Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / JOSH IN NYC: The Fifth Column

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JOSH IN NYC: The Fifth Column · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day humans, sweat under the safe space for dangerous ideas. I'm currently at London.
• 0:06
  I'll London Town. I'll, uh, Blighty as we like to call it. For a whistle stop tour, it's really a whistle stop, uh,
• 0:12
  round the world tour, uh, hustling the podcast, encouraging people to join the uncomfortable
• 0:18
  conversations community. I've been doing a bunch of podcasts all over the place. You'll see me pop
• 0:22
  up on some of the biggies, uh, went to LA for a day, went to San Francisco for a day, went to New York
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  for a day, uh, then Austin for a day, and then back to New York for a day, and, uh, then London
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  for a couple of days. Uh, let me tell you a little piece of advice. Don't do that. Don't do that.
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  Maybe, maybe more than a day in each place would be, uh, would be advisable. Nonetheless, uh,
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  I want to bring you this, uh, now, while I'm away, uh, which is a conversation that I just had with
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  the fifth column, guys. Many of you may know this podcast. They're a fabulous, uh, trio. I don't know,
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  I feel like I'm speaking like Ed Sullivan, a fabulous trio of young gentlemen, uh, ladies and
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  gentlemen, uh, fifth column, uh, they are based in New York City. And while I'm in town, every time I'm
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  there, I always want to stop by their studios and, uh, you know, squeeze their little cheeks and
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  look at their rosy little faces with the exception of one of them, Camille, who, uh, has fled New York
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  for Sonia Climes in California. Nonetheless, enough about them. Let's talk about me, which is what I
• 1:25
  did too much of on their very show a few months before my departure from, uh, legacy media.
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  And, um, some keen observers noticed at the time that, uh, I parted ways with, uh, my ABC radio show
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  that, uh, just a few months prior, I'd been hinting at some possible issues at the, uh, at the
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  broadcaster or at least at my tenure at the broadcaster on their very show. So we recap that we
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  revisit that. They grill me about that and we have a good time talking about all sorts of other
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  things that are going on in the news. If you've heard this on their feed, uh, I'm sorry. If you haven't
• 2:03
  heard this, then enjoy it. And if you want more of them, go to wheatafifth.substac.com. Uh, and,
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  yeah, I've recorded some fantastic stuff that you can look forward to, things that'll be on YouTube.
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  I just sat down with Jimmy Carr, the English comic last night, and a swanky little place in
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  Mayfair. We had a videographer. We're going to put it on YouTube. It's not coming out until his
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  Netflix, uh, special drops, uh, in a few weeks time. Uh, outside in New York City, I sat down with
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  Coleman Hughes and Jessie's single. I went for a walk with Thomas Chatterton Williams, all these
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  wonderful people who were very generous to give me their time. So that's all coming up. We've got
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  heaps in the bag over the next month or two, not to mention the live tour with Douglas Murray. So
• 2:47
  it's all Abnan here at uncomfortable conversations. If you want to be part of the community, if you
• 2:52
  want to hear all the bonus stuff without of having to endure ads or, uh, you know, shorter,
• 2:58
  cropped episodes, you know what to do. You pull your phone out, and then you know,
• 3:02
  go to the conversations.substac.com, you're your subscribe. Uh, anyway, I'm about to jump on a plane
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  and come back to my homeland. I hope you're well. I'll see you there. Enjoy me on the fifth column.
• 3:15
  Yeah.
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  Greetings. And welcome back to another exciting installment of the fifth column podcast. This is your
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  weekly rhetorical assault on the new cycle of people that make it. And occasionally ourselves,
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  I am Camille Foster. I'm so delighted to be here on this, this magnificent Wednesday,
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  following a super Tuesday. I'm joined by Matt Welch, Michael Moynihan, and Moynihan.
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  Yes. More namely than that today. He's Moynihan. Um, and because he's a little
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  handsy, but we're also joined by a special guest who joins us from very, very far away,
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  almost as far away as you can get our wonderful dear friend. I'm literally sitting in the same
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  room, Camille. I'm sitting in the US. I'm privileged that you could join us from far away.
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  You traveled. Oh, I see. Yeah. That's right. And the purpose of my trip was to do this show. I
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  love that of all of the surnames on this show. It was not Zeps that was a problem. Which
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  just spelled in various ways over your career. Briefly when I was here, I got sick and tired of
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  people saying, Oh, what is that? Shwebs? Yeah. What is that? Where's that from? Spaps?
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  What are we doing? I was just like, you know what? I don't know how many times it was misspelled
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  by customs officials who were notating my refugee grandmother's details. So,
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  the Holocaust. So we got to Ellis Island. You changed your own name.
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  That's the right thing. I never changed it. I just said the double Z.
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  I've never seen anything like that. It was, you know, there was something zappy about the ZEPPS.
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  But now for everybody who wants to look me up, S-Z-E-P-S. That's what you type into the YouTube
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  to get all the great content. Can we, and I know that we have Super Tuesday. We have Camille,
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  who is, we should put him up on the screen. Yeah. He's not on the screen. And we love looking
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  at you. There it is. There is smiling. How often does he get his teeth cleaned, do you think?
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  I, does he get his, I don't know why? Because they're so yellow.
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  I don't know. I don't even have the brush. Just stay white.
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  Your teeth so yellow when you smile, cars slow down. That doesn't work as well.
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  The black scent. Can we just get off before we get into the news of the day? I want to talk about
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  Josh ZEPPS and his job difficulties at home, which, when I read about, mentioned this podcast.
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  Literally mentioned this podcast. Literally in it's in the, who, what was it? The
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  it was in the Australian, which is a Rupert Murdoch paper, which is frequently trying to
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  take a pot shots at the public broadcaster. Well, not the whole institution, just one particular
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  individual. So last time I was on, I was talking about some, I was basically talking about the,
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  we were talking about the phenomenon of cancel culture more broadly. And to give listeners who,
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  if maybe they didn't, listen to that episode, you had a show on ABC, which is the equivalent of
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  NPR BBC. It's called. The public broadcaster. Called a wall wake up. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
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  Called wake up. You can't. Yeah, they changed the name. When I left, they were like, can we finally
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  get rid of the seaward? Josh isn't there anymore. No, no. I mean, look, it's so funny that this
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  particular appearance is now connected to everything that went down with me. So, I mean, long story
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  short, I am now in charge of a burgeoning multimedia empire, which people can follow at uncomfortable
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  conversations, which is a sub-stack and now a YouTube page and now a live events company,
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  we're bringing out a lot more smarty to Australia. Thank you very much. I love it. But what happened
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  was I was here and we were talking about cancel culture and then I mentioned that I'd done this,
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  this episode where there was a disagreement about the, the end word. And there was a bit of a
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  brujah, shall we say. Would you say very liberally on our podcast? I did. I never said that.
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  On this show in public. Well, I mean, you, I think, I think you're recording it, actually,
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  but it's fine. I insist on it. I just refer you to be allowed in private.
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  No, not true. And so, and then there was a general conversation about cancel culture and I was saying,
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  you know how these things work, you know, it's not, it's not exactly that you get threatened.
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  It's just that there's a whiff of a smell about you and everybody and, you know, next time
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  your contract's up for renewal, you know, I was sort of in general terms. Well, there's an
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  individual at, at the aforementioned newspaper, who like, I mean, God bless his cotton socks for
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  being so obsessed with everybody at the public broadcast. He must, he lives in his basement and tap,
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  tap, tap, tap, type in a way on his typewriter surrounded by candlelight, like listening to every
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  single thing. So you have those are not strictly a two candles. We have candles. No, I mean,
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  there's people. So God bless you, Gerard, if you're listening. But he, and so we did this whole
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  thing. And then I flew off, and I had a vacation in Europe after we last chatted. And I'm in
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  Lisbon, I'm with a buddy of mine. Everything's great. I wake up in the morning and a Google alert pops
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  up. And I'm like, oh, what's this? The headline, let me read the headline. The headline of the media
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  watchdog column is ABC presenter, Josh Zips expresses concern about a pervading cancel culture at
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  the ABC. Oh, yeah. That's not what you said. That's not what I said at all. Absolutely what you meant.
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  But you didn't just say that. I'm pretty sure I was clear that there was, that this was a storm
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  in a teacup and that the ABC was bigger than this. And that you had someone there had your back.
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  Yeah, that's right. To not to be true. And so the first line says, the article says,
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  the media watchdog exclusive segment makes, oh, sorry, he says, this week's segment is so
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  exclusive. That explanation is necessary. And then he goes to explain to the reader what podcasts are
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  who you people are. Like what I wrote. As the world's famous. And anyway, he makes the point that
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  basically what I was saying is that there is something uniquely problematic about the public
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  broadcast, which is not at all what I was saying. And the, but what's interesting about that? And
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  who knows whether or not that played a role in the eventual collapse of my relationship with
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  that with my employer? It's only, no, it doesn't have a mystery. It doesn't help. But then,
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  but I think this is actually the instructive about something that I'm getting more and more
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  worried about, which is the impact that anti-cancel cultural warriors, the anti-work crowd are having
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  on cancel culture. Yes. Because there's, you know, if it wasn't for the fact, like it is
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  untenable for an organization that is constantly facing fire from bad actors who are going to twist
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  every word and try to make it sound worse than it is to tolerate as much of a level of internal
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  descent as they could if they knew that people were going to be reasonable. It's because of the
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  the intensifier that constantly comes and tries to stoke up fears about cancel culture from
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  the right that the cancel that people are kind of forced to be a little bit more cancely because
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  there's less scope for a big rambunctious sharing of ideas when those ideas might trigger the
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  anti-work people to go nuts. I think one of the weird things that we've discovered, and I think
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  you have discovered this too, we have not been on this beat at all. We've just been talking about
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  this sort of broader phenomenon. We've never talked about cancel culture. We do an episode every
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  week about cancel culture. We just kind of started talking about this stuff in like 2016
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  because it was all around us, right? And we were kind of early,
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  what would you say? Canaries in the coal mine, I guess. Yeah. No stradamas. No stradamas is
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  the rest you can say as a student without being rolled in the carpet and dumped in the vulgar river.
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  And a lot of our friends who we had on or people who became friends that we had on, it kept
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  happening. But one of the things that I think is really interesting about when this stuff first
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  comes out, you start saying, oh, this guy's talking about it too. That guy's interesting.
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  And as it goes on for a number of years, you start realizing that some of the people you're talking
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  to are at the beginning are completely insane. And they're doing it about Brett Weinstein.
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  What? What? What causes AIDS? I mean, come on. We don't know. What does cause everything
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  to me? Because I'm the guy at the table. Wow. When he asked me what caused
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  AIDS, I said, Josh. Oh, John Henderson's going to run out of alcohol. Stop it. No more, Mike.
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  That's a blows lid on pervasive culture of AIDS. Oh my God. He said blows the lid, right?
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  Is that what you guys used to do advice? Yeah, of course. I'll be blowing some lid soon.
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  But no, I think it's really interesting that these people that, you know, are just kind of your
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  nominal allies because no one's talking about the issue. And as time goes on, you're like, wow,
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  that person is totally insane. And I wish I had never. But you can't help this. I mean,
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  the people like, well, you once talked to this person. I'm like, well, yeah, back then I didn't know
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  who they were. And they were sort of normal. But it deranges people and warps them over time.
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  And if you see this in every aspect of politics, it's not just the kind of work stuff. Look at,
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  I saw this clip. I think it was in London. Maybe it was in London of a, you know, pro-Palestinian
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  protestor like losing there. I mean, there's like, there's something wrong with some of these people.
