Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Josh vs the News: The TODAY Show, Cancel Culture, and Karl's Free Speech

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Josh vs the News: The TODAY Show, Cancel Culture, and Karl's Free Speech · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. And, I mean, where can you air dangerous ideas anymore in this world of cancel culture? Only on podcasts, I tells you. And if there is one subject that I can say...
• 0:20
  is brought to you by popular demand. One conversation, one editorial, one episode that I was not even intending to do, but I got so many questions and so many pleas, really, from you, our kind audience, to hear my opinion about it's today's episode.
• 0:39
  Karl Stefanovic, The Today Show, cancel culture and free speech in the legacy media and online. If you are watching outside Australia, a little bit of background. It's been all over the news down under for the past few days. The most important, beloved, powerful Australian television news journalist, the host of The Today Show,
• 1:04
  has been fired after 21 years on the Today Show for a podcast that he launched earlier this year in February. Crisis meetings were held at the biggest media organisation in Australia throughout the week as a result of Carl's latest episode. And it was agreed at 2am on Thursday night, 2am on Friday morning,
• 1:34
  the biggest television star in Australia, would no longer be on conventional television. So imagine Matt Lauer being ousted not because of allegations of peccadillos, but because of the kinds of conversations that he wanted to have on independent media. You can imagine the cancel culture and free speech furor that this has created. A little bit of background about Carl
• 2:01
  He's Australia's highest paid television presenter. He used to earn, reportedly, $2.8 million a year. His latest contract was down a little from that. I've seen estimates between 1.8 to 2.8. Still a lot of money. As I said, he's been on the show for more than two decades. He was fired from the show in 2018. Well, they say not fired. He chose to step aside in 2018.
• 2:26
  Everyone knew that it wasn't his choice, and a little over a year later, in 2020, the network came essentially groveling back to him, and the ratings had tanked, and they brought him back, and it was all hunky-dory. He has traditionally been a very,
• 2:43
  blokey, friendly, affable character. I mean, beloved by Australians. He really is the Matt Lauer of the country. He has been an advocate for indigenous rights. He's been an advocate for women's rights. In fact, one year he wore the same suit on air every single day in order to point out that nobody would notice if a male did it, but if a woman did it, then everyone would be talking about it.
• 3:06
  He once accidentally used a slur about transgender people on the air and apologized immediately and then came back on the air in drag just as a way of paying penance. He's a very fun, likable, and also fine journalist when he wants to be.
• 3:27
  um last year when his contract was up for renewal the nine network which uh which he works for only offered him a 12-month contract and they gave him a pay cut and during those negotiations he said well okay if you're gonna give me a pay cut let me do a little side hustle i want to do my own podcast and i want it to be editorially independent you guys don't have any control over it don't worry about it i'll do it on the side they said fine where's the harm in that the
• 3:57
  And his first guest was Pauline Hanson, the leader of the anti-immigrant party in Australia. And it went gangbusters. And, you know, there's been some reporting that suggests that the podcast has been wholly a right wing or far right enterprise. It hasn't. That's not true. It's not fair.
• 4:17
  He's had Curtis Stone, the famous Australian chef and restaurateur. He's had the Labour Premier of South Australia on the show. He's had the Prime Minister on the show, who is a centre-left politician. But the episodes that did the best were always him having blokey, matey, cordial, convivial chats with people who are associated with politics.
• 4:40
  not necessarily the far right, but certainly the cultural right. Again, we don't have good terms for this. They're not white nationalists. They're not white supremacists. They're people whose main raison d'etre is to raise concerns about the erosion of Western civilisation,
• 4:58
  the exaggeration of the overemphasis on woke ideas, on social justice. They tend to be opposed to high levels of immigration. So Pauline Hanson was one. She's come back on the show twice after her initial appearance. He's had Barnaby Joyce on the show four times. This is a former conservative politician who defected to Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party.
• 5:23
  Um, he's had former prime ministers, John Howard and Tony Abbott on the show. They're center right conservatives. There's nothing particularly surprising about that. He's had Matt Canavan, the leader of the nationals on the show, uh, you know, right-wing politician. Uh, he's, uh, and he's all, he's had Clive Palmer on the show, uh, a mining billionaire who started a Trumpy political party in Australia. Um.
• 5:46
  And he's also dabbled in the kind of, you know, focus on vaccine injuries and, you know, the kind of the sort of stuff that you might associate with the Joe Rogan, you know, bro podcast Manosphere stuff. Pete Evans, a celebrity chef who was sort of cancelled for being a bit too woo woo and anti-vaccine and so on.
• 6:08
  And as this was all happening, needless to say, his employers in the legacy media, many eyebrows were raised. And apparently, according to reporting, several conversations were had with him about like, what exactly are you doing here? And how is this consistent conversation?
• 6:25
  with the family-friendly wake-up-in-the-morning-to-the-today-show and sort of feel like we're in the company of somebody who's just a really good neighbor instead of a, what, right-wing provocateur or someone playing footsie with kind of anti-establishment ideas? Like, what is this thing? Yeah.
• 6:47
  So Carl paid it no heed. I suppose he figured that he'd been fired once in 2018 and they'd come back to him and the show hadn't worked without him, so he probably had a certain amount of latitude. But this week...
• 7:03
  Well, it's last week now in Australia, but this week if you're watching in the States, he interviewed Tommy Robinson in the UK. Now, if you don't know Tommy Robinson, he's a genuinely far-right, genuinely white person.
• 7:19
  nationalist agitator. He's a former tanning salon owner turned anti-Islam activist. He's been banned from several social media platforms for violating their rules on hateful conduct and hate speech. Then Elon Musk reinstated him to Twitter. He's got multiple criminal convictions. In fact, I'll
• 7:43
  There's been a lot of speculation about Tommy Robinson, and I think in a lot of the conversation about cancel culture and free speech, he gets presented as somebody who is merely questionable or suspect because of what he believes. But it isn't just what he believes, it's also things that he's done. And none of this is to say that you shouldn't speak to him. We'll get to that in just a moment. But just so that you're clear on what Tommy Robinson has done, he was jailed for
• 8:13
  was one of the loudest voices. I don't know if you remember the big race riots in the UK in 2024, in the summer of 2024, in July. That frenzy was sort of whipped up after a horrific attack, a stabbing frenzy at a dance workshop in Southport. And it was whipped up in large part because of misinformation that Tommy Robinson helped to spread, which suggested that the
• 8:43
  It turned out that the murderer was the British-born son of Rwandan immigrants, and he was raised an evangelical Christian. That didn't come to light in time to stop big, to call them race riots is probably a little bit of a misnomer because they were really anti-Muslim immigrant riots. At that point, Nigel Farage, the head of the anti-immigrant party in the UK and the architect of Brexit,
• 9:11
  decided that Tommy Robinson was too much for Farage. In fact, Elon Musk and Nigel Farage had a falling out because Elon Musk was a fan of Tommy Robinson's. But Farage felt that this kind of of street activism and violent rhetoric would not go down well with mainstream voters. So split with
• 9:33
  And Farage said, and I quote, Tommy Robinson is entirely unsuitable to be involved in any political party, and said that he leads a group full of violent criminals and ex-British National Party members. British National Party being a much more violent earlier incarnation of anti-immigrant movements in the UK. Yeah.
• 9:55
  So Tommy Robinson has a criminal record, occasional jail terms. He tried to enter the United States on a false passport. He is convicted of mortgage fraud. He's convicted of stalking a journalist and her partner. And he's going to face trial later this year for harassing two other journalists. He was jailed also, I think, actually most egregiously, in my opinion, in 2018,
• 10:15
  for contempt of court when he breached suppression orders for a child sex abuse ring trial. You might have heard about the UK's issues with child sex abuse rings, quite a horrible story, but the allegation is that the mainstream media and authorities swept it under the carpet a little bit out of a sense of...
• 10:37
  political correctness towards South Asian migrants because these gangs were, you know, a racially divided situation where you had South Asian gangs who were preying upon young white girls. And, you know, this is not to say that Robinson's work didn't in part bring this to light. Nobody is wholly bad or wholly good. There is utility in having human beings like Robinson alive in the world. Yeah.
• 11:04
  But the way in which he cavalierly jeopardised the prosecution of these people, of the people who he wanted prosecuted, by continuing to talk about them once the trial was underway, was totally irresponsible and actually jeopardised the police and the judicial system in the UK from being able to achieve the justice that he himself, Tommy Robinson, wanted them to achieve because he kept blabbing on about it in ways that are impermissible. Yeah.
