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I'm Mike Boris, and this is Straight Talk.
When they write the book about cancel culture,
there will be a page for this moment, which was...
Jean Ships, welcome to Straight Talk.
Everything is messy.
I think the only solution is conversations.
To be on the right side of history at the moment,
you have to adhere to a certain set of social justice dogmas or orthodoxies.
And if you stray from those, you get whacked.
Oh, you're always asking the tricky questions, Mark.
I mean, something's happening to our brains
and the way that they're being hijacked
that is making it increasingly difficult to have contrarian conversations.
Honestly, I think that's the only way we're going to solve the problems
of the 21st century, Mark.
You've been on Joe Rogan's show six or seven times.
I can't remember now.
Don't short something.
What the fuck's going on there?
Jean Ships, welcome to Straight Talk.
Thank you very much.
And it's very nice to meet you.
And actually, it's nice to meet you in person.
But more importantly, I need to tell you that I used to really love listening to you
when you were relieving others in the morning.
Relieving others in the morning?
I didn't mean that.
When I was jerking off other gentlemen in a public toilet.
That didn't go well.
Every morning, 6 a.m., my alarm would go off.
I'd go down to the bar, the local public restrooms,
and relieve a couple of frustrated gentlemen.
Well, why wouldn't we call you?
Alan Jones thanks me.
Well, I mean, I did the breakfast show on ABC Radio Sydney for...
A nice listen to it.
A number of years.
A nice thing myself, the grace and respect of the ABC,
please don't get shitty with me.
This guy's bloody smart.
He's brought a bit of intellect to the show.
In other words, it wasn't like literally what I've talked about,
You actually put a bit of...
It looked like you're putting some research into it.
It looked like you were putting your own research into it to me.
Is that the case?
I mean, I want to do the things that interest me,
and I think that if you're actually interested in something,
then other people will follow you because your intellectual curiosity
will carry them along in its wake.
There's nothing more delightful than turning on something
that you expect to be one thing, and then it's just slightly different
or it's slightly skewing.
I never thought about it that way or I never didn't know about that.
So I've never been the type of person who joins an organisation
or an institution.
I've never been the type of person who joins an institution
in order to just follow rules and do things exactly the way
that I'm told to because I think that's just a bit stale.
Is it boring for you or boring for them?
Is it because it's boring for you?
No, boring for them.
I mean, yes, of course it's boring for me.
So I mean there's some self-interest in pursuing my own interests,
but I think it's boring for the audience.
I think there's...
And I think something that's happening in the media at the moment,
we can get to this, is that a lot of stuff sounds basically the same
with the same kinds of opinions that you know are the correct opinions,
they have about sensitive issues.
So there's a whole suite of topics that if you turn on the ABC
or you turn on Sky News After Dark or Fox News or something like that,
you're pretty confident.
You could jot on the back of a napkin before anyone starts talking
what they're going to sound like when they're talking about climate change
or transgender athletes or, you know, gay pride or Mardi Gras
or women's equality or Black Lives Matter or whatever it might be.
And I'm just more interested.
I'm more interested in following my own curiosity
and trying to figure out what's true and paying no heed to the way
that you're supposed to talk about things.
And that doesn't always mesh perfectly into an institution,
you know, an institutional environment.
It didn't for me.
Well, let's talk about that then since you've gone to that territory.
I listen to the ABC because my mum listened to the ABC
and my mother had the ABC on all day.
And I can go back to the ABC.
What's Adam's name, the mathematician?
And it's sort of to me that the ABC stopped being the ABC
when it sort of ran about when he left to me.
Well, it became more the same issues were being talked about
which were outside the norm.
There were issues that you just mentioned, some general quality, you know,
Palestine, Israel, you know, and taking a position.
They're not in the middle.
They're taking a position.
So one, they're definitely not reporting the news as a news,
as unbiased news.
There's a bias, which is fine.
I mean, there's a bias everywhere,
but they were expressing their bias in the news.
Prior to that, around the Adam Spencer period and way before that,
Down the middle to me.
It was very not conservative base but straightforward news
about what's actually happened without a view, without an opinion.
There was no opinion associated.
It was more about facts.
And I think today, like you just said, I pretty much know what I'm going to get.
Just like when I listen to Sky News at, you know, 9 p.m.,
I know exactly what I'm going to get out of them too.
So much so, Josh, that what I do is I still have the ABC
in the morning and I get my full belly of what would ordinarily be associated
with the left and other groups that sort of fit within the left, greens, et cetera.
I get my full belly of that.
And then in the night, I put on Sky News so I can get my full belly of the right.
And you can go to bed sufficiently outraged at the world.
And then I can...
No, sometimes I am.
But mostly what I...
What I do is I'm balanced.
And I feel as though, well, the news world, I justify one against the other.
They're both sort of so far out on the edge of the spectrum
that there's not that much in the middle anymore.
Because I get that stuff in the middle.
I get that fed to me by Instagram and Facebook, all the other mediums.
I mean, and I know the news before it appears on the mainstream.
I mean, as we all do.
I mean, it's immensely frustrating to me to hear you say that,
that, you know, you know what you're going to get
from both sides and therefore you have to put up with this level
of kind of tacit unconscious bias that's coming from places
that you ought to be able to trust.
Because, I mean, what I'm trying to do on Uncomfortable Conversations
and what I know you do every day is basically wrestle
with big issues in ways that disregard the tripwires
and the landmines and allow myself to...
And the punishment.
And the punishment.
I don't care about the punishment, obviously.
Given that I ended up being sort of, you know,
my radio show ended up falling apart.
I can't stomach the idea that we're going to give away our ability
to have complicated, uncomfortable conversations
about the most important problems that we face in the 21st century
to people who have their thumb on the scale one way or another
and then we're going to individually try to grope our way towards
whatever is true or rational or reasonable on the basis of these two,
sort of, biased interpretations that are coming to us
through their own prisms.
Like, why not just do away with the prisms altogether
and just get straight to the point and talk to each other
like we're grown-ups and say, if I say something that comes
across the wrong way or that offends you, tell me why it's wrong.
Tell me what's wrong about it.
Tell me where I've erred.
Don't play a game of gotcha.
Don't try to get me fired because I said the wrong thing.
There's so much timidity.
There's so much caution.
There's so much risk aversion.
There's so much suspicion in the media at the moment
that I think, like, a lot of the bias is not intentional bias.
It's just coming from the soup that we swim in.
You know, there's not, there's, and part of this is to do
with the welcome reaction to what had previously been
a fairly straight white male profession of journalism, right?
So, you know, over the past 10 or 20 years,
there's been a push for more diversity.
I think that's a great thing.
I think more people of colour and more women should be in newsrooms.
At the same time,
they have to adhere to the original founding principles
of institutional journalism, which is objectivity.
You know, you can't come in saying,
I'm going to tell my own story or, like, as an Arab woman,
I'm going to focus on Gaza in this particular way.
As an Arab woman, you're going to be a bloody journalist
and you're going to do your job as a journalist.
That's what a newsroom is about.
You're not going to come in and, you know, say,
oh, well, you know, you have to see things from my perspective.
No, we're not going for perspectives.
Yes, there'll always be bias.
Yes, we always bring things to the table.
No-one has a position in heaven, standing on the clouds,
looking at everything objectively.
That's impossible.
But you can use that as an aspiration.
You can rely on facts.
You can say, I'm not going to allow my own background to influence this.
And I think there's a fundamental tension
between the desire for objectivity on the one hand
and this newer social justice desire
to tell broader truths with a capital T
that take down the man
and that achieve some social justice, you know, point.
And I think that's what people are smelling at the moment,
that everything seems to be loaded,
at least in the left-wing press,
with a social justice point
instead of just giving people the facts.
And I think we're just going to have to go through an adjustment period
where newsrooms get back to being about the facts.
And then on the content side,
so content is like the fancy broadcasting term
for anything that's not journalism, right?