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  They've gone so far that they think everybody who doesn't do X or Y is supporting.
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  Was this a Y person or a Palestinian person? Unclear. Okay. Because they were, you know,
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  wrapped in a confused. It's kind of hard to tell because I don't think it's rare,
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  necessarily, for Islamists and jihadists to go into this, to be able to be a little extra.
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  This was not an extra. This was a regular. Okay. Yeah. As my brother used to call them,
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  the regulars. So anyway, I don't even, just to clarify, I don't think Gerard Henderson,
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  who's this columnist, is a, is a right wing, not job. Like, like, it's not, you don't need
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  to. You're afraid of a march. No, no, no, honestly, these are, these are people who have their
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  beach, right? I'm not comparing him. I'm just saying that when, you know, in this,
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  they over time of, of this stuff, these people that you are associated with at one time,
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  you know, talking about woke stuff or, you know, which is a word that I try desperately to
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  avoid these days. And it's awesome because of the association of some people I used to know,
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  and I don't want to know anymore. It's just because, I mean, because you and I,
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  and Matt and Camille, we've been talking about this stuff for a long time. I mean, I did your
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  podcast when you were doing them live at a bar in Williamsburg. The precursor to uncomfortable
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  conversation. You did it as well. Camille, you did it as well. So I was talking about that stuff,
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  like it's probably 2015 or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's been a long time in the
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  beat of talking to this, but it's just like, it's not like the people who have, you know, monetized it.
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  It's monomania is almost never your friend. And you see this all over politics. You actually
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  see it in something we'll probably talk about later on in immigration because that's such a,
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  it's like a woke stuff can be, if you really squit hard enough, it can be your explanation for
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  everything. It's big enough. You can, you can call it, I mean, what's a Wesleyan calls it the
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  successor ideology. That suddenly looks a lot bigger than when you, when you say this, oh boy,
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  that's, you know, you can get that into cultural Marxism. You can start using it to explain things.
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  Immigration, you could use that too. And that monomania can go on many sides of many different issues.
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  But as soon as you find yourself being that person, the chances of you just like being ever on alert,
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  having your Google alerts be all about that, you're going to see, it's a big fucking country.
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  It's a big fucking world. You're going to see evidence to support your theory every day.
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  Also, and you're going to lose, can we also just stipulate that if your theory is that
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  cancelling people for their beliefs or for being outspoken about certain issues is wrong.
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  At least be consistent. Like what kind of gets me is that people who will howl allowed us to
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  about cancel culture on the left. Then somebody will come out, you know, who's an anti-sionist and
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  makes a pro-Palestinian point and they'll be like, oh, thank goodness. They lost their job.
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  That was beyond the pile. Well, no, hang on. I'm going to be consistent. Can you, can you,
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  can you be consistent when you say, yeah, that's wrong, but it is hilarious.
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  I don't, I don't, I don't think it's the right thing, but sometimes I do think it's kind of
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  funny because I look at the people shrieking at the top of their lungs. In from my perspective,
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  I'm just always thinking about what my employer or potential employer might think. I mean,
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  it's a calculation you make in life and these people are like on the streets like, you know,
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  they Jews eat the babies. I'm like, I don't know if you're going to get the job.
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  They're really big law firm doing that. So maybe that is kind of hilarious that this happens
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  anyway. Yeah, and some people have certain types of jobs. You don't necessarily want a public
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  school teacher to be doing the Jews eat the babies stuff. No, you also don't necessarily want a
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  public radio broadcaster to wrestle with the kinds of ideas that I want to wrestle with.
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  So it's not like this was, it's not like I was like unjustly maligned by my employer in some way.
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  But you know, you don't frame yourself in Australia and we're just part of ways because I'm up
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  to a different thing. Yeah, I mean, you don't frame yourself as a victim in that. Not at all.
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  Not at all. Yeah, I mean, this was a smart decision. I've never felt more liberated like that. This
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  might be your shared moment. Yeah, but why shouldn't it be the case that someone who is working
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  at a public broadcaster is engaged in thoughtful conversations about complicated issues
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  and promoting nuance, for example, it seems like exactly the role that I would want a public
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  broadcaster to play to the extent there's going to be a public broadcaster at all. Like if you
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  can't have a place in an institution like that, it should probably be abolished. Yeah, but like
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  I mean, it should be abolished anyways. But that's not my opinion. I don't know. My opinion.
• 17:07
  But I mean, I think a serious act was regarding it was a homosexual neo-Maxist organization.
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  Regardless of the public private distinction, Camille, one answer to your question is that we've seen
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  that happen just on just about every private media company as well. I mean, the aforementioned,
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  at this point, dozen people that we've had on this on this program who've lost their jobs,
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  sometimes at places that they founded, like Ben Greenwald at the intercept, like Matt Tiber didn't
• 17:40
  found Rolling Stone, but he was shown the door Ben drivers. Oh, sorry, Gavin McGuinness.
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  Gavin McGuinness, we haven't had him on the program, I don't think. No, we haven't. Not yet.
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  Not yet. That's going to be the grand return. I'm open to it. But yeah, I mean, a series of people
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  who became Jesse Single in his own way was sort of was like squeezed out of a respectable opinion.
• 17:59
  He's been kind of squeezed back in Barry Weiss in New York Times. Over and over and over again,
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  those places have shrank. And only a few of them have kind of re-expanded a little bit
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  as the pendulum has swung back. So that's the problem. I totally agree, Camille. You should have that
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  if you're going to have a public broadcast service. And you should have that if you're a private
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  place too. But the mores and culture around journalism and discussion have absolutely constricted.
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  And it's all you need to know about the cultures of these places is that when you see somebody
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  like Barry Weiss and I occasionally do work for Barry. I don't work for Barry, but I occasionally
• 18:33
  do things for her. So I mean, but you know, it's not I don't have to make that. And that's I've known
• 18:37
  her and she's been on this, you know, for over a decade and she's been on this podcast. But the
• 18:41
  response to her, just the invocation of her name and the responses that you see on Twitter,
• 18:47
  people from the sort of mainstream is fully insane. And you realize that these are people that do
• 18:53
  want to enforce a strict code of ideological conduct within their organization. You see the
• 18:58
  multiple pieces, the Adam Rubenstein piece. What was the other one in the 1841 or the economist
• 19:04
  magazine? Yeah, the what's his name, but James Bennett. But you know, one other thing. And I'm
• 19:10
  going to post this. I sent this to you guys. I made a video, which I just laid out because there
• 19:16
  was no other way of doing it laid out on a timeline in a video and exported it. And as I said to
• 19:22
  the default when you're making these videos in Adobe premieres to make every still image five
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  seconds, right? Five seconds. Not that much. And it made the video about eight minutes long. So I
• 19:32
  had to shrink it down. So it's flashing on the screen. And this is the boredom of a certain type
• 19:37
  of content. Whether it's talking about wokenness, ad infinitum, it's like you have to think of your
• 19:43
  readers, your listeners, your viewers don't overwhelm them of stuff. It's people get incredibly
• 19:48
  bored by it. And the the version that I did was the screenshots that I made and put in a folder
• 19:54
  in January of 2022. I was on the train to DC on going on a shoot for VICE. And I was on the web
• 20:04
  site, the vice news website. And I was like, there are literally seven stories on the homepage
• 20:09
  right now about Q and on. So I was like, this is constant. So I went back and I just captured
• 20:14
  not stories that were about it, but didn't mention the headline. It had to be in the headline.
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  The word Q and on in there were, I think, a 250. It was insane number. And I was like,
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  who are they talking to? Who is the person that is the audience for this unbelievable,
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  just blizzard of stories about this marginal group that you want to be important? Because also,
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  it's a very easy kind of moral position to take because they're really, really insane.
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  I mean, this is one of the reasons why I'm relieved to get out of the 24 hour news cycle as well,
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  because there are so many things that we should be focusing on that are not Q and on.
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  That are actually really interesting. And I mean, it's funny you mentioned Barry Weiss. I had her
• 20:54
  on my show The Week After My Job Disappeared. Yeah, that was clever if you wasn't. I began.
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  So you should go back and listen to that episode of Uncomfortable Conversations, which I sort of
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  start by saying, so being forced out of a news organization for having unusual or controversial ideas,
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  there's not something that you could just feel editing any affinity with Barry.
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  And she, and having conversations with, I don't want to just have conversations with the Barry Weiss
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  isn't Andrew Sullivan's, Matt Aybe's in the world. I also want to have a conversation as I did
• 21:24
  with the former president of Estonia about Putin or, you know, with the head of the leading.
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  No, no, definitely not. No.
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  No, you know, the leading artificial intelligence researcher in Australia and things like that.
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  And that stuff that you don't get on the clickbait. And there is a problem here. And
• 21:41
  Camille's your point about shouldn't a public broadcast to do that. It depends what arm of the
• 21:45
  public broadcast that you're talking about. I think the news arm, which happens to not be the arm
• 21:49
  that I was working in, but nonetheless should not allow the wrestling with big ideas. The news arm
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  should be journalism and facts and like no opinion whatsoever. And then there should be a firewall
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  between that and like the publisher and a firewall between that and what we would call content,
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  which is the division that I was working in, where there should be a certain, I don't know,
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  appreciation for the general rambunctiousness of human thought and like a capacious understanding
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  of the kinds of conversations that we should have. And it shouldn't get caught in group think and
• 22:20
  in echo chambers. And that's that would be the distinction. And look, as in this is the case,
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  particularly with NPR, as more voices, you know, get into these media institutions that typically
• 22:32
  were kind of monocultures, political monocultures, that firewall gets smaller and smaller.
• 22:38
  It gets lower and lower. I mean, it becomes like NPR has become more ideologically,
• 22:42
  yes, obvious about where it, you know, where it has just about every newspaper that still exists
• 22:49
  in this country, which is to window by the side. I mean, the times is getting better. I actually
• 22:52
  think the NBC and Australia is getting better as well. I mean, there's also this weird thing that's
• 22:57
  happening, which has been pointed out by a great journalist in Australia who was courageous for
• 23:03
  even saying this, which he was talking about in the context of Israel and Gaza, that there is
• 23:08
  something of a conflict between the push for diversity and the quest for objectivity. Because
• 23:13
  the push for diversity has as its ethos that we all bring our whole selves to our reporting and
• 23:19
  our own lived experience informs us. And so, you know, if you're a, you know, an Arab woman who
• 23:25
  is who is reporting on Israel and Gaza, you're bringing something important about your own experience
• 23:30
  to the table. That is in fun, in stark contrast to the idea of there being an objective newsroom,
• 23:37
  which just relies on facts and tries to strip your personality out of its reporting. So we have to
• 23:42
  find a way to, if we're going to diversify and I agree, I don't want newsrooms to look the way
• 23:46
  that they did in the 1950s, then we have to find a way of meshing the, like, bring your own
• 23:51
  experience into your work. But there's a, there's, this is an old conversation that we've,
• 23:58
  we've been having on this podcast. I think really since it's inception. Yeah, for sure.
• 24:03
  This notion of kind of objectivity and viewpoint diversity and what's important to always clarify.
• 24:08
  And I know you know this Josh. So I'm interested in how you might refine your remarks. But you always
• 24:15
  bring yourself to your work. There is always a subjective accounting of what's happening here.
