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Premium: Ask Me Anything · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:00
G'day, this is an abridged version of the episode
0:02
that you can hear in full by signing up
0:04
at uncomfortableconversations.substac.com slash subscribe.
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Enjoy the freebie.
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[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪
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G'day, humans. Welcome to SafeSpace for Dangerous Ideas.
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You have questions, I have answers,
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and also questions and not answers for all of my questions,
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nor yours.
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But let's give it a crack.
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Shall we shoot in a layer, mate?
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Should we ask me anything?
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You know, I've been out wandering the world.
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I've been globetrotting.
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I've been seeing sites.
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I've been inhaling smells.
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Not all of them pleasant in West Africa.
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You know, you walk on along a dirt track
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in a little village somewhere.
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You go, what's that?
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Is that just, is that open sewage or?
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Oh no, there's a young gentleman just taking a shit
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on the side of the dirt track.
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Hello, sir.
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Go about your business.
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Enjoy your day.
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And they're very friendly, I must say.
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Not just the people who are shooting in the street,
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but even those who aren't.
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Shooting in the street, very friendly folks.
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So I've been inhaling and eating and tasting
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all kinds of different things.
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And I come back with wisdom to impart.
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And so we put out the call on the sub-stack.
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Are you on the sub-stack?
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Have you on the sub-stack?
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Anyway, I'm not going to bother.
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If you're not on the sub-stack, then you didn't get the call
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out for the AMAs that we sent out this week.
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But if you are, then you did.
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So I've got them right here in my hot little hand.
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Let's get cracking, shall we?
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From Greg P. Travel logistics question,
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what do you must carry with items now?
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Specifically, what's in your emergency medical kit?
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When I was in Africa, I had a pharmacy of antibiotics
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for the inevitable gastric events, says Greg.
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What's your go-to excellent question, Greg?
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And you're obviously a wise man.
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The best thing that I took on the trip was
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azithromycin, which is a very strong antibiotic.
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Single dose, basically a nuclear bomb for your gut.
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Kills all the bacteria, the good bacteria,
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the bad bacteria.
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It can be quite hazardous, because it obliterates.
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Forget about your microflora.
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Forget about the gut bacteria.
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Your gut is an ecosystem.
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It's a rainforest.
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It's basically like a rainforest of good bugs.
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Not after you've had some azithromycin,
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it's a Holocaust wasteland.
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And it was great, because it was one day
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where it got from just being the runs to being bent over
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on the bed, knees up at the chest, just sweating.
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Sweating, just the sweat.
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And even when you're sitting on the toilet,
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there's nothing left to give.
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You've given everything.
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You can't give, there's nothing inside.
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But you're just cramping up and you're sweating.
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I had to take my t-shirt off.
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You know, it's 35 degrees.
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I'm just covered in sweat in some third world
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godforsaken bathroom.
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Anyway, anyway, you know, we're barely a few minutes
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into this episode.
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I've already raised two spectres of disgusting
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fecal experiences.
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You don't need that.
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You don't need that.
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So anyway, azithromycin was great.
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I always take a modium, which, and then regret it.
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The modium plugs you up, but it plugs me up too much.
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I go three or four days without a poopy.
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And that ain't good, even if it was a bad poopy.
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So modium's usually there.
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For jet lag, I don't like ambient,
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which is called stillnox in Europe and Australia.
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It's too strong for me, and it knocks me out like a,
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it's like I'm like a bullock.
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I'm like a bullock who's been hit in the butt
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with a dart tranquilizer.
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I'm staggering around, you know,
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lumbering about even eight hours after having taken it.
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And that's too much for poor little zeps.
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So my preference, if I need to knock myself out,
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is zanax, which can be a problematic drug.
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If you take it too much, it's habit forming.
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So it can be a bit tricky to get unless your doctor knows,
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knows you and trusts you, but mine does.
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So in moderation, they find zanax to be very useful.
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It's not like it doesn't knock me out,
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but if I can't sleep because of jet lag
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or because I'm on a plane,
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it just makes me a little bit cozy.
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You're a little bit snuggly and like ooh,
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I can snuggle up, I can dose, I can dose a little bit.
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So zanax is very useful.
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Then to wake me up, now I sound like a real drugo,
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but I've been traveling a lot for a long time,
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so I know what works.
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To wake me up, there's a drug called Modaphanil,
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which makes you more, it's not as stimulant,
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but it makes you more alert and clearheaded.
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I think some Silicon Valley bros like use it
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to enhance their focus.