So, I mean, my show on the ABC was not a newscast.
I mean, my show on the ABC was not a newscast.
It was not a news show.
It was on ABC Radio Sydney.
We'd sometimes talk to chefs about cooking.
We'd sometimes, you know, you talk about everything,
anything and everything.
And in that sphere, I actually think there should be more tolerance of
and respect for different opinions
and having the opinion of the presenter or the host come through.
I don't think I should be required to be as objective
as the person who's delivering the 7pm news
if I'm hosting a three-hour-long daily talkback radio show.
So, I think at the moment, everything's in flux.
People don't know where they stand.
Journalists feel like they're allowed to bring their whole selves to work
and tell their own stories in ways that undermine objectivity.
But commentators at the same time feel impeded
from going out on a limb and talking about things
in a bullshit-free manner because they're afraid
that they're going to trigger a tripwire
and all hell's going to break loose because they said the wrong thing
and they offended the social justice dogmas
that they're supposed to adhere to.
So, but how did that happen?
You may well be closer to being an ABC historian yourself than I am,
but what happened at the ABC, for example,
that created the current outcome?
And I just want to say this as well.
Equally, Sky News at a certain time of night
has felt the need to defend the other side, the other argument,
and they prosecute equally as hard but on the opposite side of the fence.
I mean, Sky News has less fidelity to...
I don't want this to seem like I'm ragging on the ABC
because I actually think that the public broadcaster is in a pickle,
is a national treasure and needs to be sort of protected and defended.
And one of the reasons why it is currently so cowed, I think,
and so fearful and so cautious is because it's under constant attack
from disingenuous conservative politicians and Sky News figures
who are always on about how biased the ABC is, right?
But there has to be...
There has to be some space for the ABC to be able to stand up
and have a backbone and go, no, no, no, like, just quit it.
The ABC still does great investigative journalism.
It still has great journalists who are working there.
I think the how did it get here is really complicated
and has a lot to do with changing viewing patterns,
changing listening patterns, the democratisation of the media,
social media, YouTube.
Like, that stuff has meant that people no longer are tethered
to a public broadcaster.
The way that they might have been even just 10 years ago,
let alone 30 years ago.
And so now that you can get so much of your information
from Joe Rogan or Peter Atiyah or whoever it might be
or Josh Sepps or Mark Burris, there's just more choice.
And so then the ABC goes, well, what is the purpose of the ABC?
And the purpose of the ABC really fundamentally should be
to create a town square in which everybody feels like
they're being given a fair shake, in which everybody feels
like their voice is being heard.
In which the most important issues of the day can be wrestled with
without fear or favour.
But that's going to piss people off by definition
because you're going to have a whole bunch of voices.
If you're actually doing that, then you wouldn't just be
in lockstep with, I don't know, just to pick an example
of one fight that I got into with ABC management
with Mardi Gras, for example.
You know, I was in a position where I'm an openly gay guy,
I'm married to a guy.
I wrote an op-ed for the Sydney Morning Herald during World
Pride, which was a big gay pride event last year during Mardi Gras.
I was just sort of saying, like, will there ever come a point
at which we can turn the volume down instead of turning the volume
up on our identitarian difference?
Like when it's not that important to be gay?
You're sort of saying, bit over it.
Like how much equality will we have to get before we don't have
to, you know, wear arseless chaps and sit astride a giant,
inflatable penis on Oxford Street, you know,
smothered in baby oil with waxed chests?
You know, does there ever come a point at which we're just,
like what I have achieved, I mean, through no thanks to me,
through giving thanks to the early gay rights pioneers,
the gay activists of the Stonewall era, the 60s and 70s,
what I've achieved is everything they dreamed of,
which is I've got a boring life.
It's unremarkable.
You know what I mean?
Like, you know, I tell someone I'm gay and I'm married to a guy
and they're like, okay, whatever.
They don't laugh.
They don't beat me up.
You know, I mean, yes, it's very privileged.
I'm middle class.
I'm white, whatever.
I'm sure it's different if you're growing up in a Muslim Australian
household in the southwest of Sydney.
But for me, we've achieved everything that we wanted to achieve.
So my article was basically just saying, like, you know,
will there ever come a point at which we actually achieve greater
individual flourishing, greater sexual fulfilment by not really
caring about labels and just falling in love with who you fall
in love with, getting your rocks off with whoever you want to get
your rocks off with, and we don't need a parade.
It's not going to improve your sex life, that's for sure.
You know what I mean?
It's not going to improve your sex life.
I mean, I'm just saying, like.
So I tried to publish this thing, and when you're a host,
when you have a contract at any organisation,
any media organisation, you have to get sign-off from management
for any external work to be approved.
Where was it being published?
In the Sydney Morning Herald.
And this was going to be the opinion piece on the weekend of Gay Pride.
So it would have thrown a few.
Sort of like an op-ed.
Yeah, it was an op-ed, yeah.
And, you know, it went all the way up the chain,
and management wouldn't allow it to be published because they said
that hosts can't take positions on controversial cultural issues, right,
which in principle is, I suppose, fair enough.
It's a public broadcaster.
You want me to seem impartial.
You don't want there to be an appearance of bias.
The problem is, at the time, the ABC was the official broadcast partner
of World Pride and of Mardi Gras.
In the lobby, there are gigantic rainbow flags.
Every other presenter, every other host on the station,
all of them not gay, or not to the best of my knowledge,
is singing the praises of how fabulous it is, you know,
join us tonight for our live streaming coverage of the parade,
every second promo is about the parade, is about how fabulous it is.
We've got all these guests of diverse genders and sexualities and whatever.
The one gay host is not allowed to pipe up and go,
do we really need it, right?
So it struck me that it's not that hosts can't have an opinion
about culturally provocative issues.
It's just that it has to be management's position.
You have to fall into line.
You have to be on the right side of history.
Why does Josh keep wanting to, you know, kick a hornet's nest?
Why does he keep wanting to upset the apple cart?
Well, I don't know, because I'm interested in ideas.
I'm interested in thinking things through.
I'm interested in not being a conformist.
I'm interested in going, well, okay, why was Mardi Gras so crucial?
Will it ever not be crucial?
At what point does that happen?
Like, let's just talk about it.
Let's just talk about it.
But you can't talk about it because that,
that transgresses an unspoken boundary,
which is that to be on the right side of history at the moment,
you have to adhere to a certain set of social justice dogmas or orthodoxies.
And if you stray from those, you get whacked.
So who could, but who, I mean, I've always been curious about this,
but who creates these social justice dogmas?
Like, I mean, I often wonder to myself,
is there a group of people somewhere who are silent
and we don't get to see them,
who actually are out there manipulating all these social justice dogmas?
Like BLM, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, I think it's a largely white, largely middle-class,
university-educated elite of people who talk to each other in certain ways and.
Who probably don't fit into any of the categories.
No, often they don't.
Often they don't.
You see this a lot in like the transgender wars,
which is probably the most toxic or sensitive issue at the moment.
Or even the Gaza thing at the moment.
Or Gaza, right now.
So, but, but so, and what, I mean, I'm,
I'm curious as to your opinion on these things,
because I have no doubt you've thought about it.
Is it guilt-based?
Are they feeling guilty?
And is this some way of them washing their guilt?
And, but therefore it's dangerous?
Well, it may not be dangerous.
It may just be dull and it may be conformist and it may be.
It's dull to you, dangerous to somebody who would be influenced by it, potentially.
Oh, you mean they think that it's dangerous to step outside?
Outside the bounds, or you think it's?
No, I think it's dangerous to people who,
people who might be watching and following and being influenced by it.
Unnecessarily influenced.
Without people being able to make up their own opinions.
Some people can't make, draw their own opinions.
They're heavily influenced by what other people say,
what institutions say, what individuals say.
But maybe that's just a, maybe that's just how the world is today, by the way.
We might not be able to change it.
But I think it's dangerous to people who are influenced by it.
And I worry about that.
What's an example?
