Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / The Fifth Column Guys: LIVE FROM NEW YORK

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The Fifth Column Guys: LIVE FROM NEW YORK · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Before we get started, my producer, Steph is here. Hey, Steph.
• 0:02
  Hey, Josh. Now, I know that you, like me, are a lover of movies and television,
• 0:07
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• 0:10
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• 0:14
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• 0:16
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• 0:47
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• 0:51
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• 0:57
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• 1:02
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• 1:16
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• 1:56
  That's nordvpn.com slash conversations.
• 2:00
  Check it out.
• 2:03
  Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 2:06
  I'm Josh Seps and this is a cracker of a crossover episode.
• 2:13
  I love these guys.
• 2:14
  I love these guys.
• 2:15
  I'm currently in New York City, New York, New York.
• 2:18
  The town so nice, they named it twice.
• 2:20
  My former home and spiritual hometown, shall we say.
• 2:25
  And one of my favorite podcasts is recorded right here in Manhattan.
• 2:30
  It's called the fifth column.
• 2:31
  You may be familiar with it.
• 2:33
  Matt Welch, Michael Moynihan and Camille Foster.
• 2:36
  Sit down and they talk shit about anything and everything.
• 2:40
  And they're very smart guys and they're very contrarian and they're very heterodox
• 2:44
  and they're very controversial and they're very provocative.
• 2:47
  They don't think inside easy little boxes,
• 2:50
  neat boxes that you can plop them in.
• 2:52
  And if you know me, you know that that's just the cut of my jib.
• 2:54
  I'm not going to say anything else about this episode.
• 2:56
  It's a crossover episode.
• 2:57
  So we're releasing it here.
• 2:59
  They're releasing it there.
• 3:00
  I'm, I guess, technically a guest on their podcasts
• 3:03
  since I'm with them in their space and they're not in Australia.
• 3:07
  Nonetheless, I'm sure that you will love it.
• 3:09
  If you don't know them, go and find them.
• 3:11
  And if you're new to the podcast because you heard me there,
• 3:13
  then, well, you've already heard this.
• 3:15
  So skip along to the next episode.
• 3:18
  Please enjoy the fabulous guys from the fifth column.
• 3:32
  I'm so thrilled to be here today.
• 3:34
  And by here, I actually mean on the West Coast in San Francisco
• 3:37
  because apparently New York is a swamp again.
• 3:41
  It's filled with water, disgusting and gross.
• 3:43
  There's still better than you're setting canoes.
• 3:46
  It's terrible.
• 3:47
  You know, the thing is we get the water out of the companies
• 3:51
  they stay in business there.
• 3:54
  They're just taking the insurance money and moving to San Jose.
• 3:57
  So when people listen to my podcast, presumably,
• 4:00
  they're just going to go, why is Camille talking?
• 4:02
  And now your listeners are going to be going,
• 4:04
  who is this crazy Australian just interjecting?
• 4:06
  Yeah, sure.
• 4:07
  So should we establish that I also exist?
• 4:09
  And that if I were to use these podcasts,
• 4:12
  I would say, get a human's wealth or the safe space
• 4:14
  for days, really say good day.
• 4:16
  That's what I would say.
• 4:17
  I didn't think we did that.
• 4:18
  But then Camille was just, he was going off
• 4:20
  about how terrible New York is, how it's a swamp.
• 4:22
  Yeah, and then I had to intervene.
• 4:24
  He has a bitterness of a reformed New York out there.
• 4:27
  I got to tell you Camille, I spent all day
• 4:28
  walking around the fine streets of Manhattan.
• 4:31
  And where are you?
• 4:31
  Neri, a raindrop, hit me.
• 4:33
  Although there was a straight sea lion.
• 4:35
  Did you hear about that?
• 4:36
  Yeah, that's true.
• 4:37
  I'm getting, I'm not getting that to sue.
• 4:39
  The water inflated like the water spilled over the sea lion
• 4:42
  enclosure, and the sea lion went flopping out into my brain,
• 4:46
  the streets of New York City, probably in reality,
• 4:48
  other parts of it.
• 4:49
  No, no, he was found, it was the smoking fentanyl
• 4:52
  in the 59th street station.
• 4:54
  He was like, man, very closely, they are drugs.
• 4:56
  Speaking of smoking drugs, last time I was in this great city
• 4:59
  of New York City, it was peak Omicron.
• 5:02
  So there wasn't a lot of people hanging out on the streets.
• 5:05
  The last time I was here, it was not yet mandatory
• 5:09
  to smoke the gunja.
• 5:11
  Yeah, it's not.
• 5:12
  So you are one of...
• 5:13
  Now it's like everyone has to smoke gunja.
• 5:16
  Every single street here is full of weed smoke.
• 5:20
  Correct.
• 5:21
  With impunity.
• 5:22
  Correct.
• 5:23
  Out on the street.
• 5:24
  I asked, here's something that's actually real.
• 5:25
  And I won't tell the guys name, because I don't want to give them up,
• 5:28
  but you guys all know him.
• 5:29
  He's a well-known kind of libertarian, but you know,
• 5:31
  an academic student.
• 5:32
  Woody Allen.
• 5:34
  Actually, it was Sunni Previn, but that's okay.
• 5:36
  On your body.
• 5:37
  On your body.
• 5:39
  Love's guns and crack.
• 5:40
  And I said, does everything that's happened
• 5:42
  since kind of legalization in various states
• 5:45
  has it shifted your baggage a little bit
• 5:48
  on your legalization stuff?
• 5:49
  And he said, absolutely, I was really surprised.
• 5:52
  And I'll tell you what is later.
• 5:53
  I, you know, I'm not...
• 5:55
  Hey, when you drop little hints like that.
• 5:57
  Look, look, look, look, look, look.
• 5:58
  Like you're excluding all of you.
• 5:59
  You can exclude your audience, Michael Moynihan.
• 6:01
  Not my audience, who was it?
• 6:03
  Because I know.
• 6:04
  No, no.
• 6:05
  I know.
• 6:05
  Have you noticed something?
• 6:07
  Senator Welsch.
• 6:08
  Oh, Lord, have you noticed?
• 6:10
  I definitely know that there's going to be some kind of
• 6:12
  compilette.
• 6:13
  Who's that?
• 6:14
  Who's it going to be?
• 6:15
  Exactly.
• 6:16
  Nobody from the kindest center.
• 6:18
  Some shit.
• 6:19
  I don't know.
• 6:20
  Does that really actually...
• 6:21
  Do you love Moynihan?
• 6:22
  I guess.
• 6:23
  I have never put much effort into it.
• 6:25
  But it does make me rethink the legalization thing
• 6:28
  a little bit as well.
• 6:29
  Because it is so prevalent in New York
• 6:30
  that if you are an old Jewish grandmother
• 6:33
  on the upper east side, walking your dog at seven or eight.
• 6:36
  Or an old Jewish Australian.
• 6:38
  You have to have a DB in your hand.
• 6:40
  That's why it's spread.
• 6:41
  There is no escaping it.
• 6:43
  And I wouldn't, I don't think that's a healthy, you know?
• 6:46
  Matt, do you think it's healthy?
• 6:47
  I don't mind the smell since it usually masks the urine.
• 6:52
  Although sometimes I was just in LA for a week.
• 6:54
  And boy, it was blended.
• 6:56
  It was weed urine, weed urine.
• 6:58
  And that's actually does not go well together.
• 7:00
  What I mind is public intoxication.
• 7:04
  So, smoked pot.
• 7:06
  I mean, we're in Dime Square here in the Chinatown studio
• 7:08
  and it's great.
• 7:09
  You walk around and it smells pretty great
• 7:11
  and people are out and they're having fun
• 7:13
  and they're doing cool stuff.
• 7:14
  What's not cool is when people are
• 7:16
  a little sort of passed out in their own drool on the...
• 7:18
  But are you allowed to drink on the street yet?
• 7:20
  No.
• 7:21
  They're not crazy.
• 7:22
  And often times you do not have a seat back in a park.
• 7:24
  You're also not allowed to smoke cigarettes
• 7:26
  basically anywhere.
• 7:27
  Anywhere.
• 7:28
  So, it's difficult to still, right?
• 7:31
  When I had to get vapes, just normal vapes in most places.
• 7:33
  Well, actually, there was...
• 7:34
  It was fun.
• 7:35
  That's interesting because it was really, really hard
• 7:38
  for a very long time.
• 7:39
  And there was one boat digger close to here.
• 7:42
  And they had to give you a card like their business card.
• 7:45
  And when you come back and ask for something that look at you
• 7:48
  and then you'd be like, I have your business card
• 7:50
  and they'd give it to you, right?
• 7:51
  Now, since they decided that they weren't going to wait
• 7:54
  for their regulatory regime to kick in for the weed stores,
• 7:56
  they just started opening them everywhere.
• 7:58
  It's incredible.
• 7:59
  None of these are licensed.
• 8:00
  And so now the vapes are out everywhere.
• 8:02
  And I saw in Brooklyn the other day by my daughter's gym,
• 8:06
  a boat digger that had a huge sign
• 8:08
  with the price of all the flavored vapes outside.
• 8:11
  So it's kind of funny that once the weed thing happened,
• 8:14
  now everything else are like...
• 8:15
  Well, then bring on the booze.
• 8:17
  I don't understand.
• 8:17
  I mean, for people who don't know,
• 8:19
  I spent most of my professional life,
• 8:21
  my adult life in New York City.
• 8:22
  And I've only been back in Australia for about five years.
• 8:25
  And when I first moved to New York,
• 8:27
  I remember being downstairs from my apartment building,
• 8:29
  holding a large glass of soda water,
• 8:32
  wasn't soda water, it was vodka soda,
• 8:34
  but there was no way the police could know that,
• 8:36
  who walked by me and one of them comes up to me
• 8:38
  and he's like, what's in the glass?
• 8:41
  And I was like, soda water.
• 8:43
  And he's like, let me taste it.
• 8:45
  What?
• 8:46
  And I was like, are you kidding me?
• 8:47
  I live here.
• 8:48
  Learning.
• 8:49
  Are you sure it wasn't one of those sexy cops
• 8:51
  on the way to like a strip event?
• 8:54
  Yeah, then he started licking my butt.
• 8:56
  I don't know what was going on here.
• 8:57
  And to the police here were Oslo's chaps all the time,
• 9:00
  or was it just that one?
• 9:02
  Correct.
• 9:03
  So then his colleagues said,
• 9:04
  man, don't worry about it, it's not important.
• 9:05
  And he pulled him off me.
• 9:08
  That doesn't sound very good, he pulled me off.
• 9:11
  But then, and then so now I fast forward to today
• 9:14
  and everyone's smoking in public.
• 9:16
  Well, just baby steps in New York.
• 9:17
  It's weird.
• 9:18
  Let me have a beer.
• 9:19
  Because 10 years ago, 12 years ago,
• 9:22
  we're talking like, what, 600,000 stops a year?
• 9:25
  More, I think even, where they would,
• 9:27
  without any pretext, just sort of like say,
• 9:29
  hey, do you have a gun?
• 9:30
  They pat you down.
• 9:31
  You didn't have a gun, but you had like a joint in your pocket.
• 9:34
  And as soon as you turned out your pockets,
• 9:36
  it would keep patting you down if it was this cop.
• 9:38
  Well, if it was cop.
• 9:39
  If you, if you, if you, if you showed,
• 9:41
  we'd, it was, like weed was not tasty for cruising.
• 9:46
  Weed was nominally legal or at least it wasn't criminal,
• 9:49
  but showing it was.
• 9:50
  And so that became what stop and frisk was.
• 9:53
  It was a way to find people for having weed in their hands
• 9:59
  when they complied with the order of what he got in your pocket.
• 10:01
  What do you, and what if you don't comply with the order?
• 10:04
  It's many jokes you off.
• 10:05
  The cup checks you off.
• 10:06
  That's the punishment.
• 10:07
  That he puts his hand in your pocket.
• 10:09
  Show him you a punishment.
• 10:10
  Yeah, I, it is, it is, I, I've put it in a million times.
• 10:13
  I go in the subway today and I, I'm such a sucker.
• 10:16
  I'm literally the only one at the Utica stop who pays.
• 10:19
  Nobody pays.
• 10:20
  They're all like laughing at me.
• 10:21
  I'm like, look at this fool.
• 10:22
  I'm like, my phone's scanning it.
• 10:24
  I'm like, oh, I'm going through.
• 10:27
  And everyone else is like going under, like vaulting over.
• 10:29
  It's like, not a common each going over these fucking things.
• 10:31
  Surty people.
• 10:32
  And then I realized that people are always expecting
• 10:36
  something bad to happen.
• 10:37
  And it doesn't matter that, you know, I've said this a million times,
• 10:39
  the stats on the subway because you can't measure just the kind
• 10:43
  of tension when crazy people are there, which is illegal
• 10:46
  and doesn't, it's not reported.
• 10:47
  But they're, I got on a car and there was, I walked in and there
• 10:51
  was like a crazy person and there was like orange peels all
• 10:54
  of their feet.
• 10:55
  I'm just eating oranges.
• 10:57
  Like kind of half shaved head and kind of muttering,
• 11:00
  but not bothering anyone and didn't weirdly, didn't smell.
• 11:04
  That was interesting.
• 11:05
  Did he smell of oranges at least?
• 11:06
  Yeah, no, it's, I was like, this is a very citrus end of the car.
• 11:08
  And then the other end, everybody was like pressed onto the other end,
• 11:12
  just expecting someone to get up and just start swinging an ax.
• 11:16
  Whereas I remember there being crazy people that you're just kind
• 11:18
  of like, all right, you're just there and you'd just be around them.
• 11:21
  And if they cause problems, you'd walk through the car, right,
• 11:25
  which then that stopped to about 10 years, but it's then that's back to
• 11:28
  walking through the car.
• 11:29
  But you get a ticket for that now.
• 11:31
  But that isn't how people just pushed all the way.
• 11:33
  And then the next stop, everyone who just got on, got off in their car.
• 11:35
  This thing was more courage.
• 11:37
  Any day more courage around the crazy people.
• 11:39
  Yeah, I was a crazy person on the subway just today.
• 11:41
  He was not a crazy person.
• 11:42
  He was a singer.
• 11:43
  He was an elderly gentleman and he comes on the car with his change,
• 11:47
  with a jar of change that he's shaken in time to the music.
• 11:49
  And he's going, so he was a German gentleman.
• 12:01
  This is Peter Garrett.
• 12:04
  And he goes through the whole car and he gets up for the next stop.
• 12:07
  And then I have to change trains.
• 12:08
  So I go across the platform, get on the next carriage.
• 12:11
  He comes in after me.
• 12:12
  I think it happens every day.
• 12:13
  And I'm like, I heard it the first time it was good, but not great.
• 12:16
  I don't need an encore.
• 12:18
  I'm more tempted by the showtime and by the singing than I am by the stinking.
• 12:23
  Because yeah, the orange bell and eating and public like that,
• 12:27
  I have an ongoing thing with my partner about whether it's acceptable to eat
• 12:30
  fruits like oranges in public.
• 12:33
  I was on a plane recently in Australia and I'm sitting there.
• 12:37
  And after we take off the guy sitting next to me, a small Asian gentleman,
• 12:40
  not that his ethnicity is relevant.
• 12:42
  Lin's damage was bad.
• 12:43
  It is when you're racist, is his size relevant?
• 12:47
  And he links down to his bag and he lowers his tray table.
• 12:51
  He takes out a single hard boy leg.
• 12:53
  Oh, that's a, yeah, that's.
• 12:54
  Oh, no, no, no, no, no, sorry, but his back wound is he peels the hard boy leg.
• 13:01
  And was this an economy?
• 13:03
  This hasn't given us one of the, I'm sorry, Camille.
• 13:05
  I'm sorry to offend you said your first class sensibilities.
• 13:08
  I spent eight hours at Denver Airport yesterday because of the floods.
• 13:12
  La Guadilla had a ground stop on.
• 13:14
  Sorry, I was in Denver.
• 13:16
  Really get out of town.
• 13:17
  I've been in Colorado.
• 13:18
  I was there with Coleman actually.
• 13:19
  Oh my God.
• 13:20
  Find people.
• 13:22
  That's a missed opportunity.
• 13:23
  I would have come into town.
• 13:24
  He was there with Coleman.
• 13:25
  And Coleman was, can we, was he giving speeches that were never going to be heard or what?
• 13:29
  His speech was aired.
• 13:30
  Yeah, what was it?
• 13:31
  What was in a conference or something?
• 13:33
  Can we talk about that Camille a little bit?
• 13:34
  Oh, what?
• 13:36
  So Coleman Hughes, are we switching?
• 13:39
  We're switching scares because I don't want to talk about this quickly.