• 24:21
  There is no such thing as a truly objective point of view. And while a newsroom can strive to give
• 24:28
  you something like objectivity, like there's something about a community of journalists who begin to
• 24:34
  believe that they have the capital T truth and their obligation is to bring you the capital T truth
• 24:39
  and of readership or a public that thinks, yeah, yeah, no, I just want the objective facts here.
• 24:46
  When the best you can actually hope for is nuanced reflective reporting on complicated topics
• 24:55
  that invites questions and acknowledges its own biases in meaningful ways. Yes. I think those are
• 25:01
  two very different projects in an important respect. And I don't think that most people who
• 25:07
  actually followed the news closely who say things like objective journalism actually have an
• 25:11
  appreciation for that. And I'm also reminded when you said the times is doing better of this piece
• 25:17
  that was floating around from who's Oliver Darcy at CNN who in his newsletter was mentioning the very
• 25:23
  the brew aha over the New York Times coverage of Joe Biden and the fact that they happen to acknowledge
• 25:28
  the fact that he's really, really old. Yeah, obviously slowing down. And this is somehow actually the fact
• 25:34
  that they're asking the question according to the reporting of Oliver Darcy and the perspectives
• 25:40
  of their critics. The fact that they asked the question is evidence of their bias. I mean,
• 25:44
  I would say that all of that is true. And yet you don't want to throw the baby out with the
• 25:49
  bathwater because actually the the idea that there's no such thing as objective truth and we're
• 25:53
  all biased in some way is kind of the calling card of the diversity, equity and inclusion crowd
• 25:59
  who say we shouldn't we shouldn't strive to erase our own biases because everything is
• 26:04
  subjective. It's a very kind of post structuralists like 20th century French philosophy,
• 26:08
  Foucaulti, an idea about the world that there's no objective truth. The the reality you're pointing
• 26:12
  to a to a fact which is that none of us can escape our own minds and our own histories. But there
• 26:18
  are processes that you can put in place and frames of mind that you can put in place that will turn
• 26:22
  the dial down on that. So I mean, I did Sam Harris's podcast recently with Jonathan Roush from
• 26:28
  the Atlantic and Jonathan's written a book about this about the kind of the ways that you can
• 26:33
  take information into the funnel of journalism, not just journalism, but also institutions like public
• 26:38
  public policy and so on. And there are these ratchets that will weed out the bad and enhance the
• 26:44
  good. Like for example, having a good editor who requires you to have three sources for a story.
• 26:49
  Now, this is something Mike Surnovitch doesn't have, you know, he just goes out and just talks.
• 26:54
  You know, so a newsroom is a place where yes, it's silly to deny that we have, you know,
• 27:00
  priors coming in, but you use systems to try to turn the volume down rather than simply turning
• 27:06
  the volume up and going, well, hey, this is all part of my lived experience or whatever.
• 27:09
  Yeah, I agree. Yeah, yeah, yeah, to basically above you say, what Camilla is saying and I,
• 27:15
  you know, I hear this a lot about we all have our own biases. And I think you're right that there
• 27:19
  is, you know, a different version of that and the kind of DEI lexicon that people use that
• 27:24
  quite a bit. But there is a way of doing it where you don't because I used to work with people who
• 27:29
  didn't care about this because the institution itself kind of generally agreed with what they
• 27:33
  agreed with. So they'd make no effort. The effort is I would sit across from people that I
• 27:38
  agreed with and I can grill them. I can take the other side because that's not about me. I am
• 27:44
  ancillary to the story. I am trying to get the person to say something interesting for the viewers
• 27:50
  to challenge their assumptions that I might agree with. And yes, I have my own biases. And yes,
• 27:55
  there's story selection bias and things like that that you have to consider all that. And look,
• 27:59
  in by the way, sourcing, I mean, we had John on this rash on this podcast and is when he was
• 28:04
  promoting Constitution of Knowledge, I think is a new book. And we got into it with him and I was
• 28:08
  funny because we all really love John. And in particularly his kind of the inquisitors.
• 28:14
  Kindly was his first book. I think we should have absolute masterpiece. It's a landmark.
• 28:17
  And you know, there's a lot he was really the first on the scene with the cancel. 100% Peter Tio.
• 28:22
  Actually, my new boss. Weirdly. Yes. And I don't say weirdly because it's your new boss. Actually,
• 28:28
  that is weird too. Peter, I'm in a homosexual workplaces. I get the A, B, C. I was paid
• 28:37
  in the mail. Let me tell you about the interview process. It's funny. This is when editing this,
• 28:43
  when Camille says something in this not a video podcast, he's like, Camille is actually black,
• 28:46
  no matter what he says. Josh said in a minute. Josh is himself. I'm just like, you can say these
• 28:53
  things. That's good. But even in that, when he's talking about the three sources, if you have
• 28:57
  been around journalism long enough, you also understand that those three sources are oftentimes
• 29:01
  one source. So one person says something tells two other people in government. Now you have three
• 29:05
  sources, but they're coming on the same place. On the name source. This was a big deal with a
• 29:11
  yellow cake, uranium thing. Correct. Yes.
• 29:14
  During their aqua, when Trini basically leaked it to a bunch of people and then tell reporters
• 29:18
  to talk to all of those people to get the same bullet. It was all Michael Ladin. I guess
• 29:22
  that was all right. But that stuff is that, you know, yes, I mean, there are those safeguards
• 29:29
  traditionally in journalism. Yes, they are often ignored and people leap to the conclusions
• 29:34
  that they want to leap to. I mean, recently, we don't know exactly what happened in this aid
• 29:40
  convoy in Israel or a bunch of people were killed where they run over with a shop at Israelis.
• 29:44
  It seems like some combination of the two. I mean, the initial Hamas response was that it was an
• 29:49
  air strike on them and a bunch of people went with that, you know, and then there was the hospital
• 29:54
  stuff. A bunch of people went with that. Do I think that they're bad faith sometimes? Do I
• 29:59
  think that they're acting under time constraints and pressure in a 24 hour new cycle? That's also true.
• 30:04
  People who are going with that. I mean, there was one example I can think of where the New York
• 30:10
  Times got it wrong initially in the early days where there was a strike on a hospital and they were
• 30:14
  too, too, too quick to take Hamas's point of view. But I would say that institutions like the New
• 30:20
  York Times and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the British Broadcasting Corporation
• 30:24
  are generally good at not repeating those things and trying to dig into it and get to the photo.
• 30:30
  And so is the Australian, which Gerald Anderson works for. And so are the big flagship newspapers.
• 30:35
  You know, there's a market mechanism here, obviously. I mean, they don't want to be the people
• 30:41
  that are wrong about this stuff all the time and they don't want to seem like people that are just
• 30:44
  on one side. Obviously, they did their own investigation. Now, I think they handled it horribly
• 30:49
  at the beginning. And I think they were too credulous and too quick to say, well, obviously,
• 30:53
  it's a good story. They told us this is what happened. This is what we're expecting to happen.
• 30:58
  Your expectations are the confirmation bias and so many as you expect there to be this many people
• 31:02
  in a hospital center. But yeah, they're going to correct themselves and they did their own investigation,
• 31:07
  Washington Post didn't investigation. The tunnel stuff at L. Shefa Hospital people to leave it.
• 31:11
  They people do want to get this stuff right. Unfortunately, there's a lot of people within
• 31:15
  organizations and you see in the New York Times this story about the daily podcast about
• 31:20
  rapes and Hamas rapes, which is amazing to me. All these people find it. They're absolutely
• 31:25
  incredulous that the people of Hamas would rape somebody. We need to get the facts on it.
• 31:30
  Well, you don't get freedom. Fine. Right.
• 31:35
  But that said, I think that there's people internally in places like that who are
• 31:41
  and there's definitely an age difference. And I've pointed this out before Matt and
• 31:46
  Camille and I talked about this when Camille signed the Harper's letter of the free speech kind of
• 31:50
  thing, which, you know, Salman Rischdi was on. No, Chomsky. It's how they ideologically it was
• 31:55
  all over the map. But the difference was and I asked, I wonder what this was in a listener of ours.
• 32:00
  Our brilliant listeners did the laborious work of aggregating the ages of the people who did the
• 32:05
  response letter to Harper's and saying, no, we don't want to miss it all. And the average age
• 32:09
  was like 30 versus the Harper's letter, which was like 65 or 60 or something. Only brought down by me.
• 32:16
  Really good for a 65. It doesn't crack. It doesn't crack. It doesn't crack. Unless you smoke it.
• 32:21
  I mean, all I would say just to wrap up to tell you something about is I don't want to be the guy
• 32:25
  who leaves mainstream media and then shits all over mainstream media and tries to erode trust in
• 32:29
  mainstream media. I think it's indispensable. I think the work that the big institutions are
• 32:33
  doing is irreplaceable. I don't think a bunch of podcasters like us can, you know, are an
• 32:39
  alternative to the mainstream media. Yes, all we do. The ABC is a national treasure. Much of the
• 32:43
  murder press even is important in all of the investigative journalism. You know, I want to have
• 32:49
  different kinds of conversations. I want to wrestle with bigger things. It wasn't a perfect fit,
• 32:53
  but I don't want to go on like some Pears Morgan victory lap where I'm like, oh, I'm being
• 32:57
  canceled on silence because they're all corrupt. That's not what's happening here.
• 33:01
  Yeah, yeah. I mean, and also it is when when somebody you talked about Barry, where she gave a
• 33:05
  talk at the 92nd Street Y and it was like a private talk. You couldn't buy publicly tickets
• 33:11
  for obvious reasons. This is New York City is a New York City. And of course, what happens is
• 33:16
  the place is surrounded by people, the police are like getting in fights with quote unquote
• 33:20
  protesters. It's like they don't want these people to even say anything at all about anything.
• 33:26
  And I reminded me when I was younger and I went to England and it was before the newspaper culture
• 33:33
  was replaced by the internet in the joy that I got in the morning going to the news agent
• 33:39
  in buying the telegraph the times the guardian and the independent. I'm sorry. You left out the
• 33:44
  world's greatest newspaper. The sun, the daily mail. Well, I saw two. It was too much of a little
• 33:49
  in England or tablet. I liked the real uncut right wing tabloid, which was either the son of the
• 33:55
  news world. So by that and the mirror was the left wing one. And I buy all of them and it was
• 33:58
  really fun to read all this stuff. And I don't know why we've gotten to this place. I do in some
• 34:03
  ways to a culture where people are like that person is speaking here. We must stop them from
• 34:08
  saying anything. And that's something we've talked about in this podcast for eight years probably
• 34:12
  and it's never. I can't resolve it in my head at this point still. RIP page three girls.
• 34:17
  Oh my god, the best. I mean, you do need to be taught. Don't you about the importance of
• 34:23
  and the value for everybody in tolerating a maximally large number of different ideas?
• 34:28
  Correct. I think it's instinctively. It just feels right to think like, well, okay,
• 34:33
  Josh Steps is bringing Douglas Murray to Australia for a live tour. Why would we tolerate hate?
• 34:40
  Why would we tolerate hate? So much. We should petition. I can understand that if you
• 34:50
  if you're in such an echo chamber driven partly by the fragmentation of media, driven partly by
• 34:55
  the fragmentation of our societies as they sort demographically and driven in large part by
• 35:00
  algorithms that kind of feed you stuff that reinforces what you already think and that demonizes
• 35:06
  what you don't already think, then you are going to have a tendency to think, I mean, I'm on the
• 35:10
  right side of history. Why do we have to why do people have to keep puncturing this bubble and
• 35:15
  like, why wouldn't you just stand up for what is good? Why do why do all these troublesome people
• 35:18
  have to keep talking with their bullshit? Like you do have to think they're on the wrong side of history.