Palestine, the university.
So I was listening to, admittedly it was 2GB,
but I was listening to 2GB this morning and, you know,
my old mate Ben's on there.
He's not always young.
And he was talking to some correspondent they have in the US
and the US was talking about the university protest,
let's call them protest,
actually riots are going on some of the universities,
particularly in Ohio.
And he made the comment that,
isn't it funny that all the students from New York,
and UCLA had exactly the same tents.
They had somehow managed to garner, you know,
hundreds of tents made by exactly the same company,
looking exactly the same.
And these tents were all pitched on the lawns and it was all coordinated.
And, and the question then becomes,
well, do those, how many of those people are actually students at the university?
And it seems as though not a lot of them were not students,
actual students of the university and they're occupying,
you know, territories, parts of the, parts of the campuses.
And they were protesting in, against Israel and in favor of Palestine,
which is fair enough.
That's an opinion.
But it looked like to me, it was extraordinarily well organized and the media,
the way the media cover it as is as if it's a truth.
Or a spontaneously erupting.
And I don't know what happened in Sydney University this week,
but maybe it was the same thing.
this is organized disruption to create a problem that looks as though it's students
free thinking like student campuses used to be free thinking.
Like you were saying, let's have a discussion about it.
But students have all got together.
They've actually got a view when actual fact, that's not the case.
It's well organized by others outside of the university.
And then the media has gone and reported it as, as, as it being the truth.
And that kills me.
And then, well, and that's right.
that's the sort of double standard as well, which is similar to the,
to the Mardi Gras gay rights thing in the sense that I just,
I actually just finished doing my first live video talkback episode of
Uncomfortable Conversations where the audience can actually join in.
And one of the questions was about this was,
was about the Columbia protest, Columbia University protests.
And I made the point that if you had a group of people, so now, you know,
some of these institutions over there,
Jewish academics and Jewish students have been told by the police,
not to come to class because they're worried that they can't control the violence.
You've got slogans, which verge on being anti-Semitic.
If not, they're openly anti-Semitic.
I would say they are.
And if any other group was conducting protests like this against a minority,
just imagine that it's make America great again, you know,
white dudes wearing red trucker hats and they're going off about how,
and they're going,
they're going off against Black Lives Matter, for example,
and intimidating black students.
How much would the conversation be what it currently is,
which is university academics very earnestly stroking their chins and going,
well, free speech is important on campus.
And there's a great and venerable tradition of protest on campus.
There would be none of that.
They would have been out of there on the first day.
There would be no conversation about the free speech rights of white people
to harass and intimidate and question the existence of black Americans.
Now, if that's the policy, then what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
And those people should have been out of there as soon as they started protesting.
So why were they delayed?
Why did the mayor not call the police in and or why did the vice chair?
I'm not saying they should.
You could also take a free speech position and say that this is legitimate
and it would also be legitimate if you had right-wingers, you know,
banging on about, I don't know, transgender students or whatever it might be.
But be consistent.
So why is there an inconsistency?
It comes back to that set of social justice,
dogmas and orthodoxies that have become insinuated into society and culture.
And as you pointed out, I don't think it's mostly Palestinians
who are doing this on the Palestine issue
and I don't think it's mostly transgender people who are doing it on the trans issue
and I don't think it's, you know, mostly actually people of colour
who are doing it on the Black Lives Matter issue.
I think it is a class of self-congratulatory people
and I think guilt is an interesting thing for you to flag there
because it's something we don't talk about enough.
But I think that...
I think that we have evolved into this sort of post-colonial anti-racist mindset
where, and it's a laudable instinct,
it's a laudable instinct to try to catch ourselves and go,
well, all right, let's recognise our white privilege,
let's recognise the evils of colonialism.
But as a result, we're seeing the world through a frame
where if you're poor and brown-skinned, you're the good guy
and if you're standing up in a...
in a suit and you look like a white, straight male,
you're by definition the bad guy.
So complicated issues like Israel and Palestine
get reduced into this very overly simplistic oppressor
versus oppressed, coloniser versus colonised sort of binary
and living inside that trap, there's sort of no...
there's no way out.
It's got its own weird internal logic.
Even if it's orchestrated, like as you say with the tents and so on,
it's orchestrated or not orchestrated just because it's a way
of people making sense of the world.
I mean, I think a lot of it is just...
a lot of the groupthink is just a combination of people trying
to make sense of a complicated world being handed an easy interpretation
of the world, which is that white men, white, straight men
have been pissing all over everybody for thousands of years
and now it's time for their comeuppance and so we need
to give more diverse voices, allow more diverse voices to be heard.
And the other component of it is the backlash and the threat
that you get from, you know, what we might call cancel culture
where if you step out of line, people don't come back
to try to articulate why they think you're wrong.
They go straight for the jugular and they try to destroy your life,
whether that's on social media or by getting you fired
or by severing your relationships with your publisher or whatever
or your podcast network or whatever it might be.
So there's a kind of hysteria, a censoriousness,
an oversimplification and all I'm trying to do is have
conversations that pay no heed to any of that and that make sense,
that like both sides could listen to and you might agree with me
or disagree with me, but at least I'll be articulating your worldview
in a way that is generous to you and that makes sense to you.
I mean, I think this is such a problem now, Mark,
that we're demonising the other side and caricaturing the other side.
So you ask one of those protesters to articulate what the Zionist position is.
They can't do it.
And you ask a hardcore Zionist to articulate the Palestinian position,
and they probably can't do it.
And you can go through any number of different things.
The left has become extremely sanctimonious on this stuff,
so much so that it can't even see its own blind spots.
It can't even see its own biases.
Why wouldn't you just want to be nice to gay people?
Why would you want to raise questions about Mardi Gras?
You know, what are you trying to do here?
It's like the old parable about the two fish swimming along in the water
and the young fish and the big fish swims past them and goes,
how's the water today, guys?
And after that...
After the big fish swims away, one of the little fish turns to the other one
and goes, what's water?
You know, you don't know water when you're in it.
You don't know the norms that you've inherited
that are just part of the air that you breathe.
There's a certain way of talking about this.
There's a certain way of talking about that.
You know, stop making trouble, I think,
is the overarching sentiment of that kind of social justice,
like elite clique.
Can I ask you then, just on the topic of freedom of speech, for example,
I mean, it's a broad topic, I know, and it's got lots of constraints,
but just on this blue that's sort of bubbling around
between Albanese pitching up and sort of saying
that he's going to take musk on, in relation to...
I think it relates to the more recent stabbing of the priest,
the Orthodox priest out in the west suburb of Sydney
and whether or not...
largely where the kids should be allowed to see,
but really, you know,
whether anyone should be allowed to see it.
And musk's position, of course, as I understand it,
musk's position is that, no, we should be allowed to see anything
and we shouldn't be censoring anything.
This is just a medium and people can put up whatever they want
to have a look at.
What do you think about the government's...
What do you think about governments taking a stand
on something like that against...
Forget about musk's position,
but what do you think about governments taking a stand on that
in terms of representing us, the voters?
It's complicated.
I am a big free...
Isn't it just simple?
Well, what's the simple answer?
Then it's freedom of speech.
Not even freedom of speech.
It's not freedom of speech.
This is a platform.
If you don't want to look at it, don't open it up.
And you're a parent and if you're worried about your kids,
don't let them look at it.
To some extent, yes,
but I think where we get confused on social media,
and I'm a big free speech advocate.
I've spent most of my adult life in the United States
and I've sort of inherited their attitude
towards a maximal amount of free speech.
I don't really believe in, you know,
hate speech laws or coming after people and fining them
because they said the wrong thing about, you know,
they accidentally used the wrong transgender pronoun
or they, you know,
they spread vaccine misinformation
when all they were trying to do was wrestle with what's true
and what's not true in the middle of a public health emergency
The thing about social media is the Elon Musk's
and the Mark Zuckerberg's of the world will fall back...
Look, we're not publishers.
