Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / The Best Of Vol. 1: Tim Urban, Clementine Ford & Malcolm Turnbull

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The Best Of Vol. 1: Tim Urban, Clementine Ford & Malcolm Turnbull · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:00
Get a human and Merry Christmas from the safe space for dangerous ideas.
0:07
What a year!
0:08
I had a great year.
0:09
I mean, I wouldn't say grace.
0:11
Look, in comparison to all of the years in my life, it's been busy and stressful, but
0:18
also very fulfilling.
0:19
I hope yours has.
0:21
In comparison to the last three years, though, what a cracker.
0:25
Because you come on off a very low bar with your 2020s through 2022s, aren't you?
0:32
We had bushfires, horrendous bushfires in Australia, 2019 to 2020, and then we had COVID,
0:39
2020 to 2021, and then horrendous floods, 2021 to 2022.
0:44
So welcome to Climate Chaos, but now a respite, and it's summer in Australia.
0:50
So if you're listening to this and it's freezing cold outside, I'm sorry, I'm sorry for
0:53
your loss.
0:54
It's probably a poor life choices, really, living in a place that gets very, very cold.
0:58
No, the Christmas season is wonderful and beautiful, and a little part of me is jealous
1:02
of you that you get to trudge through snow with a cold nose and cold ears and look at little
1:08
sanders in windows of stores and so on.
1:11
It's quite romantic as well.
1:12
I hope you had a lovely Christmas, and I hope you're looking forward to a new year.
1:17
Well, to the possibilities of the new year, not just to age generic new year, because there
1:21
is a lot that we can look forward to in 2023.
1:24
I've got a good feeling about it.
1:27
I reckon we're on track for a goodie.
1:30
We've had a couple of losers, and now we're getting a doozy, and it's even if you don't
1:36
really necessarily believe that in your heart of hearts, it's worth treating it as if
1:39
it were so.
1:40
In case it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, do you have like a new year's resolution
1:47
of some kind?
1:48
You know what?
1:49
I don't know about that in the next episode, because I have a thing to say about it.
1:52
To now, I just want to get straight into the content, because what we're doing this week
1:56
and for the next two weeks is bringing you the best episodes of the year.
2:06
When we thought about doing this, we thought, oh, we don't want to sort of throw together
2:10
something.
2:11
Oh, here are some clips from previous episodes.
2:13
Nobody wants to just hear previous episode clips, what my producer said.
2:18
And then I said, well, if they're the very, very best bits of the best conversations
2:23
that I've had through the entire year, wouldn't I sort of only want to hear that?
2:27
I mean, don't I kind of want the boring bits to be taken out and the very, very best bits
2:32
to be stitched together?
2:34
So we're bringing you three episodes over the next three weeks that are by no means after
2:38
thoughts and are really good.
2:41
As usual, you'll hear the entire thing if you are a member of our newsletter on Substack.
2:46
If not, then you won't get the entire episode.
2:49
You will get most of it.
2:50
It'll still be fine.
2:51
But if you haven't registered on Substack and gotten your own unique dedicated podcast
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feed, which is free, then maybe you're not understanding how simple it is or something
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or there's some other blockage either way, hop online right now.
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It helps us pull your phone out of your pocket and just go to uncomfortable conversations
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at Substack, uncomfortable conversations, in other words, just Google uncomfortable conversations
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Substack.
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If that's too many letters, you're like, oh, I'm going to spend all day typing on what
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is it?
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You and Sieg.
3:20
Oh, give up.
3:21
I'm too lazy.
3:22
It's, oh, I'm too fat from Christmas and it's almost near, it's a kind of type uncomfortable.
3:30
Then you could type zips, Substack.
3:32
That probably gets you there, SZ, EPS, but I don't know what spell I used to spell it
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without an S. And then I don't know how many P's there are, oh, I need to lie down.
3:44
Pull your phone out and do it and I don't know if you think it's complicated to do
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or something, but you literally just put in your email address and then that's it.
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You don't have to sign up with a card or anything like that.
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I'm so grateful to those of you who did and many people, many, many people have, but you
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can select a free subscription plan and you don't have to worry about whether or not you
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want to pay for bonus content until February because until the end of January we're giving
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everything away for free.
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Anyway, so that's the pitch, that's the spell you are supporting independent media and
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you're supporting me if you sign up, even if you don't pay any money.
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So do it now because then in a month's time you'll be like, oh, I would have liked to
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have gotten all that free content and all those bonus episodes and all the full duration
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podcasts while they were free because now he's asking me to pay $6.99 a month and I
4:28
rather not.
4:29
Well, you don't have to now and you won't have to until February.
4:31
And it's not going to like auto trigger somehow.
4:34
I'm not going to trick you into it.
4:35
And I'll be like, ah, now that I've got your your email address, I'm going to be like
4:42
a sniveling Australian Jew who's going to steal your credit card information.
4:48
It's not going to happen automatically.
4:49
So anyway, you should be signed up this episode three of my favorite people I've spoken
4:53
to Tim Urban is I think it's my favorite all time episode.
4:58
It's right up there of the show.
5:01
He has a, he has a website called wait, but why, which is he writes and illustrates,
5:06
which is sort of like little cartoons that deal with the most profound questions of existence.
5:13
He has a TED talk about procrastination, which if you haven't seen, you must see it
5:18
is so good.
5:20
Again, the Google machine, you know, that same Google machine that you're using to subscribe
5:24
to on comfortable conversations, dot, dot, dot, dot something on by the way, if you,
5:29
if you have subscribers, you enter email and you're still hearing, uh, hearing the normal
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regular old feed that doesn't have the full episodes and all of the bonus content.
5:38
If you think if something is still fading out on you, for example, then you have to go
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to uncomfortable, uncomfortable conversations, dot, sub stack, dot, com slash listen, slash
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listen.
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And that will generate your own unique like every single individual have their own unique
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podcast link.
5:54
It's super, super cool and super, super easy.
5:56
So anyway, Tim Urban's got this great website, which you should find, you should find his
6:00
talk on procrastination.
6:01
Uh, so that's awesome.
6:04
After that, Clementine Ford, who is probably Australia's most important feminist of her
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ear.
6:11
I mean, I suppose you've got your germane gris and so on who are banging around in the
6:14
UK doing what they do.
6:16
But Clementine is fiery.
6:18
She is ferociously intelligent and ferocious in her temperament as well.
6:23
And she and I had some disagreements about sexism and how best to approach the liberation
6:29
of, uh, of the female sex.
6:31
And then the third, uh, I guess that you have today is Malcolm Turnbull, the 29th Prime
6:36
Minister of Australia, a fascinating chat with him as well.
6:40
Uh, again, if you're a sub stack subscriber to uncomfortable conversations, even if you're
6:44
not paying anything, you'll get the entire episode on your personalized podcast, uh,
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RSS feed, which sounds more complicated than it is.
6:52
It'll literally take you three or four minutes to sign up to, uh, if you're still on the
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old feed, then that's totally fine.