• 11:30
  if a person is expected to be tried fairly. So he very nearly upended that trial completely. He
• 11:40
  Carl goes to the UK. He sits down with Tommy Robinson. Nothing wrong with that necessarily. But the podcast draws the attention of an activist group called Mad F-ing Witches in Australia, which is quite notorious for identifying people who they want to be targets of advertiser boycotts. In fact, they're one reason why another huge radio star who...
• 12:05
  was recently cancelled or lost his job, Kyle Sanderlands. Why that whole snafu went south was because this activist group essentially organized a bunch of, you know, contacted all the brands that were advertising on the show and said, you don't want to be advertising on this show. Ditto Alan Jones, former radio titan, whose show became a lot less profitable after this particular activist group targeted his advertisers. So once that happened, then it was like, you know, it was
• 12:34
  everything was on fire and it was like okay what do we do um needless to say the powers that be uh at channel nine at the nine network and in nine news had long been worried about the trajectory that carl had been taking this year on his podcast um i don't know whether the activist group uh raising the alarm influenced that or whether it was purely a matter of principle but
• 12:59
  Reportedly, nine executives sent Carl a message while he was in the UK as soon as the Tommy Robinson episode dropped, saying something to the effect of, you've definitely crossed a line now and you need to come back and we need to have a discussion. At which point, Carl Stefanovic panicked and pulled the Tommy Robinson episode and all of a sudden it disappeared from all platforms. But not before Pauline Hanson
• 13:27
  decided to repost it on her own YouTube channel with the word cancelled across the front, thereby stirring up more interest in it. It's unclear at this stage how Pauline Hanson got a copy, whether she was just savvy enough to download it before it got pulled. Nonetheless, that's where we were, and Carl now has got the boot.
• 13:54
  he released a video saying that he's now free, he's unshackled, he believes in freedom of speech, that he's a victim of cancel culture, that his free speech rights are being infringed, and that he just believes that the Australian people deserve to hear from all kinds of different points of view, and he's not going to be gagged.
• 14:19
  and now he's liberated, liberated from his multi-million dollar contract and his multi-decades-long relationship with Australia's preeminent media organisation. There's been a lot of chat about this.
• 14:36
  Is it cancellation if you do things that you know are invariably going to piss off the people who pay your wage? I saw one boneheaded piece, a columnist was saying, well, it's not cancellation because it was Carl who pulled the video down himself.
• 14:56
  And I quote, this is from a column, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has already whipped her supporters into a frenzy over the fate of her, quote, good friend, Karl Stefanovic, but she and others manning the barricades for Stefanovic have failed to acknowledge that it was Stefanovic himself who deleted the episode with Robinson, once the proverbial hit the fan. He wasn't silenced, this columnist wrote, he silenced himself.
• 15:26
  if there is one way to get Josh Sepps angry, it is to claim that there is no such thing as cancellation if the cancellation is sufficiently ineffable, indefinable, tacit
• 15:45
  mutually understood, non-explicit, as to require the person to commit suicide instead of waiting for the guillotine. It's ridiculous to say that because a person had to take it upon themselves to try to rectify a situation that they've gotten themselves into, that means that there was no undue pressure on them to do so. The history of cancel culture between 2012 and 2024,
• 16:15
  is littered with a litany of circumstances under which people were essentially forced and coerced and cajoled into leaving legacy media institutions because of an internal demonization campaign, or a wink and a nudge that told them that it was time to go, or that, you know, I mean...
• 16:39
  Barry Weiss didn't leave the New York Times because she was officially fired. Julie Zago, a journalist in Australia who wanted to report on transgender pediatric medicine, didn't leave the age because she was fired. I didn't leave the ABC because I was fired. These are situations in which a climate arises in which the individual who is trying to tackle topics that the powers that be don't want them to...
• 17:03
  that climate is created to be so hostile and so obviously inimical to the curiosities of the person involved that they have to leave. Anytime that you've been forced to leave a personal relationship because your partner sort of shut down on you, you know that it's a little bit more complicated and messy than simply having a formal letter delivered to you demanding your resignation or departure. So...
• 17:32
  When we're trying to understand cancellation, it is not kosher to say it's not cancellation if the person jumps or pulls the thing themselves.
• 17:42
  Another argument that you sometimes hear is, well, it's not cancellation for a company to just care about its image and its reputation and its advertising revenue. That's not necessarily true. It sort of depends why the company is making that decision. What is salient about cancel culture, to me, is, and what was really objectionable about the cancel culture of the late 2010s and the early 2020s,
• 18:10
  is that it was generally whipped up by a minority of extremely ideological individuals, usually using social media to manufacture a sense of scale and scope that the opposition didn't really have.
• 18:29
  So it was usually reacted to by corporations in a knee-jerk fashion in order to try to put out a fire that had been whipped up instead of in a judicious manner of sitting down and trying to figure out what the company actually wants to do.
• 18:44
  And thirdly, it was usually used to try to punish or silence legitimate questions. Those would be my three components of what cancel culture is. When people talk about cancel culture, I think cancel culture, an instance of cancel culture, has to be a...
• 19:02
  manufactured storm in a teacup that looks a lot bigger than it is because you've got highly motivated individuals trying to pressure and coerce the situation. So it has to be essentially a mob. That's component one, a mob. Component two is cowardice and jitteriness on the part of the corporation or in response to the mob. So a knee-jerk reaction that isn't properly thought through, but you try to throw a sacrificial lamb to the mob in the hope that they'll go away.
• 19:32
  So that would be the second component, a knee-jerk reaction. And thirdly, it would be that there is really no principle at stake here. So think of the iconic cancel culture instances from the early days of wokeness.
• 19:47
  just off the top of my head, the James Damore memo at Google. This was an engineer at Google. Google said, we want to understand why there are too few women in engineering and in STEM in Google. So we want a total, everyone just submit what you think the reasons are, and we can better understand how to create a more diverse population in terms of the gender of diversity of our engineering. And James Damore was one of the engineers. He wrote a very thoughtful piece, and he basically...
• 20:15
  argued that he thought that there were biological reasons why men are more likely, and cultural reasons, why men are more likely to be attracted to being engineers than women.
• 20:27
  you got a mob reaction to that. You got a company taking a knee-jerk reaction to the mob and trying to save face, and you got them throwing the sacrificial lamb overboard to mixed metaphors, punishing or silencing a legitimate point of view in order to placate an irrational mob reaction. That was archetypal cancel culture.
• 20:54
  I'm not sure that this scenario fits really any of those criteria.
• 21:00
  It was not a whipped up manufactured mob that was pressuring Channel 9 to fire Carl. It was genuine concern amongst mainly his colleagues and bosses, but also among his loyal audience, not, you know, not among some mob of crazed social media activists that
• 21:26
  His reputation as a fair and impartial journalist and a good guy to hang out with at a barbecue was being impaired by his seeming affiliation with the most extreme elements of the cultural right.
• 21:43
  So it wasn't the first, you know, the ZEPs number one criterion is not met. The number two criterion of a corporation reacting in a panic and throwing somebody overboard definitely wasn't met because this was not, you know, a sudden thing that his employers...
• 22:03
  did in a knee-jerk response to something. Yes, the Tommy Robinson episode was the proximate cause, but there'd been concerns for months and months, and it had been obvious to everybody for months and months that there was some conflict here, and people were a bit baffled about why this august news outlet—I mean, it was literally, if you're not in Australia, it was the kind of thing where
• 22:26
  Every single time I would find myself, you know, surrounded by fellow parents at a kid's birthday party or at the park playground or at a pub or whatever, invariably once a week someone would come to me knowing that I, you know, work in the media...
• 22:42
  And they would say, like, what is going on with Carl? Like, what is going on with Nine? Like, why are they letting him? And I'd be like, I just don't know. I don't know behind the scenes of what the kind of agreement between him and his employer was. But it did seem surprising to me, given the very short leash that I know legacy media outlets keep their talent on from personal experience. You know, when I was at the ABC, if I wanted to write...
• 23:07
  an opinion piece, well, not even an opinion piece, if I wanted to do anything for any other media outlet, I would have to run it up the chain first and it would have to get clearance. Fortunately, this show was an exception because it predated my tenure at the ABC, but that wasn't the case for Carl. He brought this thing into existence while he was already at Channel 9.
• 23:25
  So I didn't understand it. Nobody understood it. It was an obvious conflict. And the fact that it eventually came to a head surprised exactly nobody. So the ZEPs criterion number two for a cancel culture incident, which is that the network just scrambles and reacts to some flare-up, some sudden thing that all of a sudden a mob has drawn their attention to, that's not satisfied. Yeah.