We don't publish anything.
You can't be held to account for any of the stuff
that's on our platform.
It's just a platform.
People just use it.
Unfortunately, that's nonsense.
It's a cute argument.
It's a cute argument.
I mean, and it's nonsense
because you've got the algorithm behind it.
Like if Facebook were what Facebook was
when Facebook was created,
they'd have a point,
which was it used to be a reverse chronological feed
of all of the things that the people you follow had put up.
There was no like button.
There was no infinite scroll.
There was no algorithmically delivered content
that is tailor-made to your attention,
to grab your attention.
They weren't favoring your favorites.
Now they've got, you know, everything is about engagement.
Everything is about trying to get something
that is going to have you hover over that video
for as long as possible and or share it
and or comment on it and or like it.
Based on what they know you like.
So there's this idea that they're not publishing
is, as you say, cute.
I mean, you are publishing
because everything that's coming into this firehose
of a system that you've got
is being cranked out by Silicon Valley engineers,
many of whom are 22-year-olds
riding skateboards in Menlo Park,
who are brilliant at finding a way to-
At the peer stream mass in engineering.
To entice your neurological system to respond as,
you know, with as much reptilian angst
and kind of addiction as it possibly can
to whatever it is that they're showing you.
So I don't think it's actually,
a free speech versus anti-free speech thing.
I think it's about managing information flows
and the idea that we as a people
just have to be held hostage
to whatever ingenious junk food
Zuckerberg and Musk can throw at us
with no mechanism to push back
other than to tell our children
not to go on those websites,
I think is a bit rich.
Like I'm extremely leery
of government control.
Over what can and can't be said.
But I think that in 50 years time,
we'll look back on this period and go,
that was a crazy wild west.
And we had no idea.
We'd just given everyone a machine gun
and we didn't know how to regulate it
or how to figure it out.
And I think there'll be a more nuanced collaboration,
between the people through their governments,
democratically elected,
and social media companies,
to manage that flow of information.
Because just like those tents
came up miraculously
on the lawns of all of those American universities,
so too do the videos of gars and babies
with their limbs blown off
in a way that is suspiciously well curated.
I don't know what the Chinese Communist Party,
how they manage the TikTok algorithms.
I don't know what role,
the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has
in coaching the quote-unquote journalists,
the citizen journalists who are in Gaza
about how to tailor social media information
so that it'll go well on Instagram.
But these are not dummies.
We saw ISIS in its first incarnation
get quite good at social media.
I mean, remember the US airmen in orange jumpsuits
trapped in a cage in the desert
being set on fire and stuff,
like these huge spectacles,
these big displays,
they've gotten pretty good at it.
they know what they're doing.
So you open that app
and it's like you've got the,
whatever company is supplying those tents
is also supplying your information
So the idea that,
you know, the Australian government
shouldn't play a role in softening that,
understanding that, mitigating that,
I think is crazy.
We've got to get our arms around it somehow.
And who appoints the cabal of people
who actually make the decisions?
In the government.
In the government.
You're always asking the tricky questions, Mark.
Well, they'll appoint themselves.
They'll appoint themselves, won't they?
And then we're going to get fed
exactly what they want us to see and not see.
I mean, part of the promise of public broadcasting,
just to get a bit wonky for a second
and a bit philosophical
since you've been going on about poetry
earlier on in the show.
Habermas, Jürgen Habermas,
the philosopher who came up with the idea,
the idea of public broadcasting
was basically saying
the only way that you're going to get
true impartial information
is by freeing it from the two core biases
that can derange the information product.
One is capitalism,
where you don't want corporations
and powerful people who have all the money
to be influencing what stories get told.
And the other is governments.
You don't want people with all the guns,
to be deciding what gets told.
The idea of the public sphere
was that the government would fund it,
but would have no control over it politically.
And we've got pretty good at that.
I mean, the ABC and the BBC are pretty good
at having carved out a sphere of conversation
that is independent of whatever party happens to be in power.
And so maybe that's a model for regulating this stuff.
You certainly don't want government partisans
from the political party that happens to be in power
telling us what we can and can't say on social media.
But can you create a regulatory framework
about what algorithms can and can't do
that is overseen by people who are as impartial
as our public health bureaucrats you'd want them to be
or the chairman of the ABC you'd want them to be?
Maybe, it's early days.
I'm going to be fascinated.
For me, this whole program is fast,
not what you and I are talking about,
but the whole program of how it's going to roll out
is quite fascinating.
What you and I are talking about is even more fascinating, Mark.
Don't say you're sorry.
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I'm going to change the take for a second.
My producer told me you have been on Joe Rogan's show
six or seven times.
I can't remember now.
Don't short something.
What the fuck's going on there?
Tell me, how do you know Joe?
Of course, you're both comedians.
I never got to anything like his level
I mean, I did a bit of stand-up when I first got to New York
just to sharpen my chops and get a feel for a live audience.
Pretty scary, though.
Yeah, pretty scary.
Yeah, especially in a town like New York,
where audiences can be brutal.
But it's good training.
I mean, once you get into a television studio,
then having had the experience of-
Shitting your pants, standing in front of people.
Because no one's going to fucking laugh at what you said.
You can put it that way if you want.
Yeah, it certainly gives you a keener sense of what works
and what doesn't work.
Before we move on, what was your shtick in terms of your comedy act?
Oh, it was mostly, I mean, it was pretty intellectual, I think.
I mean, it was observations.
I mean, at the time, I'm pretty good at impressions.
When I moved over there, George W. Bush was still president.
So I do quite a lot of Bush stuff.
Did you learn how to duck from a shoe being thrown at you?
While I was just standing up there delivering a comment?
I mean, and so, yeah, and a fair bit about like Cheney and the Iraq war
and the religious right and just poking holes in things.
It was well received.
And I think Americans kind of like having a foreigner cheekily take the piss out of them,
especially in Aussie.
You're non-threatening.
You're coming with goodwill, but you're also willing to highlight, you know, what's good
You're willing to highlight to them the ways that they know they're ridiculous.
And so it was actually, I was, my first big job was the Huffington Post was at the time
the most read online only news website in the world.
I remember that period.
And yeah, there was a lot of buzz behind it and they basically decided that they wanted
to do to television what they'd done to newspapers and destroy them completely and find a new
way of having conversations.
And so they launched HuffPost Live, which was a 12 hour a day streaming television network
And I was one of the founding hosts and producers of that.
So I would host, you know, four to six half hour shows every single day with-
Newslet, newsmakers and with, you know, Thomas Friedman and Michael Moore and Robert F. Kennedy
Jr. or whoever it might be.
And there was one moment that just-
That Joe saw go viral.
It was one of the first, I think if, when they write the book about cancel culture,
there will be a page for this moment, which was Stephen Colbert was doing his satirical
This was before Letterman retired.
So you remember he was doing the Colbert Rapport.
And he did a joke that an Asian American activist felt was racist against Asians, but it was
And she was lined up, this activist that is, as a guest on my show the following day
in a kind of wrap of the news and everything that's going on.
And we started talking and she started interrupting me and saying like, well, I would certainly
expect that a white man, you know, would enjoy talking down to me.
And I was like, well, hang on a second.
We're just having a conversation.
Like, I'm just trying to understand what your attitude towards-
This is live on air.
It's a challenge.
It's a challenge.
I mean, there's no mistakes or when there are mistakes, that's just part of, you know,
I said, hang on, we're just having a conversation like, and she said, well, yeah, you know,
as a white man, you probably feel like it's your, like it's your right to talk down to
I was like, what are you talking about?
Like when I was being born with balls, doesn't mean that I don't have the right to have an
opinion about satire.
Like, you know, she goes on like this and like, it basically just ended in a, you know,
a flame, a flaming heap.
And I was, I was just like, well, okay.
I mean, all right.
If you don't want to talk to me and we don't have much to talk about.
It was this weird experience, Mark, that I've had many times since, but I'd never had it
And that was probably 2014.