• 13:40
  And before you do that, there's one punch line, which is there's more.
• 13:44
  The guy gets to the end of the end of finishes the egg.
• 13:47
  Carefully scoops off all of the shell from the tray.
• 13:50
  Very generous of what's in the plastic bag.
• 13:52
  I'm thinking myself at last this long national nightmare is over.
• 13:56
  Then he took a live chicken.
• 13:59
  He pulls out another egg.
• 14:00
  Yes.
• 14:02
  So what did you do?
• 14:03
  Did you do anything?
• 14:04
  I did nothing.
• 14:05
  I said, no, I'm scared and thought, last time I had fly coach and then you realized you're
• 14:10
  sitting next to Taiwan's egg eating champion from 2011.
• 14:15
  And he's been on one hour flight from senior Melbourne, but he went through seven hundred
• 14:19
  hundred and twenty eight years.
• 14:21
  Yes.
• 14:21
  The way to realize that flying coach in America is bad.
• 14:25
  Flying coach in Australia is another level of hell.
• 14:28
  It's a, uh, sorry.
• 14:29
  I don't want to talk about, actually, let's talk about, yeah.
• 14:31
  I talked about calling the reason I want to talk about this is just because Camille
• 14:35
  was going soft and on the text chain, our text chain, he was like, I was like, good Lord.
• 14:42
  I could hear him go, I believe the children all of you.
• 14:45
  You have to give us some God tech, give us a God.
• 14:47
  I'm going to give a context.
• 14:48
  It's a call who's our dear friend.
• 14:50
  Yes.
• 14:50
  A TED talk.
• 14:52
  Yes.
• 14:52
  And the TED talk was about colorblindness and the fact that colorblindness is a good thing
• 14:59
  and not a racist thing, which is something that people like Ibrahim X.
• 15:02
  Kennedy say, so it gives us talk.
• 15:04
  And apparently it was quite successful in the room.
• 15:07
  They were going to release this talk.
• 15:09
  And there was an internal revolt by certain people.
• 15:13
  We've heard this before.
• 15:14
  It's Spotify and other places, Netflix, et cetera, and internal revolt, uh, that said,
• 15:18
  you could, these are dangerous ideas.
• 15:20
  They heard our feelings for some people inside the company.
• 15:23
  And we're going to put a stop to this and they said, well, how about we release it,
• 15:27
  but you have to debate somebody on a different episode.
• 15:30
  And which he ended up doing, by the way, which is Jamel Bowie.
• 15:33
  And he's kind of navigated in a good way and said, well, no, I will, you release it,
• 15:39
  but later I can do this.
• 15:40
  I don't want to do it at the same time.
• 15:41
  That feels, that feels inappropriate.
• 15:44
  So this happens and, um, here, it's a piece about it for the free press and, uh,
• 15:50
  talks about how the video has completely tanked that like there's, you know,
• 15:57
  people talking about, you know, throat wobblers and, you know, a birding that have
• 16:01
  more, it's probably Christian Cooper, by the way, um, that have more views.
• 16:06
  And he's saying, like, you know, they're kind of burying it.
• 16:07
  They didn't put it out in their newsletter.
• 16:09
  And it's all to placate these, you know, handful of employees that were upset about this.
• 16:13
  Um, now, um, Chris Anderson, you should get the other wired.
• 16:17
  I don't think it's the same guy.
• 16:18
  I'm sure I'm not sure, but I was looking at into this.
• 16:21
  And I didn't see that those were the same people.
• 16:24
  Okay. Okay.
• 16:25
  That's because of the point of that.
• 16:26
  That's good because I, I like, I like, I like that, but he responded and kind of
• 16:33
  conceded all the points, didn't he?
• 16:34
  Yes.
• 16:34
  He said like the, the factual matter of this article is largely correct.
• 16:38
  Um, so you could feel the butt just like common.
• 16:41
  Um, this isn't the first response.
• 16:43
  Uh, he, yeah, he conceded most of the points.
• 16:45
  The, the vital point that he disagreed with was Coleman, uh, made a bit of an argument
• 16:50
  that they had, that one of two things that happened, uh, either the video was
• 16:57
  weirdly underperforming or they had suppressed it in some way, shape or form.
• 17:02
  Um, well, I think he had two mechanisms by which they could have suppressed it.
• 17:05
  One is that they didn't include it in their, in their wrap up.
• 17:07
  Yeah.
• 17:08
  But they said that, uh, which is true.
• 17:11
  And the, the second is that they're, that they're not presenting it, that they're
• 17:14
  whatever their algorithm on their website is, is not presenting it to people
• 17:17
  when they hit the home, right?
• 17:18
  They haven't talked about it on their podcast.
• 17:19
  And I think the thing that was disingenuous about Chris's response was he was saying,
• 17:23
  well, where is mystified by the low numbers, uh, of the videos as, as Coleman is?
• 17:28
  He was like, but YouTube's algorithms are as, are as opaque to us as they are to anybody.
• 17:32
  Here's the thing on YouTube, it's doing well.
• 17:35
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 17:35
  On YouTube, it's doing well.
• 17:36
  It's only not doing well on Chris Anderson's website.
• 17:40
  And probably doing well because Coleman promoted it on the free press, you know, by,
• 17:43
  yeah, it's doing better.
• 17:44
  It's doing better now.
• 17:45
  Yeah.
• 17:46
  So Coleman writes about this, uh, we're recording this on Saturday.
• 17:50
  I think Coleman writes about it this past week, Tuesday or Wednesday at the free press.
• 17:54
  And it causes, uh, what do you, what, what, how do you pronounce that word?
• 17:57
  Camille, it causes a kerfluffle, um, a fuffle, uh, and, uh, and so there's a week
• 18:05
  called the Chamber of Parliament in Australia, by the way, you have one.
• 18:08
  The hike, the hike, a fuffle makes the holy, and so there's an initial response from Chris
• 18:12
  Anderson and then Coleman comes back.
• 18:14
  And then yesterday, uh, Chris Anderson comes up with a second one and Camille just stood
• 18:19
  up like a, like a seal, uh, clapping and making a guttural noises in, uh, in approval.
• 18:24
  Oh, what was the second one?
• 18:25
  I didn't say the second one.
• 18:26
  I was waiting at Denver Airport for seven hours.
• 18:28
  Yeah, um, it was all about how Camille was great or something.
• 18:31
  I mean, I can't figure out why he was cheering it so much, but Camille, defend Chris Anderson,
• 18:37
  um, you know, and not your dear friend Coleman here.
• 18:41
  Go ahead.
• 18:41
  I don't know.
• 18:42
  This is, I mean, this is, oh, here we go.
• 18:44
  That's a false binary.
• 18:45
  Yeah.
• 18:46
  Look, what I, what I've said publicly about the situation is we all know how incredibly
• 18:53
  horrible and hostile the climate has been in recent years in 2021 and 2022.
• 19:00
  I'm not even sure it would have been likely to see Coleman on stage at Ted giving a talk
• 19:05
  like this.
• 19:06
  Um, the reality is that Chris Anderson, I, I happened to know and other people,
• 19:11
  have said this as well, um, publicly has been reaching out to people who are, um,
• 19:19
  I, I'll use the word right of center or at least not conventionally progressive, um,
• 19:25
  and have ideas that are probably incompatible with a lot of, uh, established popular elite
• 19:31
  opinions for a while and has not given up on the aspiration to have Ted be a place
• 19:38
  where a bunch of interesting ideas could be heard and aired out.
• 19:42
  Um, and he reached out to Coleman, he cultivated that relationship.
• 19:45
  He reached out to Coleman and invited him to participate in his Coleman documents in his
• 19:50
  email, um, not his email, his post about the ordeal, um, Chris worked pretty hard.
• 19:56
  It seems with his team to try to ensure this thing got published.
• 20:00
  Now granted for all of the reasons Coleman highlights, um, the fact that, you know,
• 20:05
  there was this group internally who was applying pressure to try to get the thing, um,
• 20:10
  not published and they wouldn't talk to, to Coleman, first Chris invites him to and then
• 20:14
  they refuse to the strange underperformance of the video on the website.
• 20:18
  And I, I don't have an opinion on what happened there.
• 20:21
  I haven't really looked at it very closely, but clearly they didn't promote it in the way
• 20:26
  that they've promoted plenty of other things, um, on the platform.
• 20:29
  And I think most embarrassingly for Ted, um, the decision to actually force Coleman
• 20:35
  to do this debate so that they could append that to the, uh, to the, uh, to the primary
• 20:39
  video, all these things are unacceptable in my estimation and demonstrate a kind of
• 20:45
  profound unfairness that said, I think Chris is at least acknowledged that some of these
• 20:51
  things are wrong.
• 20:52
  And he is acknowledged that explicitly in the most recent post that Ted has more
• 20:58
  recently had a proclivity to be less likely to include, um, certain kinds of perspectives
• 21:08
  that were likely to bristle the feathers of people on the left, um, and has expressed
• 21:14
  an interest in continuing to do that and suggested that his team, um, needs to, well, at least
• 21:21
  suggested that that Ted needs to do that.
• 21:23
  He's also been, I think, pretty defensive, um, and as you mentioned, Josh, like he took
• 21:28
  the opportunity in his first response to allude to Coleman being uniquely upset, um, about
• 21:35
  those about the, the underperformers of the video.
• 21:37
  And in that first response, like has only, I think, publicly defended the fact that people
• 21:43
  on his staff have said, have said in private, according to Coleman and confirmed by Chris
• 21:49
  that they felt unsafe.
• 21:51
  Yeah, I think that's what you're actually calling this light.
• 21:53
  And it just doesn't make sense.
• 21:54
  This is the sentence from the second one, Camille, that I just want to read to you.
• 21:58
  Uh-huh.
• 21:58
  The second response is he writes, if someone spent their whole life experiencing a playing
• 22:03
  field that is tilted against them, proactive policies to untilt that field or array of light,
• 22:09
  a talk arguing to dump those in favor of colorblindness can therefore seem not just wrong,
• 22:14
  but truly dangerous.
• 22:17
  You run your head, and again, that way, and you could say, you're wrong.
• 22:21
  Yeah, you're run.
• 22:22
  And again, I think, I think that, I think that sort of characterization is wrong.
• 22:26
  And my post, the post that I put up is in a defense of Chris.
• 22:30
  And I'm happy to see us at a point where Coleman Hughes does get invited to Ted.
• 22:35
  I'm happy to see that the, the talk actually gets published.
• 22:38
  And I'm happy to see that Chris and company are not ignoring the firestorm, which honestly,
• 22:44
  like how many times have we seen this kind of thing happen?
• 22:47
  I mean, it's getting plenty of mainstream publications and they don't even, and they don't
• 22:51
  even respond to what's going on.
• 22:53
  They don't make any sort of public comment about it at all.
• 22:56
  And even here, I've had conversations with Chris, and I know Chris is talking to
• 23:01
  plenty of other people in my hope and expectation.
• 23:04
  And perhaps I should say aspiration and expectation is to see there'd be further
• 23:10
  conversation about what's going on here.
• 23:12
  Because I'm not simply endorsing what I said explicitly is Chris and the team at
• 23:18
  Ted really need to take a look at their mission and engage in a kind of public discourse
• 23:24
  about how they're making determinations about where they draw the lines.
• 23:27
  And if there are people on their team who can't put the mission of Ted, which is to
• 23:33
  look at ideas that are worth sharing, broadly speaking, without any sort of ideological bias.
• 23:40
  If they can't put that mission first in front of their own personal ideological
• 23:45
  commitments, then they should leave the organization.
• 23:47
  I mean, I think that's what I've roasted.
• 23:48
  That's not what people want to see, though, that they're not seeing.
• 23:51
  I mean, I'm hopeful that we'll see more conversations.
• 23:53
  We're shooting our own horns when he says that those ideas like not tilting the playing
• 23:59
  field back are dangerous.
• 24:02
  The tagline of my podcast is a safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 24:06
  This is the whole point of having conversations that try to not care about
• 24:10
  triggering the trip-wise of polite society.
• 24:13
  I mean, and if you've set up an organization that is committed to doing that,
• 24:17
  then I think what people want to see from you and something like this happens is
• 24:21
  not kind of equivocations and self-justifications and HR style responses.
• 24:27
  They want to see you say ideas are not the same as discrimination.
• 24:32
  Ideas are ideas and claims are claims.
• 24:35
  So give me other claims and we will counter the claim,
• 24:39
  Coleman's claims, with better claims.
• 24:41
  We're not just going to say that we're offended.
• 24:44
  This is dangerous.
• 24:45
  We feel like our identities are being erased.
• 24:47
  Like give actual reasons.
• 24:49
  Just don't give a vote.
• 24:50
  Well, the reason that is given, and this happens quite a bit,
• 24:53
  the reason is given is that Coleman is saying things that aren't true.
• 24:56
  And the response to that was to cite a study that kind of...
• 25:01
  I mean, Chris didn't say that.
• 25:02
  No, this was from Adam Graham.
• 25:03
  Yes, from somebody else internally says,
• 25:06
  there's this study that shows blah, blah, blah.
• 25:08
  Now, obviously there's studies that show a lot of things.
• 25:10
  And this comes, if I'm not mistaken,
• 25:13
  they seek out a study to sort of extra fact check Coleman,
• 25:17
  which is something that they don't do normally to people from what I understand.
• 25:20
  But precisely, as he points out, he'd already been fact checked.
• 25:23
  The thing that bothers me about this is that rather than being honest and saying,
• 25:28
  we don't want people to hear these ideas because we're fearful
• 25:31
  that they'll be persuaded by them,
• 25:33
  they do the thing that happened with the Muhammad cartoons.
• 25:37
  They're not good cartoons anyway.
• 25:39
  Do you remember this?
• 25:39
  It was a constant thing.
• 25:40
  It was like, they're bad, they're actually really bad cartoons.
• 25:42
  It's like, I don't care what your judgment of the cartoons.
• 25:44
  That's not the issue.
• 25:46
  This is the same thing of like not acknowledging that you're trying to prevent
• 25:50
  these ideas from polluting the feed of the company that you work for
• 25:54
  because you think it should be...
• 25:55
  I mean, I don't even think that the people who object inside
• 25:57
  tend to believe that these things are ideas.
• 25:59
  One thing that I've been trying to get my head around lately,
• 26:02
  I've actually just had to take down one of my episodes of uncomfortable conversations.
• 26:06
  A fabulous podcast, available on all podcast platforms.
• 26:09
  If you're listening to Fifth Column, you don't know who the hell I am.
• 26:11
  Uncomfortable conversations.
• 26:13
  One of the Fifth Column's most treasured favorites.
• 26:16
  Yes, very very much.
• 26:18
  That's very, very much.
• 26:18
  Away too long.
• 26:19
  I've just had to take...
• 26:21
  I talked for way too long, it's been way too long since I came up with that.
• 26:23
  Away too long.
• 26:24
  Away too long.
• 26:25
  Away too long.
• 26:28
  I just had to take down a podcast episode under threat of cancellation by a guest.
• 26:34
  The first time I've ever done that, I couldn't be bothered getting embroiled in it.
• 26:37
  Was it the one that there was a very uncomfortable conversation?
• 26:40
  It was a very uncomfortable conversation.
• 26:42
  I listened to this episode.
• 26:43
  It was, you know, suffice to say a long story short.
• 26:46
  I was arguing with a black lady about the end of word.
• 26:49
  Now, when I say it like that...
• 26:50
  Oh, I don't see it as that one.
• 26:52
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 26:53
  Something Camille wakes up.
• 26:54
  I was, I've been engaged.
• 26:57
  Stop that.
• 26:58
  And I've heard Josh say that word many times.
• 27:01
  I was not, I was not claiming anything other than that, and this came as a result of not
• 27:09
  me seeking her out, but the fact that she had sent me an email saying, fuck you, it's
• 27:16
  our word, whatever, after I, I mean, I've never, I've never said the word, I've never
• 27:22
  used the word.
• 27:23
  I mean, I accept.
• 27:24
  Except when wrapping.
• 27:25
  Except when I'm wrapping.
• 27:26
  Yeah.
• 27:27
  I wasn't making an argument that we should be able to say it.
• 27:31
  I wasn't even making an argument that it's wrong for societies and cultures to come up
• 27:35
  with, with taboos around our mouth sounds, if I was like living in a Navajo civilization
• 27:42
  or an African civilization or a First Nations Australian civilization where you didn't,
• 27:46
  you know, it was impolite or it was taboo to say the names of some dead ancestor, then
• 27:51
  I wouldn't go around going like, why can't I say it?
• 27:53
  It makes no sense.
• 27:54
  Yeah, yeah.
• 27:55
  Like that's the decision that we've all come to, that's fine.