• 23:51
  And my third condition, which is that it tries to punish or silence legitimate questions, is also not really satisfied. And the reason for that brings us to the second point that I want to talk about, as well as cancel culture, which is what we mean by free speech and the platforming of different individuals. Okay.
• 24:12
  Free speech is a tricky thing. Obviously, if you have a contract with a boss and the boss wants you to be as accessible to everybody and as beloved by as many people as possible, and that's part of your remit,
• 24:33
  then it isn't really an imposition on your free speech to honour the terms of that contract and to respect the contours of that deal. You know, if you're a flight attendant, then you probably have to seem competent at being friendly to people and also helping them out in an emergency.
• 24:51
  You know, if you're a server, a waiter at a restaurant, then you have to have good personal skills. I mean, there are parts of different professions just require different characteristics. And part of being a good host of morning television is seeming like you're, excuse me, fair and impartial and unbiased. You don't have a dog in the fight. Let me have a drink here.
• 25:16
  And that you don't believe things which, if your daughter was to bring home a boyfriend who believed them, you would raise your eyebrows about and hope that she finds a better lad. So the free speech question is one that I think needs to be understood in the context of where the speech is happening.
• 25:38
  You don't have unlimited free speech to say whatever you want when you're being hired by a company to say particular things and to appear a certain way. I think the head of Nine News put this really well. There are some leaked emails from the head of Nine News to staff in the fallout of this brouhaha.
• 25:59
  in which she wrote, protecting freedom of speech is at the core of Nine News and Current Affairs. As journalists, we play a critical role in society to question, challenge, and hold people to account, regardless of where they come from or which political party or views they represent. I think that's a very sophisticated and clever way of putting her finger on precisely the problem
• 26:30
  which is simply platforming people. Now, I don't like the term platforming. I think it's too blunt a term. When we say, well, why would you platform so-and-so by having them on your podcast? Why would you give them a microphone? Well, depends how you do it. I've platformed people on this show
• 26:52
  for strategic reasons. You know, Candace Owens has been on this show. Would I have her on the show today? Probably not, because I think she's gone further off the deep end than she was when I spoke to her, what, 18 months ago or something. But the purpose of having her on the show was I wanted to make a case and to make it clear that she sometimes
• 27:17
  bloviates in a way about things that she doesn't know a lot about. And I wanted to lead her into, I suppose, a little bit of a trap and give her enough rope to hang herself, at which point I could sort of say, it may just be the case that you're just not very well informed about some of these things. And I just wanted to provide enough evidence that...
• 27:37
  it would be apparent that that might be true. And, you know, she and I laughed it off and had a good relationship afterwards and there were no hard feelings, but I, you know, there was a purpose to having that conversation. Um, I have people on this show, you know, Katie Faust, if you haven't listened to that episode, she's a very strident anti-surrogacy, anti-gay families, uh, activist who was touring Australia from the United States.
• 28:03
  She and I had a fabulous conversation for more than two hours. You know, she deeply disapproves of my lifestyle, the fact that I have children. She spends her whole life campaigning against it. And we wrestled through the ideas because I actually think that you do need to air unpopular, you know,
• 28:24
  unpopular ideas or ideas that are beyond the pale are unfortunately not just going to go away by sidestepping them, sidelining them, you know, hoping to exclude them from the public square. They do need to be wrestled with. And, you know, part of my whole mission in life is to try to wrestle with some of the more outré ideas, not because I want to be like a podcast bro who's like saying things that can't be said, dude, you know,
• 28:51
  But because I think that if you don't actually try to analyze them and understand where they're coming from, then they're going to fester, they're going to gain a life of their own, they're going to have a kind of a frisson of illicit sexiness that is going to appeal to people. You do actually need to deconstruct them. Also,
• 29:07
  We all live together in this society, and we have to figure out how to get along. You know, the 20 or 30 percent of the population who think that, you know, vaccines are terrible or, you know, I don't know, that, you know, Muslims are, you know, there are too many Muslims in the country or whatever it might be, they're not going to just go away because you tell them that they're…
• 29:25
  bigots or they're anti-scientific or they're misguided or they're endangering you. They're going to continue believing what they're going to believe until they feel like they're being heard, that their grievances are being understood, and that there's some kind of common ground that you can reach with them, not by giving in to their demands, but by engaging with them as grown-ups and taking them seriously.
• 29:43
  So I do think that the legacy media and the political elite and the academy, by which I mean universities, has been extremely poor over the past decade and a half at trying to understand and integrate the grievances that don't necessarily fit within our society.
• 30:03
  framework of what is legitimate and illegitimate to talk about. We've basically sort of, we've put all of our beliefs in a box and we've called that box legitimate conversations and everything that falls outside that box, we brand it as bigotry or, you know, illegitimate and we've tried not to engage with it. Well, that hasn't worked. And so all credit to Carl for trying to dabble outside the box, but it's a little bit rich to then cry foul when the box ejects you.
• 30:30
  and you're intentionally playing in the sandpit outside it. Now, that being said, the whole crying foul thing may also be shtick, in a sense. I mean, you know, if your employer only signs a 12-month contract with you and gives you a big pay cut, and this is happening in the context of precipitous decline in the influence and profitability of the legacy media—
• 30:52
  then there would be, you know, you can imagine a more stupid path than trying to figure out a savvy way to jump ship. And in an attention economy, if you can jump ship with a bang and go independent in a way that has the entire country talking about you and me doing a podcast about you...
• 31:16
  You know, it's better than just having your employer not sign your next contract or ask you to take yet another pay cut. One columnist put it pretty well, writing, if you can dress up this blatant grab for attention as a free speech crusade, then you can laugh all the way to the crypto bank. That is perhaps an unfair way of putting it. I'm not saying that that's what Carl's doing. I'm just saying that at the end of the day, the way that this is all shaken out is...
• 31:45
  I think, great for him. It was great for Piers Morgan. It was great for Megyn Kelly. It was great for Tucker Carlson. I don't want to include me in that group of people because I think my experience was very different. Certainly my status and my stature and my profitability is much, much lower than those people. But I also think hopefully that my credibility is more intact because I haven't pandered to any particular base. So in terms of platforming, yes, I
• 32:15
  What you want to do when you bring on somebody who is a little bit, you know, who would be a difficult sell to an executive producer in the legacy media, is you want to make sure that you land the plane by...
• 32:30
  engaging them in at least devil's advocate positions that force them to account for themselves, re-evaluate themselves, consider new positions. It doesn't have to be adversarial. I mean, I'm really not a fan of the adversarial interview where a journalist is going for a gotcha question and trying to make the guest squirm.
• 32:51
  Not my style at all. I think you win a lot more with honey than you do with spice. But there's a friendly and jocular way of pushing back on somebody. If you were in a pub or if you were at a restaurant with some friends and you trusted those people, and one of them started making the kinds of claims that Pete Evans makes about vaccines—
• 33:18
  you don't have to pull a full kind of like officious BBC journalist move and be like, but how do you, how can you say that when, you know, 14,000 people have been, you know, saved by blah, blah, blah, and do you realize that in the Congo, the blah, blah, blah, you don't have to do that, um,
• 33:37
  You can just say, come on, mate, you've got to be kidding me. I mean, of all the things to believe, and then you can rattle off a few things that you happen to know to be true, and you can poke some holes in the things that you think they're bullshitting on. That was not what Carl was doing. I mean, Carl was basically...
• 34:01
  chatting. He's a lovely, warm, engaged, engaging person, and he brings the best out of his guests. But if you're going to just bring the best out of your guests and allow them to orate for an hour without intellectual pushback...
• 34:21
  then you'd better make sure that the guest selection is sufficiently balanced that you don't come across as being biased, as having a dog in the fight.
• 34:32
  If your guest selection is... There's nothing wrong with having a biased guest selection. If you want to only talk to far-right people, that's fine. But you will be perceived as being far-right if your position during those interviews is not one of genuine interrogation and curiosity and questioning and pushback. So...
• 34:54
  The Tommy Robinson interview, for example, was not a problem because Karl Stefanovic platformed Tommy Robinson. In fact, if you go back and listen to Tommy Robinson on the Trigonometry podcast, you know, Constantine Kissin and Francis often get flack from people for being, you know, for platforming this or that person or for being conservatives in wolf's clothing, in wolf's in sheep's clothing or for, you know, playing footsie with the far right.
• 35:23
  In actual fact, Constantine does a terrific job with Tommy Robinson of holding him to account for situations in which he broke the law, for situations in which he fomented violence, for situations in which he was too quick to judge.