So this was just as like the kind of social justice reckoning was about to happen, right?
Where you're talking to someone and you realize they're not actually talking back to me as
They're talking to me.
They're talking to me as a cardboard cutout avatar of white maleness.
And they're expecting me to talk to them as a representative of some abstraction, some
identity group, some oppressed minority.
Like we're supposed to be talking about comedy, satire, offense, cancellation, because she
wanted to get Colbert canceled.
That was, it was a whole petition about it.
And instead of having a conversation where we.
Treat each other as equals, we're having a conversation where two cardboard cutouts
of different identity groups are sparring.
And that went momentarily viral.
Someone texted me that he'd played it on his show.
And so I think I just DMed him on Twitter or he hit me up and somehow said, next time
you're in LA, why don't you come on the show?
So I said, oh, I just happened to be in LA in a few weeks, quickly booked my ticket to
Just so I could have that experience.
And he and I hit it off.
And then I sort of had a standing invitation whenever I was in town to come on his show.
So what was the conversation about the show with Joe?
Well, I mean, everything.
You know what his shows are like.
You sit down for three hours and you talk about anything and everything.
You just go wherever.
So cancel culture.
Oh, he was great.
I mean, I love Joe.
And he was the reason I have a podcast.
He's been, you know, he really is the pod father.
He has been really caring and generous and supportive.
You know, he just pulled me aside after one of the shows.
I don't remember where it was, the first or second or third.
And he was like, what are you doing with these dummies getting paid a paycheck?
Go and do your own thing.
And I was like, yeah, okay.
And I started the precursor to Uncomfortable Conversations.
So tell me about Uncomfortable Conversations.
So what's the format?
Go through the format now.
The format started as a one-on-one interview with a guest about some issue that we find
difficult to talk about in a fair dinkum way.
With the guest or-
What I mean by this, the guest finds it difficult to talk about?
No, the guest doesn't have to.
So sometimes people will listen to Uncomfortable Conversations and they'll go, oh, that wasn't
actually an uncomfortable conversation at all, which is fine.
The point is not to make the guest uncomfortable or to confect, you know, intentionally uncomfortable
scenarios or anything.
Sometimes that'll arise because I disagree with the guest on something.
But the point is to have conversations about topics that if someone were to raise it at
the pub or at a barbie.
Or at work, everyone would just pucker up their bums a little bit and feel a little,
you know, oh, are we going here?
You know, there'd be, it'd be, you'd create an uncomfortable situation.
I want to create a safe space for dangerous ideas, a safe space for people to air those
kinds of conversations.
So that's the main thing.
My first episode was with Stan Grant a couple of years ago now.
This is when Stan had the drama?
No, this is before that.
No, he only exited last year.
Yeah, it was pretty recent.
And Stan and I are still mates.
And he has been a great supporter of mine as well because, you know, we were actually
getting real about race, not just talking, not just mouthing the usual talking points
about white guilt, you know, but recognizing that there are difficult identity questions
here and, you know, asking, it's like I will be accused of being, you know, some white
fascist if I raise a question about whether or not it's really.
It's really necessary for four white middle-aged women who are on a Zoom call about HR to be
doing acknowledgments of country before they start talking about the human resources issue.
What did he say about that?
I'd love to know because-
He's on the same page.
It sort of kills me a bit.
Like, you know, I arrive on an airplane and land and I go from Sydney to Brisbane and-
I'm getting asked to thank the, you know, like-
Yeah, the locals.
Like, I mean, that's cool but like I already- and then I go to my meeting and that's how
One of my staff will start the meeting off.
And I'm like, hang on, like, what does Stan say about that?
He's not a huge fan of- I mean, I don't want to speak for him.
Let's just say that I get the impression from him that he's not in lockstep with what the
correct way of doing Indigenous rights is, you know.
But that doesn't help Indigenous rights either.
I mean, it comes back to your point about guilt, right?
I think it's guilt, yeah.
You know, we've got this- it's a way for this class-
It's a way for this class of mostly white, almost exclusively white, middle class, university
educated people to signal to each other that they're on the right side, that they're on
the right team, right?
It's like a- it's like putting he, him in your email signature or she, her, you know,
like, don't worry, Gary, no one was in any doubt that you're a dude, you know, like,
we all know you, Gary.
Or I don't give a fuck either.
There was no ambiguity.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it's a- it's a way of saying, oh, I don't care.
It's a way of saying, oh, I don't care.
It's a way of saying, oh, I don't care.
It's a way of saying, I- I care, right?
Which is all very well until it becomes a conformist lockstep mandatory thing that if
you decline to participate in, you're regarded as being a bad guy.
So, anyway, we were having these kinds of conversations with- with Stan and then I expanded
it out to talk to, I mean, anyone and everyone, Malcolm Turnbull or, you know, I don't like
You and Malcolm launched your book?
Yeah, that's right.
And- and just to try to-
I remember you talking about it, actually.
During that period.
I think you might have-
I might have had him on the ABC as well.
I think I had you on the ABC, yeah.
You had him on the ABC, yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
And so, yeah, now uncomfortable- now that my show at the ABC has fallen apart, Uncomfortable
Conversations is going gangbusters because I can devote all my time to it instead of
it being a side hustle.
And so now we're expanding into doing things like live talkback video segments.
You mean inviting audience?
Yeah, inviting the audience in, doing panel segments, but our last panel was with Ben
Fordham, you just mentioned, Ben, and Antoinette Latouf, so like having people who spar a little
bit on the couch, and that's all going up on YouTube, and interviewing people like Jimmy
Carr, who I just had on the show, and you know, comedians and stuff like that, rather
than just going straight for the culture war jugular.
Although sometimes I go, oh, like when I'm watching him, I'm like, fuck.
That's the point, isn't it?
It is the point, but he does it with such a- I can ask you a question.
Do you think he does it and uses comedy?
Comedy and satire as an excuse for what he's just done, as a backdoor, or is he doing it
for social awareness, for people to think about what it is he's saying, and to have
a debate, perhaps after the show, or is he just doing it for gags, because he knows the
audience is his cheer squad?
And I think he would say that.
But it's his cheerleaders.
Maybe it happens occasionally, but most of the people who come to listen to him, in a
live audience sense, I'm talking about, are there because they like him.
They like what he says.
I mean, I asked him on- and people should listen to the episode or watch it on YouTube,
because it's interesting.
And I asked him about this, you know, about haters on Twitter, and he was like, what happens
is that people who weren't at the show get angry about it on social media, but there
is no controversy about it at the show.
I mean, the people who come to see a Jimmy Carr show are people who are cool with Jimmy
Carr, by definition, right?
I mean, they want to- you know, so, I mean, he said something interesting.
This was actually the first video- I just joined TikTok.
No, I have just now.
I mean, this is all within the past few months anyway.
Dude, get with the program.
I'm even fucking on TikTok.
What's wrong with you?
So, we just joined.
My first TikTok video that went past a million was Jimmy Carr making an interesting point
Whatever it is that's going to get me cancelled, I said it 10 years ago.
There's nothing I can say now that's going to be worse than the things that you can dredge
up, which points to this other phenomenon that I talk about.
I did a show at the Melbourne Comedy Festival just before the pandemic, which was about
why social media was ruining everything.
And I made the point that there's this whole phenomenon of what I call outrage archaeology,
where, you know, people go back through your past tweets or the things you've said in the
Like archaeologists, like they're trying to hunt for the jewel of, you know, of the
most offensive thing.
Like, who's the comic who was, Kevin, he was, anyway, he was going to host the Academy Awards
the year before last, and they went back and they found that nine years before he tweeted
something homophobic, which he'd apologised for, you know, or he'd said something in a
routine that he ended up tweeting, that ended up on Twitter.
And, you know, he ended up being uninvited from hosting the Academy Awards, a pretty
big gig, because some outrage archaeologists.
And, you know, he ended up being uninvited from hosting the Academy Awards, a pretty
big gig, because some outrage archaeologists.