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So I wouldn't recommend using it all the time,
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but when I do need to, if I'm sluggish,
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especially before I'm going on the air
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and I'm jet lagged, Modaphanil fixes that,
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pseudo-eft run, which is just, you know,
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Sudafed over the counter,
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that is a good stimulant, what else?
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Oh, when I was in Africa and we needed to sleep
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for a short period of time, they gave us Modazolam,
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which is a very powerful sleeping pill,
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and I didn't care for that.
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Again, I don't want to be staggering around
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like a wounded bull who's just been hit with a dot-gun.
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So that's my travel logistics.
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Apart from that, I just travel very light.
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I didn't take any, I was away for three weeks,
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I didn't take a check bag, just to carry on.
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What more do you need?
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Few t-shirts, plenty of undies.
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I brought a few gadgets that I thought would be handy,
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like a little fan that plugs into a USB,
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never used it, never used it.
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I brought a first aid kit just so that I had it,
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never used it.
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Another text, no, sorry, another question
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from the old sub-stack,
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how has your trip affected your perspective
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on what we mean when we use the word we in the global sense,
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or say things like, the world is more polarized than ever, et cetera.
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How well do you think we actually understand the world
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and does this matter?
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All right, so an insightful question.
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I mean, I've always, one of my favorite sayings
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has always been, the world is a book
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and he who doesn't travel reads only one page.
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I think that's true.
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It's also quite sexist,
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because it says he who only trusts him travel,
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but I'm sure that they're a woman,
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and indeed, they may not even be cisgender women,
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they may be transgender women,
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they may be, they, they, them, she's, he's.
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So whoever is doing the traveling,
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be they male, female, non-binary,
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homo sapien, mammalian, reptilian, black, white, brown,
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I don't care, yellow.
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You could be yellow if you wanted to.
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We wouldn't even, but you could be polka dot.
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I don't see color or penises over Jonas ever at all.
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Don't even know what they are.
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We wouldn't even know if you showed me a picture of genitals.
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I'd be like, what's that?
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Is that sexist?
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You're trying to be sexist now.
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So, but the world is a book metaphorically,
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and they who don't travel read only one page
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of the metaphorical book, does that make sense?
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And were there enough caveats?
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We should add some more.
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So yeah, when you talk about we are,
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the world is more polarized or we are this or we are that,
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of course we're talking about a tiny fraction of human beings
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who are engaged in some sort of discourse
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at the moment with each other.
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The people in West Africa aren't.
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It's very refreshing.
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One reason I love traveling is you get to see the way
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that other people look at the world.
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I mean, you travel through the Arab world
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and it's wildly sexist and misogynistic and I'm a phobic.
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And it makes you realize and now not all, not all,
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because as I said, you could be polka dot Arab
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and you might not even, you be rainbow Arab and that'd be fine.
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I'm not talking, not making generalizations.
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So I'm certainly not making generalizations
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about individual human beings.
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I'm talking about cultures and governments and religions.
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So, you know, they're parts of the world
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where you just see such a radically different understanding.
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Like I was, I used my African flyer miles
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on this trip to take a couple of radically extravagant
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first class flights and one of them was on Qatar Airways
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and I'm waiting late at night at Doha Airport
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in the first class lounge at Qatar, which is ridiculous.
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It's so beautiful.
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It's so damn beautiful, but this place looks like a museum.
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It has ceilings that are probably 40 feet high
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and walls of sandstone, it's just gorgeous.
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And you know how sometimes you have to get a bus
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to the plane.
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You know, they don't always have a little arrow bridge thing.
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The plane might be parked remotely, so you get a bus.
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That was the case here.
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And instead of sending us out of the lounge
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to go and get on the bus with everybody else,
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they have a bus boarding gate from the first class lounge
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and they have a special first class bus.
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The first class bus is hilariously blingy.
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It's not a bus.
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You have a big, massive red armchair,
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like a lazy boy, or a lazier boy, if you're from Australia,
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with an auto, a leather ottoman,
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and the chairs are kind of arranged facing each other
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as if you could have a kind of a meeting in the bus.
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So the bus only seats about maybe eight people
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because they're all in massive,
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massive, swively arm chairs that can face each other.
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And on this bus and getting onto the bus
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from the first class lounge,
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there's a short, fat little shape of some kind.
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He's wearing the white robes.
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He's very fat and very hairy.
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And he's got a woman beside him
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and she's got the whole veil thing, happenin'.
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And she's always like a foot behind him.
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And he's sort of, you know, arrogantly barking things
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at people who work for the airline and the bus
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and kind of being pushy.
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And she's not saying anything and she's just behind him.
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And I just thought, I would love to know what he does.
