
  or something like that, you can jot on the back of a napkin in advance what roughly you're going to
• 1:01:01
  hear, the kind of talking points that you're going to hear, and that's what people are rejecting
• 1:01:05
  and why they tune into shows like mine, I suppose. Yeah, I got a question for you actually about
• 1:01:11
  the ABC and the BBC, but I just have to mention to yes Andrew a bit, like I, it's unpleasant,
• 1:01:18
  but often I find that when I'm reading an article from a standard newspaper,
• 1:01:24
  yeah, it's often like, like when they're talking about something I know about, like, you know,
• 1:01:28
  this sort of generally a bit more online, it's kind of embarrassing how lazy it is and just
• 1:01:35
  have so many things have gotten, gotten wrong. Like one example was a Guardian article I read and
• 1:01:42
  it was about the, it was about AI, right? AI, you know, the AI wars and, you know, destroying artists
• 1:01:48
  and stuff like that and you know, the Hayao Miyazaki quote, very, he talks about the, you know, the AI
• 1:01:55
  as being like a, you know, like a threat to human dignity or something like that, right?
• 1:02:01
  And the thing is that like the quote was completely taken out of context, which you can,
• 1:02:05
  you can find out, there's no mention of the fact that Hayao Miyazaki is a bit of a freak,
• 1:02:10
  frankly, this is my reason why. Anyway, there's a barb moment.
• 1:02:15
  Any general that the summary was just this sort of like, like by the numbers, like, you know,
• 1:02:24
  basically AI, anything to do with AI, AI, AI, AI, it was bad, you know, think of the poor artists,
• 1:02:29
  it was just a boring, conventional take. So yeah, there's that, but I wanted to ask you,
• 1:02:36
  so what do you think about the, like, publicly funded outlets, like the D.D.?
• 1:02:41
  I think it's, I think it's, well, I think they're crucial. I think they have to, I don't think I
• 1:02:45
  absolutely disagree with people who think that they've lost so much credibility that we should
• 1:02:50
  defund them or do it with them. I think we should reform them and reinvigorate them and fund them
• 1:02:56
  properly, because I think a lot of the problem is that they've suffered so many funding cuts and
• 1:03:00
  so many attacks from the Murdoch press and from others and from unscrupulous politicians that
• 1:03:06
  they've ended up hunkering down. I mean, I think this was why my tenure at the ABC Left was that
• 1:03:11
  there was just a management structure that was extremely risk averse and was exhausted by,
• 1:03:16
  you know, and was just in a mode of hypercautiousness. And so people who were a little bit more spicy,
• 1:03:21
  like me, you know, triggered the immune system of the organization. But I think you need to,
• 1:03:27
  I don't think that means that you punish the organization and strip away its funding. It means that,
• 1:03:31
  like, that's part of the problem is that you've been punishing it and stripping away its funding.
• 1:03:34
  Like, I think it needs, I don't, I look at the landscape in the United States and I just think,
• 1:03:40
  like, they're but for the grace of God, I do not want to go there in terms of how divided the
• 1:03:44
  media is. I think everyone having a, having a common source of news of just information,
• 1:03:51
  you know, you can go out and you can talk about all that, I think there needs to be a much,
• 1:03:54
  so, I mean, my advice to public broadcasters is re-institute a firewall between news and
• 1:04:01
  opinion, clamp down hard on activists journalists, especially younger activists journalists,
• 1:04:06
  usually of color, keep talking, or like from the LGBTQIA plus community who keep talking about,
• 1:04:12
  you know, how we have to share the stories of the lived experiences of people in the new, no,
• 1:04:17
  that's not for news, that's not for news. Get back the, the light on the hill as being like some kind
• 1:04:22
  of objective journalism in the news pages. Do away with jargon, don't allow yourself,
• 1:04:30
  like in the news pages of the ABC, I mean, the most obvious example lately is just LGBTQIA plus
• 1:04:37
  stuff. It's so obviously, in the, in the push for diversity and it's important to diversify
• 1:04:43
  newsrooms and it's good, it's a good thing that they're not all staffed by middle-aged white
• 1:04:48
  straight males anymore, but my argument, I wrote a piece recently, arguing that diversity should
• 1:04:56
  be done in a story agnostic way, so that you should hire a diverse newsroom and then be agnostic
• 1:05:01
  about the stories that an editor assigns, whereas what's happened is that it's inconceivable that
• 1:05:07
  you would have a like quote unquote queer story written by anyone other than the queer staffers,
• 1:05:15
  and it's inconceivable that you would have a story about race written by anyone other than
• 1:05:19
  journalists of color. And I think that has got to stop. I think that is just leading.
