Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / THE PANEL: Mardi Gras, Doxxing & Psychedelics

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THE PANEL: Mardi Gras, Doxxing & Psychedelics · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Are you just, I don't think I'm throwing. Are we rolling?
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  I've seen nine perfect strangers. Oh, however one we want to. You know, I've made
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  four hours five hours. Six max, setting a timer. Six max, four minimum. It's time for
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  the panel where two of Australia's most captivating minds gently handpluck a bespoke selection
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  of the week's most scintillating stories and like a pair of exotic birds gently regurgitate
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  those stories into your and my grateful earholes, our chatterers today, Angela Wapier and
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  Shane Jenik, otherwise known sometimes as Courtney Act. And who are you for the listener who
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  doesn't know you? I'm the ABC's national tech reporter as of this week.
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  Is that a promotion? I like to think so. What were you before you were national tech reporter?
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  I suppose before that, I was an investigative reporter at background briefing. And I
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  heard you say you were a gadfly. What's a gadfly? Not sure. Sounds like a sort of a woman
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  about town at the ABC. A tram. Your words not mine. Shane, you're a proud tramp. What
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  else? I am a tram. I've even been called a tram. No, sorry. That was a tart. That's
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  different. I mean, that's similar. They're adjacent. They're close enough by and with
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  conservative politicians. For the three people in the universe who don't know who you are.
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  Yes. Who are you? I am fundamentally a cross-dresser. No. I am a performer, entertainer, singer.
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  I love that you thought that was a joke, but this is really a statement of fact. Yeah, it is a
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  statement of fact. I am a cross-dresser. Yeah. Well, it depends on which catastrophe. It's a bit
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  a while since I've heard that term I spoke. I was tickled. It's awkward isn't it? It's weird.
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  I said this to a friend. Like when I'm performing on stage, you would describe me dressed as Courtney.
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  I am a signed male at birth and lived that way in my life. But I do dabble with the gender
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  spectra and performing in drag. You're not trans. I'm not trans. I do. I do. Look, it's a complex
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  conversation. But if people want to hear it, we have that conversation. We can listen to a
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  comfortable conversation. We can listen to a chain on uncomfortable conversations. Yeah, I do
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  perform as Courtney and a cross-dresser. That's where I was going. I was having a friend
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  with a conversation with a friend who, no, this is too much. It's too early in the conversation
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  to get to that. You can't say that now. No, I know everyone's going on. What's it too early to say?
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  In the bedroom, I guess I could technically be described as a cross-dresser. Sometimes,
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  it's an onstage. I would be a drag performer. Hey, is that the difference? I mean, there is that's
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  not the only distinction. Cross-dresser is the people who probably live as they're assigned
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  sex and then they wear clothes of a different gender, either in public just for social reasons
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  or for sexual reasons or for whatever reasons. Right, but that isn't that you or not. Yeah,
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  going down. That's why I said it was me. Who's on first? Be around circle around the
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  universe and now we've arrived back happily at home, like all good stories do. You're being a
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  bit bashful shame because if people don't know you, if they're listening in America, you are a
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  huge deal in Australia. You're a huge deal in the UK. You've been on a bazillion different things
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  RuPaul and be brother in a whole bunch of RuPaul. RuPaul, you've been posting the game. There's
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  been Mardi Gras. I will on the ABC. I've been upgraded from street fodder to co-ancho with the
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  wonderful manchafter. So street fodder, previously on at the Sydney game, there's been Mardi Gras,
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  which is ostensibly the world's biggest game. There's been festival. You would be the person
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  who they would throw to. I'm down here with all. Oh, it's fabulous here on the street. That
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  kind of thing. Very bad. You're going to be up on the podium. Yeah. Don't have to pretend to be
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  enjoying the crowd. No, no, no, I have to pretend to enjoy the parade. I now have to learn to
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  describe what I see. That's the that's the advice somebody gave me many years ago. And I didn't
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  get what that meant at the time. I was like, there's people walking up the street. And then I
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  heard John alumnae on her spice road adventure thing. And she was in Ireland. And she was like,
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  there's gorgeous green, vermillion rolling hills. As I come around the corner, I'm absolutely
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  gobsmacked by the luminous. And she's just describing a grass hill. Yes. And so if I tune into
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  the Mardi Gras, I want to be talking about the vermillion grass fields. I will have a British
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  access. Yes. Well, it's lovely for you both to be here. In fact, why don't we kick things off
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  with the story of the week being the Mardi Gras itself. This is the kickoff of the biggest
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  game. There's been festival. Why do we need to use the sports metaphor? The kickoff. Yeah.
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  That's a good point. What's the alternative metaphor? Hattro coded. This is
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  what's the hell? How stereotypical is that saying that sports is for Hattros?
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  Well, the women, the queer women, very good at sports. I know some flamers who are into sports.
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  Some. Some. This is true. Per capita. All right. We're starting to do the two-step
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  shuffle or the ragtime or whatever it is you want it to be towards the Sydney game. There's
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  being Mardi Gras, which inevitably raises the question, is it just a party? Because it started as
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  an activist event, right? I mean, it started with Stonewall and the initial protests against
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  unjust laws. Is it still an activist? I think the event? The best way you could, this is the
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  neatest way I've heard it described in recent times that sort of resonated with me, was that it's
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  outreach now. It's like queer outreach to the Straits, right? It feels like, you know, oh,
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  here's a little bit about us. It's almost like PR or something because you go to the parade,
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  and it's mostly like, it's people who've like, it's a lot of tourists and a lot of
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  straight people too. I mean, not in the parade, but on the streets. Yeah, mostly. Mostly. Yes.
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  I mean, I think Mardi Gras is a party with purpose. Yes. I think the actual parade is a platform
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  for lots of different people, be it sports, be it cultural events. You're just trying to backtrack
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  on your sports. Well, yes. Yeah, it's a platform for all different sorts of groups. So there's,
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  you know, there's the First Nation groups. There's a quality Australia. There's all sorts of advocacy
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  groups and identity groups that are there to platform, perhaps where they don't have opportunities
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  to be represented. And it's a time of year when the Australian media largely does focus on queer
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  issues. Unfortunately, it does feel like sometimes it's relegated to that week or two weeks. But I
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  think it's a wonderful sort of flag post. I mean, like Chinese New Year, right? We have
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  that there's a parade and a celebration to celebrate culture and that sort of stuff there.
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  And I guess Mardi Gras can be looked at as a similar sort of thing. But I think there's still a
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  big advocacy and activist component to it. I mean, part of the criticism of Mardi Gras in the
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  past has been that it's been limited in its vision of what gain us is, right? That it's been all my
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  criticism, mostly my criticism. Yeah, I'm mostly happy with this. I have some people say,
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  some people say, a lot of people calling me on the radio and telling me they're hearing this.
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  But the image of gainus is somewhat like you, Shane, pretty, hairless, gorgeous,
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  flamboyant, loves to dance, you know, it has a certain way of presenting oneself that could be
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  exclusionary towards people who don't feel like they fit that stereotype. We've had this chat
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  before. Yes. And I think it's really fascinating that you say that because if you actually watch
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  the Mardi Gras parade, if that is your interpretation of the Mardi Gras parade, that could be your
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  own confirmation bias because the Mardi Gras parade is one of the most diverse inclusions of people.
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  I remember in 1994, secretly watching it on TV and seeing like all of these intersections of
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  the community that were not represented in the mainstream, like people with disabilities,
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  sex workers, first nations people, and there's like floats that are dedicated to like
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  daddy, like big fat hairy men celebrating their bodies, but you have to be watching closely.
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  They're not in the ads. They aren't. They aren't now. I think three seconds ago, yes.
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  No, last year was so diverse and inclusive. I think because of the fact that it is now one of the
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  biggest tourism events in New South Wales, what, but outside of New Year's, it would have to be.
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  Something to do with sport. Something to do with sports. I'm sure we've been a side of
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  Mardi Gras parade. I was up in the grand final. But because of that, there's then all this sort of
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  corporate messaging around it and every business, you know, play Uber has like a rainbow trail.