• 35:39
  And that is the kind of interview that I think is warranted. That is one where you can understand the sort of intellectual and journalistic contribution of having someone like Tommy Robinson on the show. Even if he does get a whole period of time in which he can espouse, you know, put forth his ideas, he also gets the journalistic pushback that the conversation demands.
• 36:03
  Similarly, Piers Morgan had Nick Fuentes on his show. I don't think there's any problem with platforming Nick Fuentes. He's in the news, people are talking about him. Yes, he's a, you know, an anti-Semitic Holocaust guy.
• 36:18
  denying adjacent maybe kind of, you know, guy, but he's got millions of listeners and viewers, and there's no reason not to talk to him. And Piers Morgan did an incredible job of just pulling him up on thing after thing after thing that Nick had said, and getting him to account for them.
• 36:35
  That's journalism. That's actual journalism. Instead, Tommy Robinson and Karl Stefanovic sat down. Robinson was able to talk for, you know, 90% of the time. Stefanovic praised him, talked about his tenacity, talked about Tommy Robinson's courage. He signed off with, I love you, mate. They literally hugged. There were no penetrating questions. He didn't interrogate Tommy Robinson's violent background or his, you know,
• 37:00
  significant criminal history. He didn't push back against any of the arguments that Robinson was making about Muslims. As one academic put it, and this was a piece in the conversation, which I thought put it pretty well, he rarely challenges his guests. This is Carl, who monologue about culture war issues such as immigration and wokeism. He regularly flatters them. These are not interviews.
• 37:27
  in the traditional sense, writes this academic, but extended conversations that generally affirm and promote the guest's perspective. Again, nothing wrong with doing that, but if you're going to do that and also combine that interviewing strategy with a selection of guests that leans one way politically, then it's difficult to cry foul when the centrist mainstream platform that you work for objects.
• 37:56
  the reason I object to the characterization of this as a free speech crusader as cancel culture is that there were those of us who were genuine victims of cancel culture at a time when free speech was under much greater jeopardy in terms of what I mean by that is purely through the woke prism. Free speech is under enormous jeopardy now from the backlash to wokeism in the form of Trump and Elon and MAGA and all the rest of it. But
• 38:24
  At the time that shit was seriously going down in Wokistan, there were real, genuine, intellectual conversations about the ability to interrogate, for example, pediatric transgender treatment.
• 38:43
  about the complexion of multicultural societies and whether or not some immigrant groups were more or less amenable to liberal democracy than others, you know, we all know those sort of tripwires that one could trigger, you know, talking about race, talking about whether or not it's constructive in a country like Australia for
• 39:08
  every single Zoom meeting of middle-aged white HR representatives to have to begin with a land acknowledgement, an acknowledgement of country, or whether that is fatuous. You know, questions in the States about whether or not the disparity in black incarceration was partly caused by higher criminality among young black men.
• 39:32
  There were all kinds of conversations that were legitimate things to interrogate that were ruled out of bounds and the moment someone tried to open their mouths about them. I mean, remember Matt Damon gave an interview at the beginning of the Me Too movement, where he tried to say, you know, of course, we have to understand that there are degrees of wrongness in, you know, in sexual harassment. There's, you know...
• 39:52
  I don't know, slapping a female colleague jovially on the bum in the office, and there's, like, rape. He was so pilloried. I mean, he just went silent and no one in Hollywood ever spoke out about it except for reciting the sort of pro-forma Stalinist script that the activists told you you had to recite ever again. Yeah.
• 40:15
  Um, so that kind of flattening, that intellectual flattening was a real thing and people really did lose their jobs for it. I mean, one of the, one of the egregious things that, uh, that happened to me while I was working in the legacy media was, uh, as you may or may not know, I'm not a huge fan of, uh, of gay pride of the Sydney gay and lesbian Mardi Gras. It's fine for the people who want to do it. That's great. You do you.
• 40:43
  I always felt like I was expected as a prominent gay person to sign on the dotted line and subscribe to a very narrow set of what it means to be gay that had a particular way of talking, a particular way of walking, a particular way of dressing, a particular way of voting, a particular way of speaking, a particular way of dancing. That wasn't me.
• 41:04
  And I didn't really feel that it was necessarily constructive or conducive to the flourishing of, you know, young gay people. If you're a 15-year-old kid who might have a crush on, I don't know, some other guy in your class...
• 41:20
  Is it constructive in the 2020s in big, liberal, pro-gay, progressive, you know, cosmopolitan cities like Sydney to be constantly bombarded with images that portray homosexuality as being a kind of a – quite a narrow club that has a very particular way of looking? I'm not sure that that does – I think it did. I mean, I think in the 1970s and 1980s, it was necessary to smash the norms –
• 41:49
  But there comes a point at which it becomes actually constraining instead of liberating to require people to open up such a Pandora's box of identity issues by simply expressing their own love or affection or crushes that it puts them back a step rather than allows them to be themselves. So I wrote an article. I was contacted by the editor of one of the big newspapers in Australia.
• 42:17
  It was World Pride, which apparently takes place every two years in some city or other, and Sydney was the host. And I was invited to write an article about it. I wrote an article. They loved it. They wanted to publish it on the weekend of World Pride.
• 42:34
  I ran it up the chain to my employer, and the answer came back, no, you can't publish this. And we came back to them and said, can we amend it in some way? Is there something in particular that you don't like about it? And they were like, no, no, if you work for, you know, you're a host, you're an on-air host for our kind of, you know, family-friendly mainstream broadcasts.
• 43:00
  And as such, you're not allowed to express an opinion about controversial cultural events. Now, that is fair enough. That is a totally legitimate policy for a big media outlet to have. It happens all the time. It happens if you're a 60 Minutes correspondent in New York for CBS. It happens if you're a journalist at the New York Times.
• 43:30
  There's a little bit more latitude recently since wokeness opened up the terrain to one's lived experience. But in true professional journalism, journalists should not be going around spreading their own ideas about things. The problem during the cancel culture woke era was that it was incredibly selectively deployed. So in my case,
• 43:58
  The company that I was working for was the official broadcast partner of Gay Pride, of World Pride, of the Mardi Gras that year.
• 44:10
  You walked in the lobby and there was a massive rainbow flag, like several stories tall, flanking the atrium. You would tune in and every other host on the air, all of them straight apart from me, would be extolling World Pride. Every other guest would be a drag queen in there talking about, you know, how fabulous it's going to be. Every other promo on the air would be, tune in tonight for our live coverage of Pride.
• 44:41
  So it was patently obvious that the problem with my article was not that I was expressing an opinion about a controversial cultural event. It's that I was expressing the wrong opinion about that cultural event. An opinion that conflicted with management's opinion. That is an imposition on free speech. That is cancel culture.
• 45:04
  I mean, it wasn't cancel culture until eventually my relationship with the organization fell apart. But that is the way that cancel culture works. It's an insidious set of double standards whereby there's an apparent use of principle.
• 45:20
  but the principle is unevenly applied, and people get essentially jettisoned because the corporation is taking a knee-jerk approach to some kind of, usually a mob. In my case, it was the fear of the mob. If this thing had gotten published, then what would happen? Obviously, there would be a huge social media campaign saying that I was being anti-gay or something, and the only thing that
• 45:50
  So the fact that so many of us went through an actual reckoning where our genuine ideas and reasonable propositions were being silenced and punished by institutions and organizations that were genuinely censorious...
• 46:07
  makes me perhaps overly sensitive now to claims of impositions on free speech, when the landscape is currently completely different, and the specifics of this case are completely different.
• 46:24
  I want to read you something which I wrote for the Australian Financial Review in my column this week, because it's not directly about Karl Stefanovic, but it basically addresses all of the same issues. And if you think I'm being overly critical of Karl here, and overly sympathetic towards the legacy media's role in this, hold your judgment, because I'm about to get to a bigger point.
• 46:54
  Before I do so, one little aside.
• 46:59
  The Nine News establishment has done some of the best work in Australian journalism for decades. I mean, 60 Minutes, which is one of their properties, has been running for, I think, a half a century or something. It remains one of the most credible flagship landmark shows in Australian journalism.
• 47:29
  Nine News is an incredibly solid brand. They jealously protect and guard its reputation, as they should. They own a bunch of newspapers as well as the television stations. And some of those newspapers have done groundbreaking reporting and exposés into individuals which revealed those individuals to be
• 47:53
  guilty, or at least suspected to be guilty, of things which it was a great public service to bring to light. And several of those individuals were guests on Karl Stefanovic's friendly podcast. The people who his own employer's newspapers had revealed to be frauds or, you know,
• 48:20
  in some other way, worthy of being suspicious of. One of them was a neurosurgeon who Channel 9's newspapers revealed had allegedly charged families extraordinarily large sums of money by selling them hope for cures for ultimately incurable diseases or conditions. And he would conduct, allegedly...