And found something out of context from a previous time when norms were a bit different.
And as far as Jimmy's concerned, I mean, he's right.
We've all got the paper trail behind us now.
I've been talking for long enough in years now that there are all kinds of things that
I've said that I'm sure that if you go over it with a fine tooth comb, you could create
Do you worry about that?
No, I don't anymore, because I don't have an employer.
But did you worry about it?
And thank God I don't have to anymore.
I mean, do you remember, what was his name?
He used to say, you know what I hate?
You know what I hate?
Who was that famous comedian like 20, 30 years ago?
Shit, I can't remember.
He used to have, he had a routine.
You know what I fucking hate?
And he was, he talked about haters.
And he was, and he took the piss out of everyone.
I mean, I used to love listening to him anyway.
And this is 20 years ago.
And he got a radio show for a little while.
And then they cut him out of, he's on Today FM or Triple M, one of those things.
And they cut him because he just upset so many people at the time.
It wasn't Red Simons.
No, it wasn't Red.
But it was around Red's time.
It was, I can't remember.
It doesn't matter.
But irrespective.
People have been taking the piss in comedy about social,
the way society operates for so fucking long.
And he was basically just reflecting how we are.
We all, everyone would say, I fucking hate that.
I mean, like, you know, you get the haters.
Some people just hate everything.
Yeah, professional haters.
They sit with you and they talk.
You haven't seen it for ages.
You went to school.
You went to year 12 with them.
You haven't seen it for 22 years.
And you sit down with them and they just fucking complain about everything.
And they fucking hate everything.
They don't say, use the word hate, but they just dislike everything.
They've got no positive.
They don't have a new thought on any issue.
And I think people have been doing that for a long time.
But this guy, he ended up getting cancelled.
Oh, I remember Rodney Rood.
I mean, it's literally right there in his name, Mark.
And that was his routine.
You know what I mean?
You know what I mean?
And he ended up getting cancelled.
But it took a long time to get cancelled.
But society didn't cancel him.
Some dude, like somebody in management or someone at the top of the tree got rid of him
because somebody would have prodded him a little bit and probably said,
well, that guy, he's upsetting too many people.
But today, you get cancelled by the numbers.
And like hordes of people will all have an opinion on whether or not
Josh Epps should be saying what he's saying.
Why do you think all of a sudden there are audiences have all of a sudden got to say
that management ordinarily would have?
Well, they're loud and angry.
I mean, there are professional umbrage takers who will take umbrage at whatever it is that
they can find and will try to coerce cowardly management.
So that's the issue?
I think that's the issue, yeah.
And management is too jumpy.
And they don't stand by people enough.
Is it because the management want to be liked?
We all want to be liked?
Yes, I think they're afraid of the optics of seeming like they're not taking seriously
the concerns about the microaggressions and the victimization and that they're not on
board with, again, this kind of orthodoxy of social justice.
And like they want to seem like they're the good guys.
They don't want to seem like out of touch.
Like there's nothing, no one is more woke, just to use that problematic term.
No one is more woke than a terrified, like white, straight, middle-aged man.
Who is trying to do the right thing.
Who is trying to do the right thing by the kids who are coming with pitchforks and flaming
torches, you know?
But I'd like to understand what your view is.
Is it about not being disliked?
They don't want to be disliked?
Or is it more about I want to be liked?
Because, and I want to go right back to Facebook.
You know, Facebook, Instagram, they've created this like thing.
And they've worked out, or their scientists have worked out, that in an evolutionary sense,
for us to survive, we've got to be liked by our community.
Because if we get fucked over by a community, we won't survive.
That's an evolutionary instinct in our brain.
And they've worked this stuff out.
And that's why everybody wants you to press the like on your Instagram page, or Facebook
page, et cetera, et cetera.
They've created this like world.
And I've often wondered to myself, the decision makers who make these decisions about when
they're getting pressured by groups, is it they're doing it because they don't want to
Or is it because they want to be seen as being liked as an organization?
So let's talk with ABC.
So ABC wants to be liked as an organization.
Have you ever thought that through?
No, it's an interesting question.
Tease it out for me.
Why is it important to you, the distinction between avoiding dislike and clamoring for
I don't have a particular view.
I just see that as, I see it as binary.
Because there are, and I've often, no, I don't see it as binary.
I've often wondered, is there an instinct within us, in our brain somewhere, that don't
It doesn't, it's not the same as being liked, but you can't be disliked.
Because if you're disliked.
I think that's it.
You're on the outside.
I think that's it.
Don't be excluded.
Don't be excluded from the team.
Because you're in trouble when you're excluded.
And why is it you don't care?
Why does Josh Zeps doesn't care whether he's disliked?
So in an evolutionary sense, why do you think that you've chosen not to care?
Is it because, if you're disliked, is it because Josh also realizes he can create his own community
of people who are going to like him?
Is it because he's disliked him for not caring about being disliked, and therefore you've
got your own community?
Now you're protected.
I'm a troublemaker.
I mean, I'm a troublemaker.
People like troublemakers.
I'm a troublemaker before the community of troublemakers follows me.
I mean, I would sooner be a lone outsider with no friends, but my own internal credibility
and just have faith that at some point people are going to value authenticity, credibility,
I think they value honesty and straight talk more than they do sycophancy and conformism.
And honestly, whether a tribe is with me or not is secondary to me.
I mean, I just, I'm just a sucker for like intellectual honesty.
I don't really, it's not even really, it doesn't even feel like a choice to me.
It feels like a drive.
I like it because I just want to quickly, I'm getting wound up here, but I want to keep
going on about this a little bit if you don't mind.
I won't do a Joe Rogan three hour on you.
But I don't know.
Because for me I've always had this view on instinct versus intellect
and I sometimes feel as though most of society operates on instinct
which is the like or dislike argument
and whereas intellect takes me to another level
and when I say another level I don't mean better or worse.
I mean it just takes me to a different level, a different universe
whereby I override my instincts with intellect
and that's not just in relation to commentary on what society is doing
and the sorts of things you and I do
but it's also like temptation, you know, fucking knocking myself around,
take drugs, I don't take drugs.
I mean I always take the view, I like to take the view
and I don't always achieve it personally
but I like to take the view that my intellect is always greater than my instincts.
Sometimes my instincts do overtake
and I've really tried hard over my 68 years to fucking work that out
My intellect tries to fight back
but I'm a real, a big, I'm quite interested in this instinct versus intellect
and how the brain works.
I mean I'm highly intellectual to an almost like Asperger's degree.
Yeah, I can see that.
In terms of being, it doesn't come naturally to me
to meet other people empathically, you know, wherever they are.
Because that's instinct.
Instinct is being empathetic.
I don't have that sensitivity for example that my partner does
who he's very, very good at.
He's very, very good at tuning into people's emotional wavelength.
If I'm not, I'll just go straight to the brain and go like, you're wrong.
I think fuck someone else in the world is like that
because I know I can get criticized for being this by people in a personal level,
by people who know me closely.
That people think that I lack the empathy.
Someone might send a text that says I love you
and I might go, oh, thank you.
Right, yeah, yeah.
Because I don't really see the fucking point of the word.
I mean it's the dumbest fucking word in the fucking old dictionary
because, you know, I love it.
I love whatever the fuck.
You know, like just articulate a little bit more, you know,
because I don't even know how to respond to it.
I sort of do but, you know, I know what society would say how to respond to it
but in terms of how I really feel about it, I think it's just a dumb fucking word.
So are you motivated by being liked or avoiding being disliked?
I couldn't give a shit.
But see, now I wonder whether or not that sensibility which you and I share,
if you want to get psychoanalytic about it, is driven –
like the flattering interpretation to us is to say we're galaxy brains
who can override our base instincts with our minds.