• 35:23
  Well, exactly, but you have to be taught that like you do have to learn a little bit about
• 35:27
  John Stuart Mill, like you do have to learn a little bit about how the enlightenment gave us all
• 35:34
  of the stuff that we appreciate today precisely because it permitted the larger possible number of
• 35:38
  ideas to be circulated. Why don't you bring me to Australia? Yeah, good question.
• 35:42
  Yeah, because I'm not. Yeah, I want to go. A member of your club. I mean, you're lavened
• 35:48
  your club. I want to be very clear. I'll come for free. Oh, yeah, just blind me first class.
• 35:54
  Yeah, that's not for free. Not exactly. That's pretty. That's right. I'm just going to be honest.
• 35:58
  That's a funny coach and give everybody a hand job. Yeah, I don't care. I've never been there.
• 36:03
  It's a lady sitting next to me undercutting me. This is always undercutting me.
• 36:08
  And it's the dumping of hand jobs that that actually does it. Oh, geez.
• 36:14
  This is the shit that I forget to cut out. Yeah, yeah.
• 36:17
  I mean, people take you up on the offer. Yeah, I love that you just talked to Raush because
• 36:24
  Raush is like one of the people who really helped crystallize for me. Now that I didn't have
• 36:30
  an understanding of it before, but like the arguments that are necessary for us to be making
• 36:37
  on an ongoing basis to help people understand the really complicated mechanisms that we have
• 36:42
  for actually figuring out what is true about the world and the things that are necessary
• 36:47
  in order for it to work. And what I've always appreciated about quote unquote,
• 36:52
  wokeness that I am sure most people who describe themselves as anti-woke don't actually appreciate
• 36:58
  is that the reason to hate it isn't because of the specific kind of aesthetic failures of the ideas
• 37:06
  on offers like I reject the specific like philosophical claims that are made there like those
• 37:13
  the value judgments in that particular system of belief about the congenital evil of people
• 37:20
  of particular backgrounds and the congenital lack of fitness of people of other backgrounds.
• 37:29
  If you are black and you're born into a particular system, you are by definition
• 37:34
  and disadvantaged. I think this is a poisonous ideology, but the actual fundamental foundational
• 37:42
  concern that I have with them is that they have a particular worldview that is at odds with
• 37:47
  the preservation of a free society. Like from their standpoint, the appropriate way to decide
• 37:53
  truth is effectively to invoke this radical egalitarian principle, which is I believe like the way
• 38:01
  that Roush described it, the notion that what is true about the world is something that can only
• 38:06
  be identified by the victimized in our society. They will tell us what to believe. And to the extent
• 38:12
  DEI is a problem, it's a problem because in various institutions, they actually inculcate
• 38:18
  those kinds of beliefs and I'm not being sensationalist when I describe it that way.
• 38:23
  The trouble is if your perspective is I'm anti-woke and we're going to ban those bad ideas
• 38:29
  and we're going to do a number of other things to ensure that certain kinds of bad ideas don't
• 38:33
  have any space, then you're addressing the aesthetic defects of wokeism and you're leaving
• 38:40
  undisturbed, perhaps even compounding the thing that is most threatening, this most tyrannical
• 38:48
  about these ideologies. And that's actually quite a hard step to take. I mean, I think it
• 38:52
  is worse on our part. When all of my shit was going down in Australia, it was at the same time
• 38:58
  that Israel and Gaza was going bonkers in terms of the protests in the West and a lot of protests
• 39:03
  in Australia. I would say that the median center of gravity in Australia has become extremely
• 39:10
  anti-zionist, not just Palestinian. And there were people who were colleagues of mine
• 39:17
  in the social media influencer world who were getting pretty close to anti-semitism in the
• 39:23
  stuff that they were pumping out. Like it was extremely uncomfortable. And I was privy to
• 39:28
  conversations about how we should have letter writing campaigns to their book publishers to
• 39:32
  encourage them to sever ties or to their podcast networks to have their podcasts cancel.
• 39:38
  And the only thing I ever said was to chime in and say, don't go there, guys.
• 39:42
  Don't do that. Respond to the ideas. If you think they're wrong, explain why they're wrong.
• 39:47
  We all have a megaphone now. We all have a Twitter feed. Many of us have podcasts. Talk about the
• 39:52
  ideas. Don't attack the people. You don't want to open that Pandora's Box. You do not want to live
• 39:56
  in a world where everybody is looking over their shoulder, treading on eggshells worried about
• 40:00
  triggering tripwires because a mob might come for them and attack not their beliefs, not their
• 40:05
  arguments, but their livelihoods, their families, their wellbeing. If those mean while you were
• 40:11
  obviously keeping a list of all other. I'll give to them. You were the Oscar Shindler of
• 40:16
  kind of a different thing. But no, I think that's exactly right. And when Camille was saying that,
• 40:21
  I was thinking the same thing is that this stuff isn't easy. It's, I mean, these kind of ideological
• 40:26
  battles. And if you care about this stuff, it's not an easy position to take because there is
• 40:31
  a very distinctly authoritarian and almost sometimes totalitarian bent to these ideologies
• 40:38
  that we talk about because, you know, I don't want people to be in the situation that I was in
• 40:43
  for five years in my job, which was as it got worse and worse and worse. And it got really bad
• 40:48
  around 2019, 20 around then. And it to express a different opinion was to basically signline
• 40:57
  yourself. They wouldn't fire you. They would pay you, which was, you know, an amazing thing.
• 41:02
  And just didn't didn't put me on certain projects. And by which certain, I mean, any certain
• 41:08
  any sometimes blur, but that that is a very difficult position to take when you don't want
• 41:15
  anybody else to be in that situation. If the situation is reverse, the totalitarian instinct must
• 41:20
  be treated in that kind of ecumenical way and say, you know what, you know, in the in the Cold War,
• 41:25
  it wasn't like, Oh, God, these people, these commies, these Marxists, these reds, the times that
• 41:30
  that are criticized in the response, the anti-communist response, which really interestingly was the,
• 41:36
  the, the, the left, the extreme left in America did such a great job selling as the only response.
• 41:43
  So much so that a liberal historian named Richard Gid Powers wrote a book in the 90s called
• 41:46
  Not Without Honor. And it was a book about the anti-communist movement. Not without honor was
• 41:52
  the book about anti-communist. And it's like, you know, the excesses of McCarthyism, the
• 41:57
  excesses of blacklist, et cetera. And that was actually a response. I mean, particularly in
• 42:01
  Hollywood, the blacklist was a response to a communist blacklist. So communist writers would try
• 42:07
  desperately to get people like Rex Harrison, people who were like, you know, more right of,
• 42:12
  they would make sure that they didn't work. I mean, the union itself was that sort of Reagan took
• 42:15
  over the union. That was a blacklist responding to a blacklist. And then, of course, the legacy is
• 42:20
  on the one blacklist. But the instant to do that is completely natural. I totally understand.
• 42:25
  Look at the Christian, right? Look at the Christian conservatives. Look at the, you know,
• 42:28
  I mean, you know, Monty Python's life of Brian was trying to be canceled back in the 70s
• 42:34
  for religious conservatives. It's not like the left came up with cancel culture. The left
• 42:38
  was just co-opted in the past. And they're just better at it. I mean, honestly, they have now.
• 42:42
  They're at right now. They're better at it because the broader institutions are either on their
• 42:48
  side or if they're not on their side, they know not to say anything. Right. But my fear is that
• 42:52
  the more that we push back and attack that bogeyman and become paranoid ourselves, the more likely
• 42:56
  it is that there'll be a right wing cancel culture. Correct. You know, which will become.
• 43:00
  But I would say one final thing. There is one. Oh, there is. That's true. And it's one small
• 43:05
  brief thing about this. Is it all people can, if you've worked in this business, even if you
• 43:09
  haven't, you can imagine this, you're not going to be a person at the New York Times who,
• 43:14
  after the Louis story comes out. And there's a bunch of editorials that people are at Louis and
• 43:18
  the sort of, you know, horrible culture of, of, um, you know, comedy or something. And they had,
• 43:23
  you know, no, our friend, no dormant on the, the daily podcast talking about it was a two ep,
• 43:27
  they two episodes of it. That's, I don't think I've ever heard another one two episodes about Louis.
• 43:31
  You're not going to be the person at the New York Times in the editorial meeting who says like
• 43:36
  literally no one's going to do this and says, it's kind of bullshit. But they will email us.
• 43:41
  They will definitely send us DMs. But that is ultimately the problem of it. Is the culture,
• 43:46
  you don't want to produce that culture or produce the opposite culture if when your ideology is
• 43:51
  the one that's raining. So Camille, let's put you on the spot, right? So you talk all these high
• 43:55
  flutin words that got like compound syllables and such. Um, Florida, the university system for what
• 44:02
  I understand just like acts a whole bunch of DEI departments. Um, good or bad?
• 44:09
  Uh, well, actually, I've only tracked that so closely. So I'm going to be somewhat restrained
• 44:15
  in what I have to say, write this moment because the details matter. But I can say, because I've
• 44:20
  been tracking this thing more broadly, that there are plenty of instances where universities,
• 44:26
  especially public funded universities have DEI programs that run a foul of the principle of
• 44:31
  free speech and likely the first amendment. Um, so certainly these kind of pledges that various
• 44:37
  universities demand from people where they have to insist that they are going to pursue their
• 44:43
  research in a way that is consistent with a particular ideology. The question of whether or not
• 44:50
  the various universities ought to be funding DEI programs in general, I think is another thing
• 44:57
  entirely. But I think the issue in more broadly for people who want to try and regulate this sort
• 45:04
  of conduct is that oftentimes they craft the legislation in such a way that they're only going
• 45:09
  after particular bad ideas, these divisive, divisive concepts bills, like the Stop-Woke Act,
• 45:15
  which was just, um, just lost in the 11th Circuit. Yeah. I believe this week, which is a
• 45:21
  generally conservative, uh, Florida. It's a pretty conservative circuit. Yeah. Yeah. And the Stop-Woke
• 45:26
  Act, in addition to regulating this kind of conduct, um, on universities and public education,
• 45:31
  was also interested in regulating this instant, this kind of conduct, um, amongst private employers,
• 45:37
  which is a place where it really, really, really ran afoul of the, the Constitution. So
• 45:41
  it is entirely possible that, and I'll summarize in this way, it's entirely possible that,
• 45:48
  that our concerns about free expression and our concerns about legitimate bad things, like,
• 45:55
  formal discrimination on the part of governments or employers, um, come into some conflict at some
• 46:02
  point entirely possible. And the very difficult work of trying to understand where the appropriate
• 46:09
  places are to draw the lines, um, is something that we can approach in a thoughtful and curious way,
• 46:15
  where we're actually trying to seek out the, the edges and make prudent decisions about what's
• 46:20
  happening, or we could just try to blow everything the fuck up. And by so doing run the risk of
• 46:27
  blowing ourselves up to, or prized institutions that are important for this work of knowledge
• 46:32
  formation. Um, and I think far too many people are inclined towards, we have to do something
• 46:39
  anything because we're facing an existential threat. And that do something anything is
• 46:45
  seize power, dictate to other people, precisely what the right thing is to do. And I think that
• 46:51
  approach is not just wrong, um, as the 11th Circuit, and they're rather interesting and very
• 46:57
  accessible decision, um, layout, uh, it's, it's unconstitutional, um, in liberal, and something to be
• 47:05
  avoided by any serious person who actually cares about what makes the particular country that we live
• 47:12
  in great, that makes the West great, um, and that makes, um, the, the whole process of truth formation
• 47:18
  that's led to the prosperity that we all enjoy, um, possible. Like if you care about those things,
• 47:24
  then you have to oppose people who are disregarding it, um, in service of trying to defeat their
• 47:30
  enemies and when, when easy sheep, um, and sheep because they're so quickly and thoroughly overturned,
• 47:37
  um, political battles. You might have run a foul of DEI regulations at any of the universities
• 47:43
  when you said why the West is great. Josh, that's eliminating DEI programs in Florida and in
• 47:50
  public university. Well, I mean, I don't quite understand why the government is the right tool for
• 47:54
  this, but a particular job. I mean, I'm not close to this issue. It strikes me that the correct
• 47:59
  reform would be to reform university administrations if you feel that celibuses have gotten crazy.