• 1:05:25
  It's pushing audiences away because so much of the coverage is written in a jargonistic style that
• 1:05:31
  doesn't actually raise any of the little niggling concerns that the reader might have if they're
• 1:05:36
  not already on the team. So it actually makes it harder to be critical, for example, of President
• 1:05:41
  Trump's executive order on gender, because the reporting is written from such an obviously
• 1:05:46
  partisan perspective using terms like affirmation, care, you know, instead of I don't know gender transition
• 1:05:54
  or something like that, it's just not written the way that human beings talk. It's written the way
• 1:05:58
  that activists talk. And so I think stripping that out of newsrooms, getting newsrooms back to being
• 1:06:03
  just about the bread and butter of what happened, and then having actually a much more generous
• 1:06:08
  first person attitude towards commentary towards what's technically called content, which is a
• 1:06:14
  horrible word, but that's what the ABC calls it at least, where there's like my fate was sealed
• 1:06:21
  because I was straddling those two worlds where technically I was in the content division because
• 1:06:26
  I was hosting a three hour a day talk back radio show, which is not in the news division. So you're
• 1:06:31
  supposed to have more latitude, but there's an informal assumption that you're gonna pull your neck in
• 1:06:37
  and tow a certain line of caution. And I think the muddiness of exactly of the rules around that,
• 1:06:45
  and you know, the uncertainty on the part of a viewer or a listener or a reader about like,
• 1:06:50
  is what I'm reading or watching supposed to be just the facts, ma'am, or is this also allowed
• 1:06:57
  to have some spin? And if it's allowed to have some spin, then it should be allowed to have tons
• 1:07:01
  of spin for more kinds of different directions. And I think the public broadcaster should be more
• 1:07:05
  courageous about allowing a much wider range of views, whether that's against COVID lockdowns or,
• 1:07:10
  you know, floating ideas about the lab leak or whatever it might be. It should be a much more
• 1:07:14
  rambunctious space in the commentary realm, and a much less like personal feels the kind of activist
• 1:07:24
  space in the news realm. That would be my, that would be what I would do if I was emperor of the
• 1:07:29
  world. Yeah, yeah, that sounds fair, that sounds fair. Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of universities
• 1:07:34
  where they've kind of, they've become more corporatized, become more cautious and riskabuse.
• 1:07:41
  And I think I like little, scared little puppies rather than sort of independent institutions
• 1:07:49
  with a strong voice. And I actually more keen to clamp down on academics who are inconvenient
• 1:07:57
  in terms of the reputation of the off-beat boy. Actually, I saw, like, I guess you may
• 1:08:12
  be thinking about, like, I guess sometimes the messaging around that the activists and stuff
• 1:08:18
  can be counterproductive. I think that kind of cross-month be recently, which was, it was
• 1:08:24
  from an activist organization that was pro, you know, gay adoption and parenting,
• 1:08:29
  but the graphic was too, like it was probably AI generated or something, but it was too
• 1:08:34
  extremely muskly, oiled up, shaved. Like naked, like holding a head, holding a baby, and I like,
• 1:08:44
  they don't look like any, I mean, you haven't seen my partner and I never met.
• 1:08:53
  I've got to show if you want. We'll be giving Chris a private dance later on.
• 1:09:00
  How many of you guys roll? How many of you guys roll?
• 1:09:05
  Like, I thought, you know, the things like, you know, the Flint, I don't know if you know him,
• 1:09:12
  but like the archaeologist that had to be up with Graham Hancock on Joe Rogan's show,
• 1:09:15
  and it was like a three-hour thing. He gave a, like a PowerPoint presentation.