• 48:49
  futile operations, some of which catastrophically injured his patients, and ran laughing all the way to the bank. That was the allegation in the nine newspapers, and Karl Stefanovic sat down with that surgeon and had him tell his side of the story essentially uninterrupted.
• 49:09
  Similarly, the accused war criminal, Ben Robert Smith, about whom we've spoken before on the podcast, it is still accusations because this is a live case. You know, a lot of uncritical, sort of blokey, friendly rhetoric about this individual is,
• 49:31
  And if it wasn't galling enough to have such a jocular attitude towards people who have been accused of such serious things, to do so when their accusers were your fellow journalists on the payroll of your bosses...
• 49:48
  is at least reckless, shall we say, and does not show a great amount of team spirit. Now, I'm not one to... I don't put a lot of stock in team spirit. I'm not a team sports guy. I've always been like, you know, there's no I in teamwork, so why would I want to be involved in teamwork? I'm saying this as a mea culpa. This is not a good thing. This is not a good part of the Zeps characteristic set.
• 50:18
  but it is a flaw that I have. I am an individual and it's part of what I suppose makes my work, you know, hopefully as interesting as it is. I'm always trying to be contrarian. I'm always trying not to play with the team. I'm always trying to swim against the tide. But only when it matters
• 50:39
  Like, only if I think that there's a risk that the mob is wrong and that there's utility in trying to epater la bourgeoisie, trying to poke the middle class consensus.
• 50:55
  I don't think there's anything to be gained by shitting on the hard work of your colleagues when it was your colleagues who were actually doing the insurgent, almost revolutionary work of pushing against a mainstream narrative about people in positions of power.
• 51:19
  This sort of comes back to the quote from the Nine News director that I just said. Like, good journalism and good interviewing is about at least creating the illusion that without any favour and without any fear, you're going to tackle people and issues in an intellectually rigorous way. And ideally, you're going to be coming at people who are powerful, and you're going to be holding powerful people to account.
• 51:49
  That is what the journalists at the nine newspapers who reported into these individuals were doing. They were holding powerful people to account, and they were swimming against the tide. To then dress yourself up as if you're swimming against the tide and being all, like, edgy by going back to those people for their side of the story, which really was the mainstream side of the story before your brave colleagues were able to expose them, ah...
• 52:19
  How brave is it, really? I mean, how interesting is it, even? I suppose it's probably pretty interesting because it gets a lot of views online. But I'm hoping for the future of civilization that that's not the only metric we use for journalism.
• 52:33
  Um, so platforming, yes. Oh, one last thing about platforming before I get to my piece. Um, another way to, uh, irritate Josh Sepps, another way to rub me the wrong way, excuse me, is to contaminate your intellectual argument with snide remarks about the quality of a person's show. So one opinion columnist makes this point about, uh, the platforming of Tommy Robinson,
• 53:00
  The host spoke for less than 10% of the hour-long discussion, and even then, most of that was complimentary chit-chat. Okay, good, that's a legitimate criticism of, you know, journalistic ability. But then the opinion columnist says, Robinson is given free reign to rant and rave, veering down rabbit holes while repeatedly clearing his throat and nose in a stomach-churning manner.
• 53:30
  I mean, seriously. Are you clutching your pearls? I mean, way to undermine your own point, bro. It's like, who gives a shit whether or not he was repeatedly clearing his... I sipped water twice in this recording already. I mean, send in the cavalry. This is unacceptable.
• 53:50
  Yes. Who cares that Tommy Robinson was repeatedly clearing his nose and throat in a stomach-churning manner? That's neither here nor there, and it would certainly not be a reason to punish Karl Stefanovic. This brings us to the big question, I think, which lies behind this whole controversy, which is, is there a there there?
• 54:17
  Is there a thing that Karl Stefanovic is doing or trying to do, a space that deserves to be opened up, a terrain of conversation that deserves to exist, ideas that deserve to be aired, that have been inadequately addressed by legacy media?
• 54:44
  And the answer there is yes, yes, surely, there is. Legacy media, political parties, and universities have, as I said, become quite comfortable about the kinds of conversations that they regard as being legitimate. And there is obviously an appetite for conversations that don't exist within those neat boundaries.
• 55:13
  It is a problem that part of the way that we interpreted diversity, and this is an aside now, this is not a talk about Channel 9 or about the Today Show or about Karl Stefanovic. I just think this is an interesting thing to sort of hang on the window pane as part of the conversation. Part of the problem with the way that center-left media outlets, which is where I have most of my experience, understood diversity is...
• 55:39
  was not just we need to diversify newsrooms so that we bring in a wider range of voices, which was fabulous, and I got behind 100%, but also to make what I think was a judgment error in assuming that members of minority communities are best placed to report on those communities. So,
• 56:02
  You know, it is now the norm firmly established that if you're doing a story about Indigenous issues, you're going to get the Indigenous reporter to report on that. If you're doing a story about LGBTQ plus issues, you're going to get the LGBTQ plus reporter to report on that.
• 56:17
  and so on and so forth. You would never have a panel of people talking about, I don't know, the Islamophobia and not have Muslims on the panel. The only exception to this is Jews. You do find panels talking about anti-Semitism with no Jews on it, but that's because Jews don't count as a minority in the world of social justice thinking because they presume to have power. Yeah.
• 56:44
  But there's an obvious problem with this understanding of diversity, which is that the way that a transgender person thinks about transgenderism has a lot of validity when what you want to understand is the transgender experience.
• 57:06
  But it does not necessarily have more validity than the way a non-trans journalist would understand the entire contours of the debate about gender and sex. And as an analogy to understand this, just imagine that we were talking about something like, I don't know, the mining industry, and you only ever assigned stories about mining to people who had worked in mining.
• 57:32
  I mean, yes, they would understand more about what it's like to work in mining, but it would also be obvious that they could have a bias towards the way that people who work in mining think about mining. And maybe you want someone who is outside mining to look at the impact of mining on the whole rest of society, on the environment, on culture, on the economy, in ways that aren't through the prism of a miner.
• 57:55
  Similarly, when all of your articles about, you know, some new transgender law that the Trump administration has passed are written by people who are grievously outraged about that law, you end up getting this kind of stale, jargony, echo-chambery effect. And all of this is a long aside to bring us back to Carl, which is...
• 58:19
  I'm in no way accusing the Nine Network of this because I think they've actually done a good job at avoiding this particular phenomenon. But in an overall media ecosystem, in a cultural landscape in which people feel like conversations about the most important things that are going on in the world are always...
• 58:36
  towing some particular line, like everything about the environment has to come from this perspective in this publication, and everything about immigration has to come from this perspective in this publication, it gets a bit dull. It's almost like if I tell you that you're about to read a story about, let's just say...
• 58:59
  I don't know, just stay with the issue of Muslims, since we were talking about Tommy Robinson, you know, the Muslim crime in the suburbs of Paris. And you were going to read that story in a known left-wing publication, or you were going to read that story in a known right-wing publication, or you were going to see a report on it on Fox News versus on MSNBC or something.
• 59:29
  MSNBC or The Guardian or something like that, they're going to be talking about how persistent disadvantage in that community and latent Islamophobia in France have contributed to the disenfranchisement of young Muslims in the suburb and that unemployment is high and that the conditions really haven't been addressed adequately by the French president.
• 59:54
  And, you know, Fox News is going to talk about how France has been importing a whole bunch of, you know, savages essentially from the Middle East who are incompatible with Western civilization and France is being ruined by, you know, having its native population being replaced by migrants. I mean, it's like blah, blah, blah.
• 1:00:14
  And in the middle, in the center, trying to cling on to some semblance of power and some rump of viewership and readers remains the elite centrist legacy media outlets.
• 1:00:30
  where they're conspicuously trying not to fall into a partisan echo chamber, but as a result are so fearful of seeming like they're saying anything that a lot of what they produce is kind of anodyne pablum that just kind of almost feels like a Soviet press release. So people either feel like the news that they're getting is...
• 1:00:58
  slanted and biased, or they feel like the opinion that they're getting is kind of rote and overly safe. I think this is just as another aside, also partly a problem of the fact that we have become overly cautious in the media about allowing an expansive set of ideas in opinion shows and opinion columns.
• 1:01:21
  and we've become overly gracious or overly generous in allowing opinion to come into news stories. This was also sort of part of the diversity push, and I wish that it had been quarantined, because I think diverse hiring will be more sustainable and more robust if it isn't associated with these deleterious effects on reporting.