6:57
You'll continue to get everything that you always, uh, used to get, but this particular
7:02
episode is one of the episodes per week that is intended for premium, uh, subscribers.
7:09
So be sure to subscribe to hear all of it.
7:11
Uh, in just a couple of days, you'll get exactly the same episode as everybody else will
7:15
get the same thing.
7:16
And that will be a new year's Ask Me Anything.
7:18
I put out the call for some questions on social media and I've got some real doosies.
7:24
So look forward to that.
7:25
The other benefit of being a subscriber is you don't get any ads, uh, whereas on the regular
7:30
old feed, you get ads.
7:31
I hope you had a wonderful, uh, Christmas.
7:33
I hope you have a fantastic new year.
7:35
I will speak with you just before the new year for the Ask Me Anything.
7:38
This is the first of the next three weeks highlights, best of uncomfortable conversations.
7:45
What did you want to do when you were younger?
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Uh, I wanted to do something, I wanted to make things, you know, out of, you know, create
8:05
things.
8:06
And so, uh, specifically like in the arts more than in, I wanted to, you know, either write
8:10
music or write books or write, you know, or, you know, writing your music, something
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like that.
8:16
I wanted to make stuff.
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And beyond that, I didn't know if I wanted to be doing comedy or, you know, fiction,
8:21
serious stuff or, you know, then I started blogging and that realized that was fun.
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So I don't know.
8:26
I didn't have a very specific direction other than I knew I wanted some kind of job, uh,
8:34
making something in the arts.
8:36
It's amazing that we live in a world where you're able to, and congratulations for having
8:40
found the niche where you can actually express this like kind of, you know, all the stuff
8:44
that, that I remember talking about lying on my back, smoking a joint at the age of 15,
8:50
gazing at the stars, like is basically your job.
8:52
Well, total, I actually think of it as like there's, there's a couple categories.
8:57
That's one.
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And then the other one that is like, it's like why we procrastinate is like, it's like,
9:02
it's like observing humans and what the hell's, I guess, which is also maybe part of
9:06
that, that also maybe comes out in the two A.I.
9:09
Yeah.
9:10
It does come out there as well.
9:11
It doesn't have to be about the stars.
9:12
I mean, another, the other thing that I wanted to touch on with you, which I love is,
9:18
is the, the weird way in which we see ourselves situated in history, you had a blog post at
9:23
the beginning of this decade on the 1st of January, 2020, where you were talking about,
9:27
like we basically now live in the future because we're in the 2020s.
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And you know, we are now, we are now further away from World War II than World War II was
9:38
from the Civil War.
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And how counterintuitive that is.
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And you go through a bunch of, of these like that, you know, when, if World War II was starting
9:49
today, then World War I would feel as long ago as 9 or 11 does, so not that, not that
9:56
long ago.
9:57
Yeah.
9:58
The, the World War II people must have been like, no, fucking way, really?
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Absolutely.
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It's again, really recent.
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Yeah.
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Exactly.
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And some historians argue that they were essentially one giant war, World War II, with an interlude
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in the middle.
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And the idea that-
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World War II was kind of like revenge of like, you know, revenge, the Empire Strikes Back.
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Exactly.
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It was settling, settling scores that, that, that, that I, that I failed to resolve.
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And then, and you also point out that like in 2020, why 2K was closer to the 1970s than
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to today?
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Or another one is the, like, all these 1994 movies, Jurassic Park and the Lion King,
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the, you know, these movies were, they came out closer to the moon landing than they
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did to today.
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Oh my God.
10:47
Yeah.
10:48
Yeah.
10:49
Yeah.
10:50
Yeah.
10:51
Yeah.
10:52
Yeah.
10:53
Yeah.
10:54
Yeah.
10:55
Yeah.
10:56
Yeah.
10:57
Yeah.
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Yeah.
10:59
Yeah.
11:00
Yeah.
11:01
Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And if you're, if you were 35 in 2020, you were born closer to the 1940s than to today.
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Yeah.
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You were born in 1985, so 1985, 35 years before that was the 40s, 35 years after that 2020.
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And another amazing one, you point out is 60 years.
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If you're 60 or older, then you were born closer to the 1800s than to today.
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Yeah.
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But also, the oldest people in the world were born closer to the George Washington
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administration than they were to today.
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Um, and so that one was true.
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Let me think of it still true.
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I guess it's, he, he finished in 97, but we can just find ourselves in the shoes of
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your 2020 blog.
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Yeah.
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No, it is.
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It's like the oldest Americans were, we're born closer to the Washington administration
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than to the Biden administration.
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The reason I like these is because each one is a little mind blowing for whatever reason,
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but it also just puts, you're like, okay, US history is not that old.
12:00
No.
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Absolutely not.
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I mean, my, I, uh, one thing that got more of a reaction on Twitter than almost anything
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I've ever said was when I pointed out that I was on Joe, I used to do Joe Rogan's show.
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I did about six times when I was living in the States and needed us to say that has
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a huge audience.
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So anything you say, you know, rails people up in one way or another.
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But what was gratifying was not that everybody was jumping down my throat for saying something
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they disagreed with, but that I was on his show shortly after my grandmother died and
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she died on the eve of her 100th birthday in New Zealand.
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Wow.
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Shortly afterwards, I was in Athens visiting a mate of mine, a buddy who lives in, um,
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who lives in Athens and I was wandering around the, the Agora and like the, you know, the
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Coliseum and all this stuff.
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And I thought this stuff is 4,000 years old.
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My grandma was a hundred.
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It's only 40 nanars that democracy and like modern civilization was born in ancient Greece.
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Like I think if you sort of shook me awake in the middle of the night and was like, like
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how old is democracy?
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Like how, how many of your grandmother's life spans were there?
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I'd be like a few thousand.
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Yeah.
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I wouldn't think it was 40 of my grandmother's life spans.
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And that takes you all the way back, back there.
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Yeah.
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I mean, it comes back to what you was saying earlier about all of that on writing and stuff.
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Like it's really recent.
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You could also say that it's about your 500th great-grandparent that, um, your 500th great-grandparent
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lived in a world with only hunter-gatherers anywhere.
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So that's how full Nana's, that's not what you mean 500 grates.
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Yes, that's your great-great-great to the 500th grandmother lived in a world where she
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was for sure a gatherer because every single woman in the world, or every single person
13:55
in the world was a hunter-gatherer and, um, yeah, that's not full Nana's, that's 25-year generation.
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So that's actually, you could divide that by 4 to get the number of full Nana's, but, um,
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but that's, uh, so it's, you know, it seems like a lot, but it's like you go back there
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and those, and so every single thing that we call civilization has just happened in 500 generations.
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And, and, you know, and again, we're under the, uh,
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Nana's, uh, lifespans.
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Okay, I have a, I have a crazier one, um, which is that if you, because, okay, so this is,
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there's two things going on.