• 27:57
  So I wasn't even saying, let's not retroactively punish people for a crime that wasn't a crime
• 28:02
  at the time that you're dredging it up, you psychopathic outrage archaeologist going
• 28:06
  back through people's tweets from 10 years ago.
• 28:08
  And this is something she does.
• 28:10
  Yeah, I don't want to make an accusation, a specific accusation because I don't want
• 28:14
  to get fired.
• 28:15
  She's probably put a bit of guidance out wherever.
• 28:18
  All I was trying to get it to concede was that her position, which is that it's fine
• 28:24
  for black people to use that word, but not for white people too, is a position, that
• 28:31
  is a position.
• 28:33
  It's not the truth carved in stone handed down from Yahweh and a tablet to Moses, it's
• 28:40
  a position that some reasonable people disagree with.
• 28:45
  And the idea that your truth, your personally felt truth is not the last word, that it is
• 28:52
  a position that is contingent on who you are and what culture you come from and what
• 28:56
  time you live in.
• 28:57
  It's also the wrong word, but it's not a truth.
• 28:59
  It's not a truth.
• 29:00
  It's not a truth.
• 29:01
  Right, I mean, so all, and there's one moment in the, in the podcast, which I wish you
• 29:05
  could still hear, uncomfortable conversations.subs.com, don't know why I'm directing you there.
• 29:09
  It's not even there.
• 29:10
  You can't hear it.
• 29:11
  There's one moment where I say, will you just concede that this is a debate that's, that
• 29:16
  intelligent people who are both black and white can disagree about whether or not we
• 29:19
  should have abolished the word altogether and nobody should say it whether black people
• 29:22
  should say it whether it's infantilizing to use the phrase, the N word and so on and
• 29:26
  so forth.
• 29:27
  She said, yes, I understand that it's a debate, but it's not a debate that you can have.
• 29:31
  And I said, why not?
• 29:32
  And she said, because you're a white man, why did she choose to come on the podcast?
• 29:38
  She, because I said to her, I don't want to get into a fight on Twitter about, yeah,
• 29:42
  two agreements.
• 29:43
  She was basically trolling me and trying to get black Twitter to cancel me.
• 29:45
  I was like, come on the podcast, we'll hash it out, we'll actually have a conversation
• 29:48
  like growing up, I thought it worked and then some weeks later, she had a change of
• 29:53
  heart about it.
• 29:54
  But my point is just that it doesn't, I don't think the people at Ted who feel like
• 29:59
  their identities are being violated are aware that that is a claim or an argument or
• 30:05
  a belief that is susceptible to a rational discourse, but then it's just a truth.
• 30:10
  It's a truth, but why did you take it down?
• 30:16
  Because it's not worth it.
• 30:17
  Like I felt like I'd taken three good swings and at some point you just say stick a fork
• 30:22
  in it.
• 30:23
  It's done.
• 30:24
  This turkey is roasted.
• 30:25
  Move on to the next channel.
• 30:26
  Do you think that?
• 30:27
  Well, I'll tell you this.
• 30:28
  I'll tell you that I'm being, I'm being a thing that I'm equivocating here.
• 30:32
  The actual reality is she sent me an email.
• 30:34
  She worked for the same organization that I worked for and she said that she just had a meeting
• 30:38
  with the managing director who, with the Australian public broadcaster, which is a properly
• 30:43
  funded public broadcast and not like NPR.
• 30:45
  So the managing director looms in the Australian consciousness, something like the head of
• 30:50
  general electric or Disney.
• 30:52
  People know who that, everyone knows who that person's name, you know, he appears before
• 30:55
  the Senate and stuff like that.
• 30:56
  She just had a meeting with him and he's, and I quote, committed to getting problematic
• 31:01
  people out of the organization.
• 31:02
  So there's a threat.
• 31:03
  Take it down.
• 31:04
  Yeah.
• 31:05
  Okay.
• 31:06
  Now, it's not a threat that she can actually act on because I know the managing director
• 31:09
  and he likes me, but of course, I can't be certain of what a public also, cancel culture
• 31:17
  works in funny ways.
• 31:18
  Like he's not going to fire me because I haven't done anything wrong.
• 31:21
  However, the next time there's a big show that's being cast or it comes time to negotiate
• 31:27
  contracts.
• 31:28
  It's very, very future oriented.
• 31:29
  Is it like, you know, is there just this kind of smell around the place, you know, how
• 31:33
  many people do you need in the building to think, oh, you know, Josh, he's all about his
• 31:37
  fucking uncomfortable conversations.
• 31:39
  He causes trouble.
• 31:40
  He's not a team player.
• 31:41
  He's, you know, he creates a, literally called it uncomfortable conversation.
• 31:44
  Yeah.
• 31:45
  I literally named the show.
• 31:46
  And now I'm complaining about it, about that label being associated with me.
• 31:50
  But the future oriented thing is interesting too, because you took it down because you
• 31:55
  said, after a long pause, you said, it's not worth it.
• 31:59
  They're going to say the same thing when it comes to hiring you for a new show or having
• 32:02
  you as a guest judge on a panel or whatever it might be.
• 32:05
  It's like, you know what?
• 32:06
  It's not worth it.
• 32:07
  You know, what Josh does.
• 32:08
  He creates problems and we don't want problems.
• 32:10
  So it's not worth it.
• 32:11
  And there goes my hope of being a prawn on the mask thing.
• 32:14
  Yeah.
• 32:15
  Yeah.
• 32:16
  It's a shrimp for people.
• 32:17
  To turn, to turn this back to the conversation about Ted for a moment, or at least to,
• 32:22
  to sort of talk about that in this, you know, Josh's situation in that same context.
• 32:27
  Having seen this over and over again, when I see the responses to Chris and I know that
• 32:33
  Chris is, I can tell, it's obvious.
• 32:35
  He's being like pretty defensive in certain aspects of this post.
• 32:39
  But again, openly acknowledging defects, suggesting that he wants to see changes.
• 32:47
  And plainly, and when I say defects, plainly acknowledging that, yes, within our organization,
• 32:53
  people are generally, it's a bit of a monoculture.
• 32:57
  And there is a hostility towards right of center ideas.
• 33:03
  That's something that needs to change.
• 33:05
  He invited people to, and I hope this changes.
• 33:08
  And I want there to be a conversation about, but the response that I see in a lot of circles
• 33:13
  from a lot of prominent people who are in the, quote unquote, heterodox community or whatever
• 33:17
  the hell we call it, is like these broad sides, these open condemnations, you're cow,
• 33:23
  you're terrible, you're awful, you're the worst.
• 33:26
  All I've said publicly is, I'm glad to see him engaging.
• 33:30
  I'm glad to see him acknowledge that certain things are wrong.
• 33:32
  I would challenge and critique certain things about what he said.
• 33:37
  I hope that they continue to have an open discussion about how to ensure that Ted remains
• 33:42
  a mission-focused organization because I also mean later on, he wants to give a 10.
• 33:46
  I was going to say, it really is serving its mission.
• 33:51
  My dance card is quite full.
• 33:53
  What I'd make it over there if they invite me, would I outrage the staff undoubtedly?
• 33:59
  I would be very happy to do it, but this is the point, right?
• 34:04
  There is an outrage staff there, certain people say, oh, Ted doesn't matter, all those
• 34:08
  woke idiots, their complete monsters and lunatics.
• 34:12
  I have the same feelings about them that I do, about the worst mega person.
• 34:16
  My hope is that I can get through to them, make an argument that they will agree with,
• 34:22
  and have them abandon their bad ideas in favor of better ideas.
• 34:26
  I think adopting that posture does mean acknowledging the good things that Chris has done in response
• 34:32
  to this, challenging him on the places where he's been less than good and continuing to insist
• 34:38
  we should keep having this conversation, and yeah, Ted really does need to do better,
• 34:44
  and this is what that looks like.
• 34:46
  As opposed to just a dismissive, oh, that response is bullshit, that response is bullshit.
• 34:51
  No, I don't think that's okay on the volume is being earnest.
• 34:53
  It's like a mantra that I will always agree with, turn down the volume.
• 34:56
  Let me read a little passage here.
• 34:58
  I see comments from people, some presenters saying, that's their problem, just fire them,
• 35:03
  and then he goes on, give me a break.
• 35:05
  Give me a break, John Stossel, I love this team.
• 35:09
  They're smart, creative, curious and kind, and they work for Ted because they believe
• 35:13
  in the importance of ideas and in Ted's mission, I'm sorry, just stop huffing your own
• 35:20
  farts.
• 35:21
  Ted has been an internal fart-huffing machine for how long now?
• 35:26
  15 years?
• 35:27
  Oh, look, we're going to do ideas differently because it's going to be like on a stage and
• 35:31
  it's going to be fast and they're going to point to stuff and there's going to be a graph
• 35:35
  and it's going to be great people, and we are just objectively about the idea, man,
• 35:40
  and it's like technology, plus ideas, and it's so nonpartisan and idea-e, this whole episode
• 35:46
  exposed that as being bullshit.
• 35:50
  It's an aspiration, that's nice, and he's pointing to a nodding at that aspiration.
• 35:56
  And he is also saying, give me a break when people point out that his reaction, and this
• 36:00
  whole reaction of treating Coleman, yes, he invited him, but yes, he also treated him
• 36:05
  like these tongs, this radioactive thing came into our turf.
• 36:10
  We must do something because we love ideas so much.
• 36:13
  It's the radioactive thing he did.
• 36:16
  I think we have to acknowledge that we did have said we have repeatedly, as I just did,
• 36:20
  I'm a fan, I like his podcast, and I listen to it.
• 36:24
  That's great, but he's trying to straddle Camille, he's trying to straddle, and I'm not impressed
• 36:29
  with the straddle.
• 36:30
  He doesn't have to find him, what doesn't he just sit down and say, shut up, ideas are just
• 36:35
  exactly right.
• 36:36
  That's just ideas, we're about ideas.
• 36:37
  This is actually, you can't just shut up, but you can't just sit down and do that.
• 36:42
  I think there really is a lot of heavy lifting involved when you are trying to take them back
• 36:47
  to John Locke and like John Stuart Mill, like there's a lot of learning to do for these people
• 36:51
  clearly, but you have to sit him down and give him, for an organization that's supposed
• 36:54
  to be, that should have been on the living or something, and so I've seen here is why
• 36:58
  we have conversations about things instead of shutting people up.
• 37:02
  Here is the virtue in hearing things that you disagree with, and here is the virtue in
• 37:05
  even hearing ideas that are hateful and wrong.
• 37:07
  Absolutely, yes.
• 37:08
  What essentially happened at the ACLU, the take of the ACLU, is that they just allowed
• 37:14
  this to happen, and I think there were so many people there that were of the old school,
• 37:19
  like Wendy Kaminer School of ACLU, who were like, you know, let's just not make too much
• 37:25
  trouble.
• 37:26
  And what you see in that, those messages from Chris Anderson is him trying to thread
• 37:30
  the needle and saying, I love Coleman, we want crazy, dangerous ideas, I love his podcast.
• 37:36
  These people are great, they're the backbone of the organization.
• 37:39
  They were hurt by these ideas, it's like, look, when you're talking about speech and you're
• 37:43
  talking about ideas, you cannot play it down the middle.
• 37:46
  You have to choose a side here, because when you do this, you're inviting the collapse
• 37:51
  of the organization, basically, and what ends up happening is one faction always takes
• 37:54
  over.
• 37:55
  It never goes on smoothly forever with an outrage faction who goes and tries to shut down
• 38:01
  people or say, we can't actually broadcast these ideas because they're too dangerous, or
• 38:05
  they hurt my feelings or the ideas themselves or violence.
• 38:08
  And if you believe that, you shouldn't be in an organization like this at all, you should
• 38:11
  be doing something else, you're being academia.
• 38:13
  That's where most people like that actually end up.
• 38:15
  But tell me an organization, there isn't one that is actually managed to keep all of these
• 38:20
  factions happy.
• 38:21
  When you get in there, you have to say, this is the law.
• 38:24
  We like you guys.
• 38:25
  We think you're smart people.
• 38:26
  I'm not going to fire you.
• 38:28
  But if you keep making problems like this, maybe this isn't the best organization for
• 38:31
  you.
• 38:32
  Let's look at what you've done.
• 38:33
  What's your job with this?
• 38:34
  Look at what Joseph Connison of the New York Times, New York Times, outside pressure groups
• 38:39
  and other people with half a toe in the door came at him pretty strong.
• 38:43
  And he fired back.
• 38:44
  I mean, he has made a big public showing of it.
• 38:47
  He doesn't have a lot of public agonizing.
• 38:48
  Oh, we love these people, but we also love these people.
• 38:51
  He just said, sounds like if you agree with this, that you want us to be an activist organization
• 38:55
  and not a news report, we already use report you choose.
• 38:59
  And his actions, much more than his kind of public facing words, are what count here.
• 39:06
  And the New York Times has acted a lot differently under his leadership, certainly, then under
• 39:10
  the Chris Anderson alike, Dean Backay, before them, who wanted to be the most popular guy
• 39:16
  in the newsroom, but also a little old school, a little new school.
• 39:19
  I have the least amount of respect for that position.
• 39:21
  I think that you choose one.
• 39:22
  Be a total coward.
• 39:24
  Yeah, you can't.
• 39:25
  This is the Bushemi holding this skateboard.
• 39:27
  You cannot.
• 39:28
  Yeah.
• 39:29
  Things like, hey, kids, just out of college, we'll do it your way a little bit.
• 39:32
  And then we'll do it the old school way a little bit.
• 39:34
  It's like, no, no.
• 39:35
  Ask Marty Barron how that worked out.
• 39:37
  Yeah, exactly.
• 39:38
  I'll say, I'll say one last quick thing about this, unless someone else has something
• 39:42
  else to say about it, of course.
• 39:44
  But I can distinctly remember going to Ted in San Francisco and I accompanied Carl Hart
• 39:49
  there to just giving a talk about drug legalization and not even drug, yet, drug legalization.
• 39:56
  And Carl said at some point in that talk, you know, I'm not talking about the criminalization.
• 40:02
  I'm not just talking about legalizing weed.
• 40:04
  I'm talking about the legalization of all drugs.
• 40:07
  And Carl got a standing o at the end of his talk and there was never so far as I could
• 40:14
  see any public consternation or that I heard from Carl, any private consternation expressed
• 40:20
  by the people at Ted, nor was there any call for there to be any kind of secondary follow-up
• 40:26
  debate that could get appended to his presentation.
• 40:29
  They just published the talk and it's, I mean, that's an edgy perspective, especially today,
• 40:34
  I suppose.
• 40:37
  And I think that was the appropriate, that's the appropriate kind of approach.
• 40:41
  That said, like there's going to be moderation and having the folks at Ted acknowledge the
• 40:49
  fact that they're going to be agonizing over certain kinds of things and where to draw
• 40:54
  lines and the sort of people that they will and won't have on the stage, because they're
• 40:57
  going to.
• 40:58
  I don't imagine that they're going to have people talking about how pedophilia not so
• 41:02
  bad.
• 41:03
  Like we should probably give, give, give peace a chance where that kind of thing is concerned.
• 41:07
  And I don't think there's any libertarian parties.
• 41:10
  There's just one.
• 41:11
  I think that, let me just try to draw an analogy here that there is, I think what irritates
• 41:16
  people about blowups like this is not that someone is making a decision about what ideas
• 41:22
  to include and what ideas to exclude.
• 41:24
  Everybody understands that that line has to be drawn somewhere.
• 41:27
  It's the conflation of an argument with violence or like someone's identity being erased.
• 41:35
  It almost reminds me of the use versus mention distinction that we talk about with the
• 41:41
  N word, which is something that I was trying to explain in the conversation that no longer
• 41:46
  exists.
• 41:48
  To take the Dean back a New York Times argument, the Senator Cotton op-ed about how we needed
• 41:54
  to put an end to the riots in the summer of 2020 and then the New York Times staff is
• 42:00
  saying this makes us unsafe.
• 42:03
  That was a Senator making an argument.
• 42:06
  Your safety is a completely different category.
• 42:10
  If you want to respond to the argument, then use an argument to respond, don't fire
• 42:14
  somebody.
• 42:15
  If you want to respond to Coleman's argument about colorblindness, use an argument.
• 42:20
  Don't deprioritize his thing and then scramble around and then try to prevent people from
• 42:24
  looking at it and then try to put out fires.
• 42:26
  It won't talk about that.
• 42:27
  While perpetuating that idea that speech can be violence and cause interest.
• 42:30
  Yeah, I just think we have to reassert that something has gone horribly muddy in the way
• 42:36
  that we think about thinking.
• 42:39
  Like I was interviewing Peter Singer on my podcast, great podcast, uncomfortable conversations.