• 1:01:46
  You should be able to assign the indigenous reporter to report on the mining crisis in the economy, and you should be able to assign the LGBTQ plus reporter to report on political corruption.
• 1:02:06
  It shouldn't be that they're so tethered to their beat that when that beat then becomes suspect, their very hiring is called into question. So the other thing that happened in this whole diversity push was a sense that reporters should really bring their whole selves to the story and report on their lived experience.
• 1:02:25
  that this was a legitimate thing to report. You know, if you're an Arab Australian, then you should be reporting defiantly about the war in Gaza from a personal perspective, and you should be unafraid to call it genocide. You know, that is not the way that journalism should be done. I mean, journalism should at least aspire to the light on the hill being objectivity, being something that could have been written by anyone.
• 1:02:51
  really. That doesn't mean it doesn't have personality, it doesn't mean it doesn't have flair, it doesn't mean it doesn't have passion, but it means that it is as expansive in its worldview as it can possibly be to include as many people as it possibly can, rather than coming from the parochial point of view of the journalists themselves.
• 1:03:08
  So that led to, I think, a greater skepticism in the public about news. They could see this land. They could smell it. It seemed like personal storytelling a little bit too much, and it didn't seem like just the facts. And at the same time, as you had that generosity towards different perspectives in the newsroom, on the opinion side, on panel shows, on radio shows, and in columns—
• 1:03:33
  you had a much narrower set of things being discussed. I mean, you would literally have, you know, panel shows discussing something like, you know, racism or Black Lives Matter or something like that, whether the United States or Australia are
• 1:03:49
  irredeemably white supremacist societies. And of course, it would be improper if you're on a center-left broadcaster to have a bunch of crusty white conservatives talking about how actually this is all a storm in a teacup.
• 1:04:05
  So you would have a diverse set of panelists, and you might have an indigenous woman, and you might have an African Australian woman, and you might have a Sikh woman, and you might have a transgender woman. And you've ticked the diversity checkboxes, definitely.
• 1:04:24
  But the problem is, they're all saying basically the same thing, coming from the same ideological worldview, coming from likely the same class worldview. I don't say likely because of their ethnicities, but likely because of the kinds of people who producers tend to pick or know.
• 1:04:39
  So you're not getting a diversity of actual worldviews. You ended up with the opinion pages and the opinion ecosystem becoming quite stuffy. And of course, cancel culture didn't help this. Of course, wokeism didn't help this. The fear that the mob was going to come for you and that you were going to have to do one of those knee-jerk responses and throw a sacrificial lamb...
• 1:05:03
  to the mob, that all impeded our ability to have freewheeling, rambunctious conversations of the sort that I think we need to if we're going to get out of the 21st century alive. It's one of the reasons why I do this show, needless to say. But my point is simply...
• 1:05:20
  There's a reason why there's an appetite for what Karl Stefanovic is doing. He hasn't made it up, and he is not simply cynically manipulating his position in order to jump on a bandwagon. He's noticing something that is real. He's noticing a failing that has taken place in the broader media, albeit, weirdly, not so much at his actual employer. Yeah.
• 1:05:46
  And for whatever reason, he's made a decision to start playing in these waters in a way that was invariably going to lead to, you know, some kind of a flare-up. And so it has. And the last point that I would make about that is that I've been asked quite a lot about the question of whether or not he actually believes this, or whether...
• 1:06:07
  he's doing it cynically. Like, is the mask coming off and we're seeing the real Carl? Or is he putting a mask on in order to try to, you know, roll the same podcast bro playbook that has worked for other people elsewhere? And my answer to that is that I actually, I don't quite think it's the right question to ask whether people really believe what they say they believe in this era.
• 1:06:36
  I think we've lost so much of a connection to what it even means to have a deeply held belief. We're so adrift in this media ecosystem, and we're so buffeted by the incentives of the new media that, and I suppose our trust is so corroded, especially by figures like Donald Trump, that...
• 1:07:05
  I think truth and falsehood become a more pragmatic question than they used to be in the past. By which I mean, people sometimes ask, do I think that Donald Trump, for example, believes what he says? And I said this to Rich Roll on his podcast. I think...
• 1:07:26
  that the question of whether or not something is literally true, in the sense of, like, did the atoms in the universe actually organize themselves in the arrangement that would render it true that, for example, Donald Trump's crowd at his first inauguration was the largest in history, that question...
• 1:07:50
  is less relevant to Donald Trump than the question of whether or not claiming that the crowd was large serves a useful purpose.
• 1:08:03
  You know, this is sometimes something that sort of post-structuralists and religious people get into about what truth and falsehood mean. You listen to Jordan Peterson enough, and he peddles on this quite a lot. Like, you know, you ask him whether or not it's true that Jesus was, you know, lifted bodily into heaven three days after he was crucified. And...
• 1:08:26
  Jordan Peterson will not answer that question. Jordan Peterson will say, well, it depends what you mean by true. What is true? What he means is the claim that it is true has been incredibly effective at spreading Christianity and having it be the most powerful system of thought and belief that the world has ever known. So how can you say that it's not true? Well,
• 1:08:52
  By what measure would you claim that it's not true if it achieves such incredible success? And I don't think that's quite as much of a dodge as I used to think it was. I mean, I think in some respects, did Donald Trump win the 2020 election? Well, no.
• 1:09:21
  claiming that he really won the 2020 election was pivotal in getting him elected in 2024. If he hadn't been banging on about how aggrieved he was about having been robbed of the previous election, part of his firepower would have been absent in 2024. So to the extent that it enabled him to get elected again...
• 1:09:42
  It's true. For him. For him, it's true. Now, that doesn't mean that the ballots actually make it true, but it means that sometimes people's understanding of what is true and what is false and what they believe and what they don't believe is contingent on the utility of the thing that they're believing. It reminds me a bit of the old line that it's very hard to get a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on his not understanding it. From Donald Trump's
• 1:10:11
  He believes it because to believe it is to be successful and to win, and to not believe it would be to be a loser. So of course he believes it. Of course he believes that it's true. Now this is all a big philosophical kind of epistemological way of circling back to like what is the mask on Carl and what is not. The answer is I don't know, but the answer is also I'm not sure it's that black and white.
• 1:10:38
  I'm not sure it's the case that a person wakes up in the morning and goes, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to start a podcast and pretend to like far-right figures so that I can get lots of views, which will lead to a blow-up in my relationship, which will create a cancel culture moment, and everybody, including Josh Zeps, will be talking about it, and then I'll have a really successful podcast, and I'll be pretending, I'll be hoodwinking everybody. That, I'm certain, is not what Carl's thinking.
• 1:11:05
  Conversely, is it the case that he spent 21 years waking up every morning going, I can't believe I have to pretend to not be a far-right agitator deep down? No, that's not true either. People evolve, people's beliefs change, people's interests evolve, people's interests change. The trauma of the past changes.
• 1:11:31
  decade or so in the media, thanks to COVID, thanks to social media algorithms, thanks to the decline of legacy media, thanks to the cancel culture moment, thanks to wokeism, thanks to echo chambers, thanks to political polarization, thanks to demographic change. All of that has contributed to a lot of us thinking about the world differently and being interested in different ideas and different conversations than we might have been five or ten years ago.
• 1:12:00
  I think it's legitimate for Carl to pursue interests that he has and to talk to people who he finds interesting and to try to, I suppose, elevate voices that he feels have been unjustly excluded from the mainstream media. And it's also completely legitimate for the mainstream media to say, you can do that wherever you want to. That is not the way that we conduct journalism. That is not what it means to hold the powerful to account, what it means to actually interrogate ideas, what it means to provide balance.
• 1:12:30
  So this question about, like, does he believe it is tricky. I mean, it's also complicated, of course, by the phenomenon of audience capture. You know, when you look at the most popular episodes, the most popular episodes are the ones with the anti-immigrant culture warriors. They're not the ones with Curtis Stone, the charming Australian chef.
• 1:12:52
  Um, so, you know, this is something I'm always really mindful of on this podcast. And I have to just keep reminding myself to have faith that the kinds of people who listen to this show are not people who need their worldview to be reinforced, but rather who value the process of trying to expand the conversation and be as sort of intellectually generous as we can to each other and have as much intellectual empathy for other ideas as we can. Um.
• 1:13:14
  and as much rigor and as much of a sort of a bullshit detector as we can, but to try to play in a big open landscape of ideas and hope that the chips will fall where they may and that it'll be better than if we were all uptight and censorious and finger-waggy at each other. So hopefully I don't have audience capture, except to the extent that you're going to want me to keep being as fair as I can.