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What we're doing here is showing how recent, um, how, how not, you know, humans are pretty new,
14:40
pretty damn new, and civilization is really new, but I keep, but you can get way more mind blown
14:46
when you think about, I like to think about, um, if, if you, if you made a, wrote a book,
14:52
detailing the history of humanity, um, and you made every page 200 years.
14:59
Um, so just say it's an 800 page book, you know, and, and give or take that, that would take us
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to 160,000 years back, something like that, um, which is about the length of human history
15:08
depending on which person you talk to.
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So 800 pages takes us from then to today.
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Every page is 200 years.
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You're reading that book, and it's almost all the same.
15:19
You are bored for almost that entire book reading about hunter-gatherers.
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It's only the last, you know, um, the last 100 pages, uh, sorry, the last like, uh, 50 pages
15:32
that you get to anything beyond hunter-gatherers.
15:36
And it's only the last, uh, it's, it's, if you think about, uh, hold on, let me just pull up.
15:42
I actually have, uh, I have this, take you time somewhere where I can make it, I can get,
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I can be totally accurate here.
15:51
Okay.
15:52
All right.
15:53
So, um, it is, uh, what do we got 200, 200 years per page?
15:59
Did you say 200 years per page?
16:00
Okay, okay.
16:01
So, it's settled, it settled on the final page.
16:07
Yeah.
16:07
Well, oh, yes, exactly.
16:09
So now, but, but just go back to 50 pages out of the 850.
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So you get to page 750.
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You're super bored, right?
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Because you've just been literally read about hunter-gatherers and you're holding,
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it's like, it's like the, the, the, what all this left is basically like the epilogue,
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the last chapter, and you're, you finally get to early cities in agriculture.
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That goes on for 25 pages until page 750, 775.
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So now you're really at the end here and you get to recorded history.
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It's like epilogue, colon, recorded history, you know, I'd say.
16:38
So now you're in the last 25 pages, you know, you can feel like,
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oh, just about done with this book, you're at recorded history.
16:43
Um, you, you go back, uh, uh, 12 pages and you're at Buddha as 12 pages ago.
16:50
This page, this is page, uh, uh, 788, you know, uh, Jesus is like page 791.
16:58
Um, and, and so, you know, you know, AD is only 10 pages of the book,
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but the crazy thing to me is the last page.
17:06
Um, so the US, by the way, is only, is only, is only about a page old.
17:10
It got, it got started at the end of page 790.
17:13
Yeah, about the same, uh, same, same, same age.
17:15
You know, Australia was settled because the, the Brits could no longer send their,
17:18
their, their chattel human beings to North America because of North, the North American,
17:23
because of the revolution. So they, they, they sent out expeditions to find another spot
17:28
to send, uh, to send undesirables. That's why the United States and Australia were about the same
17:32
age. You don't hear the word Australia till page 800. Um, and, um, yeah, and so, uh, so, so,
17:39
so actually, um, just one correction is I was doing the thing I, the thing I laid out is
17:44
250 years per page. Okay. So anyway, so anyway, the last page goes back to 770.
17:50
If you think about it, the first 799 pages of that book, um, the power was out.
17:57
There was no electricity at all that electricity was an as a page 800 phenomenon.
18:02
The first 799 pages of that book, um, we don't use any fossil fuels.
18:07
We just, you know, have wind and water and things like that.
18:10
And fossil fuel era is an entirely 800 page 800 phenomenon.
18:14
For the first 700 99 pages, we get around with horse and sailboat.
18:17
Um, in page 800, we have cars and airplanes and rockets, uh, for communication,
18:23
the first 799 pages we have, for most of it, just oral.
18:25
And then eventually you have, you know, writing and letters.
18:28
You can write a letter to someone, uh, the television, the phone.
18:32
All of this is a page 800 phenomenon.
18:33
So when you, you think about, um, how many things came out on page 800 that are truly nothing
18:39
like the rest of the book. It makes you, it, so this is again, like a little bit like how it's,
18:43
um, it's an instinct to say we must not be the only life because that seems arrogant.
18:47
It's also an instinct to think our time is spent.
18:49
It's an instinct to think it's arrogant to say our time is special.
18:52
It feels naive to say, oh, our time is special because it feels like everyone must say that.
18:57
But actually when you think of it this way, page 800 is truly special and so many metrics.
19:03
It is truly unlike anything before.
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It would blow the minds of someone on any page before in a way that no other page would,
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would blow anyone's mind nearly as much.
19:11
So if you think about what that means, but again, we're talking about you.
19:14
You mentioned non-linear.
19:15
We are crazy exponential situation going on here.
19:18
What the hell is going on in page 801?
19:21
And I'll tell you why this scares me is that page 800 was better than all the other pages
19:26
in so many ways.
19:27
It was more prosperous in so many ways.
19:28
There was infant mortality was the lowest ever life expectancy was the highest ever.
19:33
Just if you think about the humanity, the, you know, that,
19:36
that came out after the enlightenment, the page 800 on an aggregate was, you know,
19:41
medicine, antibiotics, you know, crazy, amazing progress, cars and planes and,
19:47
and all of this, it was better.
19:49
The good was better than all the other goods.
19:51
But the bad of paid age 800 was arguably worse than any bad before.
19:56
We had the largest genocide, the biggest wars.
19:59
We have something like climate change.
20:01
There's never been any kind of existential threat like on that level and any other page.
20:05
So the bad is getting worse and that, and the good is getting better.
20:09
So the amplitude of this kind of sign graph is getting higher on the top and the bottom.
20:13
And the problem with that is the good can get as good as you.
20:16
So the page 801, you can just imagine the kind of good we can get to.
20:19
The kind of unbelievable magical utopia progress we can get to.
20:24
But if the bad gets too low, this is what I was talking about with the great filter.
20:27
If the bad gets too low and suddenly now any one person can create a Holocaust level genocide,
20:34
with the chemicals and their fridge, and then it's over.
20:40
The bad hits the certain level.
20:41
It hits the tripwire and the whole experiment's over.
20:44
So this is scary.
20:46
Not only I'm just thinking through that final page,
20:50
that final 250 years out of that 200,000 year book.
20:55
I mean, you mentioned the Holocaust.
20:56
That's in the final third of the page.
20:59
The base age is the final quarter of the page.
21:02
And the internet is like 25 years is one tenth.
21:06
So like the final, the bottom 10% of the final page of the 800 page book is the internet era.
21:13
Yeah, I mean, climate change.
21:14
You really only got bad in the last few lines of the book.
21:17
The last few lines of the page, right?
21:20
Yes, because exponential progress is nuts.
21:22
If you transported someone from any page to the next page,
21:26
I mean, the later in the book you are, the more mind blown maybe.
21:29
So you transport someone from page 232 to 233.
21:33
Maybe that tree that they're used to is a little taller.
21:36
Maybe someone developed a new way to tie the arrow to your spear to tie that spearhead.
21:41
I mean, barely anything is different, right?