• 42:43
  You'd get it wherever you get into the podcast.
• 42:46
  No, you don't have to ask because I'm going to cut this out.
• 42:49
  So I was going to be in Peter Singer, we were doing a live, you know, the great ethicist.
• 42:52
  We were doing a live tour of Australia and he has recently faced more and more backlash.
• 42:58
  He faced a lot of backlash in the 1970s, mostly from the religious right.
• 43:02
  And the 90s too.
• 43:04
  Now he's got a resurgence of backlash from the woke left and I was saying like, isn't it
• 43:10
  right that people should draw a line in the sand somewhere and say your ideas are beyond
• 43:14
  the pale from my, from my ethical perspective.
• 43:17
  And therefore I want to respond to you.
• 43:20
  And he was like respond with reasons, respond with arguments, respond by categorical
• 43:28
  me or shouting at me or saying you're offended or saying you're insulted or saying you're
• 43:32
  hurt or saying you're being erased or saying your existence is being called and just argue
• 43:38
  with me.
• 43:39
  That's a massive generational issue because if you talk about Singer, I mean, Singer, if
• 43:46
  you read the conservative press in the 1990s, there's always, you know, the ethics of killing
• 43:50
  babies and stepping on ants and things and they hated him so much, absolutely loved
• 43:56
  him.
• 43:57
  But if you look at the people that make the argument that you just said that Peter was making
• 44:01
  on tour with you, this increasingly comes from people on all sides of the political spectrum.
• 44:07
  I mean, you can hear Ian McEwan and the late great Martin Amos making this, this argument
• 44:13
  or Christopher Hitchens, all in that same kind of Salmon Rushdie and that kind of group
• 44:18
  of people, they're all people of the left, right, very much of the left.
• 44:22
  And all the people that are old school ACLU people make this argument, they're primarily
• 44:26
  people of the left.
• 44:27
  If you saw them in the 1970s, there would be kind of socialists arguing for the clan
• 44:32
  to be able to rally in downtown Manhattan with hoods on.
• 44:35
  That was an argument that was made by the ACLU back in the day.
• 44:38
  It is so scrambled at this point that there's nothing political about it.
• 44:44
  When I look at the people, always, you know, over the age of 30 or 40, there's a lot of young
• 44:47
  people that do it too.
• 44:49
  They tend to be a lot more ideological, a lot more online, you know, making these kind
• 44:53
  of arguments.
• 44:54
  And if it's, if it's, you know, the guy whose name I always forget, Nick Fuentes or something
• 44:59
  like that, they don't really care about this, I think, in the long run.
• 45:04
  The people who do make this argument tend to be people from the left and the right.
• 45:07
  And that's just because, generationally, and I mean, I don't know how well Chris Anderson
• 45:10
  is, but I guarantee you the difference in age between him and the people that are arguing
• 45:14
  about this within the organization is probably a gulf of 20 years.
• 45:18
  That was the interesting thing that one of our listeners did that nobody else did.
• 45:21
  I think we made people, I made people do this.
• 45:24
  I asked because our listeners are incredible.
• 45:26
  I asked, say, hey, can you get the average age, the best of your ability of the people
• 45:31
  who signed the Harper's letter?
• 45:33
  And the average age of the people who signed the anti Harper's letter, and it was like
• 45:38
  a gulf of like 30 years.
• 45:39
  This is the Harper's letter from 2020.
• 45:41
  I think he'll sign.
• 45:42
  Yeah, he'll sign.
• 45:43
  He'll sign.
• 45:44
  No, I'm Chomsky signed.
• 45:45
  And usual.
• 45:46
  That was just kind of sounding the alarm about attacks on free speech.
• 45:51
  And it then was immediately attacked by a bunch of extremely online progressives whose
• 45:56
  average age was 25.
• 45:57
  It was something like that.
• 45:59
  Can I move on to something else?
• 46:01
  Yeah.
• 46:02
  I don't know if you guys are about this.
• 46:03
  And I want Josh to talk about this.
• 46:04
  I'm glad I got this stuff.
• 46:05
  Yeah, I got this stuff.
• 46:06
  This is for...
• 46:07
  I do.
• 46:08
  It's about Australia.
• 46:09
  You know everything about Australia.
• 46:11
  So the bandman, I know.
• 46:13
  I'm sorry.
• 46:14
  Who do gurus?
• 46:16
  Now, let's talk about this because it is roiling Australia and getting zero attention here
• 46:23
  in America.
• 46:25
  And I want you to tell people, and I want your Australian listeners to laugh at me when
• 46:28
  I try to do a crazy of this, of the voice vote, which is essentially reparations, essentially,
• 46:37
  a separate kind of body that would be a kind of a separate body that doesn't have voting
• 46:43
  rights as such for the indigenous population of Australia, Aboriginal population, and some
• 46:48
  islands that are mentioned I've never heard of.
• 46:51
  Yeah.
• 46:52
  What are those islands called?
• 46:53
  The Torres Strait.
• 46:54
  Yeah, yeah.
• 46:55
  Nobody goes there.
• 46:56
  Nobody cares about them.
• 46:57
  That's when we say Asia Pacific Islander, like we just like five people we throw it in
• 47:01
  there.
• 47:02
  But so this vote is coming, it's very contentious vote.
• 47:06
  And I want you to explain what it is, and it is not very popular in opinion polls right
• 47:11
  now.
• 47:12
  It looks like it's going to go down.
• 47:13
  Well, it's hard to change the constitution.
• 47:14
  So this is a change to the constitution?
• 47:15
  Yes.
• 47:16
  So it's a referendum.
• 47:17
  We don't do it very often, as countries don't, to try to change the constitution.
• 47:21
  You need a majority of voters in a majority of states, it's called a double majority.
• 47:27
  So that's pretty hard to get for the best.
• 47:28
  So four of the regions and then the states, and then four of the six percent, over 50%
• 47:36
  and of 50% of the, and tough to get, tough to get, especially since there are some small
• 47:40
  states who have three people in them, you need one and a half of those people to vote for.
• 47:45
  So I mean, the thinking is that the, I mean, let's go all the way back, right?
• 47:49
  So 1788, the country gets invaded by the British.
• 47:52
  There are a number of, of, or discovered, or discovered, if Michael Moynihan, in the
• 47:59
  British, discovered, it was discovered for them, and they were like, this is due to us.
• 48:03
  There were, there were a number, unlike, unlike North America and New Zealand and a bunch
• 48:08
  of other colonial countries, the civilizations went back many, many tens of thousands of
• 48:13
  years.
• 48:14
  These were the oldest civilizations on the planet at the time, and I say civilizations
• 48:18
  because there were a bunch of nations all over, you know, the landmass of Australia is
• 48:21
  like the same size, nor in the contiguous United States, and so you had a very, a great
• 48:25
  many languages and a great many peoples, not just the, what, the Aboriginal Australians,
• 48:30
  but also the Torres Strait Islanders who are, you know, genetically different.
• 48:35
  And so they, there's, you know, subsequent couple of hundred years of genocide and dispossession,
• 48:41
  and incredibly racist laws, it's not until the late 60s that, that we actually have a
• 48:45
  referendum to include First Nations people as citizens, you know, they're basically fauna
• 48:50
  up until 1967.
• 48:52
  We have a referendum, we recognize them in the Constitution, we continue to, with policies
• 48:58
  of taking black children away from families, you know, stealing them from their parents
• 49:03
  and educating them in nice white Christian boarding schools.
• 49:06
  It's just a horrible, very Canadian, horrible history.
• 49:11
  So over the past, I would say 20 years, especially in the time that I was away, I mean, every
• 49:16
  time I would go back to Australia when I was living in New York, I noticed a market difference
• 49:21
  in the national consciousness about First Nations people.
• 49:26
  In some ways, I think the United States history of slavery has so subsumed that that crime
• 49:33
  looms so large over the other crime of Native Americans that it's less of an issue here
• 49:38
  and can kind of slide by here more, but it has become the national crisis point, the national
• 49:45
  flashpoint, the national crisis to address, I suppose, the relationship between European
• 49:54
  settlers and First Nations people.
• 49:56
  And so in the...
• 49:57
  Just interject something quickly, is that the American conversation about this definitely
• 50:01
  informs the Australian conversation about this, doesn't it?
• 50:04
  In a sense that when I'm reading about this and you'll get into the specifics of what
• 50:07
  the voice vote is, you do have a lot of conversation that does feel like the American conversation
• 50:13
  around 2020.
• 50:14
  Oh, sure.
• 50:15
  Yeah, yeah.
• 50:16
  Not the American conversation around Native Americans, but the American conversation about racial
• 50:20
  justice.
• 50:21
  Yes, very much informed by this.
• 50:22
  So when I'm reading this, I don't have the background, the history in this, I've just
• 50:26
  sort of general stuff, but I'm like, God, you could just replace words and it would
• 50:29
  be interesting.
• 50:30
  I mean, I wouldn't say it's inspired by it because the genesis of this comes in the 2010s
• 50:34
  before Black Lives Matter.
• 50:37
  And this is basically the idea is that you create a body, which is an advisory body made
• 50:45
  up of First Nations representatives from all over the country, and that body's job is not
• 50:51
  to pass any laws or represent anybody directly, that body's job is simply to advise parliament
• 50:58
  when parliament is considering laws that affect First Nations people.
• 51:03
  And then parliament has the freedom to ignore that advice.
• 51:06
  And that's it.
• 51:07
  So that we're going to refer in them to try to put that in the constitution.
• 51:10
  We didn't need to put in the constitution.
• 51:12
  I mean, parliament could have just created this body, but then there's the risk that in
• 51:15
  a few years time, another government comes in and abolishes the body.
• 51:18
  So the thinking is you put it in the constitution so that it has to exist.
• 51:22
  Now, it doesn't have to have any set set number of members.
• 51:25
  They don't have to earn any set amount of money.
• 51:27
  All of the details are yet to be ironed out.
• 51:28
  This is one reason why I think it's a difficult referendum to pass, perhaps, because a lot
• 51:33
  of people can say, what is it going to be 150,000 people earning a million dollars a year?
• 51:39
  We don't even know what we're signing up for.
• 51:41
  You're asking me to order in a restaurant.
• 51:42
  You haven't even shown me the menu yet.
• 51:43
  Of course, if you did show them the menu yet, then we'd all be like arguing about the
• 51:48
  precise amount of money and the precise makeup of this body.
• 51:51
  The idea is, for hundreds of years, that there has been a systematic bias in the Australian
• 51:57
  system against this particular group of people.
• 52:01
  Now we just have to...
• 52:02
  We've tried so many different things, different governments have tried different things.
• 52:06
  It's going to be a cleaner solution to have them all gathered together in one place.
• 52:10
  So you support this?
• 52:11
  Well, I can't say that I will vote one way or another, because you're a Republican,
• 52:14
  Republican, impartial.
• 52:15
  Because you're a Republican, impartial.
• 52:16
  Because you're a Republican, impartial, impartial.
• 52:17
  Even if you're in America?
• 52:18
  I'm just a...
• 52:19
  Yeah, free speech.
• 52:20
  You can, like, smoke weed here, even if it's illegal in Australia, that kind of thing.
• 52:23
  In case that sounds like I am, pro, let me just give the counter-argument.
• 52:28
  Firstly, it's anti-igualitarian and un-democratic, to racially and ethnically single out one group
• 52:34
  of people, regardless of how they've been wronged in the past, and we should always aspire
• 52:37
  towards egalitarianism.
• 52:40
  Two, how is it fair to, in a country that is full of migrants to regard everybody who
• 52:46
  is non-indigenous as being sort of complicit in the crimes of the first European settlers?
• 52:51
  More than half of the country has arrived since the Second World War.
• 52:53
  It's one of the most multi-ethnic countries in the world.
• 52:56
  What does a Chinese Australian shopkeeper...
• 52:58
  Where is his chamber?
• 53:01
  He's just like, okay, I thought I came here to be equal.
• 53:05
  Why do they get this special voice?
• 53:08
  Then there's the question of why put it in the Constitution?
• 53:11
  What if it becomes corrupt?
• 53:12
  What if it becomes unrepresentative?
• 53:13
  What if it becomes hand-picked and all of the people are just kind of university-educated,
• 53:18
  very worthy elite indigenous people who are not solving any of the problems on the ground
• 53:23
  in rural and remote and regional Australia?
• 53:26
  How do you get rid of the thing?
• 53:27
  You've just baked it into the Constitution.
• 53:28
  We can have another referendum, try to get the referendum, the other referendum to take
• 53:32
  it away.
• 53:33
  Those would be the...
• 53:34
  Oh, and then there are indigenous, excuse the length of this, but it is complicated.
• 53:38
  There are two indigenous criticisms.
• 53:41
  About 80% of First Nations people support this.
• 53:43
  About 20% don't support it.
• 53:46
  Of those 20%, many are very visible, including two senators, each of whom represent different
• 53:53
  oppositions to the voice.
• 53:56
  One is, it doesn't go nearly far enough because it is just white people playing a constitutional
• 54:01
  game with themselves and jerking off.
• 54:03
  What we actually need is a treaty and a recognition that this year isn't always will be Aboriginal
• 54:09
  land and that the other whole nation of Australia is basically a...
• 54:13
  A crime.
• 54:15
  So good luck getting that if you can't even get this thing first.
• 54:19
  Then say it for years, but go on.
• 54:21
  Then the other criticism is, I guess, this is sort of too much of a distraction.
• 54:27
  It's kind of almost an opposite critique, but it sort of sounds a little bit the same,
• 54:31
  which is we need to focus on actually improving First Nations people's lives and this whole
• 54:35
  thing and a treaty and all of this kind of...
• 54:39
  It's a lot of smoke in there.
• 54:40
  It's a lot of...
• 54:41
  Exactly.
• 54:42
  So it's going to happen with it.
• 54:43
  So there's two different in-genius oppositions.
• 54:46
  Can we just applaud Josh's ability to do both sides of that argument?
• 54:50
  That's a public bet somebody who is probably got fired from the public broadcaster, but
• 54:55
  he shouldn't because that was a virtue or so performance and I didn't even say anything
• 55:01
  when he said that the Australian nation is a crime and I want to say that is indeed true,
• 55:05
  but for different reasons.
• 55:07
  The...
• 55:08
  Hemsworth.
• 55:09
  The Hemsworth.
• 55:10
  So...
• 55:11
  I'll take one of them.
• 55:12
  The former Prime Minister John Howard, the Conservative Prime Minister, who has been
• 55:16
  vocally opposed to this, made a point that I thought was a reasonable one.
• 55:20
  He said, you know, you make treaties with foreign governments.
• 55:23
  You don't make treaties with your own citizens.
• 55:25
  That's a very odd thing to do.
• 55:27
  Even if there was actually some meat on those bones, we actually knew what was going to
• 55:30
  happen.
• 55:31
  That's a rather strange thing to do.
• 55:33
  The one thing that I thought immediately, and again, this is probably an argument spending
• 55:36
  a million times, but I just looked up the numbers, you know, three to four percent of
• 55:42
  the...
• 55:43
  Between three and four percent of the country is aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.
• 55:50
  I don't want to forget about them, even though I've never heard of them.
• 55:54
  This is why I'm a great voice on this thing.
• 55:56
  People have never even heard of.
• 55:58
  But they represent...
• 56:00
  There's about five, six percent representation in parliament.
• 56:02
  I mean, there's eight senators...
• 56:03
  That sounds about right, yeah.
• 56:04
  There's four senators who are aboriginal in the Congress.
• 56:08
  There's more 26 odd total.
• 56:10
  You know more about this than I do.
• 56:12
  That is representation.
• 56:13
  Is it not?
• 56:14
  I mean, and it seems to be overrepresentation, if anything, if we're actually, you know,
• 56:18
  definitionally, it seems to be almost double the representation.
• 56:22
  Why is that in that deliberative body not alone worthy of, you know, why would one have
• 56:29
  to modify the Constitution?
• 56:31
  It's more of a political play, isn't it?
• 56:34
  And I know you can't talk about this.
• 56:35
  I just realized that.
• 56:36
  Well, I mean, I probably...
• 56:40
  I mean, the argument...
• 56:41
  So let me both sides it again.
• 56:43
  I mean, the argument for why that's not enough is that the status quo is unacceptable,
• 56:49
  that the gap between white or like non-indigenous education and indigenous educational outcomes,
• 56:55
  you know, non-indigenous life spans and indigenous life spans, non-indigenous health
• 57:00
  and indigenous health, that all these things are just so stubborn and, you know, imprisonment,
• 57:05
  crime, like, that something needs to be done.
• 57:09
  So obviously that disproportional representation in parliament is not sufficient.
• 57:12
  So it's not a uniquely American problem.
• 57:15
  Is that...
• 57:16
  Because I thought it was just us.