• 1:09:19
  And I've regularly enjoyed it because he made Graham Hancock look like a fool, but that would
• 1:09:25
  not be a format that fits, you know, like a BBC, I know the ABC, but I'm thinking to BBC,
• 1:09:30
  but there's no reason it couldn't be. It would be something, right? And they, especially if they
• 1:09:35
  gave like, you know, Flint the time to present his things, but they wouldn't like that format,
• 1:09:41
  because of, you know, I think Graham Hancock alone, they did give him a series before Channel 4,
• 1:09:47
  but the thing to me is like, when people talk about the podcasting space and they'll turn
• 1:09:53
  to medium, whatever, they are usually like singly night that they mean they don't like Joe Rogan,
• 1:10:00
  they don't like Sam Harris, they don't like Tim Poole, you know, this, the kind of ecosystem there,
• 1:10:06
  but like what they do like if they're critical of those kind of things is they will like
• 1:10:10
  Cune on Anonymous, Conspirituality, they might like Mary Hassan's channel, you know,
• 1:10:15
  and they're not, they're not kind of putting them into the same bracket. I'm not saying they're
• 1:10:20
  all of equal like levels of, you know, standards or quality, but I mean that the independent media
• 1:10:26
  is a big wide array of things that a lot is like a whole bunch of things that we like, you know,
• 1:10:32
  history podcasts or like random podcasts like ours, the coding, the girls or, or yours, right?
• 1:10:39
  But the, I don't see why, I mean, I guess I see from the viewing things as a zero something,
• 1:10:45
  but like madamee make a podcast about gurus, we talk for hours, about obscure people,
• 1:10:52
  and like they're, I'm playing clips of them, right? And there's an audience for that,
• 1:10:57
  but I've never been like, you know, the mainstream media, they can't do, I'm doing, I'm just like,
• 1:11:03
  yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there's a whole stick, isn't there? Of which I've probably been
• 1:11:09
  guilty, like three or four years ago, because I think it needed to be said then, but now it's
• 1:11:13
  become a tiresome cliche about elites, you know, sort of not listening and not being responsive.
• 1:11:18
  Like, I think there was a real thing in 2021 where, you know, the school closures during COVID
• 1:11:24
  in the United States, the kind of punitive attitude of the post George Floyd moment on race relations,
• 1:11:33
  the sensoriousness of the trans ideology, you know, that those things really did need to be
• 1:11:38
  called out. And elites did a bad job and the media did a bad job in being upfront and, you know,
• 1:11:48
  nonsense free about calling out those things. And there was a lack of courage and people
• 1:11:52
  were losing their jobs if they did call them out in many cases. Now, that's just become a trope.
• 1:11:59
  It's just like, you know, the claim that the elites are betraying us and don't know anything
• 1:12:04
  has just become, you're not allowed to talk about this, Joe. A stupid, stupid, stupid point that
• 1:12:11
  that people make usually to feather their own nests or give increased credibility to their
• 1:12:16
  independent media, media sphere. So I don't, I don't bang on, I mean, people regular listens
• 1:12:21
  of my will notice that I don't bang on about that anymore. I mean, I don't talk about how elites
• 1:12:26
  have lost the trust of the little man or something like that. I think we need more elites,
• 1:12:30
  not less. And I mean, even as you say, Chris, the difference in the media landscape is
• 1:12:35
  fast in podcast to stand. Even the three people who you mentioned, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris and
• 1:12:41
  Tim Poole, I mean, could not be more different. You know, Tim Poole's a fucking idiot.
• 1:12:46
  Joe Rogan is a, Joe Rogan is a really, is a really curious and talented conversationalist.
• 1:12:54
  And Sam Harris is like a rigorous and courageous genius. Absolutely.
• 1:13:01
  And none of them is without their flaws as a great, but yes, it's a very large landscape.
• 1:13:09
  I think what people are talking about when they're talking about podcasts to stand as a
• 1:13:12
  phenomenon is a particular type of, I mean, you guys cover this well on your show, which is like
• 1:13:17
  the weird combination of conspiracy mindedness mixed with credulity, mixed with skepticism,
• 1:13:25
  like intense skeptic, like, you know how the conspiracy theorist is also really
• 1:13:29
  credulous about certain things. And I think that's just that's kind of what we're talking about,
• 1:13:34
  like a kind of dude, bro, podcaster, dumb guy, smart guy, like what a dumb person thinks a smart
• 1:13:43
  person is talking to people in a really uncritical, but professorial kind of contemplative
• 1:13:50
  way about bullshit without much cheap pushback. There's one thing that I meant to mention that
• 1:13:57
  like it plays this. I know we should wrap up soon, Mark, because we're going to go, like,
• 1:14:02
  you know, sushi, we're going to go eat food that's better than Australian and American food.
• 1:14:08
  That's not a standard picture. Don't send me pictures. I don't like pictures.