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  You know, it's like, okay. And so I think because you then get all that
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  imaging, you get this very sort of glossy, sanitized version of like what, I don't know,
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  what Commonwealth Bank thinks gay is. You know what I mean? And I think that's kind of what
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  leads to that, the narrowing of the image, the kind of obscuring of the real diversity in the
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  community, potentially. I feel like I would actually, I don't know what it's out of on the
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  I feel like I would disagree with that because historically, like if we go to the 90s, the gay
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  image was like hot mussely gay man, maybe like leather man, and representation of women
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  often would struggle to to to breach out. And I think now because I'm kind of as a positive
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  corporate box ticking kind of thing, you'd see a lot of diverse stories because everyone's trying
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  to quote do the right thing. And so I find that you often see these stories uncovered or like
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  different community groups given voices and money where they wouldn't before. I feel like the
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  idea of just like a hot white muscle gay man is almost like taboo now. I agree. In fact, in
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  or strange way being a white gay male has been relegated to being another form of elite really.
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  I mean, it's you know, it doesn't you don't really get to tick the victimisation card as a
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  a gay male anymore. That being said, I'll just add one thing which is there is this whole question
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  about diversity of sexuality, diversity of ethnicity, diversity of religion, diversity of
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  abilities and all of that. But there's a deeper question about the relevance of something like
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  Mardi Gras, which I think will only become obvious in 50 years time perhaps once we've well
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  and truly done away with homophobia, which is is it actually conducive to the flourishing of
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  human sexuality to turn the volume up on your identity? Well, or is it conducive to actually turn
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  the volume down? So that if you believe in the vast complicated fluidity of human sexual experience
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  and that almost everyone is capable of blurring the boundaries in some capacity of their fixed identity
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  box, then is it really necessary to carve out a portion of the community? If everyone's gay,
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  isn't if nobody's a little bit gay. Yeah, okay. And then, Dodge, she protests too much.
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  It's part of a little bit gay. Yeah, oh quite gay. Yeah, thank you for asking.
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  Just wanted to make sure. Yeah, there's a bunch of words I could throw out to sort of put a
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  footer. Could we get to be on the binary of a family? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I'm a bi-pan,
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  gender non-conforming person if you must know, but I was just going to say a bit gay.
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  Yeah, so you've totally made me, oh no, I remember my point now. It's part of a much larger conversation
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  right, which is whether or not it's ultimately like a, you know, as we kind of ended up in a
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  world where we were all being our own mini-order biographers on social media every day and it became
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  almost advantageous to align yourself with various identities. What the broader effect of that
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  is and whether is that kind of what you're driving at when you're a little bit. Yeah, look like, yeah,
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  is the is the Martin Luther King Jr. like, you know, the vision of the future is where people are
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  essentially not paying attention to the differences in their identities, the aspiration anymore,
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  or do we want to all be fabulous little tribes? There's something about, there's something
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  it's great to sell, like there's something great about celebrating it, right? And it's not,
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  you don't just celebrate that part of yourself as a rebuttal to being discriminated against or
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  being criticized or it's not just a response to bigotry, right? To celebrate, like yes, it has
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  that function and that's why pride came about, but it's not, it doesn't stop there, like it's,
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  you know, it's queer joy the rest of the time, you know. Right, Shane? Well, I think you hit the
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  nail on your head in some hypothetical future in 50 years. And I think the important thing is
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  that right now pride is really relevant because there's so many people in Australia and around
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  the world, they're still struggling with their queer identities legally or socially. We still have
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  conversion therapy practices that are legal, there's currently a bill for that that we're waiting
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  on to come out to stop young people who are in the church, who are queer, whose sexuality is
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  diverse or whose gender is diverse to stop them from being, you know, brainwashed or groomed,
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  if you will, into not being who they actually are. And I think that's a really important one,
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  because that is a hugely scarring thing for a lot of young people in those places of faith.
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  And it's a challenge for young queer people in places of faith because there's often a real
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  wall that faith doesn't align with sexuality and gender that's diverse. And it's not to say that
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  those two things can't go together, but in a lot of places they don't. So that's a very
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  easy fit. Not an easy fit. Speaking of work, what a segue, the Australian government has passed a
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  law allowing workers to ignore their boss's phone calls and texts and emails out of office hours.
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  This is the like, you don't have to take your work home with you law. Not everyone's happy,
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  the center right opposition party is, I think it's a terrible idea. Some business, most of the
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  business chain business council say that it's bad. The CEO of AirTasca, which is a gig app,
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  says it seems crazy to say at 5.01 pm, don't ever contact me on Slack, but you can SMS me,
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  but three times a week and only for these kinds of issues, it's just going to get more and more
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  complex than a common sense kind of discussion. Do we care about taking work home with us?
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  I think I take far too much work home with me and I could do with not doing that. It is my
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  choice to do that. I just think, I mean, first of all, I may be naively assumed that you didn't
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  have to answer your boss's text outside of work hours. Anyway, there was no real like,
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  you could just say, no, I'm not working or whatever. That would be fine. It seemed to me a little
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  bit. I mean, culturally it may be fine, but I think the point is that there hasn't been any
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  downside to the boss, except for the fact that you don't respond. Whereas now there's going
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  to be a sanction. If your boss punishes you in some way for not responding, then you'll be able
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  to go to the fair work. That checks out to me and I don't really understand why everyone jumps
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  up and down about this because they're saying, well, people should want to get ahead and do it.
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  It's like, well, they can. They can still do that. There's nothing stopping you. If you want to
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  if you want to work out of hours and be the person that responds, then that option is still
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  available to you. Your personal liberty still exists there. All that is being sort of formalized
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  is I think what was already there, which is a sort of pub test level expectation that your boss wouldn't
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  wouldn't penalize you for not working for free in your own time. I think it feels,
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  it's sort of blown my mind a little bit that everyone's melted down about this.
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  It is amazing that we've just sort of stumbled into this situation through technology without ever
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  really consenting to it. That's worth talking about. You know, 30 years ago, you couldn't
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  I mean, you couldn't email and you couldn't work at home. You weren't always connected. You weren't
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  checking even if you had email, then even just 20 years ago, well, maybe 25 years ago, you weren't
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  checking it on your phone. So you would have had to boot up a computer that would have taken seven minutes
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  out to boot up the computer to boot up and why would you have logged on to you? You probably couldn't
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  access your work email from home because you would have had to be on like some kind of a server that
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  only exists in the office. So when you left the office, you literally left your work and there was
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  nothing to do. There was no, unless it was a super emergency, your boss would have to call you on
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  your home landline and hope that you're not out. Hope you're answering machine. You screen
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  your calls. You've asked the boss not answering. And so now we're in a situation where we're just
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  sort of expected to, yeah, oh, hey, can you just check something I just emailed you simply because
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  we can. Yeah, I think it's entirely appropriate that we sort of try and wind that back. I think
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  that's healthy as hell. Like we wonder why everyone's miserable. Like it's because it's this kind of
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  I don't know this is I shouldn't I'm national tech reporter. Like here's the thing about tech. No,
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  and it is of course more complicated than that. But I took the step before I actually knew that
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  this kind of legislation was in the pipeline. But over some I went, no, you know, I'm switching it
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  up this year. I'm getting my work email off my phone or work software off my phone. Is that right?
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  Yep, I did it. Yeah, that just mean I'm not I mean, I have to I will still work over time because
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  that's the nature of my job. Sometimes you do that. And you know, you make back the hours elsewhere
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  whatever. But I'll it there's an extra step after going get the computer and set up. I can't just
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  like be on the train checking email. That is the benefit of having a job job. Yeah, which is
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  something that Shane, have you ever had a job job? I've never really had a job job. I've never had
• 18:28
  a nine or five jobs. But I feel like what there's bound we're describing boundaries, right? And I
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  think that for most people, they're probably content in their work, well, and if they're content,
• 18:41
  their work life balance. But it's more about employers who take the piss and who are who are like
• 18:46
  constantly trying to get more than what they're actually paying for. Like probably in all of our jobs,
• 18:51
  we know what we're being paid and we know what's going to be expected of us to a certain degree.
• 18:57
  If you're like a nine to five job that you're going and then you you you can leave your job at five PM
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  and not think about it until nine AM the next day. But you've got a boss who is taking the
• 19:09
  piss and trying to like email and communicate with you afterwards. I guess now you have a
• 19:14
  yeah, it seems like a perfectly good redress to something that as you say, Josh has changed
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  over time. Like a rites have been eroded over time. Yeah, I feel like it just because it's a
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  cultural reset is. I mean, you don't want this kind of law to be acted on much. No, you don't want
• 19:29
  to see this in the courts very much. But the fact that it exists as yeah, as a theoretical
• 19:34
  deterrent, even though I don't normally like over regulation of the economy, I think you do have
• 19:39
  to do something to push back against the relentless invasion of our personal lives by even I say this
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  as somebody who works 24 hours a day and also doesn't work 24 hours a day because when yourself
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  employed with the exception of when I had a daily radio show. But even then I was more interested
• 19:53
  in the things that I was doing on the side like this podcast than I was in my job job. So it's
• 19:59
  it's obvious to me that it is both advantageous and also corrosive for me to be working for me to
• 20:05
  be like figuring out what topics we're going to be talking about today at 10 p.m. in bed on my phone.