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Like not, I don't care about his job,
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he's obviously important in the, in Qatar
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or in the Emirates or in Saudi Arabia or something,
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but like how does he spend his time?
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And what do they do, do they, how much do they talk?
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And what's their sex lifeline?
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Like I mean, does she have any say,
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does she have any opportunity, does she like this?
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Is she like, I caught, I've got a great catch.
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I'm with a shake.
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I'm flying first class everywhere.
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So yeah, of course you go and you see that
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and then you come back here
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and we have our conversations about the Me Too movement
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and how terrible it is that is it $0.78 on the dollar
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or $0.92 on the dollar that women get for the bloody blah.
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And is it, are they, do they actually get less
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for the same job?
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No, they don't get less for the same job.
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The point is that the kinds of jobs that women do
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tend to be undervalued because their teachers
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and preschool people, blah, blah and nurses and like,
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yeah, the whole thing is, of course,
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different depending on your perspective
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and depending on your environment.
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In fact, I tweeted such a thing while I was in Africa,
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which momentarily threatened to get me into trouble
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because cancel culture.
11:38
I was tweeting some and on Instagram put some pictures
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of the trip up and in a very long thread
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among other things that I was talking about
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how incredible it is to have been,
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to be seeing the sites of slavery
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and to be witnessing the horrors of the slave trade,
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which is incidentally part of where I was.
12:00
I wrote the following.
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I wrote, Africans are the least woke people I've ever met.
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They're so unruffled about race,
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laughing about how black tribes were enslaving each other,
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teasing me about my thin straight hair.
12:13
We came across a chameleon on the road
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and my African buddy wanted to smash it
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with his flip-flop and eat it.
12:21
In this jungle, our guide is bragging about shooting monkeys.
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All right, and this is true.
12:28
We went hiking near the border of Ghana and Togo.
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We were in Togo, a very arduous hike up a mountain
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and then down into a valley with this huge waterfall
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tumbling into this river in the middle of the jungle.
12:45
I went swimming and I didn't die of parasitic worms
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that you get in West African lakes.
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I didn't put my head under, but I was a little worried
12:53
and I got to tell you, I'd read those stories
12:55
about how you summon in some African lakes and rivers.
12:59
There are these little parasitic things
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where if you pardon the French, piss in the water,
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then they can swim up the urine stream.
13:09
They swim up the urine stream.
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This is if you're in the water,
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especially if you've got a doodle
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and you may be a woman with a doodle, by the way,
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a polka dot woman with a doodle.
13:19
They like the stream, the warm stream of urine,
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so they swim up it and then they hide
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and live inside your urethra
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and cause you no end of problems.
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I gotta tell you, you don't wanna have anything lying in you,
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hiding in your urethra.
13:33
So I'm lying and I posted this video of me lying
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in this West African pool with this waterfall behind me
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and it looks like I'm relaxed in that video.
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But I can tell you something,
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underneath the tranquil surface of that placid lake,
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there's a tremendous amount of sphincter work going on
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and a great deal of penile clenching
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to make sure that not a drop of urine comes out of my,
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my old fella, you know, that's all going on.
14:08
I'm not relaxed.
14:10
I'm making sure that none of those West African parasites
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can get up me.
14:14
So we're at this place and the guide, he's bragging
14:17
about shooting monkeys because he finds a cartridge
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from a gun.
14:21
He says, this is from the people who shoot the monkeys.
14:24
I said, do they shoot him to eat him?
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He said, of course.
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Of course they do.
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He said, if you didn't shoot him to eat him,
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otherwise they'd be monkeys swinging through all the trees.
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He says that like it's a bad thing.
14:36
And I guess it is a bad thing.
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If you live there, you don't want the monkey swinging
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through all the trees, you'd rather shoot him
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and then what are you going to do with him?
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Well, you eat him.
14:44
So then I tweeted, I continue on this tweet thread,
14:47
try white-splaining to Africans,
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how colonialism and capitalism disrupts
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the delicate environmental equilibrium
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of traditional cultures.
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And they look at you like you're a dickhead
14:58
who's never been attacked by a baboon.
15:02
And then I said, oh, because we went to a primary school
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as well, we met lots of West African kids.
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Oh, and West African children, I write,
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are taught that they have agency
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that racial oppression is in the dustbin of history,
15:13
not that they are living victims of white supremacy.
15:17
I know this because I spoke to some teachers there.
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I say, it's eye-opening how parochial we are
15:22
about race in the West.
15:24
A billion Africans couldn't give a staff
15:26
about white folks virtue signaling to each other
15:29
about diversity, equity, inclusion.
15:32
Africans want white friends, white money, and white equals.