• 1:14:12
  It's going to be pearls before swine. He wouldn't even recognize. He'd be like, this isn't just
• 1:14:16
  good as my local, wonderful job. Let me uh, so we did, we recently covered the
• 1:14:24
  Chris Williams appearance on Rogan. And one of the things that got me a lot, I've expressed it
• 1:14:29
  quite clearly on the episodes, but was that there was this lamenting about how partisan people
• 1:14:36
  got high, people born together over hundreds of art groups and how, you know, kind of like Lex,
• 1:14:42
  you know, the, the platitude and this shouldn't we all be more charitable, shouldn't we be,
• 1:14:46
  and within one minute, they had moved to talk about high, the Tesla attacks were being funded by
• 1:14:53
  USC and NGOs and the academics were like corrupted by China to promote communism. And they were,
• 1:15:01
  then they would switch back and be like, yeah, and these guys just demonize our groups and they
• 1:15:06
  they bond over hatred. And I was like, you can't do this. You can't be like, you have to
• 1:15:12
  need at least five minutes. Right. What I want is like someone there like in that case,
• 1:15:19
  it happened to be Douglas Murray, not about a super fond of, but he, you know, someone that says,
• 1:15:24
  hold up guys, aren't we bonding over hatred of my group? And it just seems like that is
• 1:15:31
  unfortunately like rare. And yeah, so if you could do that. It's also, it's particularly
• 1:15:41
  fatuous because it's true that we are bonding over. I mean, you guys literally have a show in
• 1:15:46
  which you just shit on other people like, you know, it's like, we are, but that's fine. Like,
• 1:15:51
  that's fine. There's a place in the world for that. And that and analysis analysis does often
• 1:15:56
  involve shooting on other people. That's why it's analysis and not secrecy. Yeah.
• 1:16:02
  But yeah, I mean, it's like the style. Anyway, yes, I think I think the point has been made.
• 1:16:11
  Should we go and eat sushi then? Yes. Oh, though, the very last thing there,
• 1:16:15
  at last time that we had you on, he had like this really important question that he wanted to ask.
• 1:16:21
  He wrote it down. He forgot to ask it. Okay. Okay. He's not shaking his head. No, no,
• 1:16:25
  no, I got it for you. I know you were talking to me about it on the front. I didn't bring this up
• 1:16:29
  to Josh. I didn't like, wasn't there a cook up era that you wanted to ask him a fight?
• 1:16:36
  What the mask got from the Olympics? What?
• 1:16:41
  What? I'll explain it to you. I can explain it to you. Just be on the basis of the word
• 1:16:48
  cook up era during the 2000 Olympic in the 1990s when I was in high school, I was a voice actor
• 1:16:55
  and I got cast as one of the mascots in the Sydney Olympic as the voice of one of the mascots
• 1:17:00
  in the Sydney Olympic Games whose name was Oli the cook up era for the 2000 Olympics as a teenager
• 1:17:07
  and then they kind of just sideline. By the way, you don't get in the suit. There are dancers,
• 1:17:13
  they could dance in the suit and then the voice actors are in the studio pre-recording it
• 1:17:18
  and the only thing that we, they kind of shied away from the idea of using mascots at all because
• 1:17:23
  it was a bit cheesy so they didn't really appear. I don't even think they appeared in the opening
• 1:17:27
  ceremony but you know the biggest thing that we ever did was an album called Sid Millie and Oli
• 1:17:34
  who were the three mascots sing your favorite Olympic tunes and the one country where it sold
• 1:17:42
  massively was Japan. The Japanese love Sid Millie and Oli sing your favorite Olympic tunes
• 1:17:50
  because it was a platypus, a cookabara and a kidna in front of a cartoon opera house and hungry.
• 1:17:56
  Maybe the sushi restaurant they should ask if they have it. I remember I only remember one
• 1:18:01
  track which went Olympic Games, Olympic Games were having fun at the Olympic Games, Olympic Games,
• 1:18:07
  Olympic Games, Sydney Olympic Games. Those were the likes. That's a remarkable career you've
• 1:18:14
  had, Josh. You picked it. Who would have thought that high school student who was singing as a
• 1:18:23
  cookabara about the Olympic Games would someday go on to be sitting with the likes of YouTube?
• 1:18:28
  Yes, in the Japanese and in the UK. My dreams can come true kids.
• 1:18:38
  All right, enjoy the sushi guys. Thank you very much.
• 1:18:41
  Lovely thanks for having me or me having you. I don't know what this is.