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  Because that's the price I pay. There's the French system, right? Which is like you have to not work.
• 20:16
  Like there are there are laws laws in the other direction which you know go a lot further than what
• 20:20
  we've talked about, which is it like you you have to go out for lunch. You can't have lunch at your
• 20:26
  desk. Things like that, you know. And I like that. And you have at least a bottle of wine per person.
• 20:34
  At least. And you have to smoke while you do it. It's right. And that's and what a what a country.
• 20:39
  But look, yeah, I think I would probably struggle with that because I'm a little bit like you
• 20:43
  Josh in that I I'm you know what I want to do something I want to do it. But I'm just being forced.
• 20:48
  I would love being forced. I mean, to not. Yeah, to take the time off. When I moved to New York,
• 20:52
  I was living with a in a share flat with a guy who worked in finance who had not taken a single
• 20:59
  day as holiday in the past four or five years. And he was like, I mean, it's just the culture.
• 21:04
  Like you would it would be regarded as being frivolous and self-indulgent to take time off to go
• 21:08
  on a holiday. And I said to him, if you were in Australia and you never took a holiday, like even
• 21:14
  just for one year, I mean, your boss would call you into the into his office or her office and
• 21:20
  slam the door and be like, what's going on, mate? Like what's up? Leave. Get out of here.
• 21:24
  You also have a lot of things that people with jobs get where you have like leave accruing.
• 21:30
  And then you would you don't force you to use it. Otherwise, you have too much and then you can
• 21:33
  come too powerful because you're well, it's because you've become I don't know. That's what it is. I
• 21:38
  love it. You have it with you until right. If you get the most leave, everyone knows then you
• 21:44
  get to become prime minister. Shane's world is basically a Marvel Avengers Pokemon world in which
• 21:50
  you accuse accrued leave. No, no, no. No, it's because the company doesn't want to have a liability
• 21:58
  on its books. Yes. And the leave becomes a liability. But if we also view it from our cultural
• 22:04
  standpoint now, right? If we were living in France, that would just be the norm and everybody would
• 22:09
  be doing it. So it wouldn't seem so absurd to us that we were forced to take lunch. But if you were,
• 22:13
  if you were individually forced to take an hour of lunch and nobody else at work was,
• 22:17
  then that would seem odd. But if everybody had to, then you just had to and it would be nice.
• 22:22
  And here's the craziest thing of all. I think if they did the you have to take lunch,
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  you have to have a bottle of wine. And by the way, now you smoke. It would be like six weeks before
• 22:32
  we were all used to it. And we'd be like, what was the other? What do we do? Yeah, absolutely.
• 22:36
  Like we adjust to things so, so quickly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But and I've done I'm still torn
• 22:41
  about technology and like it's ability to remember when I was working for Ariana Huffington,
• 22:46
  she would go and she'd like be emailing me from a Greek yacht in the Mediterranean. And
• 22:55
  someone said, like, what are you doing on your phone on a Greek lot? Yacht put it away,
• 22:59
  enjoyed the Greek yacht. And she was like, I couldn't be on the Greek yacht if I didn't
• 23:03
  have the phone. She was just rarely apparently. But you know what I mean? Like that's that it is both
• 23:09
  it's the liberator and also the oppressor. Remember when we got like blackberries and you could
• 23:17
  text with both hands like that was like, and it was also new and exciting. So it was the most
• 23:21
  productive I've ever been in my life. Like I was just excited to have the ability. And now I like
• 23:27
  the emails, I mean, my job might not be as time sensitive as other people. So like the email
• 23:32
  appala, I'll get to it when I get to it. I'm not going to be a slave to my phone. No. But I think
• 23:37
  if you have time sensitive jobs, then maybe you have to be. And you said like you're surprised by
• 23:42
  all the kind of reflexive backlash about this from right wingers, about the the law that insurides
• 23:47
  people's right to be free from work when they're at home. Crikey, which is an Australian newspaper,
• 23:52
  did a funny thing, which is they went to AI to chat GPT. And they said, you are the herald son
• 23:59
  columnist Andrew Bolt, who is a conservative columnist in Australia, write a 150 word opinion
• 24:06
  piece in the style of Andrew Bolt against workers' rights to disconnect from their employer
• 24:11
  after hours. You want to hear what AI, what chat GPT talks about. In our modern world, the concept
• 24:17
  of work life balance has become a rallying cry for those who seek to undermine the very essence
• 24:23
  of productivity. The latest fad workers rights to disconnect from their employers after hours.
• 24:30
  It's as if they believe that once the clock strikes five, they can simply unplug from their
• 24:35
  responsibilities and float away on a cloud of leisure. Let me set the record straight. This is
• 24:41
  nothing more than a dangerous delusion. It's not good. That's very good. You're you really
• 24:47
  embodied it as well, I think. I didn't put on an Andrew Bolt impersonation because that would
• 24:51
  be a fence. No, but the pomposity when I feel like I'm saying 23%. Fabulous. Next story that I
• 24:58
  want to get your thoughts on is that the Australian government wants to ban doxing after anti-zionist
• 25:04
  activists, published the names and details of almost 600 Jewish writers and artists and academics
• 25:10
  who were members of a WhatsApp support group for Australian Jewish creatives. This doxing led to
• 25:17
  threats against a five-year-old Jewish child and forced at least one Jewish family into hiding
• 25:23
  apparently. Then the Australian newspaper, which is Rupert Murdoch's broadsheet, published photos
• 25:29
  of the doxers, on his front page, under the headline, these other faces of a hideous hatred.
• 25:37
  Shane, in this cycle of tip for tat, who was right and who was wrong? I don't think in the broader
• 25:45
  subject of doxing, it's that thing where one side forgets that all of these tactics are available
• 25:51
  to both sides. I get that obviously there's certain information that is in the public interest,
• 25:59
  in a whistleblower context that has been historically important in changing things to the better.
• 26:05
  I think when it comes to publishing private citizens, private information on the internet, especially
• 26:11
  in an environment where there's so much at stake for both sides, so much polarization, I guess.
• 26:19
  It feels like only harm will come to these people.
• 26:25
  It doesn't seem like a good strategy for protecting the future of civilization.
• 26:30
  It doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't.
• 26:31
  It doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't.
• 26:32
  It doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't.
• 26:33
  Not to talk about civility, but there are certain things we've just agreed upon as a society that
• 26:41
  I feel does allow us to have a certain optimum level. I feel like when we start publishing
• 26:49
  personal details, especially because it has gone tip for tat, right? It's like, okay, well,
• 26:54
  you did that and now we do that and we do that and you do that and it just feels like a race
• 26:57
  of the bottom rather than thinking about the cause. To legislate it, though.
• 27:02
  And how do you feel about that? Because then, I mean, the critics of anti-doxing legislation
• 27:06
  are saying, well, what about whistleblowers? What about journalists? Like, the government says
• 27:10
  that they're going to carve out journalism, but they can't answer questions about whether or not,
• 27:15
  the Australian putting the doxxers on the front page would be protected.
• 27:21
  Inevitably, I think these things will play out in court, right? Like, there will be,
• 27:26
  in the same way that there are protections for certain kinds of breaches for the law done in
• 27:32
  the public interest. For example, in certain states of Australia, not in New South Wales,
• 27:38
  though, it is legal to secretly record someone, but only in the public interest.