21:43
But if you get to someone in the year two,
21:47
if you get to Alexander the Great and you transport him to the Roman Empire,
21:50
he'd be pretty mind blown.
21:52
But nothing is like transporting someone from page 799 to page 800.
21:57
And even within page, yeah, yeah.
21:59
So page 743 is basically the same as page 347.
22:03
It's basically exactly.
22:06
I have a metric called a die progress unit because if you brought,
22:09
I always think if you brought George Washington today,
22:11
he'd show him everything, he would die out of shock.
22:15
And so the question is, how far do you have to go in the future to die out of shock?
22:18
That's a die progress unit to DPU.
22:21
And so the DPUs used to take forever.
22:24
You could transport someone to 100 pages from page 200 to 300.
22:27
And you're not going to kill them from shock.
22:28
No, that'd be right.
22:29
Wow, that ship is that's exactly exactly.
22:33
There might be a new kind of flower that's developed in this area, right?
22:36
So, but as you go through the book,
22:38
the DPUs get shorter and shorter until you get to just one page.
22:41
And so the question is for us,
22:42
the DPU might be only a few lines, right?
22:44
2060 might legit kill us from shock the way that today would kill George Washington from shock.
22:50
Maybe, or maybe this, sorry,
22:52
I mean, I'm just thinking like people like Tyler Cowan,
22:55
also have this idea that like there was a lot of low-hanging fruit that got
22:59
that exploded in the past century.
23:01
And we're kind of, we're basically benefiting from the enormous productivity gains,
23:06
not just economically, but in terms of health outcomes and technology that took us from
23:11
the way we lived in the 1880s to the way we lived in the 1980s.
23:14
But after that, you know, with the exception of the internet,
23:17
there's not a lot left.
23:19
Do you think that's a fallacious end of history?
23:22
You know, my uninformed intuition is that no, it's going to keep getting,
23:28
no, there's S curves.
23:29
So like it goes, it's progress isn't just straight up in an exponential curve,
23:33
it goes up in like S's where it kind of shoots up.
23:36
And then when there's a new paradigm like, you know,
23:38
the iPhone comes out and the internet and there's all this crazy progress.
23:41
And then it kind of matures.
23:42
And I feel like we're in one of those now where, you know,
23:44
it used to be that every year there was something new.
23:46
There was the I Facebook and then the iPhone and then these revolutionary things.
23:49
And I think that the S curve is kind of, you know, it's now getting flatter.
23:53
But then there's another S curve coming.
23:54
And I don't know what it is.
23:55
It can be, there's so many things.
23:57
You need an S on its side, right?
23:58
So yeah, I mean, no, I mean, it's like an S.
24:01
It's basically picture the curve is, you know, going up but not at huge slope.
24:08
And then it starts getting super steep, right?
24:10
And then it kind of levels out, right?
24:12
So that's one S.
24:13
And then picture now it starts getting steep again.
24:15
Now you're in another S.
24:16
You see that?
24:16
So it kind of goes up in waves.
24:19
And if you step back and zoom out, it looks like one big exponential curve.
24:23
But if you zoom in at any given point, you might be on one part of the S
24:26
and it might feel like things are slowing down.
24:28
But the reason I disagree with Cowan and this, I see his points.
24:33
And I'm sure if you take a step back, there's some ways to look at it and say,
24:35
I know this is, you know, maybe there's a big S that we just got to the top of.
24:39
And now it's going to be a while.
24:40
But there's so many candidates for things that would just dramatically
24:46
that would be as big a deal of the internet if not bigger.
24:48
There's brain machine interfaces.
24:50
We might all have a machine, you know, a BMI in our heads in 20,
24:55
30, 50 years that we can think to each other.
24:58
I mean, that's, that's like the last update there was language.
25:02
Then the next, you know, if you brought a caveman here from 100,000 years ago,
25:06
he'd be blown away by everything except the way we talk.
25:09
He'd be like, you know, you two people in the field are just with no technology on them,
25:12
just having a chat.
25:13
He'd be like, wait, that's how we do it.
25:15
You're just talking and he'd be like, you do that the way we do it, right?
25:18
So this could be an update to that where you now you think to each other, right?
25:22
So that's crazy.
25:24
I mean, even before you get an intellectual intelligence in computers,
25:27
and that revolution has everything robotics,
25:29
then it's energy-like.
25:30
And just self-driving cars.
25:31
We mastered fusion.
25:32
And if energy was just as perfectly unlimited,
25:35
we'd enough to worry about conserving energy,
25:37
that would be equally transformative.
25:39
There's a lot.
25:39
Or have a cryonics where you can pause someone
25:42
and basically transport them to a hospital in the future.
25:45
So you pause someone before they die,
25:47
and they retain their or right after they quote die by our standards,
25:52
but they're savable for by future standards.
25:54
And then in the future, you revive them,
25:57
and you can totally fix them, give them artificial organs.
26:01
So to me, life extension stuff,
26:04
some of these, if you listen to this podcast in 50 years,
26:07
will be laughable because nothing will have changed.
26:10
But okay, here's one.
26:11
I mean, how many great leaps for all of life
26:14
can you count on one hand?
26:15
Like, you know, you could say, like I said,
26:18
beginning of life, simple cell to single,
26:20
complex cell to multi-cell, multi-cell to,
26:24
ocean animal to land animal.
26:27
On that same list has to be one planet to multi-planets.
26:33
For not just for humans, for the whole species,
26:35
that is a massive leap.
26:39
That's just a crazy leap.
26:41
That can happen in the 2020s.
26:43
Like in the 2030s, like we are going to witness
26:46
one of the great leaps for all of life.
26:47
So there's too many of those things for me to say,
26:50
yeah, I think like 2050 will be totally normal to us.
26:53
Maybe just a little cooler, the phones will be cooler.
26:55
No, 2050 to me, I think will be utterly mind-blowing
26:58
if you just want to imagine it.
27:00
Yeah, what's amazing is we'll probably be there, touch wood.
27:03
Like, you know, we'll probably see it.
27:04
And my kids, we're going to experience the 22nd century.
27:09
There's kids today, even without life extension technology,
27:13
they will experience the 22nd century.
27:15
And we might too.
27:17
I mean, if human body is just a physical object made of atoms
27:21
and it's a certain arrangement of atoms that makes you you
27:24
in your brain, there's no reason that advanced enough AI
27:27
can't figure out how to kind of preserve that to back it up.
27:30
Sure, I mean, that's a possibility, but it's not likely.
27:34
But what is certain is that the kids who are being born,
27:37
the babies who are being born today,
27:38
the vast majority of them will see the 22nd century.
27:42
Yeah, even if we don't do anything amazing,
27:45
I'd buy which I would just mean we'll survive past 2100.
27:48
Right, exactly, unless it's this awful dystopian thing
27:51
where the bads get worse.
27:52
And we survive the bads on page 800,
27:56
but we will not survive the bads on page 801.
27:58
If that's one storyline that would be unfortunate,
28:01
and it's totally plausible.