The less flattering interpretation which comports with your thesis
that people are generally driven by a desire to be liked would be
where the types of people who maybe when we were younger didn't fit in
and didn't find it easy to fit into the cool kids club,
and therefore took a posture of, you know what,
any club that would have me as a member I don't want to be part of anyway
and so, you know, I'm different, I'm special, I don't need to obey your rules.
I'm a contrarian.
That's probably it.
But do you think – was that you?
Were you that kid?
I probably was too.
I wasn't pushed out of groups or I wasn't not accepted into groups
but at the same time I didn't care.
I didn't try to be in the group.
Are you sure you didn't –
Are you sure that the not caring wasn't a consequence of exclusion?
I don't really remember being excluded as such.
I mean, like most things I did, I did quite well, like sport and blah, blah, blah.
I was in footy teams and well at school, you know, academically and stuff.
I don't think so.
I do believe I just didn't care.
Like my mates would ring me up and say,
well, we're all going to meet down the road when we're 15 and, you know,
I don't know, steal stuff off cars and stuff.
And not that I had a moral position,
but I'd say, oh, I can't be bothered, I'm not coming.
You know, I'd just rather stay home and read my book or whatever.
So my position is – here you're interviewing me now –
but my position is I don't know if I could well have had that somewhere in my background.
I don't really know.
I haven't done a psychoanalytic sort of exercise on it.
But it's interesting because that's why I sort of warmed to you
without even having met you, listening to you on radio.
I liked listening to you on the radio.
That's why I like listening to Adam because he's a bit odd too.
Not to say we're odd, but he's a bit different.
No, I mean, I like – I'll take odd.
That's a compliment to me.
For me, odd's good too.
Weird, odd, you know, thinking about things in a strange way.
You know, this is part of what I worry about just going back to the likes
on social media versus the likes in the real world where you can touch the grass
and actually, you know, have conversations with people
that aren't limited by the number of characters you can put in a tweet.
Like part of what's corrosive about the way that we're living is,
so much of our social groups and so much of our likes and, you know, strokes,
our social strokes are coming from – coming mediated through machines
where not only are you chasing the wrong kinds of respect
because mostly it's conformism.
Like the way that –
Either side, exactly.
The easiest way to get a lot of likes on social media is to go on and say,
I stand with the people of Gaza.
I stand with my trans allies.
I stand with the women of Australia against domestic violence.
What a brave position.
You don't believe that men should beat and murder their wives.
How enlightening.
This is incredible.
I talk to me about this moral revelation, this epiphany that you had.
It's so bloody facile.
And yet that is actually the currency that we're swimming in.
And it's distracting us.
It's capturing our attention.
It's a bit like – it's a bit like you're walking around
with another version of Josh Zeps on your shoulder
who's constantly monitoring your life and looking at your life and saying,
is that thought something that you should be broadcasting
that would get you likes?
Is that coffee something that you should put on Instagram
and would get likes?
From something as facile as a meal that you've had going on Instagram
to something as complicated as making a geopolitical commentary,
about the most intractable conflict in the world in Israel and Gaza,
it's all being filtered through this kind of meta experience
of witnessing yourself having experiences
and then pushing those experiences through the algorithm
and the filter of going, am I going to get more likes and followers
and strokes by disseminating this to the world?
So it's like I think – I mean for me personally,
I don't use social media anymore.
I use it as a broad.
I use it as a broadcasting platform to push out my content
but I no longer engage with it.
And we only get one life as far as we know.
This is actually it.
Today is the actual day when you're experiencing today.
You're never going to get today back.
You're never going to get to interface with reality and touch the grass
and look at people and wrestle with ideas in this moment again.
And yet most of us spend that time,
that moment, whether we know it or not,
with a little editor in the back of our brain
who works for Meta or Elon saying, is this content?
Is this content that can get me the social kudos
that if we weren't embedded in social media
would come from actually sitting down and having a cup of tea
with somebody and talking to them?
Like something's happening to our brains
and the way that they're being hijacked,
that is making it increasingly difficult
to have interesting, unusual, innovative, contrarian conversations
and is dialing up the reward for having facile, conformist ones.
So do you think that is actually being consciously done?
I think it's just the algorithm doing what algorithms do.
That's what our attention, you know, by definition,
you're going to engage with things that either reinforce
what you already believe or demonize what you don't already believe.
The messy, muddy space of wrestling with things
in a complicated, nuanced way is not an instantaneous dopamine hit, right?
It takes more thought.
It takes energy as well.
I mean, and people who value that are my audience.
Like if you value that, come and subscribe to Uncomfortable Conversations,
be part of the team, be part of the journey,
and it is a tribe of the tribalists.
It is a tribe of people who just want to talk about things
without caring about whether or not they tick the correct checkbox
on a preset list of opinions that you're supposed to be talking about.
That's what you're supposed to have in order to make you a good progressive
or a good conservative.
Like I just want to be all over the map.
I want to be as heterodox as possible because I want to be as honest as possible
and neither side has a monopoly on the truth.
Do you think that part of the success of your podcast, your show,
is your, I'll call it amazing,
control of your literate brain
and your ability to,
to articulate in such a,
I won't call it polished,
but quite beautiful way.
Like you speak very well.
one of the things I remember listening to the radio,
I thought this dude can put a sentence together.
your command of the English language is very good,
but you do it in a,
you don't do it in a posh way or a pompous way.
It sort of just works.
How important is that to you?
it's my bread and butter.
Is it natural or it's developed?
There's so much to be grateful about.
Grateful that I'm born in Australia.
grateful for so many things,
whatever it is that you've got in your toolkit,
that's that one thing that you can really lean on.
If I could tell young people anything,
it would be like,
find the thing that you,
it sounds facile,
you have to reach middle age before you realize that it's profound
because it sounds stupid,
when you're in your twenties,
but like find the one thing that you're a lot better at
than other people are.
And they'll always,
almost always be something.
And then the trick is in monetizing that.
There might not be a job,
what kind of a job is radio host?
There aren't a lot of them around.
It's a rarefied spot to get to,
especially like intellectual radio hosts,
who's required to have half hour long,
highfalutin conversations about something.
if you can't get that,
then just make your own thing.
And that's what the podcast is basically.
Now I don't have to worry about whether or not management thinks it's okay
to question Mardi Gras and gay pride.
And can I ask you,
it's a bit of a personal question,
but are your parents still around?
Dad's got Alzheimer's,
so he's half around.
I was going to say,
what do they think of their son?
in doing what you're doing now and what you've done in the past.
dad was born in a refugee camp in Switzerland during the war to Jewish parents,
Which I presume means he's Jewish.
which means he's Jewish.
he has an incredible story of escape and his,
he was raised in Paris and actually spent his seventh birthday in an orphanage in Paris
when his mum was sick and,
but was raised when he was very young by a staunch Lutheran family in Switzerland who
took him in and out of the refugee camp.
He was born in 1943.
his mum managed to scrounge up enough money to bring him and his sister out to get out
And she had been a penniless,
Jewish refugee from Poland who spent the war fleeing the Nazis in France.
And she got to the,
she got to the port in France where they were loading these huge refugee boats to go to
And she went up to the,
the clerk who was signing people in and the clerk said,
the United States or Canada or Australia.
And she had no understanding of geography.
So she just said,
which one's further from here?
And he put down Australia and they came out to Australia.
And so dad has always had an extreme reverence,
I would say for contrarianism for pushing through for,
he's got a refugee spirit.
someone who doesn't,
And mum is just this fabulous font of love and wisdom.
Who as long as I'm happy,
just dedicated to her son's.