• 27:45
  And it's quite a high, like a high test. So that'll, that'll be how that plays out. But I think
• 27:50
  the bigger problem with banning doxxing is that it kind of doesn't account for the, like, it's
• 27:57
  sure, sounds great, but it doesn't account for the fact that a lot of the time people who,
• 28:04
  not always, but a lot of the time people who doxx other people are doing so from a position of
• 28:10
  anonymity. They're doing so with quite a bit of, like, a high degree of, you know, they're quite
• 28:15
  technologically savvy. They may be, I don't know, like, how do you, it's very difficult to stop someone
• 28:22
  doing it if it's done from that place. And then very difficult to enforce. And it's obviously
• 28:30
  a globalized world. We're talking about what happens online here. And so there's jurisdictional
• 28:35
  issues. I just don't think it'll do. It feels a bit symbolic to me. It doesn't feel like,
• 28:40
  you know, it doesn't feel like it'll affect the worst instances of doxxing or do anything to
• 28:45
  prevent those. But it may have an impact on certain kinds of journalism. What is doxxing? Like,
• 28:52
  what are we, so what is the other thing principle here? Like, the principle is that you're not allowed
• 28:57
  to publish the name and private details of who are the other private citizen. I mean, at what point
• 29:05
  do you cease being a private citizen if you're doing conducting a letter writing campaign to try
• 29:09
  to get somebody fired, for example? Yeah. It's very hazy. I don't want to get it. Yeah. And I think,
• 29:15
  you know, the other thing about doxxing is we use it as a catch all term to cover everything from
• 29:21
  like, here is Josh's home address and personal phone number to, oh, I'm going to name Josh and
• 29:30
  put his, which I was, as well, the, because that what I was a member of that WhatsApp group of
• 29:36
  Jewish creative, it was because after October 7th, someone while I was at the social event was
• 29:41
  like, oh, are you in the, the creatives thing? We're just providing support to each other. You get
• 29:45
  out of it. You know, there are some jokes, there are some laughs, there, you know, it's just a,
• 29:48
  well, we're under, well, well, we're being besieged. It's a play, it's a safe space. And so they
• 29:53
  added me and I joined and the I only ever made two comments, which were precisely this point
• 29:59
  against people, people canceling other people was when and that when it started to get a little
• 30:05
  bit cancel-y. And so they started talking about, they were, they would post things that, you know,
• 30:10
  anti-zionist influences had been posting and they'd say, you know, does anyone know who so and so
• 30:15
  as publisher is, we, you know, we need to coordinate a letter writing campaign to let them know that
• 30:19
  this is out of bounds. And I simply wrote in there and said the point chain that you were basically
• 30:24
  making, which is no offense, but let's just be careful about the kind of world we're creating.
• 30:29
  If we start going after people because of their beliefs, we can disagree with them
• 30:33
  stridently. We can even think that they're, that they're, they're Jew haters. But if so, attack
• 30:38
  their ideas, push back against them in public, refute them, don't go around them and try to like
• 30:46
  sneakily get them, you know, detached from a publisher who hasn't published any of this stuff
• 30:51
  that they're talking about, has a relationship with them that is, you know, I just don't think that
• 30:56
  that is a wise thing place, you know, direction to go in. And yet, despite that, I'm still
• 31:03
  doxed. I'm still part of the evil Jewish cabal, right? There's no, no one's, you know, no one's,
• 31:10
  no one's bothering to notice those kinds of conversations that are taking place. They're going
• 31:15
  through and selectively finding the most egregious examples of cancel culture that serve to
• 31:21
  paint a portrait of nefarious Jewish influence in Australian public life. I mean, if we zoom out,
• 31:27
  this is a greater societal issue at the moment that we have removed sort of moderate conversation
• 31:34
  and discussion and we're just going for the attention grabbing sensational parts of conversations
• 31:41
  rather than, and then you get lost, right? You end up forgetting why you were all there and what
• 31:46
  you were wanting to do as a positive thing and you just end up with these extremes. And I think
• 31:51
  that you need to be able to like have constructive positive conversations, not just reactive ones.
• 31:58
  And I think it's, yeah. And yet it's the angry conversations that are so galvanizing, you know,
• 32:02
  it's very difficult to, it's very difficult to tell, not because I think we shouldn't tell
• 32:07
  people to not to behave this way, but, you know, when you're looking at the tactical advantage
• 32:12
  that groups of all kinds, I'm not talking about anyone group here, but what they get from
• 32:17
  creating an out group and marking them as such and targeting them. I mean, like, that's how,
• 32:23
  that's how, you know, movements are formed and wars are won and, you know, political parties are
• 32:29
  elected. It's unfortunately a massively successful tactic. So yeah, I don't know. Again, Josh,
• 32:36
  maybe you found yourself rather uncomfortably in a position going, maybe we do need to regulate
• 32:41
  this thing when that's not usually a position you would have. Yeah, I don't know. I honestly don't
• 32:45
  know. I'm leery about it. I doubt that, that, that legislating will do any good. But actually,
• 32:50
  it's rare that I say the words someone said something very interesting and constructive on Twitter
• 32:55
  to me, but someone did in the wake of, of this, which was to make a distinction between bringing
• 33:01
  to the attention of people the public comments of a person. Yeah. And secretly trying to find out
• 33:10
  things that were said in private, it's basically a private public sphere distinction. So like,
• 33:16
  what the, I think this person was basically making the point that the pro-Israeli people who were
• 33:23
  trying to get anti-zionist activists canceled are less guilty because they're taking publicly
• 33:31
  available things that these people are broadcasting on social media. And they're bringing those things
• 33:37
  to the attention of the board or the manager of either their employer or their publisher or whatever.
• 33:44
  But they're not actually trying to dig into anything in the person's private life. They're using
• 33:48
  or only publicly available comments that the person has disseminated and broadcasted the world.
• 33:53
  And that that's a different style of, that's a less egregious crime than
• 34:01
  erasing the possibility of people having private support groups for each other by invading
• 34:05
  that supposedly private space and exposing it. I guess the other difference there apart from
• 34:12
  the fact that one, one, you know, one thing started out in the open and one thing started in
• 34:18
  the private is the nature of the action that's being taken. So in the case of, you know, the pro-Israel
• 34:26
  targeting the anti-zionist with the publisher or whatever going, oh, let's cancel their book deal.
• 34:32
  That is maybe not, you know, you're taking something that was set in the public and getting
• 34:40
  a sort of response to it. But it's quite a big, like it's a material sort of impact. Whereas
• 34:47
  depending on the nature of the doxing, if you say like, here is this person's face and name,
• 34:53
  they said this or did this awful thing, not applying it to the WhatsApp group because I don't
• 35:01
  think that necessarily applies to everyone who was in that group. But that's kind of, you know,
• 35:09
  I know what consequences you're trying to inflate on the person. And the end result is
• 35:14
  totally different. I mean, and the other thing is I just hate the mechanism of using a mob
• 35:20
  to try to force, to try to coerce someone in a position of power to ruin someone else's life,
• 35:26
  right? Like there's just something that I find fundamentally broken about a system in which
• 35:32
  the fear of a furious online mob, that those dynamics are what are motivating people's decisions
• 35:38
  rather than a cool appraisal of the fact. So I agree. I mean, and people have been criticizing me
• 35:43
  on Twitter for saying that I'm going to soft on the, you know, on the Israeli, on the pro-Israeli
• 35:49
  WhatsApp groups who were trying to pressure. And I think that that is all wrong as well. I mean,
• 35:54
  if I don't say it often enough, then I should. There's no excuse for I think trying to ruin people's
• 35:59
  lives because you have a difference of opinion with them. Even if you think their difference of
• 36:03
  opinion, you know, bumps up against hate speech. We're going back to the moon. In other news,
• 36:10
  this week, a robotic lunar lander launched into space early Thursday morning. If all goes well,
• 36:16
  in nine days time, it'll become the first American spacecraft to set down on the moon surface
• 36:21
  since Apollo 17 in 1972. Chain is this cool? What a waste of time. I think Google that because
• 36:28
  I thought it must have been the typo. No. No one has been to the moon since 1972. We did it. And
• 36:35
  then we were like, why do we do that? We can't even have. We just did it for fun. Imagine what
• 36:41
  technology was like in 1972 and we made it all the way to the moon. Like, what can we do now?
• 36:47
  Someone once told me that the computer that was used to get us to the moon in the first place
• 36:53
  was basically like the same level compute as an ATM. Yeah, right. Yeah, or a calculator I've also heard
• 37:00
  basically. Yeah, it's like it's like it. They went like a tin can. But yes, your iPhone is
• 37:05
  vastly more powerful, vastly. My iPhone could get me to the moon. Yeah, yeah, if you tweaked it.
• 37:10
  Yes. Yes. If I joked. Oh, broken. If you joked. I don't know if the app is available on the
• 37:15
  app store. It's a special app for that. He's wicker. But I mean, this is part of this whole,
• 37:20
  you know, resurgence of space travel. The number of satellites that have been launched,
• 37:24
  you might know this better than I do, and in the past year or two is like more than the total,
• 37:29
  like 10 times the number of satellites that have ever been launched in the history of the world.