28:03
What storyline do you...
28:04
I want to...
28:05
You've given me lots of your time, so I'll wrap it up here.
28:07
But let's wrap up with your sort of big picture prognostication.
28:10
Like if you are a betting man, what will become of us, Tim?
28:16
Man, see, on one hand, I want to feel optimistic
28:20
because we are a survival species, you know,
28:22
and we have a good track record of survival,
28:25
even if it's a lot of catastrophes along the way.
28:29
But the question is at some point, as you said,
28:31
the US isn't that old, it's a new experiment.
28:33
Humanity is...
28:34
A civilization isn't that old, especially
28:36
the rate things are going.
28:38
So it also feels like looking at the past and saying,
28:40
hey, we've always been okay.
28:42
So we should be okay in the future.
28:44
That might not be good logic.
28:45
It might be...
28:46
When you're on an exponential curve,
28:48
the future might not resemble the past at all.
28:51
So honestly, I can't say I feel confidently optimistic
28:55
or pessimistic.
28:56
I will say that that means
28:58
that I also don't feel confidently pessimistic.
29:00
I feel truly...
29:03
I feel like a huge question mark
29:05
about what's going to happen.
29:06
I think if I had to lean, I would say optimism
29:10
because I just am an optimist as a human.
29:12
But I don't have really...
29:13
I couldn't argue, I couldn't debate someone
29:15
and feel like I won that one if they were a pessimist.
29:18
I think the problem for us is that our technology
29:21
is exponential, but our wisdom is cyclical.
29:23
You know, if you look back,
29:24
you know, like, oh, the Salem witches,
29:27
we're so much smarter than them, it's like,
29:28
well, we know more than them,
29:30
but the way they're behaving is a lot of what I see on Twitter.
29:33
And that was also a down swing, maybe.
29:35
And then there was an era, you know,
29:36
in ancient Greece when they were more humane
29:38
than people 800 years later.
29:40
And it seems like we unfortunately,
29:42
wisdom does not go up exponentially.
29:45
And that's a problem because
29:46
that more technology gives us, you know,
29:50
exponentially more power.
29:52
But if we're not getting wiser,
29:53
then that's a species that is...
29:55
I'm scared of that species having too much power.
29:58
And that's interesting.
30:00
Yeah, and if you go through periods where your wisdom peaks
30:05
and then your wisdom troughs,
30:07
and there's a kind of a sine curve of wisdom
30:09
over civilizations over history,
30:11
then as the technology gets bigger and bigger,
30:14
the peaks become more...
30:16
The stakes get higher.
30:17
And the troughs get more damaging.
30:19
And maybe there comes a point at which your technology
30:21
is so powerful that you can't survive one of the troughs.
30:25
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
30:27
The big troughs are, I think, the deal breaker here.
30:31
So the question is, you know, look,
30:33
we built...
30:34
We had the enlightenment and built laws
30:37
and liberal values and stuff,
30:39
which is a way of containing our worst nature.
30:41
We have a history of being very clever recently,
30:44
especially at kind of outsmarting the primates, right?
30:51
And the question is, can we continue to do it?
30:53
You know, maybe as the goods get better,
30:55
we get really powerful ways of outsmarting the primates
30:57
and keeping ourselves safe from ourselves.
31:00
I'm certainly not scared of asteroids or other animals
31:02
or, you know, the moment aliens, scared of us.
31:06
And so, you know, can we...
31:11
Yeah, can we do what we did
31:14
with the kind of the enlightenment
31:15
on a much more intense scale, you know,
31:17
for whatever the future is going to bring?
31:18
And I hope we do.
31:21
I hope we do the utopia.
31:22
Honestly, if we can, you know,
31:24
this world would seem like a utopia
31:26
to someone from the year 200.
31:28
And yeah, I think, I mean, in our lives,
31:29
we're headed for what would seem like a utopia for us
31:32
if we don't look at us.
31:35
That was Tim Urban, on an earlier episode of the show.
31:38
Up next, the Firebrand Feminist Clementine Ford.
31:42
You know, you're certainly not shy
31:43
about making your opinion known,
31:45
but sometimes when I read you, I think this is someone
31:48
who lives in a world in which the dominant narrative
31:52
and the dominant, like, cultural forces
31:54
just are not the ones that I see.
31:57
Like, I don't see...
31:58
There's a... I was listening to...
32:00
I actually listened to your first book
32:03
before, over the weekend,
32:04
because I hadn't read it before.
32:06
Fight like a girl.
32:08
And I thought it was fascinating,
32:09
but like, there's a piece in it.
32:11
I just want to play you this,
32:13
which is you articulating what the kind of power structures
32:16
and the dominant narrative sounds like to you.
32:19
How many times have you heard
32:21
or seen someone dismiss a woman's opinion
32:23
by calling her ugly?
32:25
By calling her a slut?
32:27
A dumb cunt?
32:28
A stupid fucking bitch
32:30
who needs to get a decent dick up her.
32:33
An irrational man hating feminazzi with daddy issues
32:36
who demonizes men because she's upset none of them
32:39
find her attractive.
32:41
A dog, a mut, a hog,
32:43
a useless lump, too old, too dried up,
32:46
too aggressive, too shrill,
32:48
too angry for anyone to take seriously.
32:51
A joke.
32:53
Like the question is, how many times have I heard that?
32:55
I heard that and I was like,
32:57
never.
32:58
Like, I've never heard that as the main.
33:00
I've never heard that as a position that's put forward
33:02
by a guy that hasn't been pushed back on
33:05
vehemently and instantly by all the other guys in the room.
33:08
You should ask some women whether or not they've ever heard that.
33:15
Yeah.
33:16
Because I think that that's the difference.
33:18
I don't doubt it.
33:19
But isn't the question a woman or not?
33:21
I know you can tell you that I've
33:22
and I'm not exaggerating at all.
33:24
All of those things have been said to me this week by numerous people.
33:30
Even even the mutt,
33:32
I've got, I could send you a screenshot, Josh.
33:35
I mean, that's appalling.
33:38
But this is the thing is that we have different perspectives of the world
33:41
because we move through the world differently.
33:42
And I know through the world equally as you,
33:45
with a lot of privilege, and I still hear all those things.
33:51
From whom?
33:52
Well, from men mainly, but from women too, who, you know,
33:57
kind of young women, especially sometimes use that language.
34:01
Is it men who are trolling you on Twitter?
34:03
Or is it human beings who don't use it?
34:04
I don't use Twitter anymore.
34:07
Well, look, I would say that it's men
34:09
from all different kinds of demographics.
34:11
I've had, you know, issues with students,
34:14
like public and private school boys.
34:19
You know, private, pre-pandemic.
34:21
I would always get a little influx of trolling from students
34:25
whose schools I'd been to speak at.
34:27
And I, it's not like I went into those schools and said,
34:29
look at all you boys, you're all piece of shit.
34:32
Like, one school I literally just talked about,
34:35
like the presentation I gave was about gender inequality in the media.