• 57:17
  That would be that argument.
• 57:18
  But you're right.
• 57:19
  Then the counter-argument is we have all of the systems of democracy to solve this.
• 57:23
  The problem is a problem of will and coordination.
• 57:25
  The problem is not a problem that we lack.
• 57:28
  There isn't enough bureaucracy.
• 57:29
  You know, the problem of the big counter-argument is, oh, you know, since when has it been the
• 57:34
  case that Australia does not have enough government departments and bodies are seeing?
• 57:38
  Yeah.
• 57:39
  It's like that's not the problem.
• 57:40
  No, you can do a whole series of...
• 57:41
  Australian, yes, minister about...
• 57:43
  Absolutely.
• 57:44
  But here's...
• 57:45
  I'm going to broaden this to...
• 57:47
  So American listeners will kind of get something out of this beyond a kind of remedial
• 57:52
  history of Austria.
• 57:53
  Australia.
• 57:54
  I love doing that to Australia, because it's like they get so mad.
• 57:58
  It's so weird.
• 57:59
  We're not...
• 58:00
  We're not Austria.
• 58:01
  It's not just...
• 58:02
  Oh, it's not just Hitler.
• 58:05
  The Guardian.
• 58:06
  The right-wing paper.
• 58:07
  No.
• 58:08
  The Guardian has been...
• 58:09
  The lefty Guardian has been writing a lot about this.
• 58:12
  There's obviously an Australian Guardian too.
• 58:13
  Yeah.
• 58:14
  And there's been one theme that is something we've talked about a lot on this podcast,
• 58:18
  which I find amazing.
• 58:19
  And the thing is that the voice vote looks like it's going to go down to defeat 50 odd,
• 58:26
  maybe 55, 56 percent, and these opinion polls vary a little bit.
• 58:29
  So there's a real scramble from the people who are defenders of this to respond to it.
• 58:35
  And I think this is a remarkable thing that we're seeing.
• 58:37
  And this is how the Trump era has really infected the politics of the entire world.
• 58:44
  Two headlines, quote, Trumpian era of disinformation makes voice, yes, campaign job more difficult.
• 58:53
  Megan Davis says, Megan is an academic, right?
• 58:56
  And then another one, this is an opinion piece by someone you're probably familiar with
• 59:00
  named Van Batum.
• 59:01
  Yeah.
• 59:02
  I think Van's coming on my podcast on comfortable conversations in a few minutes.
• 59:05
  This will be an uncomfortable one because this is quite a piece.
• 59:10
  This inframania has taken over the internet.
• 59:12
  Can no voice opportunists maintain control of an unleashed far right flank?
• 59:18
  So they're losing this and what is the arguments being made?
• 59:22
  It is the Marxian angle's argument of false consciousness, which is now called disinformation.
• 59:28
  But that can be true.
• 59:29
  And it can also be true that there's a ton of misinformation and bullshit, right?
• 59:31
  I've heard, you know, I've received calls from people on my talk back radio show who
• 59:36
  are convinced because they got a flyer in the mail that if the voice referendum passes,
• 59:42
  that will, the high court will interpret that as a concession that Australia is stolen
• 59:45
  land.
• 59:46
  And there'll be no more private property in Australia because first nations people will
• 59:49
  be able to take your house, you know, no academic or constitutional lawyer thinks that that
• 59:53
  is even remotely true.
• 59:55
  But there will be.
• 59:56
  Yeah, but it's called leave it.
• 59:57
  That's right.
• 59:58
  Right.
• 59:59
  And that is misinformation.
• 1:00:00
  Sure.
• 1:00:01
  Just did you say there's something in the through the post?
• 1:00:02
  Yes.
• 1:00:03
  No.
• 1:00:04
  How do you mail?
• 1:00:05
  This is how Australia does.
• 1:00:06
  It's information, right?
• 1:00:07
  A kangaroo jumps up to your front door.
• 1:00:10
  Go outside of the pith helmet on, distributing like news and believe it.
• 1:00:17
  And what the letter is in the pouch of a kangaroo.
• 1:00:21
  But this is the language of this disinformation as this thing that must be typically fought
• 1:00:27
  by governments, right?
• 1:00:29
  And fought by public broadcasters.
• 1:00:30
  And that's like there, we are in the business of countering disinformation.
• 1:00:34
  And there's a reason why you put Trump in it because it like, it, it all sounds like
• 1:00:38
  this dark ominous cloud as if it is spatially different than every other political campaigns
• 1:00:44
  in history.
• 1:00:45
  Well, so the idea of fake news as popularized by the Trump administration has caught
• 1:00:49
  on everywhere.
• 1:00:50
  So every time there's somebody wants to, you know, which no one remembers was stolen
• 1:00:54
  from her.
• 1:00:55
  Yes.
• 1:00:56
  It's originated by.
• 1:00:57
  She said fake news that the reason they're winning was fake news and, you know, Facebook
• 1:01:01
  ads and the rest of it, Donald Trump is like, I'm going to take that.
• 1:01:04
  And I'll tell you what.
• 1:01:05
  Trump has taken also.
• 1:01:06
  Oh, no.
• 1:01:07
  I was at Trump rally as a journalist last three or four days ago in Detroit, and I noticed
• 1:01:13
  this.
• 1:01:14
  Mug is great.
• 1:01:15
  Well, you were at Moina Hansen.
• 1:01:18
  He said, and he keeps, he said this in a couple of speeches before and after, he keeps
• 1:01:24
  on saying fascism.
• 1:01:26
  He said, you know, he's like, want to defeat the communist, the Marxist, the fascist.
• 1:01:30
  And he's going like, he's, he's now taking fascism too, which I think is hilarious.
• 1:01:35
  Trump is empty.
• 1:01:36
  He's empty.
• 1:01:37
  He's like, I'm the real antifa.
• 1:01:38
  I love antifa.
• 1:01:39
  You sit down.
• 1:01:40
  Wrong.
• 1:01:41
  You're fake.
• 1:01:42
  But it's incredible because this, this idea of misinformation, though, it, it, it's,
• 1:01:48
  what undergirds it is this idea that if people only had the real truth, they would
• 1:01:54
  agree with me.
• 1:01:55
  That's the kind of Thomas Frank argument of what's, what's the matter with Kansas is that
• 1:01:59
  what's the matter with Kansas?
• 1:02:00
  Why don't they agree with Tom Frank and they say, oh, that they have the wrong priorities?
• 1:02:05
  You know, who the fuck are you to tell them what their priorities should be?
• 1:02:07
  Yeah.
• 1:02:08
  Number one, but also it's, it undermines, I mean, what percentage of people are the crazy
• 1:02:13
  person that calls into your show?
• 1:02:14
  Is that 5%?
• 1:02:15
  Is it 50% because they make it sound in a lot of the news stories that I've read about
• 1:02:18
  this 50% 60%.
• 1:02:19
  No, I mean, there's also a lot of virtue signaling a shock horror, you know, especially
• 1:02:22
  from the, the yes side.
• 1:02:24
  And I mean, you know, you go around the neighborhoods that I live in.
• 1:02:26
  I live in the inner west of Sydney, which is sort of like the Brooklyn or, you know, the
• 1:02:30
  Silver Lake.
• 1:02:31
  You know, choose your example of the kind of Bohemian area.
• 1:02:35
  And needless to say, shock horror.
• 1:02:39
  And every, you know, every, every block will have multiple houses with an Aboriginal flag
• 1:02:43
  in it, with yes, a yes post, uh, yeah, it's on top of the harbor bridge, mate.
• 1:02:48
  Really?
• 1:02:49
  Check it out.
• 1:02:50
  All right.
• 1:02:51
  They replaced their land.
• 1:02:52
  They replaced the state flag with the Aboriginal flag a few years ago, so there's no
• 1:02:55
  reason why you would know that.
• 1:02:56
  But anyway, there are a lot of yes posters, yes, uh, you know, flags and, uh, in this house,
• 1:03:02
  we believe in stuff.
• 1:03:03
  Yeah.
• 1:03:04
  That's my fact.
• 1:03:05
  No, what's that?
• 1:03:06
  Oh, you haven't seen that?
• 1:03:07
  No, is that a very good thing?
• 1:03:08
  You've been gone a while.
• 1:03:09
  Yeah.
• 1:03:10
  In this house, we believe in.
• 1:03:11
  And then what do you find?
• 1:03:12
  Science is usually science.
• 1:03:13
  Science is real.
• 1:03:14
  That's the one I said yesterday.
• 1:03:15
  Oh, God.
• 1:03:16
  Science is real.
• 1:03:17
  Okay.
• 1:03:18
  Everyone.
• 1:03:19
  Meaning you need to wear three masks.
• 1:03:20
  Science is real.
• 1:03:21
  Science is real.
• 1:03:22
  Love is love.
• 1:03:23
  Yeah.
• 1:03:24
  Love is love.
• 1:03:25
  Maybe without three masks, they'll be arrested.
• 1:03:27
  Yeah.
• 1:03:28
  Biggest science is science.
• 1:03:29
  So the Aboriginal flag is essentially the Angolan flag without the, without the sickle
• 1:03:34
  in the middle of it.
• 1:03:35
  I love that you know the Angolan flag.
• 1:03:36
  Yeah.
• 1:03:37
  That's what you're doing this right now.
• 1:03:38
  Yeah.
• 1:03:39
  It's looking furiously at his laptop.
• 1:03:40
  No, I'm looking at the Aboriginal flag.
• 1:03:42
  It's like so many flags.
• 1:03:43
  I haven't chill out with the flag.
• 1:03:45
  I mean, my point about the virtue signaling was just there are no, no, uh, flags or no
• 1:03:51
  signs.
• 1:03:52
  All right.
• 1:03:53
  So it's way more fashionable.
• 1:03:54
  I mean, like, and the hypocrisy, I think I'm free to say this on the yes side wreaks of
• 1:04:00
  the same kind of hypocrisy that you see in very worthy progressives all over the world
• 1:04:05
  where it's like, the only reason, like Michael was just saying, the only reason why a person
• 1:04:10
  would disagree with me is because they're an irredeemable, awful person.
• 1:04:13
  They're a racist or something, not because they might have legitimate concerns about the
• 1:04:18
  wisdom of changing the constitution or whatever it might be.
• 1:04:20
  I mean, and you're, so there's that, like I saw on Twitter, a famous Australian
• 1:04:24
  comedian who has a television show in the UK saying, um, it's extraordinary, the backlash
• 1:04:30
  that I'm getting and the hate racism, ableism, uh, this and that is from the, just for standing
• 1:04:38
  up for justice for our indigenous brothers.
• 1:04:41
  And I'm like, we're hang on a second.
• 1:04:44
  What's the likelihood that if you put up a yes post or a yes flag saying I support this
• 1:04:52
  change to give a voice to indigenous Australians that you're going to get a brick through your
• 1:04:56
  window or get the front of your house spray painted.
• 1:04:58
  I mean, I'm not taking a shit on your front door.
• 1:05:01
  I mean, they're not freedom writers come up zero, I guarantee, at least in my neck of
• 1:05:06
  the woods in the places where, where the cool kids hang out.
• 1:05:09
  If you put up a no poster, there would be a lot through the window.
• 1:05:12
  So spammy the sanctum, so it is like that that in the kind of Brooklyn areas of the
• 1:05:17
  major metropolitan cities and in Australia that the no is something you don't say, I reckon
• 1:05:23
  it'll, I reckon it'll pass by 80 plus percent in the, in the, yeah, in the cool kid air,
• 1:05:29
  in the, in the wealthy areas of this, this van batham, uh, person, the entire piece, which
• 1:05:36
  was, you know, seemed to me to be about 7,000 words, uh, about 5,000, 8,000 too long.
• 1:05:42
  But she said these are just lists the things that people said to her on Twitter.
• 1:05:48
  And, um, these are the trolls and it's the QAnon people and it's all stuff about QAnon.
• 1:05:54
  And it's essentially saying that if you're on the other side, you're, you're essentially
• 1:05:57
  Steve Bannon and she does reference Steve Bannon a couple of times in this piece.
• 1:06:01
  But, um, yeah, I find that, I find that kind of writing in that kind of, um, opinion journalism
• 1:06:08
  to be the cheapest type of opinion journalism that somebody said bad things to me on Twitter.
• 1:06:13
  Yeah.
• 1:06:14
  I mean, it takes, it takes the kernel of a truth, which is that all racists will vote no.
• 1:06:17
  Yeah.
• 1:06:18
  And then extrapolates from that to something that is not a logical conclusion, which is
• 1:06:22
  that all no voters must be racists.
• 1:06:24
  So I did this piece for, uh, I'm not talking about van specifically.
• 1:06:27
  Yeah, yeah, of course.
• 1:06:28
  Of course.
• 1:06:29
  Now, I did this piece for Barry Weiss's podcast, honestly, which you should check out.
• 1:06:32
  Um, and the first half of that was Barry in, um, at the rate of Reagan library, like,
• 1:06:37
  boo, can I speak Reagan library in the CME Valley and then I did, uh, one from Trump's
• 1:06:42
  rally because he didn't show up, of course, the debate, only a hundred people according
• 1:06:46
  to Michael Moynihan outside.
• 1:06:47
  Right.
• 1:06:48
  Okay.
• 1:06:49
  That was outside.
• 1:06:50
  I didn't know if I came through because he was hilarious and he was like, thousands,
• 1:06:53
  yeah.
• 1:06:54
  Can't get thousands outside.
• 1:06:55
  Thousands.
• 1:06:56
  And I was just like, I was just others like literally like 50 people all in rascal scooters,
• 1:07:01
  like going in circles, like, I don't know what you're talking about.
• 1:07:03
  There is a moment which I had them add to the piece where I was interviewing people on
• 1:07:08
  the way out and it was like a torrential downpour.
• 1:07:10
  So hard to get people.
• 1:07:12
  So there's, everyone's huddled onto this, you know, little awning in this big, rough looking
• 1:07:18
  guy comes by and I was like, I'm going to get kind to talk to you and he's like, who
• 1:07:20
  you with?
• 1:07:21
  And I see the free press.
• 1:07:22
  So we're in Detroit, the Detroit free press and I said, he's like, fuck you, fuck the
• 1:07:26
  free.
• 1:07:27
  And I said, no, no, no, no, no, it's not that free press.
• 1:07:30
  It's Barry Weiss's free press.
• 1:07:32
  And he walks away and he goes, go get your fucking Yamaka really says this and so I just
• 1:07:39
  walked with him.
• 1:07:40
  And I was like, hey, no, all right, we'll tell me where you get your news.
• 1:07:43
  And he is talking to some of the Trump volunteers, right?
• 1:07:46
  I think they're volunteers.
• 1:07:47
  One of the guys gave me my press credentials and they were talking about how they loved
• 1:07:51
  the Holocaust and I or Nick Fuentes.
• 1:07:53
  This is where we get our own.
• 1:07:54
  Oh, seriously?
• 1:07:55
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:56
  And they were like, oh, Nick Fuentes.
• 1:07:57
  So I did this piece and I guarantee you, if I was the NPR person that got that, that
• 1:08:03
  would have been the piece, right?
• 1:08:04
  This guy.
• 1:08:05
  I talked to about, you know, 50 other people who I probably disagreed with about all of
• 1:08:12
  them.
• 1:08:13
  But we're perfectly nice, really love their, you know, auto industry jobs or their union
• 1:08:18
  jobs, actually the weren't in the auto industry.
• 1:08:20
  And they were like, maybe Trump can help us some voted for Joe Biden.
• 1:08:23
  One guy that I talked to voted for Obama.
• 1:08:25
  There was a lot of like, do you work in the auto industry?
• 1:08:27
  I buy about American car once in a while.
• 1:08:30
  Yeah.
• 1:08:31
  Yeah.
• 1:08:32
  He gets into his key.
• 1:08:34
  Yeah.
• 1:08:35
  Yeah.
• 1:08:36
  Yeah.
• 1:08:37
  And so there was a lot of that.
• 1:08:38
  But like, that is the thing.
• 1:08:39
  You can focus on that, right?
• 1:08:41
  And it's like the Twitter stuff.
• 1:08:42
  There's always going to be that one guy.
• 1:08:44
  And that one guy I made sure that he was included because those are the type of people that
• 1:08:49
  are going to show up.
• 1:08:51
  Not all the people that there are racist or anti-Semites, but every racist and anti-Semite
• 1:08:55
  is going to vote for your candidate.
• 1:08:57
  That's for sure.
• 1:08:58
  And so it's worth mentioning and that actually is something that did happen.
• 1:09:01
  But to say like, you know, these are the people, all of these pieces about, you know, the
• 1:09:06
  voice vote and like, oh my God, the unbelievable racism and hate I got online.