• 1:13:38
  Which is useful. But I am absolutely sure I could grow this show much bigger than it currently is if I leaned into heavy anti-wokeness, culture war stuff all the time and threw you red meat. Absolutely, without a doubt.
• 1:13:56
  So then it becomes a question of, is that totally cynical? Or is it just a sort of a feedback loop? You know, it's quite, it is quite hard, I do have to do a constant self check, and like, you know, an honesty check of like, am I actually on track?
• 1:14:12
  am I fooling myself? Because it is very hard to get a person to believe something when their paycheck depends on them not believing it. And you only have to look at the way that podcasts from Brett Weinstein's to Joe Rogan's to wherever, the way that they've gone off on tangents and down rabbit holes as a result of this kind of reinforcing feedback loop of audience applause, to see that audience capture is a real thing.
• 1:14:41
  And I think it's too cynical to frame it as being, oh, they either really, really believe these things or they're just cynically pumping out these episodes because they want to be able to count their cash and they know that the audience are all rubes for lapping it up. It's neither. It's neither. People are complicated. Psychology is complicated. Incentives are complicated. Yeah.
• 1:15:02
  You know, you wake up in the morning and do I do this story or do I do that story? Are you even conscious of the fact that you're thinking about the fact that the latter story is going to be ten times more lucrative than the former story? No, probably not. Quite possibly not. But something in you leans you towards the latter story because it just seems more appealing on that day.
• 1:15:26
  And the fact that it's going to be 10 times more lucrative is factored into the equation at some level that you don't even really appreciate. I think that's the most generous way to think about audience capture and the question of whether or not people like Carl really believe the things that they seem to.
• 1:15:45
  Oh yeah, I just wanted to have a go at one more columnist who was, and I apologize for sniffling and snorting and drinking water Oh my goodness, I hope the columnist who didn't like Tommy Robinson clearing his throat and nose in a stomach-churning manner Doesn't hear this, hang on I'm recovering from a wee cold So, the other columnist not the one who was talking about the stomach-churning, throat-clearing
• 1:16:14
  The other columnist was taking Tommy Robinson to task for his rhetoric about British Muslims. Now, if you listen to Robinson, and as I hope I have already proven, I have bona fides on opposing Robinson and thinking that he is, you know, a problematic individual. But
• 1:16:37
  The situation that exists in the UK with its South Asian Muslim population is one of dysfunction, shall we say. It is not being adequately addressed. Integration is a problem. Crime is a problem, knife crime in particular.
• 1:16:58
  I've spoken to the former foreign minister of Australia on this show, Alexander Downer. It's a really interesting chat, actually, about this particular topic, the rise of the far right and anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK, because Downer,
• 1:17:12
  In addition to, interestingly, being the person who... Oh, who was the whistleblower who got the Trump... The whole Russiagate stuff kicked off? George... Anyway, I'll remember the name, or one of you will tell me on Substack. The whole beginning of Russiagate...
• 1:17:30
  started when one of these Trump guys was having drinks with a foreign diplomat in London and said, oh, by the way, our campaign has dirt on Hillary Clinton that the Russians gave us. That foreign diplomat who then passed that information on to US intelligence, which kicked off the whole Mueller inquiry in Trump's first term, was Alexander Downer.
• 1:17:54
  Just a little irrelevant aside. So Downer was the foreign minister. After being the foreign minister, he was the ambassador to the United Kingdom.
• 1:18:04
  which weirdly we call the high commissioner between Commonwealth countries. That's just a little quirk. If you're ever at trivia night in the States and they say, what do Commonwealth countries call their ambassadors to each other? The answer is high commissioner. So he's the ambassador to the UK and he has a lot of experience with, obviously, British society as he's Australia's highest official residing in London. And he gets taken one night by police in, I think it was Liverpool, around the...
• 1:18:34
  the suburbs, the majority Pakistani suburbs. And he was saying that the police were saying they just don't police any of these areas because the local kind of, you know, community leaders, shall we say, are effectively mob bosses who keep tight control over their populations. The populations don't speak any English. They're self-governing...
• 1:19:01
  you know, fiefdoms inside the United Kingdom, which are operating by their own internal logic and according to their own norms and laws. That is not an ideal way for things to go. And if you have any
• 1:19:18
  queasiness about the compatibility of political Islam or radical Muslim communities with Western civilization, for want of a better word, or liberal democracy, there has to be a context in which you can talk about that without being branded as a bigot. Now, this columnist who I wanted to have a go at talks about Tommy Robinson's remarks about Muslims,
• 1:19:46
  which I haven't heard the Karl Stefanovic episode, but I've heard Tommy Robinson a lot in the past, and he has gone overboard in saying his problem is with specific people and his problem is with Islam, and his problem is with a clash of civilizations. His problem is not with every Muslim or something. But this columnist says, excuse me,
• 1:20:09
  If you substituted the word Jew for Muslim in any of Robinson's rhetoric, Stefanovic would not be able to claim he was simply standing up for freedom of speech by interviewing this person. He would rightly be called out for abetting the endangerment of Jewish people. It's a good point. It's also slightly evasive, because nowhere in the column does this columnist address the fact that Jewish people in the United Kingdom and in Australia
• 1:20:41
  pose zero threat to anybody. You can question their affiliation with the state of Israel, you can say that they should be more vocal about foreign policy misdeeds abroad,
• 1:20:56
  But no mosque is protected against truck bombs from crazy Jews, the way that the synagogue where my dad was buried has barricades and security guards out the front and bollards to stop a truck full of explosives from being driven into it.
• 1:21:18
  No Muslim students waiting at the bus stop to go to their Muslim school are being harassed and spat on or violently threatened by Jewish students. They might be by white supremacists, but not by Jewish people. So, yes, it's wrong to demonize an entire community. But the fact that it's wrong to demonize an entire community
• 1:21:46
  should not lead us to impose speech codes on each other that prevent us from articulating concerns about individuals who are more predominant in a particular community, namely highly religiously motivated people who are bringing foreign gripes into our country.
• 1:22:11
  How do you have that conversation? I mean, it's fucking tricky, let me tell you. Because I try to have it on this podcast, it doesn't always go perfectly. And as you can hear in the pacing of my remarks right now, you have to pick every bloody word to make sure that you don't tread on a landmine. It shouldn't be this hard.
• 1:22:40
  It can't be this hard to have conversations about things that a lot of people are thinking about. And if it remains this hard, we're going to find it really difficult to stick together as liberal, democratic, multicultural societies and to solve the problems of the 21st century from climate chaos to AI to whatever, because we're not going to be on the same page and we're not going to feel liberated enough to talk to each other honestly and openly.
• 1:23:11
  So it's a bit rich to say, well, the way Robinson talks about Muslims, if he was talking that way about Jews, it'd be obvious that he was being a bigot. Yes, but...
• 1:23:21
  partly because his rhetoric is impolite, but partly because the two categories are different in the way that they operate in their home country. If he was talking that way about Jews, it would be obvious that he was making shit up, because Jews do not have fiefdoms in which they operate their own society and enforce their own criminal codes in the United Kingdom.
• 1:23:44
  It would not be true to say that Jewish people are at the extremes when they're the most religious, fundamentally motivated to inflict violence on the host country in order to achieve deranged religious goals. That just wouldn't be true.
• 1:24:06
  There isn't jihadism among the Jewish community in the United Kingdom. It would not be true to say that Jewish kids were guilty of knife crime at higher rates than non-Jewish kids. So it's a bit rich, isn't it? I mean, it's a fair point. Don't demonize people. Don't group people together. Don't collectively punish people. Don't be a xenophobe. Don't be bigoted towards an entire group of people because of the actions of some.
• 1:24:35
  But at the same time, we have to foster a conversational environment in which it's possible for people who have concerns and grievances that don't fit inside the neat box that the elite have set for us to have those conversations without being accused of abetting the endangerment of the community that they might be talking about. There is a real live conversation to be had about the compatibility of political Islam with liberal democracy,
• 1:25:03
  and the compatibility of radical Muslims with Western culture. There is not the same conversation to be had about Jewish Australians or Jewish Brits or Jewish Americans in their own countries, in terms of their own behavior within the borders of that country. How do you have those conversations? I hope you have them with a certain amount of empathy and interrogation and curiosity.