• 48:04
  I mean, so it's not, it's less about the syllabus, right? And it's more about actual departments at
• 48:09
  state universities that are, well, that's, that's the right. The government's involved. Yeah.
• 48:12
  Yeah. Yeah. State, state operated state. Right. But the government wouldn't ordinarily be taking a
• 48:17
  granular approach to specific. Usually, no, yeah. Usually not. I mean, I would make the case that I
• 48:23
  think that this, um, the stock well, stomp woke act was absurd in about a thousand levels and
• 48:29
  the court was right in the decision and what I read about the decision from the decision. I thought
• 48:33
  was, you know, pretty much what I thought, um, eliminating the DEI departments. I'm not upset about,
• 48:39
  I think it's fine. And the reason I think it's fine is that if it is about on the top level,
• 48:45
  and this is how it's always presented, that representation, that flabby word that everyone throws
• 48:50
  around that essentially means nothing these days, because representation is like, is it 13% of
• 48:55
  the population? It's like, well, no, it never stops. I mean, it's like, if you can get 80%,
• 48:59
  you're the happiest person. Well, it's no longer representation. But if that's what it's about,
• 49:03
  that's what it meant. That's what admissions is for. And we have those battles in the Supreme Court
• 49:08
  over the Backey decision, over affirmative action, etc. And we can solve that there. DEI is
• 49:15
  an explicitly ideological department, um, arm of university, whatever you want to call it.
• 49:22
  If there were a version of this that was promoting the views of moms for liberty in a kind of,
• 49:29
  sort of more adult sense, because they talk about elementary school education, junior high
• 49:34
  stuff. I don't think we'd even have a second thought about this. If there was a department within
• 49:40
  the university saying, one must talk about America in a particular way, in a patriotic way,
• 49:47
  in a way that, that, that admires the founders, admires the constitution of the issue of statement
• 49:52
  as you're giving your job saying that you think the constitution is the greatest thing.
• 49:58
  Well, so for me, that's the thing. For me, the thing is forcing people to sign statements,
• 50:02
  like I should be absolutely anathema to me. And the point has been well made by others that,
• 50:08
  you know, the ability to write an essay about how your, if you're a, you know, a professor who's
• 50:14
  applying for a job at a university, the ability to write an application essay about how your
• 50:18
  career at that university is going to enhance diversity at the, at the institution is something
• 50:24
  that is going to come naturally to a certain class of well-educated upper middle class one person.
• 50:30
  That's right. And may not come as naturally to a Bangladeshi professor who hasn't been inculcated
• 50:36
  in this, who's coming and trying to get a job. So it may actually not. I'm a scientist.
• 50:40
  Yeah, exactly. That's right. I'm right with particle physics. What do you want from me?
• 50:44
  I don't know. Did you imagine asking Leo Zalard if he's coming to Los Alamos? Like, how do you
• 50:48
  do eighties? Like, I don't know. We're all European Jews, right? I kicked out. Yeah.
• 50:52
  We're going to sound like bombs. So could you please fuck off?
• 50:54
  Imagine Slavo Gisek trying to explain to somebody how he's going to incorporate, you know,
• 50:59
  diversity, diversity, diversity. So for me, you know, expecting people to talk a certain
• 51:05
  talk, a certain kind of elitist university educated language and then requiring them to sign on,
• 51:12
  they're signed their field to a set of ideological positions is completely absurd. And I would
• 51:16
  definitely get rid of that through whatever means necessary. But at heart, I'm an incrementalist.
• 51:20
  So if you could do that by reforming the department rather than passing laws that abolish it.
• 51:25
  I mean, there's a certain amount of this that, you know, sort of democracy, freedom,
• 51:30
  the West will use its own tools to destroy itself. I mean, that's kind of the thing is, you know,
• 51:35
  the Lennon quote is that, you know, the capitalist will sell you the rope that you hang them with.
• 51:40
  And it's essentially a amount of that here. And this is the thing with the Rufo types.
• 51:45
  And I think they're on very dangerous ground here that, okay, they want to destroy the
• 51:49
  institution. So we have to use these kind of extrajudicial ways of saving the institutions.
• 51:55
  I don't think is necessary. But that said, I don't, I think that the DEI stuff is so, we were talking
• 52:01
  about an acronym and people having conversations on cable news about this acronym. Tell me what
• 52:07
  University of Florida, what this department is requiring of people. And I think that once you
• 52:12
  kind of enumerate those things, people are like, oh, yeah, that's fucking insane. That's
• 52:16
  great. A university is telling people what they have to say and they have to express
• 52:20
  fealty to this idea or this person and diversity because whatever it is, if it's diversity,
• 52:27
  like that word is so wonderfully chosen because who could be a post, who a post is diverse.
• 52:34
  And then people say, well, let's talk, like you don't mean diverse viewpoints.
• 52:37
  Not just talking in your life. Diversity is an amazing thing. So therefore, you have to,
• 52:42
  how are you going to enhance this? You should be able to have a job as a physicist, as a professor
• 52:48
  of even literature. If you say, I will do absolutely nothing to further diversity. I will teach
• 52:55
  people about literature and I will do it from maybe different, but I was hired to do American literature.
• 53:01
  They're black people in American literature. They're Native Americans in American literature.
• 53:04
  I just do good literature. You know, I mean, those Saul Bello show me the proofs of the
• 53:09
  papalans and I'll read them. I don't care. I just care about the literature. But what they're
• 53:14
  demanding is that that there's a there's a layer above that of whether you care about good literature.
• 53:18
  It's like, well, what about the idea of literature, the ideology of the whole thing? It doesn't
• 53:24
  have an ideology. It shouldn't have an ideology. You should read up in Sinclair, despite the fact
• 53:29
  that he politically, he was a complete fucking dingbat on every possible issue. And you should read,
• 53:35
  I don't know, Evelyn Wah, who was one of the few writers in writers take sides in 1936 that said,
• 53:41
  I support Franco. Great. Who fucking cares? Because, you know, every one of his books is fantastic.
• 53:49
  I don't give a shit what he thinks. But all these things make sure that you don't have that.
• 53:52
  I too support James Franco. Yeah. I prefer Dave.
• 53:57
  Actually, James Franco is a non entity in Hollywood now. That's true.
• 54:02
  On the diversity issue, just lastly, I was having I was catching up with Coleman Hughes.
• 54:06
  And by the way, people should see this. It's not on YouTube yet. But if you're listening to my
• 54:10
  podcast, I will also now have a YouTube page. So you should go and subscribe because I have
• 54:14
  like an embarrassingly small number of subscribers on YouTube because we just launched it. So everyone
• 54:18
  go and subscribe. Just I think if you search for uncomfortable conversations on YouTube,
• 54:21
  you get something called uncomfortable conversations with a black man.
• 54:27
  You don't know about this guy? No. Wait, it's uncomfortable conversations and you saying
• 54:32
  with a black man. That's the name of it. That's the name of it.
• 54:36
  That's the name of it. That's the name of it. I'm really excited about that.
• 54:41
  There's another suspicious trillion right now to my name.
• 54:45
  You're on.
• 54:49
  So you have to search for just search zeps YouTube as the
• 54:54
  anyways. So Coleman Hughes and Jesse Single and I went up to Columbia the other day with the
• 54:59
  old one. This is a joke.
• 55:02
  Drew comes with black guy in an Aussie. What can a Columbia University
• 55:07
  and I also caught up with Thomas Chatterton Williams who was fabulous and had grants
• 55:12
  tomb of all places that we shot a conversation there. But Coleman was talking about diversity.
• 55:17
  You wouldn't believe this. Coleman talking about diversity. I don't buy it.
• 55:21
  And one of the points that came up was I have literally worked in workplaces where if you're
• 55:25
  putting together people on a media panel then or even just having inviting guests on a television
• 55:31
  show or a radio show, the producer is obliged to fill out a diversity spreadsheet so that the
• 55:37
  organization can track its diversity targets, metrics, which means that they write the race,
• 55:43
  they write the sex, they write the sexuality, guessing, I guess, intrusive. I mean, they're not asking.
• 55:51
  How many beers they hold?
• 55:55
  And what's the most important thing in the green room?
• 56:00
  If I'm with you, if I'm with animals and they're hooking up, does that mean I'm gay?
• 56:08
  Camille is going to run the experiment.
• 56:10
  I'm just trying to find that out for the past year.
• 56:13
  Thomas Chatterton is one of them in the go. Ladies and gentlemen,
• 56:17
  say, shall we and Marco?
• 56:20
  It's like the old Harris-Turnt show.
• 56:22
  But my point is there is no column on that spreadsheet for ideology.
• 56:26
  There is no column on that spreadsheet for political outlook.
• 56:30
  There is no column on that spreadsheet for economic background or class.
• 56:34
  So you're selecting for a very limited sort of metrics.
• 56:37
  My former employer used to release every year a vast amount of statistics about how many people
• 56:46
  of different backgrounds were doing X, Y, and C in the company. It was the meticulous detail.
• 56:52
  And it was very scary. It reminded me of the detail kept by authoritarian regimes on,
• 56:58
  you know, dissidents and people of the wrong ethnic background. But it was insane to see the
• 57:02
  deal. And it released this publicly. It wasn't something.
• 57:04
  And what you can end up with is you might have a television panel where there is a seek woman,
• 57:10
  an indigenous woman, a transgender woman, and like an African woman. And they're all saying the
• 57:16
  same fucking thing. Exactly. All the green violent. Yes.
• 57:19
  Yeah. One thing that's that I think is underrated in the conversations about this is that
• 57:24
  we're about ready, I think, over the next five years to basically make illegal most forms of
• 57:30
  state-mandated affirmative action in the United States. The Supreme Court is listing in that
• 57:34
  direction. There's been a lot of work for that affirmative action. It's just never been popular,
• 57:38
  which is something that almost never gets discussed, including among the people who are supposed
• 57:44
  to intend to help. So that's going away. And so we've already seen in the places where that has
• 57:50
  been applied, like public schools, for example, like a university in California, really imaginative
• 57:57
  workarounds to it. And what's interesting is the Harvard one, the Asian personality test?
• 58:02
  Yeah. The personality test. It produces itself deeply racist, right?
• 58:06
  Super duper racist. One of the workarounds that they use, for instance, in K through 12,
• 58:13
  including the New York City system, is that they use economic class, basically as a stand-in,
• 58:20
  as a as a predictor, that if you are below the poverty line or below some multiple,
• 58:26
  above the poverty line, that you're probably black or brown as the idea in New York. It differs
• 58:31
  in different places. It's fascinating because I think a lot of the efforts to kind of push up DEI
• 58:40
  and push up those kind of structures come from the managerial and largely white progressive class,
• 58:47
  who find a way in all of this because they can speak the language of it to your point earlier.