• 1:09:10
  I'm like, yeah, but what percentage of that is the actual electorate that's going to
• 1:09:13
  vote no on this?
• 1:09:14
  Yeah.
• 1:09:15
  And it's hard to tell.
• 1:09:16
  They don't appear to want to quantify that because, you know, obviously it's much
• 1:09:19
  more interesting and you can get people riled up by saying they're all a bunch of fascists.
• 1:09:23
  I mean, it is a bit worrying to the chattering classes and I include myself in this.
• 1:09:28
  What it looks like if the vote goes down, like it's not a great look to people outside
• 1:09:35
  of Australia who don't necessarily who aren't familiar with the ins and outs of who haven't
• 1:09:39
  listened to this episode to just see the headline that Australia had an opportunity to give
• 1:09:44
  a voice to its First Nations people and decline to do so.
• 1:09:48
  Like the country already suffers from a reputation of being uncultured white racist boobs.
• 1:09:53
  It probably doesn't.
• 1:09:54
  And I thank God.
• 1:09:55
  Because if we need someone else in the English-speaking world that beats us on this, but we're so much
• 1:10:00
  like Australian.
• 1:10:01
  I'm like, Australians?
• 1:10:02
  Yeah, I know.
• 1:10:03
  Everyone loves our beaches and they think we look really.
• 1:10:06
  Yeah, it's true.
• 1:10:07
  Yeah.
• 1:10:08
  Have you had anything about Gale Gassi Abunal being a getting backlash for playing a gay
• 1:10:13
  person?
• 1:10:14
  And no.
• 1:10:15
  Oh.
• 1:10:16
  Is he not gay?
• 1:10:17
  No, apparently he's not gay.
• 1:10:18
  Oh, my God.
• 1:10:19
  That was weird.
• 1:10:20
  So there's a straight washing or something.
• 1:10:21
  Are we still doing that?
• 1:10:22
  Apparently we're still doing that.
• 1:10:24
  I think it's an Al Madova movie or something.
• 1:10:27
  He plays like a Mexican wrestler who's gay in the 80s.
• 1:10:31
  And I was listening to another podcast.
• 1:10:32
  Is he actually a luchador himself?
• 1:10:34
  I mean, yeah.
• 1:10:35
  We have to dig through all of the boxes.
• 1:10:39
  And he was saying, yeah, and then he has a list.
• 1:10:41
  Well, and I listened to this 20 minute review of movie reviews talking about this movie
• 1:10:46
  and the main subject is about how problematic it is.
• 1:10:49
  Like he's fantastic, but there are so many gay actors who could have done it.
• 1:10:54
  I'm like, I mean, is that and you're not.
• 1:10:57
  Yeah.
• 1:10:58
  Yeah.
• 1:10:59
  I mean, I'm like a Hispanic gay.
• 1:11:02
  I mean, Ricky Morton.
• 1:11:03
  How do you have to be though?
• 1:11:05
  Is there a threshold?
• 1:11:06
  Yeah.
• 1:11:07
  Like if you got like one body, you get what you got to.
• 1:11:10
  I mean, if you're not.
• 1:11:11
  I'm curious.
• 1:11:12
  If you just posted online occasionally.
• 1:11:14
  Yeah.
• 1:11:15
  Like sometimes you're down or at him and her.
• 1:11:18
  That's what you do.
• 1:11:19
  Should we point out, by the way, the only was recording this on a Saturday, the only
• 1:11:27
  news story that has really come across the Transome in the United States today is Jamal
• 1:11:31
  Bowman.
• 1:11:32
  So good.
• 1:11:33
  Representative Jamal Bowman from New York City.
• 1:11:35
  Yeah.
• 1:11:36
  Who's a commie pulled the fire alarm in the House of Representatives on purpose.
• 1:11:43
  On purpose?
• 1:11:44
  What?
• 1:11:45
  At least the statement there was like his people were like, he thought that opened the
• 1:11:48
  door.
• 1:11:49
  And I was like, how long has he been?
• 1:11:50
  I think the door.
• 1:11:51
  The thing is that fire on it, he's a literate, it burns, that's how it is in the subway,
• 1:11:57
  New York.
• 1:11:58
  No, seriously.
• 1:11:59
  Yeah.
• 1:12:00
  Yeah.
• 1:12:01
  I mean, that's crazy.
• 1:12:02
  Yeah.
• 1:12:03
  Why did he do this?
• 1:12:04
  Was this when they were voting on the on the extension?
• 1:12:06
  Yeah.
• 1:12:07
  Yes.
• 1:12:08
  He was trying to stop it.
• 1:12:09
  He didn't want them to be able to pass the extension during the, he pulled the fire
• 1:12:13
  alarm.
• 1:12:14
  So now you have no democracy times in the bright cannon office building when Greenwald is
• 1:12:22
  very unironically calling for his prosecution.
• 1:12:25
  Really?
• 1:12:26
  Well, yeah, because he's making the yeah.
• 1:12:28
  He should have played that wrestler.
• 1:12:29
  He's being making it.
• 1:12:30
  Yeah.
• 1:12:31
  He's making the what about his point.
• 1:12:32
  That's how gay.
• 1:12:33
  That's how gay.
• 1:12:34
  He's like, and he's got the marriage.
• 1:12:35
  He's weak.
• 1:12:36
  He's got the marriage.
• 1:12:37
  He's supposed to be close enough Spanish.
• 1:12:38
  Yeah.
• 1:12:39
  Yeah.
• 1:12:40
  Yeah.
• 1:12:41
  That's exactly how he should do it.
• 1:12:42
  Yeah.
• 1:12:43
  The argument that all the January 6th protest or a lot of the January 6th protestors were
• 1:12:48
  prosecuted under this kind of reach of a statute of disrupting an official proceeding.
• 1:12:54
  And by that same exact logic, this guy intentionally disrupted an official proceeding.
• 1:12:59
  So he's going to have to face six months in the, in the Husqaw, according to a lot of
• 1:13:03
  people.
• 1:13:04
  And New York Democrat Jamal Bowman literally pulled a fire alarm to Stalin prevent our efforts
• 1:13:07
  to force a vote to keep the federal government open pathetic.
• 1:13:11
  Criminal investigation needs to happen set up state GOP Congressman Nick Langworthy.
• 1:13:15
  Here we go.
• 1:13:16
  And a few others calling for his to be kicked out of the chamber lock him up.
• 1:13:23
  But that's pretty funny.
• 1:13:24
  But they should not go with a punishment.
• 1:13:26
  This is an embarrassment.
• 1:13:27
  Kevin McCarthy said.
• 1:13:29
  But that is an amazing, amazing tactic.
• 1:13:31
  It's like your panic and you're like, I don't know how to get this.
• 1:13:34
  Pull the fire alarm.
• 1:13:35
  Basically, yeah, that's right.
• 1:13:37
  It's what my six year old daughter would say as a solution.
• 1:13:40
  I think someone says people are about to vote and something you don't like.
• 1:13:42
  What do you do?
• 1:13:43
  They all have to evacuate, Danny.
• 1:13:46
  Glad to hear that she's a hooligan, that's great.
• 1:13:49
  She's a spaniard, man.
• 1:13:50
  She's a spaniard, you know.
• 1:13:52
  She's a crockie.
• 1:13:53
  Fucking far along.
• 1:13:54
  Josh, I don't want to, I don't want to, I think, I think this is probably fine.
• 1:14:00
  When you were talking about the voice vote, you gave the two sides.
• 1:14:05
  But for me, the best argument against the various equity things that I encounter is that
• 1:14:13
  aiming for parity is a far worse way to try and make things better for people who are
• 1:14:22
  actually suffering through deprivations of various kinds than just trying to address
• 1:14:28
  deprivations and improve the lives of the people who are struggling the most irrespective
• 1:14:33
  of what they look like.
• 1:14:35
  Are there, are there people who are perhaps part of that first nation's community, even
• 1:14:41
  that I don't like these phrases?
• 1:14:43
  But who, who, who appreciate that, is there any sort of constituent among them who make
• 1:14:49
  that argument?
• 1:14:50
  There are.
• 1:14:51
  Yeah.
• 1:14:52
  I mean, there are no one could be.
• 1:14:56
  Yeah.
• 1:14:57
  There is only one meal for us now.
• 1:15:00
  Yes.
• 1:15:01
  So one, I would say that one half of the indigenous no camp is in that, is on that side of the
• 1:15:08
  aisle saying, well, we need our practical solutions.
• 1:15:12
  I'm not sure that they'd articulate it exactly the way that you're saying by saying like
• 1:15:17
  it needs to be colorblind.
• 1:15:19
  I mean, I think they would still want to.
• 1:15:20
  Not colorblind.
• 1:15:21
  I do, I do have issue with that phrase, but that's a whole other thing.
• 1:15:24
  Right.
• 1:15:25
  Look, I think they would want to map the, how the disparities between indigenous Australians
• 1:15:30
  and non-indigenous Australians were moving and what I'm, and I think parity, I don't think
• 1:15:35
  there are many people who would disagree with parity in, say, life expectancy and health
• 1:15:41
  outcomes between races.
• 1:15:45
  I don't think many people would think that's a bad idea to, to, to keep track if one group
• 1:15:51
  has been historically shatter upon.
• 1:15:54
  But I do think that they, there would be a lot of differences of opinion about how that
• 1:15:57
  is done.
• 1:15:58
  Is there a reparations movement?
• 1:16:00
  No, no.
• 1:16:01
  No, at the moment, this is, seems crazy to me, I mean, this is what reparations should
• 1:16:06
  be for in America as well, like you committed a crime against these people.
• 1:16:10
  You signed, in our case, treaties that you broke at every case.
• 1:16:14
  You took people from their families, you did a lot of really horrible shit.
• 1:16:17
  Well, when I say no, what I, I guess I mean is that the conversation at the moment is
• 1:16:21
  consumed with this enormous national project to change the constitution.
• 1:16:25
  So like one thing at a time, and there are people who are talking about reparations, who
• 1:16:29
  are talking about a treaty and who are talking about all these other things, but I think
• 1:16:32
  those people are confused if they think that those things are going to happen if this
• 1:16:37
  thing goes down.
• 1:16:38
  Like, you know, I think there's this kind of, you know, they can be a progressive, almost
• 1:16:43
  quasi Marxist revolutionary, illusory fervor that people get into where they think you
• 1:16:49
  just have to burn it all down, and then the green shoots will appear in the, out of
• 1:16:53
  the rubble.
• 1:16:54
  Like a banning thing too.
• 1:16:55
  Yeah.
• 1:16:56
  Exactly.
• 1:16:57
  Yeah.
• 1:16:58
  Exactly.
• 1:16:59
  And it's just bizarre.
• 1:17:00
  Like, there's a contingent of indigenous Australians who, who say, this is the wrong,
• 1:17:06
  like, let's, let's vote no so that in the neck, in the coming years, we can do a much
• 1:17:10
  bigger and more audacious reform, like a treaty.
• 1:17:15
  And I think if you understand how the messy reality of politics tends to work and how
• 1:17:20
  the inertia of public opinion tends to function and how political expediency tends to arise,
• 1:17:27
  the idea that you're going to do this huge national attempt to do something, it's going
• 1:17:31
  to fail, and then you're going to immediately turn around and do something even larger and
• 1:17:34
  more audacious as a result, just doesn't, does not, in my experience, tend to be how
• 1:17:38
  politics goes.
• 1:17:39
  Is it true?
• 1:17:40
  I mean, look, I've been digging into a lot of this stuff in the US, in opinions, incredible
• 1:17:46
  opinion polls, the massive book of opinion polls that I found right when they started
• 1:17:50
  becoming reliable in the 1940s about people, you know, willing to have black people move
• 1:17:55
  in their neighborhood, willing to have black students at their school where their kids
• 1:18:00
  go.
• 1:18:01
  This is white people who are, who are pulled.
• 1:18:03
  And the numbers are absolutely shocking and not unexpected, but absolutely shocking in
• 1:18:07
  like 1940.
• 1:18:09
  The change in 20 years is also shocking.
• 1:18:12
  I mean, it's, you know, heartening that it goes from 40% of people say, I'm happy having
• 1:18:17
  a black person moving to the neighborhood to something like 70%, 65%, then it goes up
• 1:18:22
  from there.
• 1:18:23
  And I'm sure that you probably would be in the 90 plus percent, I'm sure right now.
• 1:18:29
  In Australia, I mean, you see this representation of people in parliament, you say it was only
• 1:18:33
  1967, where, where Aboriginal people actually became Australians as it were.
• 1:18:39
  It seems also that there's been an enormous amount of progress and a short period of time.
• 1:18:43
  People often misunderstand this and say that what you're saying is that racism is over,
• 1:18:48
  things are, are solved, no, it's not a binary thing, but progress has been made and that's
• 1:18:52
  very difficult for a lot of people on a particular side of the argument to ever acknowledge.
• 1:18:56
  Is it true?
• 1:18:57
  Because we know this and I don't make this argument, but people in talking about reparations in
• 1:19:01
  the U.S. tend to make this argument in the anti-reparation side.
• 1:19:05
  I think it's kind of a more extreme end, it says this, but, you know, the war on poverty,
• 1:19:11
  affirmative action, all of these things, government programs, were a form of reparations.
• 1:19:15
  So we've had that in a way already.
• 1:19:17
  I'm not saying I agree with that, but that's just an argument that's made.
• 1:19:20
  Have there been a number of programs since 1967 to today that have allowed, you know,
• 1:19:27
  the people that have been pounded into the pavement for so long and, you know, disrespected
• 1:19:32
  their land stone, their children's stone, given them in edge up an affirmative action
• 1:19:36
  type program or something?
• 1:19:37
  Yes, I mean, there have been massive programs.
• 1:19:38
  So there's been a lot of, it hasn't been ignored.
• 1:19:40
  There's been enormous, there's been enormous amounts of money, but I mean, you know, what
• 1:19:43
  exactly do you do, you know, those, those things have problems with their own.
• 1:19:47
  I mean, give people, you know, who live in remote areas as much money as they need and
• 1:19:54
  then what does that do to their entrepreneurialism, for example, what does that do to the
• 1:19:57
  business, to local indigenous businesses and so on, if there's, if you remove financial
• 1:20:01
  incentives.
• 1:20:02
  So then you swing in the other direction, you go, okay, we need a self-reliance ethos.
• 1:20:05
  And then that doesn't quite work because, you know, you haven't got the educational resources.
• 1:20:09
  So you pour more money into education, but then, you know, maybe you're not addressing domestic
• 1:20:13
  violence and alcoholism and family strife.
• 1:20:15
  So then one government literally sort of militarized the response and sent in the military and
• 1:20:20
  was like, okay, let's get tougher on this.
• 1:20:22
  And then the next government comes in and goes, we have to get softer on this.
• 1:20:24
  I mean, the reality is you have this irreconcilable clash between the, the oldest and quote unquote
• 1:20:30
  most primitive civilization in the world at the time.
• 1:20:33
  That'll get me in trouble.
• 1:20:34
  But I'm talking from the perspective of someone in the 1700s where the British Empire is
• 1:20:37
  the most technologically sophisticated civilization in the world.
• 1:20:41
  And these, these, according to the sort of logic of, well, you start out, you know, pre-agricultural
• 1:20:47
  and you go through the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age and, you know, you go from the
• 1:20:51
  Stone Age and then you develop agriculture and then you develop houses and buildings and
• 1:20:54
  so on.
• 1:20:55
  I mean, the Europeans came to the land mass and they had a set of criteria by which they
• 1:20:59
  determined whether or not a land mass was inhabited.
• 1:21:02
  And they declared it terronolious.
• 1:21:03
  It's an empty land mass because they aren't buildings.
• 1:21:05
  There isn't farming that they're not using metals and stuff like that.
• 1:21:09
  So you've got a, you've got the largest gulf probably anywhere in the world between where
• 1:21:15
  two civilizations are at or rather one civilization, a whole bunch of civilizations in Australia.
• 1:21:20
  And so yes, all of those attempts since 1967 and before to try to resolve those differences,
• 1:21:27
  it's not an easy thing.
• 1:21:28
  It's not like someone has a master plan.
• 1:21:30
  And I think the biggest evolution and the thing that Australians can be proudest of is
• 1:21:36
  that there is a, there's been a massive shift in recent decades, culturally, intellectually,
• 1:21:43
  emotionally about the importance of the issue.
• 1:21:46
  The problem is that can also exhibit itself in ways that could be fatuous or virtue
• 1:21:53
  signally.
• 1:21:54
  Like every single meeting now in Australia and every single event begins with an acknowledgment
• 1:21:58
  of country, which is like a land of culture.
• 1:22:00
  So even if you're really exploring a lot of done the things that way, I don't think you
• 1:22:03
  are.