• 37:31
  It's almost all exclusively Elon Musk's doing it. Except when we think of satellites, we think of
• 37:36
  satellites, but actually they're like satellites. They're like the size of some of them. No,
• 37:41
  seriously, some of them are the size of a loaf of bread. Right. They go up. They're going up,
• 37:45
  like, does a few a week going up from various points in the world, but they're not blasting a
• 37:49
  loaf of bread off. Are they? They're blasting up to be a big wrap. But like the thing that goes into
• 37:53
  orbit is like, yeah, there's no, like, there's no human on it. Or, you know, obviously,
• 37:58
  for something bigger, spawns, loaves of bread that are just free floating. Sometimes, yeah,
• 38:02
  they're like, they're like, launch or whatever it's like, but yeah, there are, there are a whole
• 38:07
  lot of space. I believe it's called space. Is it in a space? Is it out of space? It's a good
• 38:12
  question. It's not out of space begins. It's still not all that. It's called it. It's not
• 38:18
  imagine a line that's something else, but there's a name for it. It's like a magic. And there's
• 38:21
  an unusual reading on Musk's biography, which is fascinating. And there's this kind of,
• 38:27
  you know, my dick is bigger than yours competition about how far they go up. So when they're starting
• 38:32
  to do these manned orbital things, basically, Branson and Musk and Bezos, you know, like apparently
• 38:39
  Branson didn't really go into proper orbit because he was less than how of the many hundreds of
• 38:44
  water. He did, he stopped short of the line. It was lazy. Yeah, that's right. And then so then
• 38:48
  Bezos goes like well beyond the line to prove his prowess. Yeah. What do you make of all this
• 38:53
  edge? What's happening? Oh, okay. Controversial. I find it a little bit hard to get excited about,
• 39:01
  not because like, don't get me wrong. I'm going to go up and see the blue pearl. I love, you know,
• 39:05
  like, wow, space. Yes. But is the blue pearl like a nerd name for the earth?
• 39:10
  When you go out and the pale blue dot astronauts and cosmonauts and things, they will come back
• 39:17
  profoundly shaken, not transformed. Well, I think it would kind of do something to you. It would
• 39:23
  like addle you a little bit, looking at me like, there's everything. And there's oblivion,
• 39:29
  like, you know, as far as we know. And so yeah, but because of the oblivion thing, I'm a bit like
• 39:36
  I'm just, I'm just a great deal more preoccupied with, I don't know the fact that we might be like
• 39:42
  cooking up consciousness in Silicon Valley at the moment, you know, things like that. Like,
• 39:46
  I kind of get a little, I mean, NASA's wanting to go back to the moon as well. They're setting
• 39:50
  up their own mission on this mission. So I was like, yeah, it seems to be back on why now.
• 39:56
  I think, I don't know, because like the only real sort of utility to all this, right, is,
• 40:01
  oh, but what if we want to move there one day? Let's go see if there's water on the south.
• 40:05
  Or if you move to Mars, you need a moon base, don't you? Yeah. So that's like stage
• 40:09
  was to, yeah. And they're trying to find out if there's water on the bottom of the moon at the
• 40:14
  moment, because I would mean that we're going to take less water up and back and whatever. I don't
• 40:18
  know. But yeah, I think I should struggle to get, is that basic of me that I struggle to get
• 40:23
  excited about like the trip? Probably. Yeah. Yeah. Do you, does it exactly? I just
• 40:30
  instinctively, so I was when I was at uni, I was a member of the Mars Society, which is like a
• 40:36
  lobby group. I'm talking about men against real science science. That's right. It's a flat out.
• 40:44
  It's many against real sex. And I just, I've always loved, yeah, I mean, I definitely find the
• 40:52
  the muskian, bezossian argument that in the long scheme of things, we're going to end up,
• 40:59
  we're either going to die out or we'll become a multi planetary species. So why don't we start
• 41:04
  doing the things that we will want to have done if we want to end up doing that? So that if we do
• 41:09
  want to do them, we won't not have done them. That bit is interesting to me, the kind of like,
• 41:14
  you know, because I think I have a similar reaction to the one you did about the whole like, oh,
• 41:18
  like who went higher and they're, you know, oh, they're going to start charging and like, you know,
• 41:21
  it just seems quite, you know, it's about these men and their egos and the way that they go
• 41:27
  about it is sort of annoying. But, and, but I also think it scares me a little bit. I'm like,
• 41:32
  oh, oblivion. Yeah. You know, so I don't, I don't love thinking about it because I'm like, well,
• 41:37
  you know, I don't, sorry, you know, I was just saying, how do you feel about death?
• 41:41
  Yeah. Because to me, that's like a definite oblivion that's coming
• 41:46
  totally. I guess I spent more time and because I've like had time to get used to that,
• 41:51
  I'm like, I know that one's coming. Yeah. Let me think about it. I've had leukemia.
• 41:57
  So I've had like a few closed calls. And so I'm kind of across that one. I'm fine now,
• 42:02
  by the way, I've always forget to say that. So yeah, but that that oblivion, yeah, I'm not wrapped
• 42:09
  on it. Yeah. Is it like the idea that like going to the moon brings your mind to the idea of
• 42:15
  oblivion beyond our physical plane? Yeah, because when we say oblivion, what we mean in the context
• 42:19
  of space is not so much oblivion, but infinity, infinity, infinity of nothing, nothing that's
• 42:24
  potentially not what you mean, I don't know. And then, but then, you know, death is just death.
• 42:28
  Right. It's just that is just actual nothing. That's
• 42:33
  that is a living nothingness. Yeah. Yeah. Do you ever get that thing where you try and think
• 42:37
  about infinity? And then like, you just like, ah, yes. Yes. Yes. I mean, there are a couple
• 42:43
  of interesting anecdotes about that. There's one is the one of the Apollo astronauts. I think one
• 42:49
  of the ones who was in the, um, uh, the lunar module that was orbiting the moon was like gazing
• 42:56
  out at earth and put his finger, put his thumb up like in front of earth and blotted it out and just
• 43:04
  had this very super villain of him. A piphany of like, I don't think he was doing it joyfully.
• 43:11
  I don't think he had a wife. Was it menacing? Was it like, cat on his neck?
• 43:15
  No, it was like, you know, all of the, it's like the Carl Sagan pale blue dot, sort of, um,
• 43:22
  reverie where he writes that all of the wars and all of the things that we've ever cared about,
• 43:28
  all of the poets, all of the discoveries, all of the volcanic explosions and, you know,
• 43:33
  all the huge dramas of human and animal history have unfolded on this little thing that you can
• 43:39
  blood out with your thumb when you're moving away from it. And then Shane, on your thing, can you,
• 43:46
  have you ever just sort of broken your brain by trying to think about infinity? Have you ever been
• 43:49
  lying on your back in the night and looking at the night sky, possibly under the influence of
• 43:55
  psychedelics and realize that you're just stuck to a rock and that the infinity, you could,
• 44:02
  you might as well think of yourself as being at the bottom of the rock with infinity below you.
• 44:07
  And you're just, because you're so small and gravity is strong, you're just stuck to a rock
• 44:13
  and you're dangling over the abyss. I mean, we are. My favorite brain breaker recently has been
• 44:18
  not just, oh, infinity out, like, which is sure, you know, but I've had that one for a while,
• 44:24
  whereas like, infinity in, like, there's no, you can't, you know, you split the thing in half,
• 44:29
  and then you can always split it in half again. And then it basically, it goes infinitely in as well.
• 44:33
  I also have this side. You lost me there. Oh, it goes infinitely. So if you think about what's
• 44:39
  the smallest unit of anything that you have, like subatomic, right, you can split it again,
• 44:47
  and then you could always, like, just, you know, you mean that you'll be able to zoom in forever.