34:40
And I went through and like shared a bunch of statistics around Hollywood.
34:43
And, you know, and a lot of them were kind of shared
34:47
from the Gina Davis Institute on, sorry,
34:50
the gender institute on in media.
34:54
And even after that, you know, I was having boys
34:56
writing to me and calling me a cunt and making fun.
35:01
I mean, it's sort of water off a duck's back,
35:02
but it is reflective of this way in which,
35:06
particularly I suppose, when you put yourself out into the world like I do,
35:10
that people who are uncomfortable with what you're saying,
35:14
but lack the ability to articulate an argument against it,
35:18
then reach for all of these traditional forms of language.
35:21
And just because you don't see it.
35:22
And just because the men that you know as far as you're aware don't say it,
35:28
doesn't mean it's not happening because I can tell you,
35:29
it comes from all sorts of different people,
35:31
it comes from boys, it comes from dads of daughters,
35:34
you know, who probably have pictures of them with their kids and their profiles.
35:39
It comes from, I mean, look, it comes from Tim Blair at the Daily Telegraph.
35:43
I mean, I should clarify that I don't, I'm not, I mean, first, I can't,
35:48
I can't claim that something that you're claiming is happening doesn't happen.
35:51
And secondly, when I say that I don't hear that language,
35:54
I don't mean that I never experience it because I find myself at the,
35:57
at the receiving end of a lot of hate online and on social media for various
36:01
positions that I might have about things.
36:03
I do what I don't, what I mean is that I don't hear those things
36:08
as being an acceptable part of the conversation in any powerful cultural way.
36:15
They would be laughed out of the room.
36:17
I mean, every member of our cultural elite regards that kind of behavior towards women
36:22
as being completely unacceptable.
36:23
There are no cocktail parties you can go to where that's acceptable.
36:27
Like with the exception of the shock shocks, right?
36:29
The Tim Blair's, whose whole business model is to spew reactionary nonsense
36:33
at everyone to the left of Genghis Khan.
36:36
I don't see anyone in the opinion pages of,
36:39
forget about the Guardian, but even the Australian Rupert Murdoch's broadsheet,
36:43
or I don't see anyone on the ABC or on Channel 9.
36:45
I don't see anyone from Virginia Triolli to even Ben Fordham or anyone in mainstream media
36:52
who calls women that kind of thing and gets away with it.
36:57
And rightly so.
36:59
But Josh, I mean, I don't, I don't expect that someone's going to go onto national TV and say,
37:04
well, that's just because she's a dumb dog with daddy issues.
37:07
Like that's not where that language and that discourse happens.
37:11
It certainly happens in places where people can, you know,
37:15
remove themselves from being accountable for it.
37:17
I mean, you mentioned Twitter before it.
37:18
It's all across Twitter because people don't have to have their faces
37:22
to what it is that they say.
37:24
That's why it's so threatening for people when they are found out, you know,
37:27
or the sort of their real life identities are uncovered.
37:30
And whether or not the, I mean, you said that you don't hear it being said at parties or whatever,
37:39
you know, outside of some men who you don't associate with.
37:44
But I don't think again that that means it's not happening.
37:46
I mean, but also you've read us a segment from a book that's articulating a very particular kind
37:53
of method that is used to silence women.
37:56
And that is one that hinges on a pretty dated, I think.
38:01
And this is why it's no longer, I mean, maybe this is why it's dying out,
38:05
is that it's not really working on a lot of women anymore
38:07
because they've become so used to it or they've become empowered to speak out against it
38:12
or even just to laugh at it as I tell women to do.
38:16
But the idea that women's primary offering to the world
38:23
is in the way that we look and in how well we perform.
38:26
And that's not like a radical feminist idea.
38:29
That's one that's that's very well kind of embraced by capitalism if anything.
38:36
So, you know, we know that women's primacy is located in the way that we look.
38:41
And as such, that will be the first port of call for many people who can't articulate an argument
38:47
to try and yell us down.
38:49
Yeah. Yes, that's true.
38:51
You certainly see more judgment of women's appearance and women's mannerisms like the,
38:56
you know, everyone will recall that when Hillary Clinton was running for president,
39:00
people would accuse her of being shrill, which is something you don't hear men being accused of
39:05
and endless fixations on what they wear, you know, way that you don't know.
39:08
Yeah. And the number of criticisms of carried chat.
39:12
Is it chant or chat?
39:13
Yeah, I'm glad you have a problem with that as well.
39:16
Anyway, she's the chief, she's the chief health officer of New South Wales, yeah.
39:20
Um, you know, the, the, the grotesque things I've seen said and just the pictorial memes
39:27
made about her appearance is if somehow because she fails to live up to people's,
39:33
I don't know what, because they don't want to go home and wank over her,
39:36
that somehow she's unable to be a chief health officer or that the advice that she's offering
39:41
is laughable in some way because, you know, you can zoom in on her upper lip and she's,
39:47
she's got, well, like me, she's got a little bit of hair on her upper lip or even, you know,
39:51
it's the idea that, and it's so embarrassing. I mean, embarrassed for the making of this argument,
39:56
but, that conservative women are somehow more attractive than left-wing women.
40:02
And that's why left-wing women are so angry and shrill this time. It's just because we're so ugly.