• 1:22:04
  I'm not even sure you explored it.
• 1:22:05
  We might have got a man.
• 1:22:06
  We did.
• 1:22:07
  We did.
• 1:22:08
  No, we did.
• 1:22:09
  I mean, the only thing that ever got from that was Yahoo Sirius and he lasted for about
• 1:22:11
  a second.
• 1:22:12
  The question to the land is profound.
• 1:22:14
  This is not something that needed importation from the United States, I think.
• 1:22:17
  I mean, it's something that they do with each other.
• 1:22:19
  There would be aboriginal nations that would meet and they'd do a welcome to country ceremony
• 1:22:24
  to each other.
• 1:22:25
  Yeah, but when a bunch of white people are doing an unzoom, it's different.
• 1:22:27
  Right.
• 1:22:28
  Certainly.
• 1:22:29
  Yeah.
• 1:22:30
  So then the question is, when aboriginal say that, I'm like, oh, that's cool.
• 1:22:32
  That's interesting.
• 1:22:33
  And then the question is, does that become a distraction from actually resolving the real
• 1:22:38
  life circumstances of indigenous Australians because it helps us to feel good about ourselves
• 1:22:42
  without really doing anything practical or is it an necessary precursor or do they run
• 1:22:46
  alongside each other?
• 1:22:48
  So that's a long way of answering your question about what has happened since 1967.
• 1:22:52
  What I would say is what has happened even just in the past 20 years in my adult lifetime
• 1:22:57
  is a revolution in the way that Australians think about First Nations people from being
• 1:23:02
  something that they can exclude from their daily life to the sort of national issue along
• 1:23:07
  with probably climate change.
• 1:23:09
  And then, but in parallel, yes, advances in closing the gap between indigenous Australians
• 1:23:15
  and non-Indigenous Australians, but that hasn't moved as fast as the cultural awakening
• 1:23:19
  has.
• 1:23:20
  Isn't there a risk of kind of infantilizing and I mean, the reasons why the gaps persist
• 1:23:31
  and perhaps even widen in certain areas may not necessarily boil down to colonialization.
• 1:23:39
  It could be any number of things, especially if, for example, you insist on trying to
• 1:23:44
  live a lifestyle and in a way separate from the rest of the community because this is
• 1:23:53
  how we've always done it and this is how we're going to do it going forward.
• 1:23:57
  That may actually retard your development.
• 1:24:00
  And it's the reason why I say addressing disparities as opposed to looking for parity probably
• 1:24:04
  makes the most sense because there is a complex infrastructure from culture to social interactions
• 1:24:13
  et cetera that all have to be taken into account and simply insisting over and over again
• 1:24:20
  that this population must be dealt with separately, must be regarded independently and must be
• 1:24:26
  viewed as a kind of perpetual victim.
• 1:24:30
  And forever and ever are men, disparities that exist between anyone who happens to look
• 1:24:34
  like this and anyone who happens to look like that must always be explained in this way.
• 1:24:39
  It's a kind of essentialist fundamentalism that I think is necessarily going to lead to
• 1:24:45
  problems down the road.
• 1:24:46
  And the reality is that there are disparities in all directions in the United States.
• 1:24:50
  So there happens to be one with one that gets obsessed over all of them.
• 1:24:56
  We don't bet, Josh.
• 1:24:57
  And I think it's generally not helpful.
• 1:24:58
  Of course.
• 1:24:59
  Yes.
• 1:25:00
  They own everything.
• 1:25:01
  I think it's great.
• 1:25:02
  And that may break through.
• 1:25:03
  Yeah.
• 1:25:04
  Let's just cut the mics off.
• 1:25:05
  The one thing that concerns me a lot about this, and I've spent way too much time in
• 1:25:11
  the past month reading about race relations in America's put it in a broad way like that
• 1:25:18
  since, you know, the 1600s.
• 1:25:22
  And what the conclusion that I come to is not a conclusion about the history of American
• 1:25:28
  race relations.
• 1:25:29
  It's one where at the end of it, I'm incredibly despondent.
• 1:25:32
  And I'm despondent because I look at Australia and I look at Sweden.
• 1:25:36
  These are two examples that I've been looking at recently.
• 1:25:38
  I've been trying to pay attention to this voice vote.
• 1:25:40
  And you see that from, you know, colonization in Australia to the present day, and
• 1:25:48
  an enormous gap has opened up.
• 1:25:50
  I'm narrowed probably a little bit, but it's the huge gap between the indigenous population
• 1:25:56
  and the...
• 1:25:57
  Well, just to clarify, it hasn't opened up.
• 1:25:59
  I mean, the gap was there.
• 1:26:00
  Was there?
• 1:26:01
  Yeah.
• 1:26:02
  Yeah.
• 1:26:03
  It's not like they had.
• 1:26:04
  No, but the gap opened the second they got on Australia and there's the gap.
• 1:26:09
  But you have this happening in Australia.
• 1:26:12
  You look at Sweden.
• 1:26:13
  Sweden last week, oh, of Christus on the Prime Minister called out the military because
• 1:26:20
  of the gang problem that's going on in Sweden.
• 1:26:22
  There was a bombing the other day killed an innocent woman in these gang wars.
• 1:26:28
  The gangs where people don't want to talk about in Sweden that some people do are mostly
• 1:26:32
  immigrant gangs.
• 1:26:34
  The people, the prison population is wildly disproportionately people from Afghanistan,
• 1:26:39
  the Middle East, etc.
• 1:26:41
  There's every conversation that I see from one particular perspective in the United States
• 1:26:47
  in...
• 1:26:48
  This is the Ibermex-Kendi position in Australia in Sweden, focuses entirely on racism,
• 1:26:54
  entirely, almost exclusively.
• 1:26:56
  That's what Kendi's book is about.
• 1:26:58
  And when I go back and read this stuff, I say, well, yeah, it's absolutely worth not
• 1:27:02
  only knowing this stuff, but understanding the background, the history of how we got to
• 1:27:06
  where we are.
• 1:27:08
  That is also true in Australia.
• 1:27:09
  Also true in Sweden, but I fear the disappointment that is going to wash over everybody when they
• 1:27:15
  realize that the problem is a thousand times more complicated than this.
• 1:27:20
  And when you're only making political arguments, and I think the profession of sociology has
• 1:27:26
  been taken over by political ideologues, a lot of these people, a lot of these papers
• 1:27:29
  that I've been reading are unbelievably political.
• 1:27:33
  And there's no solution to any of these things because when you look at money that's been
• 1:27:38
  put into all these programs, the fact that in Sweden, I mean, everyone has apartments.
• 1:27:42
  They're basically given an apartment when they arrive in Sweden, integrations been in
• 1:27:46
  issue.
• 1:27:47
  But when you look at the newspapers in Sweden, particular newspapers, it's just like if
• 1:27:51
  we don't stop Swedish racism, which is the only thing that is preventing the development
• 1:27:56
  of our immigrant communities in creating the crime.
• 1:27:59
  This is literally a piece that I read yesterday.
• 1:28:01
  The crime is being a creation of white supremacy.
• 1:28:05
  It's so unbelievably embarrassingly simplistic that that is what dominates to debate.
• 1:28:11
  I mean, truly what dominates to debate.
• 1:28:13
  I mean, the candy stuff is, I'm not Chris Rufo on this stuff, but when I'm looking at what
• 1:28:19
  kids are reading about this stuff, when it's political, it's usually in that direction.
• 1:28:22
  I've got to say there's less of that in Australia.
• 1:28:25
  And then the yes campaign does not predicate itself on the woes of indigenous Australians
• 1:28:30
  being caused by racism.
• 1:28:32
  That actually is not a necessary component of the case.
• 1:28:35
  It does exist, though, that argument.
• 1:28:37
  Well, it exists in, yes, of course.
• 1:28:39
  I mean, people who fly around and want to take cheap shots at the no side will use
• 1:28:44
  the cheapest tool they have available, which is to accuse them of racism.
• 1:28:48
  But the actual yes campaign itself, like the official campaign, is one of positivity,
• 1:28:52
  is one of like, we are all Australians, it's shitty that we have this heritage, this
• 1:29:01
  baggage that we still have to carry from a shitty thing that happened in the past.
• 1:29:06
  Let's not mope around and feel guilty about it, like no one now alive is to blame.
• 1:29:11
  Let's just do this change to provide opportunity to everybody.
• 1:29:14
  I mean, I think Camille, your point is really interesting about, you know, is race necessarily
• 1:29:20
  the best metric.
• 1:29:22
  So there are, I mean, I've always said this about American racism as well, which struck
• 1:29:25
  me as a foreigner moving to the United States and seeing the racial conversation here, that
• 1:29:30
  there was a big jigsaw piece missing from the conversation, and that piece was class,
• 1:29:35
  that there's an overlay between class and race.
• 1:29:39
  And so we often confuse the two, I think.
• 1:29:41
  I mean, you know, we have certain attitudes towards, towards people who smell like urine,
• 1:29:48
  you know, and if a disproportionately large number, just call my friends, but they're
• 1:29:52
  fine.
• 1:29:53
  Disproportionately is a large number of redheads, you know, were shuffling around the street
• 1:29:58
  smelling of urine, then you would have certain attitudes about redheads.
• 1:30:02
  And so, you know, and disadvantage and, you know, the perpetuation of disadvantage over
• 1:30:07
  the course of generations.
• 1:30:09
  So similarly in Australia, there's that problem, you know, the disadvantage means that
• 1:30:14
  people's attitudes towards first nations, people get colored by in the same way their attitudes
• 1:30:19
  towards poor people would be colored.
• 1:30:21
  And then the second component in Australia that's essential to understand is geography.
• 1:30:24
  And as you alluded to, Camille, I mean, you know, if you live, we've got a landmass
• 1:30:29
  the same size as the contiguous United States, we've got the population of Florida.
• 1:30:34
  And all of that population of Florida, 80% of it is huddled on the eastern, on the bottom
• 1:30:40
  half of the eastern coast within 60 miles, 100 miles of the coast.
• 1:30:45
  Then you've got thousands of miles.
• 1:30:48
  If you're living in the middle of those thousands of miles, then of course there are going
• 1:30:53
  to be disparities in health outcomes, access to specialists, educational outcomes.
• 1:31:02
  And so you're right, Camille, I don't think the attempt is to say we must racialize this
• 1:31:08
  because the only problem is that white people are being racist.
• 1:31:13
  I think the claim is there are all of these challenges that map unequally onto this group
• 1:31:18
  of civilizations that had been here for longer than anyone had been anywhere.
• 1:31:23
  And therefore, the way to address those is for representatives of those nations to have
• 1:31:29
  some forum in which they can debate.
• 1:31:31
  I guess one of the things that I am frustrated with in the conversation in the United States,
• 1:31:35
  which is of course the one that I pay the most attention to, is the idea of a uniqueness
• 1:31:39
  to it in the United States or in Western Europe in the UK is pretty similar debate about
• 1:31:44
  this.
• 1:31:45
  But when you focus on race, all you have to do is kind of look at any other region in
• 1:31:50
  the world, any other region, and you will find something similar that is oftentimes not
• 1:31:54
  based on race.
• 1:31:55
  I mean, how do you think that Russians look at Chechens or Georgians or Azerbaijanis?
• 1:32:01
  I mean, this is universal in the world.
• 1:32:04
  Asian on Asian racism is really, that's hilarious.
• 1:32:09
  The Korean way that people talk about me, the Japanese talk about the Chinese, the way
• 1:32:13
  that the Chinese talk about the Korean way and speak about the Chinese.
• 1:32:17
  Nikki Haley talks about Vivek Ramaswamy.
• 1:32:19
  Yeah, a difference.
• 1:32:20
  I will.
• 1:32:21
  I will dine out on that.
• 1:32:23
  Yeah.
• 1:32:24
  It's so bad.
• 1:32:25
  She hates it.
• 1:32:26
  She hates it so much.
• 1:32:27
  Yeah, I can't do it.
• 1:32:28
  You'll get banned.
• 1:32:29
  You'll get Josha.
• 1:32:30
  I'm not going to get Josha banned.
• 1:32:32
  This is a very uncomfortable conversation.
• 1:32:35
  It's extremely uncomfortable.
• 1:32:37
  I think you can get that podcast on the sub-stack as well.
• 1:32:40
  You can subscribe to become a premium member.
• 1:32:42
  It's a great listen.
• 1:32:43
  It's extremely uncomfortable conversations.
• 1:32:45
  Yeah.
• 1:32:46
  Google that.
• 1:32:47
  And only that in quotation marks.
• 1:32:48
  So you don't get any other crap.
• 1:32:49
  Come here.
• 1:32:50
  Just before I forget one thing, one interesting point that you sort of alluded to about disparities
• 1:32:54
  of outcomes is that some people have said, well, you're baking this thing into the constitution,
• 1:32:59
  this new body.
• 1:33:00
  So why don't you have a suicide trigger where once there is equality between indigenous Australians
• 1:33:06
  and non-indigenous Australians on all of the metrics that you want, the thing dissolves.
• 1:33:11
  But you need it forever in the constitution if the point is to close the gap between
• 1:33:15
  outcomes of indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.
• 1:33:18
  You're putting this thing in the country forever.
• 1:33:22
  And you're talking about problems that you want to overcome over some time frame.
• 1:33:27
  That doesn't make any sense.
• 1:33:28
  It's what Sandra Day O'Connor said in her ruling on affirmative action that we probably
• 1:33:32
  won't need this in 25 years.
• 1:33:34
  That was 22 years ago.
• 1:33:37
  It was always a conversation that had an end date and expiry in it that once these goals
• 1:33:42
  were met, we would disassemble it.
• 1:33:44
  That's not a conversation that really happens now, though, I would say, not really.
• 1:33:48
  It happens basically at the Supreme Court and not generally, even that much in politics
• 1:33:53
  anymore, which is really curious because in the 1990s, it was a huge topic.
• 1:33:58
  There's the ballot initiatives everywhere, especially in California where I'm from, against
• 1:34:03
  affirmative action, and these things tended to be popular in California and everywhere
• 1:34:07
  else too.
• 1:34:08
  But it was part of politics.
• 1:34:09
  It was right-coded politics to be motivated by being against affirmative action.
• 1:34:15
  It isn't anymore.
• 1:34:16
  Yes, not.
• 1:34:17
  But that sort of revolution kept simmering under the surface, especially within the libertarian
• 1:34:23
  legal movement.
• 1:34:26
  It shows up suddenly and everyone is shocked and for about a week slate, we'll say that
• 1:34:31
  America is about ready to plunge into eternal darkness, then they forget about it until the
• 1:34:35
  next abortion case.
• 1:34:36
  What is slate?
• 1:34:37
  Slate.
• 1:34:38
  Slate.
• 1:34:39
  It sounds pretty good, though.
• 1:34:44
  It's what they're smoking on the streets of Europe.
• 1:34:46
  It's a new drive.
• 1:34:47
  Slate.
• 1:34:48
  Yeah.
• 1:34:49
  Mandatory.
• 1:34:50
  Zeps, I'm curious.
• 1:34:51
  I mean, what was the last time you were in the States?
• 1:34:54
  I was here, so peak on the crime, actually, and I was going to catch up with you guys.
• 1:34:58
  And I think Matt, you and I had a lunch date in December of 2021, and then you got
• 1:35:04
  Omicron.
• 1:35:05
  I think the day before you got COVID.
• 1:35:08
  That's when Nick Gillespie insisted on having a close quarter's reason, happy hour to celebrate
• 1:35:14
  Christmas and every single person got not just Omicron, but AIDS.
• 1:35:19
  Yeah, you have the same.
• 1:35:20
  Yeah.
• 1:35:21
  I think that's it.
• 1:35:22
  This is great.
• 1:35:23
  Great party.
• 1:35:24
  Yeah.
• 1:35:25
  It's such a great.
• 1:35:26
  It's a go-kameleous, when I was like, how do things look to you now that you're back?
• 1:35:32
  Look.
• 1:35:33
  I mean, I'm only here for the weekend, so I'm not going to be like the Thomas Friedman
• 1:35:36
  who goes to Egypt for one weekend and talks to a cab driver and comes back and writes
• 1:35:40
  an op-ed about what all Egyptians really will for him.
• 1:35:43
  You don't know.
• 1:35:44
  You don't know.
• 1:35:45
  You don't know.
• 1:35:46
  You don't know.
• 1:35:47
  You don't know.
• 1:35:48
  No, but.
• 1:35:49
  No, I just love this city.
• 1:35:52
  I always do.
• 1:35:53
  I'm such a sucker for it.
• 1:35:55
  My formative years were here.
• 1:35:56
  My 20s and 30s were in New York City.
• 1:35:58
  I came to New York.
• 1:35:59
  I didn't come.