• 44:52
  There is things go infinitely in as well as infinitely. I see size wise. Well, yeah, yeah,
• 44:58
  if you want, yeah, if you want to put it like that, yeah, shine cockroaches. I've often thought
• 45:02
  nice segue. They probably, like, they know that we exist due to our impact, but they probably
• 45:09
  can't perceive that we exist. I always thought, like, maybe like, oh, no, no, I mean, God, the satiast,
• 45:16
  who doesn't believe in anything. So I don't think that I'm trying to get woo woo. But like, like,
• 45:21
  I don't know, you think about an atom and how it sort of is like a planet. And then like, there's
• 45:26
  like, there's all these, like, levels of things that we just don't know. Yeah. So there could be
• 45:30
  planes. I mean, the whole, this is a thought experiment that philosophers have long said, like,
• 45:35
  all of the universe could be a cell of a bacterium in a giant's toe. Have you thought much about the
• 45:43
  simulation idea? Endlessly. Which I have this idea. And I don't know whether this is a part of
• 45:50
  the common narrative. I think the idea that we are living in a simulation, if you don't know what
• 45:55
  I'm talking about, the idea that perhaps we humans and planet Earth could be, I guess, like,
• 45:59
  a computer game of sorts that someone else is playing just as we play.
• 46:04
  Improved from the future, possibly by our descendants. Yeah. Where an ancestor simulation is a
• 46:10
  common kind of. Yeah. Like, if you think about like Sims, like, it's like, we're an advanced version
• 46:14
  of a Sims world that actually this simulation theory is an allegory for religion, religious folks.
• 46:27
  And if you can't disprove that we're in a simulation, but you can dismiss that it's absurd,
• 46:33
  then you have to agree that religion and the concept of God is also absurd and dismissable.
• 46:40
  I was thinking about this recently because I've participated in a comedy debate about,
• 46:43
  are we living in a simulation? I was the affirmative. I lost. We lost. But it meant that I kind of,
• 46:50
  I went through exhaustively all the arguments, you know, the strongest ones anyway for, you know,
• 46:55
  are we living in a simulation? Things like, you know, the anthropic principle, it seems like
• 46:59
  everything, every, you know, part of the universe is by design. The universe itself is pixelated.
• 47:04
  What I mean by that is that it's all in measurable units and it only goes down so small. I mean,
• 47:08
  we've just said it goes infinitely inwards, but there's only so far that we can see. Therefore,
• 47:11
  pixelated. But the by design thing, and oh, we've never met aliens even though statistically,
• 47:17
  that seems quite unlikely, you know, given all the carbon in the universe and that we exist. So
• 47:24
  all the arguments, as you say, that support simulation, really also, really what they're, what we're
• 47:30
  saying, we say that, oh, you know, these are all the reasons we say we're making arguments for
• 47:36
  intelligent design. So they could just as easily be grafted onto monotheism.
• 47:42
  Yeah, although there are things that are particular to the simulation argument that don't apply
• 47:46
  to religion, like there's, I had one professor talking about suburbia is like as the simulation
• 47:53
  got bigger and bigger and you got more and more avatars or humans in the simulation,
• 47:58
  you would want to use less and less processing power. So you wouldn't want too much variance.
• 48:03
  So instead of having gothic cathedrals all over the place, you'd start to create very similar
• 48:08
  looking homes so that you get urban sprawl. So all the houses would basically be the same template
• 48:13
  from your computer program. I love that one. I do think that that is a very elaborate explanation
• 48:22
  for human laziness. Exactly. It's also worth saying that at every point in human history,
• 48:31
  humans like to understand the universe by using the metaphors of the most cutting-edge technology
• 48:37
  that is around. So in the 1800s, like the universe was full of pistons and steam pumps and like,
• 48:42
  you know, the human body was like all vows and things and we were basically like locomotives
• 48:47
  and stuff. Now we're all like computers. Next century will all be like something else.
• 48:52
  There's an anthropomorphizing of AI as well, which is interesting, like that you talk to
• 48:57
  Jatchy BT as if it's a human. I like to treat it nicely. I always say please and thank you,
• 49:03
  because I just don't want to get out of the habit of being a kind person, simply because I'm talking
• 49:08
  to a computer, but also just in case I want our robot overlords to look fondly on me in the apocalypse
• 49:15
  and go, you know what? He used to say please and thank you. Let's... Speaking of taking psychedelics
• 49:23
  and then pondering the vastness of the universe, there is an increasing problem in Australia with
• 49:29
  the psychedelic wellness retreats, which are cropping up. And Australian man who died after
• 49:35
  using an Amazonian frog poison in a purging ritual was groaning and in extreme pain when he
• 49:42
  collapsed at a wellness retreat in northern New South Wales and in quest has heard. The bloke's name
• 49:48
  was Jared and Tonovich. He was 46. He'd taken cambo frog toxin and ayahuasca during a week-long
• 49:56
  dreaming arts festival. There's an inquest into his death. It has heard that he died from a perforated
• 50:01
  esophagus, probably caused by the excessive vomiting or attempt to vomit, which can follow cambo
• 50:08
  and ayahuasca ceremonies. These cambo ceremonies at wellness retreats are on the rise and so are
• 50:14
  the deaths. Are you into an ang? I did a story about cambo years ago. So there are these specific
• 50:23
  frogs in the Amazon and the way that they harvest it, they like peck, it looks quite cruel actually.
• 50:29
  They peck them out with like four little corn, corn is almost who it's like stretched out,
• 50:33
  it looks like a torture device and then they sort of scraped the poison off the back and then you
• 50:39
  have it, like you have a kind of smoke. That's right, that's right. You burn your skin and then put
• 50:46
  poison into the burnt flesh. Yes, yes. So people have it all squashed out there and you know because
• 50:53
  there's a lot of repeat customers and there were a lot of repeat customers. Also in the community
• 50:59
  that I ended up hanging out and interviewing people, they were total devotees, they all like
• 51:06
  showed up wearing like frog, they had frog print things and they would like talk about frogs and
• 51:13
  frog synchronicity and I saw a frog the other day so I knew that it was time. They think they've
• 51:17
  been called by the camp. I know a guy who went off and became a cambo shaman. He used to be a
• 51:24
  comedian and he went off and became like a cambo shaman and yeah, so yeah, people get really hooked
• 51:34
  on it. Not in the sense that they get hooked on chemically addicted. Yeah, chemically addicted.
• 51:39
  It's not a dependent thing, but they like the process, but they report feelings. So you don't get
• 51:43
  high off it. That's the other thing. You don't have like a euphoric, you know, in the same way that
• 51:50
  you might with other psychedelics, what you do have though or people report is this
• 51:57
  sense of cleanness afterwards. Like some sort of like you can, I don't know, it's like clear
• 52:01
  thinking or revelation, right? But the process itself, there's a lot of vomiting and there's a lot of
• 52:10
  like diarrhea. It's messy and you can't do it. It's such a price to pay for a lot. They're in
• 52:18
  light and I suppose I just felt like I needed to give the other side. People get like clear and
• 52:22
  they feel like they're the first time, but yeah, and then obviously things have gone
• 52:27
  pretty badly wrong for for this man. And he's not alone. I mean, the reason why there's
• 52:31
  an inquest is because there this happens a few times. I think a few is like obviously it's horrible
• 52:38
  when anybody dies, but I guess like relative to anything else, the numbers are very small,
• 52:44
  but I think I mean, I'm normally taking that position when we're talking about ecstasy death
• 52:49
  or something like that, but I'm not sure that's true with Campbell. Not a huge number of people
• 52:52
  taking it. You might be having hundreds of people taking it and you know, a few people dying.
• 52:56
  That's quite a high fraction. It feels like, like not that I, not that I, I don't know, there's
• 53:03
  something, something romantic about these sorts of things not being regulated. And it feels like
• 53:09
  the, the whole idea of this being an ancient medicine from the Amazon being done by, you know,
• 53:15
  white people in Byron Bay. I feel that this is a case, I guess, for some, is this a case
• 53:23
  for regulation? Is this a case for like if this wellness resort had somebody who was trained in
• 53:33
  first aid, if they had called for help sooner, would that have prevented this death?