40:07
That is, it's not uncommon to see, yes, and they may be shock jokes, but it's not uncommon to see
40:13
that argument kind of, sometimes these things don't have to be articulated in actual words,
40:19
but you know that that's what's going on. I guess maybe it's just, maybe there is,
40:24
maybe you and I agree on everything apart from strategy, because as you say that, I find myself
40:28
nodding in agreement and then, nonetheless, I think of all of the times that I get attacked by
40:35
the right and by the left. And I, and my response is not to allow them to behave as representatives
40:45
of the group that they think that they're representatives of. It reminds me almost a little bit of
40:49
after the Christchurch massacre, Jacinda Raiderne gave this beautiful speech where she stood up and
40:54
she said, you speaking to the, to the attacker, you think that you're defending us, that you are
41:00
a representative of us against them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like we are not with
41:06
you. You are not a representative of us. You are not a defender of us. You are completely
41:13
other. And in so doing, she removed the only thing that a mass murdering racist lunatic has to
41:19
hang his hat on, which is he's the only person who's brave enough to actually do what's
41:25
necessary to be done to protect Western civilization or white people or more Christianity or whatever
41:29
it might be. And similarly, I think a shock-jock or a sexist goes into the world with this kind of
41:36
swaggering attitude of, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to articulate the things that all of those
41:41
wimpy men like the Josh Steps of the world just aren't willing to say, but I'm going to take up
41:46
the mantle of manhood and I'm going to defend man against the onslaughts of the Clementine
41:51
Fords of the world. And my most important, my most like urgent instinct there is to go, no,
41:57
you fucking won't speak on behalf of me. Like, I'll sideline you, I'll dismiss you,
42:03
I'll even maybe perhaps right now what I'm doing is kind of, you know, pretending that you
42:08
exist less than you actually do because I want to live in a world in which it's possible to
42:12
to sort of carve off the arseholes and find a reconciliation and a consensus between all the
42:18
reasonable people from all genders, sexes, races and so on. And my worry as I listen to your
42:25
audiobooks and read your books is like, not helping. Like allowing allowing the loudest
42:31
angriest, most arse-holy voices to to get what they want, which is to to perceive themselves
42:37
as representatives of the whole. And, you know, sort of handing them, I guess, the authority
42:43
that I don't think they deserve. I mean, I think that you're making a flawed comparison between
42:49
those two positions because the terrorist in Christchurch, yes, Jacinda Ardern was very correct
42:56
in saying you don't represent us, you're not defending us. I mean, leaving aside the fact that
43:01
there are actually lots of reprehensible people who would have cheered on what he did that day
43:06
and that is that is been supported by political positions and by politicians who've stoked
43:14
anti-Muslim sentiment. He's not a shock-jock. He's not paid hundreds of thousands of dollars
43:20
a year to sit behind a microphone every day and disseminate those views to the public in the way
43:25
that someone like Alan Jones was or John Laws was or even Neil Mitchell still is or Ben Fordham
43:31
to a much sort of more polite degree gets to kind of stoke some sort of sense of traditional
43:37
traditional conservativeness or conservative ideals that you can't compare those two positions
43:46
because it's all well and good for you to sit there and say, well, I don't accept you
43:52
this shock-jock insert whatever your name is as being a representative of me. But unfortunately,
43:57
they're being paid to be a representative for a lot of people. And the other question I would
44:01
ask you is when you and it's totally fine. I'm not offended by you thinking that my methods
44:08
aren't helping. I mean, it's certainly not the first time that I've been told that. But I would
44:12
I'm interested to know whether or not if you think that in the past few years things have changed
44:18
and things have improved and that women are more empowered now to speak out and that society in
44:23
general is becoming particularly and Australia becoming more articulate and cognizant of these
44:29
issues and more willing to stand up and speak out against them. Do you think that I have had
44:34
anything to do with that? I'm not claiming credit for all of it, but do you think I have been part
44:38
of that conversation that has enabled that to happen? Or do you think that my methods have actually
44:43
prevented that from happening further or have been destructive to that? It's tricky. I don't know
44:49
how to answer that Clementine. I suspect that it's got that we've gotten to a point at which it's
44:56
counterproductive, actually, if I'm perfectly honest, at which the I mean, it sort of depends what
45:04
this reminds me a little bit of the arguments about how to respond to Trump in the states were.
45:08
Like a lot of my friends in the states, most of my friends being like me broadly on the left,
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you know, thought that the most pressing thing that they could do for the past five years
45:21
was to expunge from civil society, the half of the population who had been broadly sympathetic to
45:30
Trump's presidency. And if it were true that Donald Trump was going to usher in a Holocaust,
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the likes of which my grandmother was always worried about, then of course you would just have to
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do absolutely everything within your power to stand up against that. And it wouldn't really matter
45:53
how many bridges you had to burn or how many innocent people got torched in the process. The most
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important, most pressing thing would be to prevent this man from wheeling any power at all.
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And essentially to exclude anyone who might have voted for him from polite society at all,
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harass them whenever they came into restaurants to punch them in the face when you saw someone
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walking down the street with a make America great again cap on. That would be completely legit
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just as it would be okay to knee cap a Nazi in 1930s Germany. And yet, part of my concern,
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I guess at the moment is that civil society is becoming so polarized and so hostile and we're
46:34
becoming so hunkered down into our warring factions that we're at least as great a risk of some kind
46:44
of civil war, some kind of informal ongoing mediocre civil war as we are of the forces of
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oppression and patriarchy and racism and sexism creating authoritarian states. So I don't quite
47:00
know how to respond to your question. I mean, I admire your passion and your commitment and your
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aggression, frankly, because so many of the people who I admire throughout history have exhibited
47:13
those same those same traits from civil rights leaders in the 1960s to the feminists who I admire
47:19
and who I sort of shape my sense of feminism around. But I do think that comes a point at which
47:28
I suppose the reconciliation instincts of a Martin Luther King or a Gandhi or a Mandela
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become to me more pressing than their revolutionary fervor. And so I'm not quite sure
47:42
at what point of the knife edge we currently sit. Is that adequately?
47:48
A really interesting response. I guess what that
47:53
something that that throws up for me is that oftentimes I think that and people might say, well,
47:59
might say, well, this is a failure of your messaging Clementine, except that I think that
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people take away from me what they want to take away. And I'm curious at your position on that
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because actually a lot of what I do or a lot of where my focus is is on encouraging men to be more
48:24
aware of the ways in which expectations on them may have harmed them. You know, even just yesterday
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I shared a reshared something actually which was this long reflection written by a man named Nathan
48:39
Simmons who wrote about the sexual grief he felt that he had that, you know, at 43 years old he
48:44
found himself crying because he realized that as a young man he was conditioned into this idea of
48:50
what kind of sex he should be having and how sex ultimately was a performance for other men
48:54
and that he feels like he spent the decades but he has done having sexual experiences
48:59
being completely devoid of any kind of intimate connection to those experiences and that he
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truly believes that he's lost something because of that and he grieves for what it is that's been
49:09
taken from him. I'm having those conversations all the time and that's, you know, a large part of
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what boys will be boys about is not some angry treatise against men. It does articulate some of the
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terrible things that men and that structural powers that favor men have done to women and to other
49:27
men but it's also about the loss that men suffer when their connection to these things is taken away
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and how, you know, we need to we need to envisage a better world for men. When you say that your
49:41
methods are unhelpful, it's not it's certainly not an argument I haven't heard before but I'm always
49:47
just very interested in whether or not that's coming from and I guess a stereotype of me and a
49:56
superficial understanding of what my work is concerned with and the very different kinds of
50:03
approaches that I take. People think of me and they think or she's just that angry feminist too
50:07
says provocative things online and I actually think that that's a very unfair
50:12
characterization of me and I think that's pretty lazy actually. That is fair. I'll
50:17
cop that because you are not a model if and I wouldn't be talking to you if you were.
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So I guess we can think about our public personas as being, you know, comprising at least
50:31
several parts and what I was talking about there was I was referring to to your question which
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I think was pointing to this the aggressive kill all men that Clementine forward from social media
50:47
not so much the nuanced, you know, scholar of feminism who comes out when you actually read your
50:52
books. Has Twitter ever been nuanced? Look and I will own that there are things that I've said in
50:58
the past. I'm never shied away from that. Things that I wouldn't say now and that, you know, maybe
51:04
were born out of my age. When social media started when we really, I mean we have to remember that
51:15
these things are very recent, you know, it's really been the last 10 years that we've evolved through
51:20
social media to have I think having more nuanced conversations now. But there was a particular trend
51:28
that during the kill all men period in particular, which I wouldn't tweet now.