• 1:36:00
  I didn't move to the United States.
• 1:36:01
  I didn't want to be in the United States.
• 1:36:03
  I didn't care about the United States.
• 1:36:05
  I care about New York.
• 1:36:06
  I loved this time.
• 1:36:07
  I just loved it.
• 1:36:10
  And yeah, I had a tremendous time here.
• 1:36:13
  So when I, you know, I literally, I'm that guy who as the plane is coming into La Guadilla
• 1:36:17
  and I see the skyline like a lump forms in my throat and my eyes well up.
• 1:36:22
  You, you, you and me both, man, to be totally out.
• 1:36:25
  It's the only place I feel like home.
• 1:36:26
  I mean, honestly, when I drive over the bridge, I'm in the cab over the bridge.
• 1:36:29
  You know, I mean, I'm at that point in my life now where I have two little kids.
• 1:36:32
  I have my podcast, which is going really well.
• 1:36:34
  I have a job, which is going really well.
• 1:36:37
  And it's a lot of, it's a lot of.
• 1:36:39
  I'll see.
• 1:36:40
  No, but I mean, that's right.
• 1:36:42
  Exactly.
• 1:36:43
  I'm still managing director.
• 1:36:44
  It gives me a call.
• 1:36:45
  No, but it's a lot of work.
• 1:36:47
  And so when I think back to my time in New York where I had no responsibilities, no mortgage,
• 1:36:53
  you know, a pretty, pretty cruzy life.
• 1:36:57
  And I was in my 20s as a gay man in New York City.
• 1:37:00
  Cruzy life.
• 1:37:01
  Oh, yeah.
• 1:37:02
  Yeah.
• 1:37:03
  Okay.
• 1:37:04
  I meant to relax.
• 1:37:05
  Yeah.
• 1:37:06
  Yeah.
• 1:37:07
  Cruzy.
• 1:37:08
  Oh, it's way.
• 1:37:09
  Yeah.
• 1:37:10
  Yeah.
• 1:37:11
  So there's a certain amount of whistfulness as I walk the streets and go, you know, walk past
• 1:37:14
  my old apartment building and I think I remember going in here.
• 1:37:17
  I went to Half-Bus Live today.
• 1:37:19
  I just woke past the building where I went in for what is that now a mattress store?
• 1:37:23
  What was that?
• 1:37:24
  It's something R.T.
• 1:37:25
  It's R.T.
• 1:37:26
  It's R.T.
• 1:37:27
  Yeah.
• 1:37:28
  It's sputnik.
• 1:37:29
  Yeah.
• 1:37:30
  Yeah.
• 1:37:31
  All sorts of good news from yours.
• 1:37:32
  Yeah.
• 1:37:33
  Yeah.
• 1:37:34
  Yeah.
• 1:37:35
  Yeah.
• 1:37:36
  By the way, if you before, right before you got here, Matt and I were talking about the great
• 1:37:43
  Norma Donald.
• 1:37:44
  I always like to bring this up that my favorite clip of Norma Donald actually is Norma Donald
• 1:37:47
  and Josh Zepz.
• 1:37:48
  God, I missed that guy.
• 1:37:50
  Did you know this?
• 1:37:51
  The one where...
• 1:37:52
  Not at all.
• 1:37:53
  Not at all.
• 1:37:54
  Really?
• 1:37:55
  Brutalizes Seth Meyers.
• 1:37:56
  Which is...
• 1:37:57
  Oh, yeah.
• 1:37:58
  No.
• 1:37:59
  Wasn't it...
• 1:38:00
  Wasn't it Fallon?
• 1:38:01
  Or...
• 1:38:02
  I said Meyers.
• 1:38:03
  Oh, was it?
• 1:38:04
  Yeah.
• 1:38:05
  Anyway, we kind of shot on all of them because I was...
• 1:38:06
  Yeah.
• 1:38:07
  Yeah.
• 1:38:08
  I had a norm.
• 1:38:09
  Yeah.
• 1:38:10
  Yeah.
• 1:38:11
  It's like...
• 1:38:12
  Yeah, comedy.
• 1:38:13
  I think a...
• 1:38:14
  What would Seth Meyers do?
• 1:38:15
  Just unbelievable.
• 1:38:16
  I was trying to...
• 1:38:17
  I was trying to kind of poke him and I was trying to get...
• 1:38:20
  Because I'm a huge fan of Letterman and I always hated Jay Leno and I think Jimmy Fallon
• 1:38:27
  is fatuous.
• 1:38:28
  And so I was kind of trying to get Norm's...
• 1:38:30
  Because Norm was a Dave Letterman guy as well.
• 1:38:32
  Yeah.
• 1:38:33
  And he wrote with Jim Downey, who you just hung out with, who was one of the first writers
• 1:38:38
  on Letterman on Late Night.
• 1:38:39
  And he was like in the first season.
• 1:38:41
  Yeah.
• 1:38:42
  I think you can still find that most of the half-bossed live stuff because I was one of the...
• 1:38:46
  We call them presented, one of the hosts and producers of that.
• 1:38:49
  Miss Begotten Adventure but it was fabulous while when it was at its peak.
• 1:38:53
  It was fun.
• 1:38:54
  I used to do it all the time.
• 1:38:55
  Yeah, you would come on on...
• 1:38:56
  Yeah.
• 1:38:57
  You only had one cup of Wednesday.
• 1:38:58
  One cup of Wednesday.
• 1:38:59
  You only had one cup of Wednesday.
• 1:39:00
  One cup of Wednesday.
• 1:39:01
  One cup of Wednesday.
• 1:39:02
  So...
• 1:39:03
  Who's that?
• 1:39:04
  Mark Mahill.
• 1:39:05
  Oh, yeah.
• 1:39:06
  You just said Mama Moo.
• 1:39:07
  Mama Moo.
• 1:39:08
  Yeah, Mark Lamont Hill.
• 1:39:09
  Yeah.
• 1:39:10
  He's the hip hop professor.
• 1:39:11
  Yeah.
• 1:39:12
  He's the hip hop professor.
• 1:39:13
  He's the hip hop...
• 1:39:14
  He's a very nice person by the way.
• 1:39:17
  I do like him and he is someday going to prove that Moo Mee is innocent.
• 1:39:22
  He wrote a book about that like 20 years after Michael Moore was like, yeah, guys, probably
• 1:39:27
  guilty.
• 1:39:28
  Who Michael Moore literally wrote that in his book, it's probably guilty, which just shows
• 1:39:33
  you how guilty he was.
• 1:39:34
  Anyway, my favorite book of him is him with a juicy small, that what Jesse says, well,
• 1:39:40
  I mean, so, well, he asks him, so what do people say about you that isn't true?
• 1:39:44
  Well, that I, you know, perpetrator to fake hate crime.
• 1:39:46
  It was like, oh, yeah.
• 1:39:47
  Obviously.
• 1:39:48
  Yeah.
• 1:39:49
  Yeah.
• 1:39:50
  Yeah, obviously.
• 1:39:51
  Mark Lamont Hill's response.
• 1:39:52
  Can you drop the audio of that into the podcast just to propagate it further?
• 1:39:57
  Thank you, Jesse.
• 1:39:58
  For coming on up next.
• 1:39:59
  Oh, Jay Simpson will be in the building trying to find the real killer of his wife.
• 1:40:06
  He's just such a shame that you do.
• 1:40:07
  We were doing 12 hours a day of content if for like five or six years.
• 1:40:12
  And then you get, it gets bought by you know, Gigantocorp and it all gets pulled.
• 1:40:17
  So now that's only the thing that's linked stuff, basically, uh, and occasionally stuff
• 1:40:22
  that I release on my podcast to our premium subscribers, uh, I've noticed yet it uncomfortable
• 1:40:27
  conversations.
• 1:40:28
  Uh, yeah.
• 1:40:29
  Susan Sarrell, that's in wild breach of some, but they're like, they're not doing anything
• 1:40:33
  with this shit.
• 1:40:34
  I always think about that.
• 1:40:35
  Like, let me post a clip from the Soviet movie and my violent, no, it doesn't exist anymore.
• 1:40:40
  No Soviet Union, no half post.
• 1:40:42
  I mean, no one can get that.
• 1:40:44
  It's not, yeah.
• 1:40:45
  I'm not sure.
• 1:40:46
  Anyway, but I'll occasionally put thing.
• 1:40:47
  And in fact, you can get the norm McDonald, you can hear the norm McDonald interview in
• 1:40:50
  my podcast feed as well if you can't find it on YouTube.
• 1:40:53
  But I mean, I feel like I've got some of them on video on hard drives.
• 1:40:59
  I feel like I should just upload them to YouTube.
• 1:41:01
  Sure.
• 1:41:02
  Probably.
• 1:41:03
  I made a, when I saw the first flames inside the device building, like at the beginning
• 1:41:11
  of the Reichstag fire, as I was running outside, I got as much of my old stuff as I could.
• 1:41:17
  I mean, stuff that wasn't aired.
• 1:41:18
  I mean, just like old, full interviews, because you know, that stuff gets cut to a minute
• 1:41:22
  and a half, two minutes.
• 1:41:24
  And some of them are 60 minutes of me doing combat with somebody in a really fun way.
• 1:41:27
  And I got most of that.
• 1:41:29
  But I fear that all of it is gone, is going to be gone.
• 1:41:33
  The stuff that I don't have, the Huffington Post thing, which is crazy, is that I did a million
• 1:41:38
  hits on Huffington Post and Huff Post live.
• 1:41:41
  I can't find any of them.
• 1:41:43
  They didn't have.
• 1:41:44
  I mean, why not just keep it up?
• 1:41:46
  It was all this.
• 1:41:47
  I just leave it.
• 1:41:48
  What's the code?
• 1:41:49
  What do you have to pay for a Google Cloud storage account?
• 1:41:51
  You do.
• 1:41:52
  You do.
• 1:41:53
  I mean, Ariana can, you know, plagiarize a book and, you know, get some money.
• 1:41:59
  She never did that.
• 1:42:00
  She just did it twice.
• 1:42:01
  She just did it twice.
• 1:42:02
  Those two times are two books.
• 1:42:04
  Like, who cares?
• 1:42:05
  You didn't once.
• 1:42:06
  You didn't once.
• 1:42:07
  You didn't do the Marie Callis book and the Picasso one.
• 1:42:10
  And she did this with like Ghost Rider's the whole time, including Andrew Breitbart,
• 1:42:13
  right?
• 1:42:14
  Ghost Rider.
• 1:42:15
  Oh, that's right.
• 1:42:16
  Original Huff Poe, him and Greg Gutfeld, original Huffington Post employees.
• 1:42:19
  Rest in power, King.
• 1:42:20
  Yeah.
• 1:42:21
  Rest in power, King.
• 1:42:22
  But so what else in this final thing, because then you have to go to do something.
• 1:42:29
  I'm going to see a show.
• 1:42:31
  Oh, my God.
• 1:42:32
  I was going to see the show.
• 1:42:33
  That's so good.
• 1:42:34
  I've got a part.
• 1:42:35
  Yeah.
• 1:42:36
  Yeah.
• 1:42:37
  The colon.
• 1:42:38
  Bye.
• 1:42:39
  Yeah.
• 1:42:40
  Yeah.
• 1:42:41
  And by the way, if you guys who are not from New York, when somebody says they're going
• 1:42:44
  to a show, it means they're going to a dungeon somewhere in Chelsea.
• 1:42:46
  No, I'm going to a show show.
• 1:42:49
  Oh.
• 1:42:50
  I'm going to a Broadway show.
• 1:42:52
  What are you going to see?
• 1:42:55
  It's actually Stephen Sondheim's last musical, and it's the second night of previews, and
• 1:43:00
  two of my friends are in it, Dennis O'Hare, brilliant actor and trailer, and also the
• 1:43:07
  husband of one of my old school friends, Bobby Canavale, who's married to Rose Bowie,
• 1:43:11
  and who I went to school with.
• 1:43:12
  You went to school with Rose Bowie?
• 1:43:13
  Yeah.
• 1:43:14
  I don't know.
• 1:43:15
  She's an Aussie.
• 1:43:16
  Yes, from Sydney.
• 1:43:17
  I think a brother and a artist.
• 1:43:18
  I think I'm running.
• 1:43:19
  That's right.
• 1:43:20
  Yeah, you had a show down here, and I saw, I didn't know it was Australian.
• 1:43:23
  I would have gone up and said some really nasty things to him.
• 1:43:26
  No, I would have grabbed him by the lapels and looked him in the face, and I would have
• 1:43:30
  said, the time has come to say fairs fair, to pay the rent, to pay our share.
• 1:43:36
  Well, yes.
• 1:43:38
  That is George.
• 1:43:39
  That would be George Byrne, and hello, George, and Rosie, Rose is up in Montalk shooting
• 1:43:43
  something.
• 1:43:44
  So she won't be joining me.
• 1:43:45
  Okay.
• 1:43:46
  Well, where can we get your podcast?
• 1:43:48
  Right.
• 1:43:49
  Well, actually, for the people who are listening to this on Josh Zebsfield, I know there's a
• 1:43:59
  few of you, a couple of people in Australia listening to this.
• 1:44:02
  WeTheFift.substac.com is where you get everything, and all the good stuff is behind the paywall.
• 1:44:07
  There's some other stuff there for you.
• 1:44:08
  It's a freebie.
• 1:44:09
  Once a week, freebie.
• 1:44:10
  If you go to the website after you listen to this, what you should do, you'll see probably
• 1:44:16
  some thing written, and that thing written will include all the links to all the other
• 1:44:21
  times we had Josh.
• 1:44:22
  Yeah.
• 1:44:23
  Oh, that'd be good.
• 1:44:24
  Zebs.
• 1:44:25
  So that's going to get me fired.
• 1:44:26
  I mean, those were times before I had a job.
• 1:44:28
  Oh, yes.
• 1:44:29
  Oh, yes.
• 1:44:30
  That was when I would have been talking about the Jews with impunity.
• 1:44:31
  Yeah.
• 1:44:32
  Exactly.
• 1:44:33
  My real belief.
• 1:44:34
  Yes.
• 1:44:35
  Yes.
• 1:44:36
  Holocaust.
• 1:44:37
  That's not even make sense.
• 1:44:38
  Is he denying it or is he just a wordplay?
• 1:44:42
  Because we can, yes, we'll put up all the other.
• 1:44:45
  I think people are familiar with how podcasts work.
• 1:44:48
  Yes, they do.
• 1:44:49
  So they can figure out how to, my listeners will go to your one, and your listeners will
• 1:44:53
  come to my one, and everyone will be a big happy family.
• 1:44:55
  And the commentaries will no doubt, because they have pointed this out for years, that
• 1:45:00
  I did at one point make up a morning show, because you said you had a window.
• 1:45:04
  People still contact me about that.
• 1:45:05
  Yeah.
• 1:45:06
  Yeah.
• 1:45:07
  What was it called?
• 1:45:08
  Wake up.
• 1:45:09
  Yeah.
• 1:45:10
  Yeah.
• 1:45:11
  Not on public radio.
• 1:45:12
  I did host the weekend, like we have a morning show on the obviously in Australia for
• 1:45:19
  a year.
• 1:45:20
  And I think I was on this show when I was doing show.
• 1:45:22
  Yes.
• 1:45:23
  And you asked me what the name of the show was.
• 1:45:24
  Yes.
• 1:45:25
  Yeah.
• 1:45:26
  And then when you didn't have an answer I gave.
• 1:45:27
  That's right.
• 1:45:28
  That's right.
• 1:45:29
  Yes.
• 1:45:30
  It's not the today show.
• 1:45:31
  It's wake up your counts.
• 1:45:32
  Yes.
• 1:45:33
  What a blockbuster show that was.
• 1:45:34
  If I could get the archives of that.
• 1:45:36
  Yeah.
• 1:45:37
  More important than HalfbowLife.
• 1:45:38
  Great show.
• 1:45:39
  Great show.
• 1:45:40
  Oh.
• 1:45:41
  I think I disagreed with a lot of anti-albanian sentiment, which is very odd.
• 1:45:46
  But there was a lot of owl Jolson kind of routine.
• 1:45:48
  I couldn't believe it.
• 1:45:49
  You said, oh, well, I'm friends with Camille.
• 1:45:50
  I was like, that's not giving you a free pass.
• 1:45:52
  Because he's not black.
• 1:45:53
  All right.
• 1:45:54
  All right.
• 1:45:55
  All right.
• 1:45:56
  I love you guys.
• 1:45:57
  That was good to see you again.
• 1:45:58
  See you again.
• 1:45:59
  All right.
• 1:46:00
  You too.
• 1:46:01
  Bye.
• 1:46:02
  Bye.
• 1:46:03
  Bye.
• 1:46:04
  Bye.