• 1:25:26
  Because what we've currently got in this situation with Karl Stefanovic and the Nine Network is essentially a big phony storm in a teacup binary where you're being forced to choose between an organization that is being unfairly caricatured as a big bad anti-free speech cancel culture organization when all it's trying to do is uphold its own journalistic integrity and the audience which has grown to know and love
• 1:25:53
  this person who has changed completely in the past six months in the eyes of the public. And on the other hand, you've got this person who's being, Carl, who's being unfairly maligned as being, you know, some far-right fascist, because from his point of view, to be maximally empathetic here, from his point of view, he's trying to open up the boundaries of the conversation to voices who have traditionally been poo-pooed by the elites amongst which he's had to swim.
• 1:26:24
  Now, you can quibble with the way that he's opening up the conversation, as I do. You can say he should be more critical in the questions that he's asking, as I do. You should say he should be more balanced in the kinds of guests that he gets, as I do. But to say he's spun off the deep end and he's just cynically trying to—this is a cash grab where he's cynically trying to manipulate clueless people in order to jump on the bandwagon of Tucker Carlson—
• 1:26:54
  also unfair. There has to be a way to have conversations that are too spicy for the legacy media. I don't think Carl's way is the way that is going to be most conducive to the flourishing of Western civilization in the 21st century. I think it will be divisive.
• 1:27:17
  but I don't think that the solution is everything was hunky-dory and totally fine while he was at nine, and there was no need to try to expand the scope of opinions that people were allowed to have in polite society. Which brings me to this week's column. Mainstream politicians must stop dodging the culture questions, writes columnist Josh Sepps.
• 1:27:44
  subtitled The Political Elite's Refusal to Acknowledge Demographing and Economic Realities Has Driven the Electorate into the Arms of Populists. And this, excuse me, this comes off the back.
• 1:28:02
  Needless to say, not just of the Stefanovic brouhaha, but of the political ructions that have been taking place all over the world. And the subtext of this is precisely the topic of the Tommy Robinson interview, largely, which is an example of the kind of conversation, and as I say, it's not just one about Muslims that sound like I'm sort of banging on about this particular community, because exactly the same points could be made about the way that we have been having the
• 1:28:30
  gender relations between men and women, you know, kill all men, or that kind of rhetoric, or the way we've been having a conversation about immigration writ large, the idea that if you make a connection, for example, between immigration rates and house prices, that that's a xenophobic or, you know, bigoted thing to say, or you could, you know, pick your poison of one
• 1:29:00
  So my article begins, you've been married nine times? Dame Edna apparently exclaimed to Zsa Zsa Gabor. What's your secret? She said. Good gag. One might ask the same of British democracy, as Westminster prepares to tie the knot with its seventh prime minister in a decade. What's the secret?
• 1:29:24
  It isn't complex, I write. The electorate, like a spouse in a loveless marriage, has stopped feeling heard. Britain has no monopoly on this. In New York, the socialist mayor, Zoran Mamdani, just watched his candidates sweep the congressional primaries, knocking off establishment Democrats who never saw it coming.
• 1:29:47
  In Australia, One Nation is polling like a major party, while Jim Chalmers' budget, that's the treasurer, the government's recent budget, landed like a dead rat on the doorstep. The pattern repeats around the world. Centre-right parties are bleeding to the populist right. Centre-left parties are bleeding to the populist left. And the establishment is scrambling.
• 1:30:15
  Sending in Andy Burnham on his three-legged horse to save the day. Burnham was sworn into Parliament three seconds ago by sounding like he cares about working people while never touching the culture questions that drove those people away in the first place. He's Keir Starmer in red lipstick. The rupture isn't only political.
• 1:30:40
  Karl Stefanovic, the most popular broadcaster in the country, is in hot water for getting too chummy with far-right populists on his podcast. As the political establishment fragments, so does the cultural establishment. Full disclosure,
• 1:30:58
  I wrote in my column, I owe my podcasting career in part to Joe Rogan. I've been a guest on Rogan's show seven times. I've seen the slow-motion tsunami of fragmentation up close. Here is how the mainstream can ride the wave without wiping out. For more than a decade, the major parties have spent more energy pandering to their bases
• 1:31:26
  than making a universal case for shared goals. This has blinded them to arguments that don't fit their worldview. Donald Rumsfeld, the former US Defense Secretary, named this problem years ago. There are known knowns, he said, the things we know we know. There are known unknowns, the things we know we don't know. And then there are unknown unknowns.
• 1:31:54
  the things we don't even know we don't know. Thanks in part to the echo chambers of social media, policy wonks in Canberra just can't believe large swathes of the electorate actually care about the things they say they care about. The political elite has left itself vulnerable to unknown unknowns.
• 1:32:19
  On the centre-right, this blindness shows up as an overemphasis on red meat, bashing woke eco-socialists and shilling old-school social conservatism. Instead of broadcasting a bridge-building story about innovation, equality and opportunity, the Liberal Party narrow-casts to its base, knighting Prince Philip and taking a she-ll-be-right attitude towards China and climate. . . .
• 1:32:45
  The Liberal Party is so preached to the choir that it lost the congregation. But the left is in an even stickier pickle. Its cultural dominance in the 2010s allowed it to assume that its own preferences were in fact universal. It enshrined a cluster of positions as the price of decency, and it mistook the absence of debate for the presence of agreement.
• 1:33:16
  The social justice revolution supercharged distrust by making regular people feel they were being forced to obey the pet projects of an elite class. There was nothing wrong with leftists believing silly things. You're entitled to believe that biological sex is a fiction, that immigration doesn't strain housing, that radical Islam is compatible with freedom, or that Britain should never have colonised Australia.
• 1:33:43
  The problem was the intolerance of dissent. The establishment drew a circle around acceptable opinion, put its own preferences inside, and branded everything outside as bigotry. This had two effects. The first was to narrow the establishment's own understanding of the electorate.
• 1:34:06
  If voters claimed to want things that didn't fit a social justice paradigm of privilege and diversity and inclusion, then, well, the voters must be mistaken. It increased, in other words, the number of unknown unknowns. The second effect of the culture wars was to train voters to read progressives as out-of-touch scolds.
• 1:34:29
  When governments then failed to act on consequential things like immigration, energy prices and the pace of demographic change, voters doubted whether such problems could be fixed inside the existing democratic framework. The establishment's pomposity and dogmatism had already been demonstrated. Trans women are women made the establishment look like a foreign tribe. Immigration and inflation delivered the death blow.
• 1:35:01
  There are two ways for centre-left parties to respond to a mess like this, I write. The first is an honest reckoning. You name the thing plainly in language your opponents will understand. You antagonise your own tribe, but you reset expectations.
• 1:35:17
  Bill Clinton had his sister soldier moment. Obama's Philadelphia speech on race did the same. Bob Hawke faced down the unions. John Howard faced down gun owners. None of them did it by dismissing their opponents' concerns. They did it by contesting, by persuading, by reframing the debate in non-partisan terms, while granting that more than one grievance was legitimate. They spoke their rival's language.
• 1:35:48
  The second possible response to the mess, which Burnham and Albanese seem to prefer, is to dodge the cultural questions and hope that bread and butter class warfare will distract people. It won't. The past 15 years of dismissing demographic concerns and imposing new cultural dogmas has left a whiff of rotten eggs,
• 1:36:15
  The air won't be cleared by shoving the eggs under the carpet and hoping voters don't notice you've changed the subject. The gravest risk in the chaos of 21st century politics is that mainstream politicians cede the conversation to extremists. A question answered only by demagogues gets a demagogue's answer. The job of establishment elites, from New York to Westminster to Canberra.
• 1:36:41
  is to aggressively wrestle with grievances that don't fit their tribe's political grammar. Their job is to move as many issues as they can from the category of unknown unknowns to known unknowns. We rarely know as much as we think we do. Luckily,
• 1:37:02
  The fallibility of our knowledge is one of the few things we do know for certain. If we want to reclaim the centre, that is where to start. We can't fix blind spots we don't know we have, but we can adopt the humility of assuming that we have them.
• 1:37:20
  So that was my fortuitously timed article this week, which I began writing before Karl Stefanovic and ended up being sort of perfect for the conversation about what kinds of conversations are permitted inside or outside polite society. I think...
• 1:37:38
  As I told a journalist who called me up for my opinion about Carl's podcast, nobody ever made money betting against Carl Stefanovic. I think the world of the guy. I wish him all the best. Carl, if you're listening, come on the show. I would love to talk to you about it.
• 1:37:56
  And I also think the world of Nine News, and I absolutely object to any characterization of this as being an attack on free speech, an attack on journalism, an incidence of cancel culture.
• 1:38:12
  It's not. It's a necessary reckoning, and that doesn't need to sort of cast a shadow or cast any questions on either of the parties who are involved. I wish Carl all the best. I wish the Nine Network all the best. And I'll see you next week.