51:35
And I mean, I don't tweet. I realized that Twitter was a very bad and unhealthy place for me.
51:41
I think it's a bad and unhealthy place for a lot of people. It's horrible. By the way, I just went online
51:45
and I'm blocked so I can't even see your tweets anyway. I don't know what I must have done at
51:49
some state. I was like, why can't I say, oh, oh, well, I don't know. Maybe I was going through a day
51:57
that day, but I don't really use it anymore. My account's still there, but I haven't, I very,
52:02
very occasionally will go on and retweet something for work. You know, like I might retweet some
52:07
things about the book, but I'm not having conversations on Twitter anymore. Partly because
52:13
I find it a very difficult place to really have those conversations because if you've got numerous
52:18
people replying to certain threads and things get lost, but also because I realized that every time
52:23
I went on there, I was being primed to defend myself and primed to attack. And it leads to you making
52:29
very poor choices about how you articulate yourself. And the kill all men era where I know that
52:38
there are screenshots of collages that people have made of me saying things. Firstly, mostly I'm
52:43
responding to people who say things. You know, the tweets I'm responding to are never included in
52:48
them. But mostly they're very hyperbolic. I mean, very crude humor, but yes, very basic. I'm not
52:55
saying it's clever, but hyperbolic responses to people saying things like you just hate all men
53:00
or you won't stop to all men are destroyed or, you know, a reduction of the feminist argument and
53:06
the feminist, the feminist project too. Well, obviously it's just because you hate men. It's just
53:11
silly. It's laughing at them for this silliness. But there was also a period of time and I think
53:16
that this is sometimes what people don't understand as well is that in the same way that memes work and
53:21
in the same way that that vocabulary kind of can sometimes reflect a particular moment in pop culture.
53:29
So too is the same of Twitter that that was a period in time where everyone was being very ironic
53:34
and very kind of like, you know, those, it wasn't uncommon to see those things said and did I
53:41
join in on a a basic crude comedic meme? Yes. I mean, this is what again, I'm not saying like I was
53:51
very clever, but no, I get it. I mean, I've been there as well. I've done thing, you know, there are
53:55
tweets that people pull out of from me completely out of context and, you know, now treat as if I have
54:02
transgressed some some tripwire that I should have known about at the time. But actually,
54:06
I was tweeting it in 2014 and the more I was actually word different seven years ago about whatever
54:11
it was, whatever provocative joke I was making and Twitter was supposed to be a place where you
54:16
would like provoke and make ridiculous jokes. It wasn't like this. It wasn't like I was
54:21
issuing a press release that I was supposing everyone was going to take seriously 160 characters.
54:27
Do you think that's, I mean, let's just pause there on social media for a moment because I think it's
54:31
it's an interesting like what impact is that having on the tenor and the quality of our conversations
54:38
about things? I think that they can be incredible tools, you know, there are people who even on
54:45
Twitter, there are people who love academic Twitter, although mind you, it is quite funny sometimes
54:51
to look at the drama that's going on in like spaces that you wouldn't think have drama, you know,
54:58
the things that I've heard about craft Twitter. That's pretty funny. That's pretty funny. I mean,
55:05
just you know, fights in the crafting community. I can't tell you what those fights are because
55:12
I'm not in the crafting community. But when you hear something like that, you're like, that checks
55:15
out. That checks out. It's very people's front of Judea. Yes. Yes. And I feel like people's
55:21
front of Judea really kind of, and for anyone who hasn't seen the life of Brian, it's a moment in
55:26
the movie that has a lot of, I'll play it, I'll drop it in right, I'll drop it in right here, yeah.
55:34
What is those is? What's a lot of splines? Got any nuts? I haven't got any nuts, sorry. I've got
55:39
wrens, livers, badges, splines. No, no, no. What does notice? I don't want that Roman rubbish.
55:45
Why don't you sell proper food? Proper food? Yeah, I know, I was rich in pureness, tippet.
55:50
Oh, don't blame me, I didn't ask to sell this stuff. All right, thank you for those noses in.
55:55
I get two. Two. Thanks, rich. Are you the Judean people's front?
56:00
Fuck off. What? Judean people's front. For the people's front are Judea. Judean people's front.
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Can I join your group? Now, piss off. I didn't want to sell this stuff. It's only a job. I hate
56:19
the Romans as much as anybody. Are you sure? Oh, dead shore. I hate the Romans already.
56:27
Listen, if you wanted to join the PFJ, you'd have to have really ate the Romans. I do.
56:35
Oh, yeah, how much? A lot. Right, you're in. Listen, the only people we ate more than the Romans,
56:45
are the fucking Judean people's front. Yeah, the Judean people's front.
56:50
Oh, yeah. And the people's front of Judea. The people's front of Judea.
56:56
Splitters. Where are the people's front of Judea? Oh, I thought we were the popular front.
57:03
People's front. What if it happened to the popular front?
57:06
Yeah, it's over there.
57:14
But the life of Brian is a movie, obviously, that has things in there that now you would never,
57:20
and I don't even want to say you would never get away with, but you shouldn't get away with.
57:23
There are some jokes in there that we have distinctly moved on from finding funny.
57:28
And that's the same of, you know, things that were happening as recently as 2014 on Twitter.
57:34
We have privileged and benefited from. We have been privileged by and we have benefited from
57:40
the incredible conversations that activists and advocates from marginalized communities
57:45
have been forcing on the public through whatever means necessary to, you know, articulate things
57:52
like casual transphobia is not acceptable. Casual racism is not acceptable. We don't use the
57:58
R word anymore because it's ableist. These are recent understandings that we've come to.
58:04
And I would argue that what we need sometimes is those big sledgehammer moments. We need someone
58:12
like me or like any other activist that does things that people say of their methods.
58:18
Why, just don't think they're very helpful to be standing at the side of the pool and throwing
58:23
a giant boulder into it to cause, you know, rather than gently placing a pebble at the edge.
58:29
And so, excuse me, could we please have a nuanced and kind conversation?
58:34
Those conversations can happen later and maybe that's what we're moving towards now.
58:38
But we need the initial bandage to be ripped off or the whatever. I mean, I'm a very big fan of
58:43
metaphor. We need the boil to be lance and all the pasta spill out before we can start gently
58:49
tending to the wound. Yeah, you just don't want the pasta spill out in such a way that it
58:54
infects other parts of the leg and becomes gangrenous and the whole leg falls off.
59:00
Well, that's true, but I mean, I don't think that that's what's happening. I think it's very
59:03
interesting the perspectives that we come from. And I would say as well with all kindness meant
59:09
that I think that one of the reasons why you're able to take that position is, well, particularly
59:14
when it comes to sexism, is that for you it's largely theoretical. You can go home at the end of
59:18
the day and not think about it and you cannot worry about it. You have the luxury of being able
59:23
to think about whether or not methods should be gentle or not because ultimately, you're not really
59:28
experiencing the full weight of them.