Like at the end of the look,
if I was making a living,
being a Neo Nazi,
she might draw the line,
but I don't think I'm doing anything.
if in any other scenario there would be respect for people who,
I suppose we've always been a minority like the kind of Christopher Hitchens and the people from Germany,
And then I thought all of a sudden,
of the world, the people who are always trying to find the angle that is against what the
mainstream think. But it's an honourable tradition and it's just upsetting to me that now progressives
who think they're on the right side of history have inherited a censoriousness and an intolerance
which traditionally was associated with the right. Like, you know, the right bangs on a lot
about free speech and cancel culture and wokeness these days, but it's pretty hypocritical because
when Monty Python was releasing The Life of Brian, it wasn't the left that was calling for
it to be cancelled, it was the religious conservatives. McCarthyism in the United
States, the anti-communist crackdowns and the witch hunts, that was the right. The right
mastered cancel culture long before the left got wind of it. And it's just in the past decade or so,
I suppose, that the left has unfortunately taken up the tactics of the old right in creating a
kind of a purity test and like, these are the things that we believe.
We hold sacred and, you know, there is a certain sanctity around the opinions that you're supposed
to have about racial inequality, about gender inequality, about gender identity. And if you
transgress those, now the left goes batshit crazy the same way that the right used to go crazy if
you transgressed, you know, if you were offensive or if you were blasphemous in some way. I just
think the volume needs to be turned down all over and we need to rediscover a small liberal
tolerance towards a plurality of views.
We need to try to cast the net of acceptable conversation as wide as possible. Honestly,
I think that's the only way we're going to solve the problems of the 21st century.
Just tone it down.
Just, well, tone it down and expand the landscape. Like we, the 21st century is going to be really,
really tricky. The intersection of artificial intelligence, climate chaos, and the rise of
China and disruptions to liberal democracy and the alternative path of, you know, and whatever new
world order Putin wants to introduce.
Or dictatorships in general.
Dictatorships in general. Like, it's,
It's going to be hard to manage. And you can't know what the correct path is unless you have
the maximum number of voices all arguing about it and chipping in so that you can grope towards what
the best course is. If you carve out, if you, you know, if you make it forbidden to talk about
race or sex or sexuality or whatever it might be in advance, if you, if you earmark a certain set of
opinions as being beyond the pale before you even talk about it, then you're going to have to
hear about it, and you need to talk about them. How are you going to know what's true?
Well, that's the greatest form of censorship. I want my last question, I'd just like to
ask you, if you don't mind.
And I haven't had anybody ask this question for a long time. Do you think
that Australia should have a bill of rights for its citizens, similar to what they have in the USA,
and talk about things like freedom of speech and etcetera, etcetera.
I'll go back and forth on it. At the moment, I'm a no, because at the moment, I'm a no. Because at the
moment, I'm a no. At the moment, I'm a no. But I'll say, and this is a no, when we're talking about
and I'll say, and this is a no, when we're talking about things like freedom of speech and etcetera, etcetera.
At the moment, I'm a no, because at the moment, if you wrote a Bill of Rights...
A modern Bill of Rights, I should say, not the American Bill of Rights, because it's
Yeah, but if you wrote it now, then the social justice warriors would get in there and they'd
make everyone have a right to not have their gender questioned, which would mean that people,
you know, for example, feminists like Germaine Greer, you know, or comedians like Barry Humphries
who took the position that there's such a thing as biological males and biological females
could be in breach of the Bill of Rights.
But if what you mean is a Bill of Rights that enshrines freedom of speech, in some respects,
I feel like the absolutism of the American approach causes more problems than it solves.
The reason I say it is because during the COVID period, I kept thinking to myself, governments
can actually do whatever they want.
And I thought to myself, we don't really have a...
We don't have a Bill of Rights here.
There is legislation which says you can't do this, you can't do that, to protect people's
There's rights protection legislation, which sort of therefore, by definition, is a sort
of like a number of bills of rights.
But during the COVID period, I thought to myself that we don't have one in Australia.
And my rights are being determined by other parties based on epidemiological...
Studies and models and all that sort of stuff, which to some extent, I didn't agree with.
I'm talking about the modelling, the mathematics of the modelling.
I'm talking about...
I'm not talking about protecting people from getting COVID.
I'm talking about how they model these things.
Because models, by definition, are always wrong.
You're talking to somebody, by the way, who wrote an opinion piece at the end of 2021
in the Sydney Morning Herald saying, you know, is it time to start thinking of having a national
conversation about the human rights implications of the lockdowns?
I didn't know that, but that's my position.
You know, I literally wrote the article at a time when it was extremely unpopular because
everybody felt like that was killing grandma.
But I interviewed on my ABC show.
It's turning out to be right.
Well, it may be right.
Well, this is the end of 2021 when we were basically all vaccinated and we still had
ridiculous scenarios, like a woman who I interviewed who flew from Melbourne to Adelaide with her
family to see her family, with her little kids, to see her family for the first time
since the lockdowns began.
There was some...
There was one person on her flight who tested positive for COVID the next day.
So the police came to her hotel in Adelaide and took the whole family and locked them
up and wanted to lock them up for two weeks.
And after five days, she made such a fuss that she was driven in police convoy to the
border of South Australia and dumped out onto the Victorian side of the border after having
been incarcerated for five days.
All of them were COVID negative, but just because she'd been on the same plane as someone
And I used that as a way of saying, like, at what point?
Do we start asking?
Do we start saying the human rights of this woman are more important than whatever epidemiological
like solution you thought you were achieving in terms of tracking and tracing that disease?
So, yeah, I mean, I...
Or is it a conversation that maybe perhaps, maybe not, someone's just going to get, here's
the bill, maybe that's probably a silly way of putting it, but should there be a conversation
Yes, there should certainly be a conversation.
Well, no one's offered it.
I mean, I would have...
I mean, we need to get ahead of...
We need to get ahead of AI.
We need to get ahead of the next pandemic, which will come, and it'll be worse.
I mean, a pandemic...
By definition, it will be.
The next one always will be worse because they adapt.
Because it's there to control the host, by definition.
So it will do it.
And there may be smaller ones, but there will be bigger ones.
And, yeah, so I think that would be a good idea, having some kind of a national round
table where, you know, people could come together and go like...
Or do you think it's not possible?
No, I think it's possible.
Do you think it's possible to settle on something, though?
I have to have faith in democracy, Mark.
So do you think it's going to be Anthony Albanese or it's going to be the, you know...
Is it going to be Chris Minns?
I mean, what do you think?
Do you think that we have the capacity to settle on something?
Yes, I think you could have...
Yeah, I think you could have a national cabinet where the premiers sit down with the Attorney
General, with the Federal Attorney General.
And, you know, Health Minister and Prime Minister, and you get academics together, and you get
human rights people together, and you just hammer out, even if it's not a Bill of Rights,
A one-pager about, like, you know...
A discussion page.
Yeah, this is what we expect.
As Australians, this is what we expect of our government.
Sort of like a code of conduct.
As opposed to a bill where you can, you know, you can talk about, you know, I'm not going
to answer that question because I've got a bill...
There's been something put past the parliament that protects me.
Yeah, that's right.
Everything is messy, basically.
I think the only solution...
With conversations.
I don't think any Bill of Rights or any...
I mean, constitutions are worth the...
Aren't worth the paper they're written on unless they're enforced by courts, and courts
aren't worth their salt unless they're backed up by the good faith of the political process,
and the political process isn't worth its salt unless the military obeys what the politicians
And, you know, at the end of the day, everything is a conversation.
Everything is trust, is a story, really, right?
It's like, you know, what's money?
Money is nothing.
Money is relationships, right?
Money is, you know, investments in things.
So, yeah, to me, looking for one...
That one thing that's going to save us, like the Bill of Rights or something, is a bit
of a fool's errand.
Like, my mission is to have a platform, Uncomfortable Conversations, where people can have conversations
about uncomfortable things in ways that are as inclusive and as interesting and satisfy
people's intellectual curiosity as much as possible.
And I just hope that that is one piece of a larger mosaic, like one piece of a...
One piece of a jigsaw that can contribute to a sane and prosperous future.
It's not going to be the whole answer, but I'm pretty convinced that that landscape of
having conversations in an honest and generous way is the easiest...
Like, that's the path of least resistance to our success as a culture.
Josh Sepps, to use a controversial word, I loved it.
Good on you, mate.
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