• 58:52
  They're going to be grandfathered in, like even if they have to like self denunciation, whatever.
• 58:58
  They never lose your own job. You never lose your own job. You can sort of like figure it out.
• 59:02
  You've created a new rule. You have to kind of like go through this minefield, this great
• 59:06
  Luciana from fire has pointed out in the past. But if they really do replace these things with
• 59:11
  a class analysis and enforce that rigorously, it's going to look way, way, way different.
• 59:18
  Way different than that. I mean, there's, it's funny because to your point, I was looking at
• 59:24
  one of these DEI reports from Vice and it was like new hires. It was like 60, a 50 odd,
• 59:31
  60% of people of color, which by the way is, you know, that's I guess overrepresentation.
• 59:37
  And the executives when you went to the bottom was still like 90% what? And they're the ones who
• 59:41
  are creating this entire thing. But the funny thing about this is I don't know if you saw this video
• 59:45
  and I'd be hard to find. I don't know how to search it. But it was about a week ago that I saw it
• 59:49
  on Twitter and it was some woman for I think UVA. So maybe it wouldn't be that hard to find.
• 59:55
  Talking to a graduate student or something and it was just like a Zoom video and she was
• 1:00:01
  introducing this woman about her, you know, this woman who's really understood. I mean, it was like,
• 1:00:06
  it was like a reeducation video and it's like, you know, it's understood her privilege and she's
• 1:00:10
  been great and speaking about about her whiteness and in the evil of whiteness and it comes back
• 1:00:15
  to this woman, which I don't even think the people posted this were posting it for this reason.
• 1:00:19
  But her first response was so unbelievable. She was like, yes, this is all true. And you know,
• 1:00:25
  it's not something I understood growing up in Appalachia. No job. I'm sorry. What?
• 1:00:30
  The entire thing was about privilege and about whiteness and she was like, you know, growing up
• 1:00:34
  in Appalachia, I didn't, you know, I had friends that were, I didn't understand any of this though.
• 1:00:37
  I mean, I guess someone has to only call mining. Yeah, I know. Yeah.
• 1:00:41
  It's the guy who talked about cocaine, but anyway, crazy.
• 1:00:45
  Camille should be, should be look at this video of this clips.
• 1:00:48
  And particularly the, we don't have all day with the, with the, yeah, I was, I was just,
• 1:00:51
  I was just trying to see if I could find the clip that you were, it's amazing. I'll see if I can
• 1:00:56
  speak of West Virginia. That's right. Actually, is she from West Virginia? No, but the clip.
• 1:01:00
  Oh, yeah, this is incredible. Talk about class politics. This is a great version of it.
• 1:01:05
  This is from last night. We're transitioning to, to, yeah, super Tuesday results were coming
• 1:01:11
  in an MSNBC panel. And it was a profoundly diverse.
• 1:01:19
  They're increasingly from the tea party on. They're voting on race. They're voting on this idea
• 1:01:24
  of an invasion of brown people over the border. The idea that they can't get whatever job they want,
• 1:01:29
  a black person got it. Therefore, drive all the blacks out of the colleges, get rid of DEI.
• 1:01:34
  That is what they're voting on. They're just voting specifically on racial animus at this stage.
• 1:01:39
  It isn't about economic. No, which is why Trump killed the immigration bill. Correct.
• 1:01:44
  That's why. And because otherwise, he can't run against the other and brown people and people
• 1:01:50
  who don't look like him, like his supporters, his base of supporters coming across the, the border
• 1:01:57
  and scaring people and killing people or whatever he's threatening out there. I mean,
• 1:02:01
  if you look at some of these exit polls, I mean, I live in Virginia. Immigration was the number one
• 1:02:05
  issue. I mean, again, these could change in Virginia. Virginia does have a border with West Virginia.
• 1:02:12
  There are countries there. I mean, when I was in New Hampshire, people were talking about the
• 1:02:18
  Northern border as a threat because Trump has indoctrinated people with this fear of people who do not
• 1:02:24
  look like them. Being a threat to them. But as, you know, every election cycle, when there's
• 1:02:31
  particularly when there's a Democratic incumbent, we get reminded about the borders and the borders
• 1:02:35
  become a thing again. And then if there's a Republican in office, we don't forget about them anymore.
• 1:02:39
  It's the deficit and the border. Like, you make these things an issue. You make them into
• 1:02:45
  boogie men. You make them into something that grabs you from end of the bed at night as soon as you
• 1:02:48
  wake up. As long as there's a Democratic incumbent to blame on it, you make sure that nothing's ever
• 1:02:53
  done to fix either. And then you hope that people stop talking about them once you've got a
• 1:02:57
  Republican. But the Republican is the same thing. My entire adult life. But the only difference now
• 1:03:03
  is they dropped the every four years part. And now, I mean, all the programming about cities,
• 1:03:08
  the greatest threat of crime and crime in New Delhi on Earth one. The FBI reported violent crime
• 1:03:15
  America is at a 50 year low. And my first one of the thing and my time is not a thing. And you live
• 1:03:22
  on Earth one. Yeah. Wow. Camille, you want to start that? You still have many things to
• 1:03:30
  live in Virginia wrong there. Yeah. As soon as as soon as you shared this clip this morning,
• 1:03:35
  I went to go look at the numbers with respect to like immigration in Virginia, particularly like
• 1:03:41
  the undocumented population and having recently moved out of Arlington, Virginia and spent most
• 1:03:47
  of my life actually living in that part of the world. I can tell you that there is a huge immigrant
• 1:03:52
  population there. And Virginia is apparently like number 14 or 13 in the country with respect to
• 1:03:59
  it's the percentage of its population, the share of its population that happens to be undocumented
• 1:04:04
  Americans. And the percentages are only so different. I think it's maybe like a point away from
• 1:04:10
  Arizona, for example. So why is this an inch in issue of interest to the population of Virginia
• 1:04:16
  because they are living with the realities of it. And the trends have actually increased in
• 1:04:20
  recent years during Virginia has seen some outflow of population. But to the extent it's
• 1:04:26
  seen growth. It's in rural communities. And it's a lot of people who are coming from other parts
• 1:04:32
  of the world. They're literally living with this reality every single day. And Genzo,
• 1:04:37
  Genzochi may live there, but insulated, coistered in her particular community the way that she is
• 1:04:42
  doing her television show on a nightly basis. She is obviously immune from the facts of reality that
• 1:04:49
  are entering into people's lives. Now, whether or not every person who's voting on these issues
• 1:04:53
  is influenced by those practical facts versus like insane political narratives. I can't tell you
• 1:05:01
  just just off the cuff. In fact, I suspect plenty of those people are maniacs on the left
• 1:05:07
  and the right quite frankly. But I can tell you that when I see someone like Rachel Maddow joke
• 1:05:13
  about violent crime and how we're we're at a 50 year low in violent crime. It's like there is
• 1:05:18
  a slight of hand there that is just like so so naked. What's the slide of hand? Is it not true
• 1:05:25
  that it's a 50 year low? It's it's a 50 year low, but that's useful if you want to obscure the
• 1:05:31
  fact that over the course of the last like 10, five years, we've actually seen a meaningful
• 1:05:36
  increase. The kind of meaningful increase that would make lots of people concerned. If I don't
• 1:05:40
  concerned about violent crime in my neighborhood, I'm not I'm not and I've seen it spike by 10 or
• 1:05:46
  15 or 20 or even 50% right over the last two or three years ago. That doesn't make me feel
• 1:05:53
  more comfortable. It is that this is everywhere. It was this guy on substack who's a criminologist
• 1:05:58
  who who came out with these numbers and it was all over MSNBC. There's there's some playing
• 1:06:03
  with some numbers in there. I think there's some accuracy to some of it. There's reporting
• 1:06:07
  issues with people point out all the time and somebody pointed out the other day that a camera
• 1:06:12
  was Austin or something. Oh, this crimes are down here, but mysteriously stolen cars are up by
• 1:06:18
  like 80% or 30% or something huge. And as somebody pointed out, it's like this reporting this stuff
• 1:06:24
  itself reported and a lot of people don't report and cars, you have to report for insurance purposes
• 1:06:30
  if your car gets stolen. So you're going to have a pretty accurate number in that and murderers.
• 1:06:33
  And there's a couple of things about this that drive me crazy. First of all, it's the idea that
• 1:06:39
  even if Virginia was not full of immigrants, illegal, recent migrants who are legal, who are
• 1:06:50
  committing crimes who aren't committing, doesn't make a difference. There are a lot of people
• 1:06:53
  that are like when I very briefly lived in Northern Virginia when I was in DC, everywhere around
• 1:06:57
  me, like every place was like a little Papusa shop because there were tons of like, you know,
• 1:07:01
  Ecuadorian immigrants, Salvadorian immigrants, all over the place. So it's not strange at all. But
• 1:07:06
  that obscure is something. And it's that even if that weren't the case, why can't you care
• 1:07:13
  about the borders of your country and how, you know, demographics are changing, whatever it might be.
• 1:07:19
  I don't know what people's concerned about. I'm just sort of filling this in. But even if you live
• 1:07:23
  in a place where there aren't any immigrants, you can't have that as a concern. I mean, these people
• 1:07:28
  are on the streets talking about Gaza every day. They don't live by Gaza. Nobody make that argument.
• 1:07:34
  You're not going to get blown up by Israel or blown up by a suicide bomber. It's also wrong in
• 1:07:39
  the sense that it's like, when I went and I did a story of this woman in 2016,
• 1:07:47
  January, 2016, I went, Trump was speaking in Marshalltown, Iowa before the Iowa caucuses.
• 1:07:52
  And I went up to this place in the middle of nowhere of this woman who was supporting Trump.
• 1:07:55
  And she was the principal of a school where everybody was the child of a legal immigrant because
• 1:08:02
  of all the hog processing plants only had people from Central America working there. And she was
• 1:08:08
  incredibly generous. She was incredibly sweet. She would pick these kids up at school on her own
• 1:08:13
  because the parents were out working at six in the morning. And she would go pick them up,
• 1:08:16
  bring them to school. And they, you know, buy her lights and she was supporting Trump.
• 1:08:20
  Didn't deserve to be there. Didn't belong there. But she was just got in the middle of Iowa.
• 1:08:24
  These are people on fucking MSNBC who would say, I would Jesus Christ. Like they know, yeah,
• 1:08:29
  every country, every place in this country knows something about immigration, whether it's
• 1:08:34
  New York City or Chicago or Iowa or Virginia. And even if they didn't to have that concern is not
• 1:08:39
  at all crazy. Just a steel man, Rachel Maddow for a month. Sure. It is a phenomenon that is real
• 1:08:46
  that every time the Republicans want to beat this up, they want it to be an issue that they didn't
• 1:08:51
  pass the bill because they want it. That's true. That's true. That's true. That they talk about the
• 1:08:54
  deficit when ever Democrats are in power and they get into power and they spend like drunken
• 1:08:58
  sailors. But they don't talk about the deficit anymore. That's, yeah, she has an updated
• 1:09:01
  approach. That's true. That's true. But I mean, so there is this phenomenon going on where,
• 1:09:06
  yes, you do have to, yeah, you have to acknowledge the politics of it and you have to acknowledge
• 1:09:09
  the media's complicity in some of the, in some of the hysteria. That being said, allow me to
• 1:09:14
  parachute in from a remote island nation and school you guys on immigration policy. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:09:20
  Tell us one thing that really have walls. Exactly. We've got a bloody moat.