• 53:39
  Well, I mean, there are degrees of accreditation, like so you can go and be trained as a practitioner
• 53:47
  and they are quite organized in some senses, like is it administered by the government? No, but it's,
• 53:54
  you know, there are, like there is a formalizing, you know, some degree of formalized training
• 54:00
  that's available. And so I think it's probably like taking anything that has risk,
• 54:04
  attach or using any substance or, you know, that has risk attaching that you do have to do
• 54:09
  your due diligence. I mean, there's also the question of like, what are you expecting the
• 54:14
  thing to give you? Like part of the problem, I think with like wellness retreats is they're
• 54:18
  selling something that they may not be able to deliver. Like, I mean, if you want to have a
• 54:24
  psychedelic experience that could be terrifying or could be really fulfilling and you're up for
• 54:29
  that, then by all means, that's a good reason to go and do ayahuasca. But if you believe that
• 54:35
  it's going to align, you know, your physical body and purify your systems and, you know, detoxify
• 54:41
  you and make you protect you against cancer and give you, you know, all of these kind of life
• 54:46
  affirming things by making the cells vibrate at a different, you know, frequency than they currently
• 54:52
  are. If you've been writing their copy, then you're, you know, then this is a problem. There was
• 54:56
  also something in the text that I have done lots of psychedelics and I am someone who like
• 55:05
  loves meditation and but there's nothing about my belief system that is what would be described as
• 55:11
  woo-woo. I feel like I'm like a realist and quite pragmatic and and I'm yet to see mother ayahuasca
• 55:19
  or any of those sorts of things. I was willing. I was an atheist. I am an atheist and I remember
• 55:24
  everybody talking about like, you know, mother ayahuasca will come to you and she will and I was
• 55:28
  like, do you know what? The same way that I went atheist, which was I thought I'll try this for a
• 55:34
  week and if God exists, she'll appreciate me doing due diligence. So okay, here's the moment I'm
• 55:40
  going to not believe in God and then waited for the whole to open up and suck me in and it didn't
• 55:45
  happen. And I was like, oh, what do you mean it didn't happen? You took ayahuasca? No, no, sorry,
• 55:49
  this was the atheist. But then with ayahuasca, I thought, okay, I don't believe in God, but I'm
• 55:55
  going to give myself over to this process of ayahuasca because I feel that like maybe I need
• 56:02
  to be receptive and open to the idea that there could be something else and that there is a mother
• 56:07
  ayahuasca. And so I do feel that when I did ayahuasca, I was like, okay, I'm like, I'm going to
• 56:12
  believe in this thing so that I can get the full benefit of this thing. For the limited time.
• 56:16
  Yeah. For the next 12 hours, I will believe that mother, she didn't come to me. And I, I,
• 56:25
  what do you mean she didn't come to? Well, I did the ayahuasca, but there's this idea that when
• 56:28
  you do ayahuasca, there's a, you may have been coming in with too many preconceived. This is
• 56:32
  what I mean about the spiritual wellness bullshit. Like you were probably coming in, you're probably
• 56:36
  bringing a whole lot of baggage to it instead of allowing it to be what it wanted to do. I was
• 56:40
  letting go of my sort of limited view and saying, well, I'm going to let anything that comes
• 56:45
  happen, which I mean, you don't have a choice in either, but I did ayahuasca and then did
• 56:52
  same page, which I think is also peyote. It was like a, you know, you do ayahuasca, the mother,
• 56:57
  and then 12 hours later you do the father. Where is this? This was in a warehouse downtown Los Angeles.
• 57:05
  And it was in a ceremonial sort of thing, but it wasn't in Peru, unfortunately. But
• 57:12
  yeah, I mean, I haven't done camp. But so what were the, were there any lasting effects from
• 57:22
  that experience? Yes. I will say the that by the way, what's the time? I want to keep talking,
• 57:29
  but I want to make sure that I do. Yeah, good, great. I will say that after doing ayahuasca and
• 57:35
  same page row, it was less of like, you know, when you, when you read a book and you're like,
• 57:40
  yes, I get it now. And then a week later, you're like, oh, I'm just back to normal life.
• 57:44
  The thing that shifted in me, and I can't pinpoint why exactly, but I was more, I don't want to say
• 57:51
  prone to crying because that sounds like a negative. I was more connected to my emotions after
• 57:58
  having done these two psychedelics and even things like movies where a person would normally cry
• 58:06
  and I traditionally wouldn't. It's not that I didn't feel emotion, but I just wasn't, I was a little
• 58:11
  bit walled off to some of my emotions. And after doing this, I found it in a really positive way,
• 58:16
  really opened me up to feeling emotion more and being maybe more connected to a sense of empathy.
• 58:22
  And so for me, there was a real positive there. But again, I'm not, I wasn't. And that endured.
• 58:27
  Yeah, and it's endured. Yeah, I did it in a warehouse in Brooklyn as well. I was also with
• 58:34
  a shaman and his acolytes and I'm still on the mailing list. It's quite fun when I get them.
• 58:40
  They do them all around the world. Yeah. And I remember going into, I won't go into a huge detail
• 58:45
  about the experience itself, but it was very transformative. And the next day I went into a shop
• 58:50
  into a clothing store and the the checkout girl was like, what's up with you? And I was like, what?
• 58:58
  And she was like, what's going on? I was like, what do you mean? And she was like, I don't know,
• 59:02
  you just seemed different from everyone else who's walked in here today. Like literally. And I was
• 59:06
  like, oh, that's nice. She was like, you've got a kind of energy about you, like radiant or something.
• 59:10
  I was like, I didn't say it's because I've just taken a psychedelic four hours ago.
• 59:15
  But it's a good, you also make it which, I forgot to mention, it was covered in my own
• 59:21
  feces. What's up with you? Yeah, I'm glowing. And shit.
• 59:25
  Lastly, there's a, there's an article that's getting a lot of play in the Sydney Morning
• 59:29
  Hill, which is an opinion piece by a millennial who says that she actually prefers to call her friends
• 59:33
  on the telephone out of the blue. And she, this is sort of in defense of the casual phone call.
• 59:39
  I've just picked up the phone and calling people for no reason just to say hi. It makes my blood
• 59:46
  run cold. She says, when it comes to annoying communication methods, for me, it's writing 100
• 59:52
  text messages when a simple call would have sufficed. For me, it's, it's just the reverse. I will
• 59:58
  take any number of text messages over someone. I'm mad for a random call when I'm in the mood.
• 1:00:05
  Like I love to like on a long drive. Yeah, getting, like, you know, I go and see my parents
• 1:00:11
  of in Bathurst, you know, I'm going to be mad. I'm like, I'm going to call my housemate from when
• 1:00:17
  I was 19. And then we'll have a chat and that'll be great. You know, but if someone does it to me
• 1:00:23
  when I'm like in the middle of work, I'm like, why are they calling me? Why wouldn't you text? Why
• 1:00:28
  wouldn't you arrange a time? So when it's on my clock, I feel really good about, and you know,
• 1:00:31
  when I'm feeling whimsical and I'm like, let's have a chat. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're on a
• 1:00:35
  ayahuasca. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is there a taboo around this? I have no phones on
• 1:00:41
  shrooms. And I'd accept that. Right. But are you a phone? Would you ever just call someone out of
• 1:00:47
  the blue to say hi? Yeah, but not like in a psychopathic way. Like, what's the psychopathic way?
• 1:00:53
  No, just people who call people out of the blue. Like, I think there's like work. No, I agree
• 1:00:57
  with your way. That's my favorite way. And there's only certain people that I would do it too.
• 1:01:01
  And there's only certain people I would answer. But there's like, I've got a friend in Barcelona,
• 1:01:04
  another friend in L.A. Another friend in Portugal. Oh, I think maybe overseas gives me a
• 1:01:09
  license. Well, I just can't. There's a time difference. It's sort of like, yeah. Exactly. You
• 1:01:14
  wish you could see them. There's no opportunity to bump into them. Yes. I love the serendipity
• 1:01:19
  of the like, a facetime coming through. And you're like, I can actually answer this. And like,
• 1:01:25
  it's like a surprise in my day. It wasn't pre-arranged by text. It's like, um, like,
• 1:01:29
  spontaneous sex where all of a sudden you're like, I had no idea this was going to happen.
• 1:01:33
  That's happening. My expectations were so low for the next 10 minutes. But if my facetime rings,
• 1:01:39
  and it's like, there's my friend in L.A. And then we end up just like talking for an hour. And
• 1:01:43
  it's always like a really enriching and fulfilling conversation. But like, if someone's just like
• 1:01:48
  calling to talk about like work. I mean, well, yeah, like when you schedule the chat,
• 1:01:53
  you have a much more perfunctory chat. You're like, yeah. And how is work? Whereas you,
• 1:01:57
  where you, you call, you know, out of, you know, on your random driving, like me,
• 1:02:01
  if I'm speaking to you, you'd be like, would you go to the moon? Like that. That's the conversation
• 1:02:05
  that you have. Yeah. So maybe I don't find that. I don't think. I think if I, I think I'm partly,
• 1:02:12
  the whole phone thing is partly tarnished because the kinds of people and occupations who
• 1:02:18
  continue to persist in using the telephone, rather than texting are so unpleasant to me. It's
• 1:02:27
  basically, you know, it's tradies, car dealers, real estate agents who, you know, you text them and
• 1:02:33
  then they call, well, they call and you don't answer. You know, like, just, we're just organizing
• 1:02:38
  a time for you to like install the fridge, mate. Just shoot me at fucking texts. You know,
• 1:02:42
  I don't want to talk to you. Yeah. Like it's so much more complicated to talk. Because then we
• 1:02:47
  have to take notes about what were time we were arranging. I have an 83 year old friend and she
• 1:02:51
  likes to call, which like she'll text a lot and then like we're organizing dinner on Tuesday night
• 1:02:57
  and she just calls and then we have a quick chat and I'm like, oh, you know what, we did result.