15:36
They don't have time for white guilt.
15:39
And then I ended up saying Africa
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and Africans are the bloody best.
15:46
That got me in a bit of trouble,
15:49
which I'll go into in a future episode.
15:53
The trouble didn't eventuate into anything,
15:55
but suffice it to say that a colleague
16:01
who I want to get on this show,
16:03
because I think it's easier to talk about these things,
16:05
they're talking about them rather than tweeting about them.
16:07
Got into a huge Twitter spat.
16:09
It became, I thought quite hastily defamatory,
16:12
saying that that Twitter thread was a thinly veiled excuse
16:17
for my deep prejudice and bigotry against black people.
16:21
And anyway, the media got wind of unrest at the ABC,
16:26
and so then a media organization contacted my boss.
16:30
My boss had to escalate that Twitter thread
16:32
up to the editorial policies.
16:34
People, can you believe this?
16:36
I mean, really, at the public broadcaster,
16:38
the editorial policies, people to their credit,
16:40
to their great credit found nothing wrong with that.
16:43
They said, no comment.
16:44
This doesn't, it's not in breach of any guidelines.
16:46
I've seen any problem with that.
16:48
I had to do a back channel outreach to what I didn't have to.
16:53
I thought it was a good idea to do a back channel outreach
16:55
via email to contact this individual
16:58
who was tweeting at me directly, saying maybe this isn't the best,
17:03
maybe Twitter is not the best place to hash out these kinds
17:06
of disagreements in a public forum like that.
17:08
Anyway, the point that I was trying to make,
17:14
and the reason I paused so long there is
17:16
because there are so many directions that you could go with this
17:18
and I just have to sit down with her
17:20
to figure out what the best direction is.
17:21
But the point that I was trying to make is precisely
17:24
the point that's pointed to in this question
17:26
from our sub stack listener, which is the universalization
17:31
of our own contemporary ethics and social and cultural attitudes,
17:36
is what is one of the most infuriating
17:38
and I think counterproductive debt ends
17:42
in our current cultural moment.
17:44
I mean, we're always parochial.
17:47
We're always universalizing things from our own personal experience
17:53
and assuming that that experience is universal.
17:55
I try to stop myself from doing it,
17:57
but of course I'm guilty of it sometimes.
18:00
But the idea that my observations over there are because they contravene
18:09
the way that we're supposed to talk about social justice
18:13
and racial issues in 2023 in Australia and the United States,
18:19
because they run counter to what is regarded as being the correct way
18:22
of thinking about diversity, equity and inclusion,
18:26
that I am a bigot for simply noting them,
18:33
like that's a stretch.
18:37
I mean, that is really a stretch.
18:39
So how has the trip affected my perspective
18:41
on what we mean when we talk about like we and us
18:44
and the world being polarized and everything?
18:46
It opens my eyes.
18:48
It would open anyone's eyes to how petty our squabbles are
18:54
and how contingent what we think is important is.
18:58
Next question from the sub-stack AMA,
19:01
which you could be part of and you would have contributed to
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if you'd just gone to uncomfortable conversations.substack.com
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and subscribe.
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Oh, also, I should mention, if you are on the free tier of substack,
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We said you were going to get them for two months.
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You've been getting them for six, seven, eight months
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or whatever it's been now.
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You'll still continue to get a weekly newsletter.
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You'll get whatever the free things are.
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But so far, even free people have been getting
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the full of premium episodes, right?
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And the only people who had the premium episodes fading out
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after a short teaser were people who'd never even bought
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the two subscribe to substack at all in the first place.
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If you have subscribed to substack,
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but you're not paying anything,
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then you will notice that the premium episodes
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will start to reflect the fact that you're not paying for them.
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So just pay for them if you want.
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And if you're not on substack at all,
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just go to substack.
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It's easy to subscribe.
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Then you get your own personalized podcast feed.
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It's yours forever.
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And then when you upgrade or downgrade,
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So you're empowered.
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You're empowered, rather than just getting whatever it is
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that happens to be out there on the free feed.
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It's not hard.
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I know there's a lot of friction about it.
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I know nobody wants to have to go.
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You're talking and comfortable comfort choices,
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those are up there.com.
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Where do I go?
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You basically go slash listen.
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And the slash listen page is where you get your own dedicated,
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uncomfortable conversations feed that will follow you
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So the next question is two good first eight questions
20:42
that I would ask you and your guests
20:44
if I could, this person writes.
20:47
One, if you can have a billboard up somewhere,
20:50
what would you put on it?
20:53
That's good, isn't it?
20:56
What would I put on a poolboard?