• 1:09:26
  One thing that really irritates me about the conversation around immigration in America and always
• 1:09:31
  has and it's even happened. Camille, you just kind of did it and Michael, you just kind of did it,
• 1:09:35
  which is in like the same sentence or two sentences back to back, we'll talk about immigrants
• 1:09:42
  and we'll talk about undocumented or illegal immigrants. Sure. Sure. As if they're the same thing.
• 1:09:47
  Not what I'm saying. No. I know it's not what you're saying. Yeah. But the issue in the states
• 1:09:51
  has become so fucked up and the policy has become so confused that the question of people coming
• 1:09:59
  across, people literally just walking into the country with no right to do so has become conflated
• 1:10:05
  with what is the overarching strategy of this migrant nation going to be? Of course. Yeah.
• 1:10:10
  Now, my country has made a faustian pact where it bribes small South Pacific island nations
• 1:10:16
  to build concentration camps so that if anybody tries to arrive illegally by boat, which they used to
• 1:10:21
  do in significant numbers, there was a policy that they will never set foot in Australia.
• 1:10:25
  Even if they're legitimate refugees, and they don't, and they don't come anymore, right?
• 1:10:29
  I mean, they know, like the people's mugglers know that they don't have a market anymore.
• 1:10:33
  When that policy has been softened in the past, the boats start up again and then the navy intercept
• 1:10:38
  them before they get into Australian waters so that we're technically not in breach of the refugee
• 1:10:42
  convention. They get shipped off to some friendly country that we're bribing. And then if they are
• 1:10:46
  legitimate refugees, then hopefully they get repatriated to another country. But that country will
• 1:10:50
  never be Australia. That's the policy. At the same time, Australia is either number one or two
• 1:10:54
  in the world for refugee resettlement and has one of the highest immigration rates per capita
• 1:11:00
  in the world and has done since the end of the Second World War. And the argument by
• 1:11:05
  Colwell, who was the first ever immigration minister after the Second World War,
• 1:11:09
  was the only way that you're going to be able to convince the Australian people to accept the
• 1:11:15
  levels of immigration that this country needs is by having them feel that they're in complete
• 1:11:21
  control. And that is the trade off. If you don't feel like you're in control, you get Brexit.
• 1:11:27
  If you don't feel like you're in control, you get Trump. There's this, like I believe that America,
• 1:11:33
  like why is it the case that if you can make it to the southern border and cross, that's great.
• 1:11:39
  But if you're in a refugee camp in Bangladesh, that's not so great. Like proximity should not
• 1:11:44
  be the deciding factor here. So I'm always on the side like people think that I'm like an
• 1:11:48
  immigration or something because I'm like, yeah, secure that border and like make sure that that's not
• 1:11:54
  the the the main conversation in immigration. Let's talk about an actual immigration policy.
• 1:11:59
  Yeah. I was a migrant here. I got a green card. I lived in New York for 12 years. It's a pain
• 1:12:03
  in the ass. You have to jump through lots of who closing the door. They're always doing it.
• 1:12:10
  So yeah, figure out who you are. When did your video call them start? Was it this year?
• 1:12:16
  It's probably as run by British people that in the course of America. No, a couple things here.
• 1:12:21
  Well, first I'll start and say that why are these things conflated? They're not really conflated.
• 1:12:26
  But I mentioned both of them for a specific reason. The beginning of that clip is joy read.
• 1:12:32
  Enjoy read makes an argument that a panel of doofuses, no one decides to intercede because
• 1:12:38
  I don't know. That would make good television to have people have different views. But everyone's
• 1:12:42
  to aim and choir there. And what she's saying is that it's not about documented or undocumented.
• 1:12:48
  It's about race to her. She says, oh, they're brown people. They want the brown people gone.
• 1:12:53
  And I don't think that somebody like Joy read has a very narrow view of the world. And it's about
• 1:12:58
  10 blocks from her house in the Upper West side. I imagine. But if you look at anywhere in the world
• 1:13:03
  where you have people that are coming in the anti-immigration, you would always say flooding,
• 1:13:10
  a neighborhood, and they're white. But they're from Georgia in Russia.
• 1:13:16
  Azerbaijan. People just don't like them. It's just never a thing.
• 1:13:20
  It looks like the UK and Polish people. They were actively trying to expel Polish people
• 1:13:28
  because I mean, look right now. Even the hot ones.
• 1:13:31
  Well, no, I'm not making policy. But you know, you see the same thing now of like the polls,
• 1:13:37
  speaking of polls who have been so sympathetic to the Ukrainian struggle are now blocking the border
• 1:13:42
  because they don't want Ukrainian grain coming in. And nobody likes anything outside screwing
• 1:13:47
  up their ecosystem. So that's just like, so I mentioned it for that sense that when people racialize
• 1:13:53
  this because Joy read doesn't know how to think outside of those terms. That that's just not
• 1:14:00
  to say that they're all races became difficult when you have 65 million people voting for Donald
• 1:14:07
  Trump. I mean, I was guilty of this at the beginning too. And then I went and talked to people.
• 1:14:10
  I don't think she's talked to anyone who lives outside of her little area and believes the same
• 1:14:15
  things that she believes. But also the populist thing is interesting when you had your little
• 1:14:20
  Pauline Hansen moment. It's really interesting. International institutions that, well, you know,
• 1:14:30
  it's a violation of ex-international policy, refugee policy. And look, that's literally how you get
• 1:14:36
  Viktor Orban. That's how you get people. And you said, you said Brexit, it's like these international
• 1:14:41
  institutions should not be telling me what I can do on my own borders. And that's the kind of
• 1:14:46
  that you see that more and more in places. I didn't know Australia had that record. And it's
• 1:14:51
  really interesting to know that that turning back boats policy was actually successful. That's
• 1:14:58
  something I didn't know. I mean, I also got to say it's a terrible moral stain in a way. Like,
• 1:15:03
  I do think, but I think the moral stain is going to land somewhere along the like at some point
• 1:15:09
  between we live really good rich lives and lots of other people don't. There's going to be
• 1:15:15
  inflection points that are nasty. And I personally think that once you have people in your duty of
• 1:15:20
  care, you have a better duty of care towards them than to let them rot in perpetuity and a
• 1:15:24
  concentration camp on a desert Pacific. I think it's true. But I would probably tolerate a higher
• 1:15:30
  level of boats coming in and I would figure out something with some more humane system. But I'm
• 1:15:35
  just saying there's a trade off somewhere. Yeah. I mean, it's also true in the man and sorry,
• 1:15:39
  sorry, man, it's true. It's true somewhere that, you know, people that they interview in New York
• 1:15:44
  are here because they know that there's literally nothing that anyone can do once they get here.
• 1:15:49
  Yeah. I mean, that's the other thing. You know, there's also money and jobs.
• 1:15:52
  Yeah. And you need to process the people. I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with
• 1:15:55
  people being able to declare asylum at the border, but they then need to swiftly be rebuked if
• 1:16:01
  it's not true. Like there has to be a mechanism for just three years with
• 1:16:07
  a quick point on on the joy read aspect. I watched the last couple of days like more Donald
• 1:16:14
  Trump than I have in the previous year just because he's been talking a lot. He's been doing
• 1:16:18
  victory laps for his I could tell you seemed much happier. Yeah. I watched him because unlike
• 1:16:26
  the other guy who won a bunch of super Tuesday contests, he actually went in front of the camera
• 1:16:31
  after he won and didn't just sit looking at a wall at a weird event and say, I better not
• 1:16:38
  answer questions because I'll get into trouble, which is just a horrifying clip if you haven't
• 1:16:42
  seen it. It's awful. He keeps saying that line too. Yeah. And it's like, he's not smiling.
• 1:16:48
  Yeah, but why do you think people, what are they assessing that you're going to get in trouble
• 1:16:51
  because you're a thousand years old and you're going to say something makes no sense?
• 1:16:55
  Why are you? He wants to, but he's going to get in trouble. But anyways, that Trump was talking
• 1:17:00
  and it's remarkable the contrast between what he was saying and what joy read and others were
• 1:17:07
  describing what he said. In his remarks, taken for what they are, it's Trump and it's going to be
• 1:17:12
  half crazy and stuff. He's saying, you know, basically contrasting how life was in America during
• 1:17:18
  his presidency, maybe up until about February 2020 and life under Biden. And it's like, you
• 1:17:25
  know, it's a beautiful thing. We had, I'm not going to do the accents too early in the morning,
• 1:17:28
  but it's a beautiful thing we had. We had prosperity for everybody, people with college degrees,
• 1:17:34
  people who don't have high school degrees for black people, for Asian people. And it wasn't,
• 1:17:39
  it didn't at all feel like box checking or defensive at all. It felt like he was happy about
• 1:17:46
  this. And it also reflects that as we mentioned time or two. And the New York Times definitely had
• 1:17:52
  in their various polling. He's polling. If really it's about like white people being scared of
• 1:17:58
  brown people, man, the brown people aren't getting the memo. They're getting a different memo.
• 1:18:02
  That's weird. Are you saying that they're voting against their own interests, Rachel Maddo?
• 1:18:06
  It's again, yes. Yeah, of course. The crime thing is interesting too because you both have
• 1:18:12
  the immigration and the crime thing. And you have Jen Psaki saying, oh, I live in Virginia.
• 1:18:17
  And, you know, they use, I don't remember who said this exactly, they use the city as code for
• 1:18:23
  crime and everything's out of control. And Rachel Maddo, you know, who lives in a castle somewhere
• 1:18:28
  and gets $30 million a year to have one show a week says, oh, my God, can you believe these people?
• 1:18:35
  Right as they're saying this, this is something that happened probably an hour before they
• 1:18:39
  talked about this. This is from the city that they, some of them have lived in or some of them
• 1:18:43
  currently live in. And that's DC. The Secure DC Omnibus Amendment Act of 2024
• 1:18:50
  includes more than 100 proposals to help fight crime in our nation's capital. And because 2023,
• 1:18:56
  this is a new story by this not like in Wall Street Journal editorial. 2023 ended with the highest
• 1:19:01
  number of homicides DC has seen in more than 25 years in car jacking's nearly doubled.
• 1:19:08
  So if you want to take a mayor of the years, Moynihan, come on. Well, yeah, you can move those
• 1:19:12
  goalposts. As I always point out, I love it. It's like, we have had the number of terrorists
• 1:19:15
  that we've had since September 12th, 2000. I guess you're starting there. This thing, and this is
• 1:19:22
  not to say that those numbers that they're citing can't be justified or they're wrong. I'm not
• 1:19:28
  an expert in this stuff. But when you talk about Fox News, when you talk about Trump,
• 1:19:33
  and they're the people that are responsible for the fear. And by the way, I did this this morning,
• 1:19:38
  Google and Google News search like crime spike myth is a thousand articles of it. But you know,
• 1:19:45
  it's not a myth is that every time I go into a fucking target, I can't get anything without
• 1:19:50
  getting someone to open one of the cases because everything is now in case that. But did you know,
• 1:19:53
  Michael, that there's less shoplifting today than there was in 1770. Yeah, you know, John Calhoun
• 1:20:01
  opened the first target. And the general slide of hand is comparing their murder right now in
• 1:20:08
  big cities to 2020 and sexy. It's gone down. Yeah, well, exactly. And that was the big
• 1:20:12
  one. It was the biggest spike here. And that's why I don't believe actually. And I need to,
• 1:20:15
  I haven't seen this the first time I heard it that 50 year number because generally speaking
• 1:20:19
  in big cities in the country, spike went up so high in 2020. It hasn't come back down to 2019
• 1:20:26
  levels. That's right. And people live with with that. They'd see a net increase. In by the way,
• 1:20:30
  when I say this and the people who will inevitably send emails about this, when I say,
• 1:20:35
  oh, you know, the targets, whatever, I'm not saying that that means that crime has gone up or
• 1:20:40
  gone down. But I'm just talking about the idea that the perception comes from Donald Trump or
• 1:20:45
  comes from newsmax or these people that surely absolutely puff up the crime stuff and the migrant
• 1:20:51
  crime stuff, which, you know, there's really no evidence for, but it's hard to kind of quantify.