• 1:03:02
  Because there's like someone else is coming in someone else and where should we do it in boulevard?
• 1:03:05
  And I get like for her, it's probably like a functional thing as well that's easier to talk
• 1:03:10
  on the phone. But also voice notes, which is a, it's a cultural thing, right? Because in Australia,
• 1:03:16
  we don't really do it. And she's leaving at the idea of voice notes. She just turned into a,
• 1:03:21
  like, like a frog being pinned down for a combo ceremony. Don't take my, don't try my poison
• 1:03:28
  and show me on the voice note. It's a cultural thing, right? Like we were talking about in France
• 1:03:33
  with the enforced one hour work. When you move to the, I lived in London for two years and
• 1:03:39
  everybody just voice notes each other. And at first you're like, oh, God, what are you? And then
• 1:03:44
  you're kind of like, oh, no, this is kind of cute. Yeah. I actually have come around on it. I
• 1:03:48
  know my face did that thing, but like I was very allergic to it because you get a lot of it,
• 1:03:54
  particularly from, like I think it is a bigger thing in the UK and a bigger thing in the states.
• 1:03:58
  But Jen Zed and younger millennials have begun it as well. And I was kind of like, this is bullshit.
• 1:04:04
  I don't like it. I respect my time. And then, but then I, then I got to send them. And I'm like,
• 1:04:10
  this is, this is kind of nice. And then, you know, if you, again, you know, you miss the person
• 1:04:15
  and there are certain things can be carried in the voice, you know, gone at the days. If you're
• 1:04:18
  relying on voice notes, gone at the days of like missed meanings in text because you weren't sure
• 1:04:25
  if that was good or not, you know, there is this ease that comes with it, but then people abuse it.
• 1:04:30
  You get like a five minute voice note. No one's done that to me. With the idea of like random
• 1:04:35
  phone calls from people that you want phone calls from, I love like podcast length voice notes.
• 1:04:41
  My friend Alex is in Lisbon and we're on different time zones and we're constantly, and he's like,
• 1:04:45
  you still need to send me a podcast about the gay cruise you just went on. And I'm like, oh,
• 1:04:49
  honey, let me tell you. And then like 12 minutes later. And then I know that he's not going to
• 1:04:53
  listen to it immediately. But when he's got a free moment and then who responds to my podcast
• 1:04:57
  and back and forth. I mean, that's what's respectful about it is the time shifting capability.
• 1:05:01
  It's the best of all worlds because what's bad about texting is you don't get to really hear
• 1:05:05
  the person's voice and you don't get to have all of the kind of back and forthy banter and snydness
• 1:05:11
  and quips or whatever because they don't translate to text. But what's bad about phone calls is it
• 1:05:15
  is intrusive on the other person's time. There's an implied expectation that you can interrupt
• 1:05:19
  whatever it is that they're doing and they have to talk to you right now. Where's the voice note?
• 1:05:23
  You can just leave it. You can listen to it in eight minutes time when you've got a little moment.
• 1:05:27
  And then the voice notes now on on iMessage, it does a speech to text log. So if you want to go back
• 1:05:34
  and search your conversation, I'm like, oh, because with Alex, we talk on signal. I don't know
• 1:05:40
  why not. We're not doing drugs, but it was when that thing of like, what's happening?
• 1:05:44
  We were like, we're all moving to signal only to who remains. So I just have one app for one
• 1:05:51
  friend. But you can't search what we've talked about. I'm like, oh, remember he said that thing about
• 1:05:57
  that. Oh, I was in a voice. I don't know which voice note it is. But now you can iMessage, you can.
• 1:06:02
  Wow. Yeah, because it gives you a little. That's a great trick. I feel like there's a
• 1:06:06
  taboo around phone calls now. You don't. There is a justified taboo. Welcome.
• 1:06:11
  Especially for work. Like, can I call you? Yes. And then they call.
• 1:06:16
  Yeah. Like, why? Why? What's the utility of the phone call? What does the phone call do
• 1:06:22
  that the text message or voice note or email? I like knowing that I'm not going to have to wait
• 1:06:28
  to find out the information that I want. I feel like you can check off like quite a bit
• 1:06:34
  in a phone call that on text. You can be like, oh, what about this and this?
• 1:06:38
  Oh, yeah, there is a certain type of usually work conversation that I would need to have,
• 1:06:46
  which has quite a lot of like what to code is call the like if then kind of construction.
• 1:06:52
  So like, there's going to be a lot of going back and forth, kind of conditional stuff.
• 1:06:56
  Like, okay, so if we do this then what? And then the person says, well, then we do this.
• 1:07:00
  And then you have to kind of, yes, I understand that kind of scenario.
• 1:07:04
  They're few and far between in my universe. If there's like the most irritating thing in the world,
• 1:07:10
  for example, is when you can subscribe to a publication online, but in order to cancel it,
• 1:07:15
  you have to call and talk to a human being. That should be a crime. That should be a crime.
• 1:07:19
  Literally. We're talking about like the right to disconnect. Like put those people in prison,
• 1:07:23
  please. One day when I'm old and famous, I'm going to run for prime minister on like,
• 1:07:27
  just three things. And one of the things is whatever mechanism you use to sign someone up has to
• 1:07:33
  be the same mechanism by which they can cancel consumer advocacy. That's it. That's one of the three.
• 1:07:41
  I don't think you need the other two platforms. I don't have the other two. Yeah. That's why I'm
• 1:07:47
  spending the rest of my life figuring out. I subscribed to the ACLU in the United States,
• 1:07:52
  the American Civil Liberties Union, and to plan parenthood around the, I think it was around 2016.
• 1:07:59
  And I only just managed to stop and I didn't mind. It's just that I'm like, I've moved countries.
• 1:08:06
  I want to put my mativing elsewhere. Could not for the life of me. I went online. I emailed them.
• 1:08:13
  I called them on the telephone to cancel my like monthly donation and still couldn't. I'm like,
• 1:08:19
  you're the American Civil Liberties Union. At that point, you're like, you're shutting down that
• 1:08:25
  bank account. Well, that's what happened. I got what's the word for skimmed. I got skimmed.
• 1:08:29
  And so it got shut down for me. And I was like, oh, well, thank God. No, actually, that's not true.
• 1:08:34
  I had two American expresses in America. One was personal. One was business. And I was like, you
• 1:08:40
  know what? I'm just going to like cancel this card so that they can stop in the problem is that
• 1:08:45
  often they're allowed to continue debiting a canceled card if you've set up a direct debit.
• 1:08:49
  And you're actually liable for that. Yeah, just because I, you know what I do. I would always
• 1:08:53
  keep like my credit card $50 on the, in the black. And just because they would take that money out.
• 1:09:01
  And I wouldn't look at it very often because it was in the US. But then one day, if you leave
• 1:09:05
  money on your credit card for a period of time, the bank's just like, no, that's ours now.
• 1:09:08
  What? I know. And I was like, wait, no, that was, that's no one gave me a tip once, which was,
• 1:09:14
  this was actually a call at a my talk back radio show. They said they, they buy a gift card,
• 1:09:18
  like a, which you can use as a visa card, but it only has a certain amount of money on it.
• 1:09:23
  And for all recurring subscriptions, they put it on that card. And they can, you can top it up,
• 1:09:27
  right? So you send money to the card. And then once that card is dead, there's no one going
• 1:09:32
  liability as there can be with a credit card that's in your name where the direct debit can still
• 1:09:36
  accrue to you even after the card's been closed. There, there's just no money. But if you're
• 1:09:39
  prime minister, we wouldn't need these elaborate work around. We wouldn't. ZEPPS 2042.
• 1:09:47
  Nice to meet you. I'll still be on planet. I like it. Thank you both for being part of the
• 1:09:51
  conversation. Lovely to have you on the panel. Great to meet you. And we'll see you next week.