• 1:20:56
  But it's just the general perception of this. What would you like the media to do?
• 1:21:00
  Not report on what's happening in San Francisco. The worst is Oakland. I mean, Oakland is in
• 1:21:04
  complete desk. Why is this a federal thing? Why are we talking about this as a federal election?
• 1:21:09
  I mean, the surely crime is a localized thing. I mean, with the exception of the impact that
• 1:21:15
  collapsing immigration policy has, it strikes me that state police forces and cities are
• 1:21:21
  responsible for law and order. And what's a bit weird in the states, and I was just in California
• 1:21:27
  and in the flaming trash heap that is San Francisco only kidding. It's a lovely city.
• 1:21:32
  It's not flaming. It's just a trash heap. It's a smolering point.
• 1:21:37
  What's a little weird to a foreigner is that like the left in America is so much more left
• 1:21:43
  than the left in the places that the left in America likes.
• 1:21:46
  Sweden. Yeah. I did a semester of university in the Copenhagen and I lived in the UK,
• 1:21:54
  grew up in Australia. These are places where with the possible exception of the UK,
• 1:21:58
  where which are considered to be, which are more progressive than the United States,
• 1:22:02
  there's no way we would tolerate the shit you guys are putting up with. We would crack down,
• 1:22:06
  we wouldn't have tense. The moment there was a tent on a street in Copenhagen or Sydney,
• 1:22:12
  the cops would be like, yeah, no, that's not what you do. You don't do that. There's a you move
• 1:22:16
  along. Thank you. And if shoplifting was coming was was on the rise, then the police would
• 1:22:20
  collapse would cooperate with the big stores to figure out what to do about it. They wouldn't start
• 1:22:25
  locking away the shavers. Yes. A big problem and this is here in the states is your city tries
• 1:22:32
  to pass an ordinance to forbid this company from leaving. That's right. That's right. That's right.
• 1:22:37
  Lock them in and tolerate the shoplifting and various other signs of social decline because
• 1:22:42
  we say so. There, there was a really large mistake made by a lot of progressives and not a small
• 1:22:48
  number of self identified libertarians in the push for pushing a long overdue criminal justice
• 1:22:55
  reforms, particularly bail reform, but also the war on drugs, rolling that back, which I think
• 1:23:00
  the war on drugs, especially has been a great. It's been a boon to roll that back. But in the push
• 1:23:05
  for that measure one 10 in Oregon, which just got modified is part of this. Many, if not most of
• 1:23:12
  those reformists decided to turn a willful blind eye against public disorder. And if you and not
• 1:23:20
  only that, but like saying that those of us who live among public disorder and talking about it
• 1:23:25
  are being reactionary, playing into the right wing and that your your eyes are lying to you
• 1:23:30
  and that if you go against public disorder, you're just trying to give cops reason to do whatever
• 1:23:35
  they want with impunity. So they're telling people that what they're seeing isn't true.
• 1:23:40
  And that public disorder is the inevitable cost of more freedom for everybody else.
• 1:23:47
  And that's going to lose the political argument and the people are not facing that directly and
• 1:23:52
  we should talk about that. People leave the state as they have been doing. I mean, a lot of
• 1:23:56
  Californians have gone to Austin or yesterday because they, you know, they don't believe that it's
• 1:24:00
  a human right to shit in the street. There's a lot of homeless people. Yeah. I don't know
• 1:24:04
  where you were elected. They're progressive, but yeah, they're too. I would say one final thing
• 1:24:08
  that's an inner Josh has to go is that Sweden is a is a good example of this. And I went on a bit of
• 1:24:13
  an intemperate rant. I think maybe in a subscriber episode about immigration and got a lot of pushback,
• 1:24:20
  some of which I think the people who corrected me were probably right about things. And the
• 1:24:24
  letters of blood are, or maybe not all may have blood. Well, it was, he said the
• 1:24:29
  tibre foams with blood. He never said rivers of blood either. In a pile is much more
• 1:24:32
  blind. No, I'm joking. In a pile was in that case. But I said a few things and but someone sent
• 1:24:38
  an email about, you know, every other country does this, you know, will deport someone if they
• 1:24:44
  said, oh, you're not paying attention to Europe. And I said, you know, in my head, I was like,
• 1:24:48
  maybe I'm just assuming that people know this, but that's correct that there are certain places
• 1:24:52
  in Europe that don't do that. And there's a lot of you regulations, etc. The one thing that
• 1:24:56
  changes it in Sweden and Norway and Denmark, they started their immigration pushback with a political,
• 1:25:05
  like there's a political balance to it. When you have a bunch of people from Ecuador or, you know,
• 1:25:10
  people from Nicaragua or Venezuela or Cuba who are escaping sort of communist tyranny,
• 1:25:16
  they're not coming. They're coming here. Some of them are political. Some of them are not. In
• 1:25:19
  Norway, I remember when I first was in Scandinavia, they were, there was a big push to get rid of
• 1:25:24
  Mula Krekar, who was a radical Kurdish, uh, Islamist. And so all of that stuff about immigration was
• 1:25:31
  all about Islamism because then there were attacks and said, oh, you know, they'll only attack people
• 1:25:35
  if they're involved in Iraq. And then that turned out not to be true. There was attacks in Sweden,
• 1:25:39
  etc. So that is where to invent the other thing. And Camille mentioned the,
• 1:25:43
  it mentions this. We have this very similar thing that Camille mentions this. I say yes. And that's
• 1:25:48
  as well. The quote's not entirely right. But it is the Milton Friedman quote about, which is say,
• 1:25:53
  it's like, you know, free immigration, open borders is great until the welfare state plays a role.
• 1:25:59
  And whether or not that's the exact quote doesn't make a difference because in Sweden,
• 1:26:03
  that is actually a serious issue because people right left in center. I've had people that are
• 1:26:08
  quote unquote conservatives arguing strenuously that the state should run the liquor stores.
• 1:26:12
  There's a Swedish mindset. And once it is like, okay, all of the hospitals are now people getting
• 1:26:18
  primary care, um, you know, because they have a cold or something and they're, you know,
• 1:26:24
  not going to a doctor, etc. And it's all migrants, right? That's how I noticed that they
• 1:26:28
  talked about it when I was doing a piece in Austria. All the Austrians when they were talking about
• 1:26:32
  immigration, we're talking about health care. They say, oh, the health care system's overwhelmed.
• 1:26:35
  Like, well, why? Yeah, you know, you know, how it goes. They're like, oh, you're talking about this
• 1:26:40
  right after the big migration wave in 2015. And that is the thing. They worry about the health
• 1:26:47
  of the welfare state. Right, but this is a failure of government. I mean, this happens in Australia as
• 1:26:51
  well, the way that you talk about immigration and the way that critics of immigration talk about it
• 1:26:56
  is not to say that they don't like around people or that unlike migrants. They say, look how clogged
• 1:27:01
  the roads are. Look at the strains on our schools, look at the strains in our hospitals.
• 1:27:06
  And like a case can be made and has been made eloquently by a former premier of New South Wales,
• 1:27:12
  which is like a governor of the most populist state, who was a lefty, but now he says we have to
• 1:27:17
  curb the immigration rate significantly because the reality is that state governments are not going
• 1:27:22
  to invest the amount that they would need to invest in hospitals, schools, parks, roads, public
• 1:27:27
  transportation and other infrastructure to cope with the increase in population. It doesn't matter
• 1:27:31
  who they are or where they're coming from, just the sheer number of people. So for me, okay,
• 1:27:36
  well, then just make sure that you're on the same page. And every time the federal government says,
• 1:27:41
  okay, an extra 100,000 people are coming in, they have to be coordinated with the state government
• 1:27:45
  to say, all right, X number of hospitals and schools are going to be required. Like that's not
• 1:27:49
  rocket science to me. That's just good governance. And the fact that it's not being done is not the
• 1:27:52
  fault of immigration. I think that we should have a debate on this podcast. Very serious about this
• 1:27:58
  too, because when, you know, you have something like joy reads as a race, it's about black people,
• 1:28:02
  brown people, they want to push them across the board. They don't want them in their communities.
• 1:28:06
  There is a version of that that is not, it's not that at all, but it's a version of a slight
• 1:28:11
  version that is worth debating that people don't debate. It doesn't, I don't know,
• 1:28:14
  Douglas Murray talks about this. And I'd love to have people from two sides on this is that
• 1:28:19
  is there a debate to be had? And this is very, very serious debate that's happening now in
• 1:28:24
  Europe, vis-à-vis Gaza, right? That cultural change, massive cultural change is a worthy point
• 1:28:33
  of debate about immigration. That was always considered off limits because it was taken to be racist,
• 1:28:38
  right? You don't want these people that come from the Middle East or Islamophobic, etc.
• 1:28:43
  Is there an actual conversation to be had about this issue that is not racist, that is totally
• 1:28:49
  sensible when you have a Sweden loves being Swedish. And 10%, 11% of the population now is
• 1:28:57
  foreign-born. Now, those are kind of juice numbers because a lot of people are born in Finland,
• 1:29:01
  right? Finland's Fence. But there's still a huge number of people born outside. But in the reason
• 1:29:07
  that the far right party is now the number two party in Sweden, sometimes it even pulls up number
• 1:29:11
  one is because of the idea of Swedishness, but no one will talk about it. And I just wonder if
• 1:29:16
  there is a conversation about that that does not descend to the joy-read level of discourse and
• 1:29:21
  can be had and say, well, I guarantee you, I mean, the Japanese are very obvious about this. I don't
• 1:29:26
  think that, you know, the Syrians would be super happy about this if there was, you know, Christian
• 1:29:31
  culture coming in. Is that positive juice? Nation States are weird, man. Yeah. Well, I'll talk to
• 1:29:36
  Douglas Murray about it on our upcoming live tour of Australia, which you can hear on uncomfortable
• 1:29:41
  conversations. We're all good hot hot hot hot hot hot. Yeah, you do. Okay. How do you, is it like a
• 1:29:46
  fingerprint scan? We just had to get it. Oh, that's how you walk down the street,
• 1:29:52
  keeping spreadsheets money. Oh, no, Nate Silver is gay. Yeah. You did say that earlier.
• 1:29:58
  I didn't say that you said that. No, I said that he's gay. I know that. Yeah, but you know who he is.
• 1:30:04
  Yeah. So your gator was clearly broken. Yeah, you have to meet the person. Really?
• 1:30:10
  Yeah. Get on a plane. Way to throw his ding. Okay. Get out of here. All right. All right.
• 1:30:18
  Thanks, Josh. Thanks, Josh. Thank you, Josh. As always.