Decoding the Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
In this stunning crossover episode, Matt and Chris are joined by Australian 'media personality' and podcast host Josh Szeps for a joyful discussion of podcasts, gurusphere, and general media dynamics. As you might imagine, we discuss issues around the heterodox sphere, cultures of criticism, and the issues involved with 'platforming' controversial figures. We discuss the constantly surprising popularity of Lex Fridman and his unique interview style, how the heterodox respond to criticism, and rampant hypocrisy. Also, Matt is finally held to account for his food takes, and we find out the real story behind the Olympic mascot, Olly the Kookaburra.SourcesJosh's Substackistan podcast
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus crossover edition.
You're about to hear a conversation between myself, the anthropologist of sorts, with Matthew Brown, the psychologist, and with Josh Zeps,
the Australian broadcaster and podcast host.
Resident of Sabstakistan, and so on.
So we talk about a bunch of different things, including the heterodox fear, the role of criticism, the responsibility when platforming people, etc., etc.,
and most importantly, his time as Oli the Kookaburra during the Olympics.
So join me and Matt and Josh, won't you?
For Decoding the Uncomfortable Conversations.
Coming now.
Yes, I'm not sure how we're going to even manage the logistics of this since we have two completely different shows.
Decoding the Uncomfortable Conversations.
Decoding the Uncomfortable Conversations.
Why don't we talk about Japan?
We should do.
Japan's fabulous.
This isn't like artifact of modern technology.
Josh is actually here.
I'm actually here.
If people aren't watching on the YouTube, then they should be aware that Chris and I are literally sitting shoulder to shoulder because Chris's technical capabilities were too poor to be able to figure out how to have us sitting across a table from one another.
So we're huddled around a single microphone.
And the microphone you might notice has black tape.
Yes, a bit of gaffer, literally gaffer tape and twine holding this recording together in Tokyo.
And Matt, you're joining us from, are you at home?
I'm at home in sunny Queensland.
Sunny Queensland, obviously not a great place for culinary exploits, given your controversial positions about how bad Australian food is, which can only be ascribed to you living in the wrong part of Australia.
It was hilarious.
I think it's fair to say I've been radicalised by regional Queensland when it comes to...
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah.
But, you know, the flip side is I've learned how to cook really well.
And the flip side is even when you go to places that have a pretty poor baseline of media and cuisine like the United States, you're wildly impressed.
You're like, this isn't nearly as bad as the Chinese joint on the corner.
I was impressed by the hamburgers.
They do burgers.
They do a good burger.
We got feedback from the listeners when Matt was offering those takes that two things and you're actually qualified to say whether it's true.
One was that like Matt's take is like that because he's in Bundaberg.
Yes.
That's the first thing.
And the second was Matt is a racing The diversity of Australia.
He's just talking about white cuisine.
To listeners who are not familiar with the spat that I'm referring to on a previous episode of Decoding the Gurus, Matt had been gallivanting, I would say, around the fine United States and was extolling American food.
Which is an uncommon thing for an Australian to do when in America, usually confronted by sloppy plates of diner grits.
And then there was a big backlash from Aussies saying, what on earth are you talking about?
I didn't even take the bait.
I didn't even text you.
I thought he's just trolling.
He's either trolling or he's psychotic, or he's just chosen the worst place in Australia to live.
Because the median, you can just wander into any.
Cafe in Sydney or Melbourne and the quality of the poached egg will far exceed the quality of a poached egg at an average American diner.
Or, you know, pick any substitute.
Uncomfortable conversation about whatever you say.
I'm not uncomfortable.
I'm not uncomfortable.
No, that may well be true in the trendy bohemian.
Inner city, leafy suburbs that you like to haunt there, Josh.
But what about the rest of us?
You know?
But I think this is what happens when people travel.
They travel and then they go and eat at a different class of establishment than they are used to.
And then they think that that's emblematic of the whole.
But if you went...
But of course we're talking about the fancy...
Like the vast majority of Australians live in cosmopolitan environments.
Like 70% of the population lives in four cities or something.
They don't live in Wunderburg.
I was even impressed by Waffle House.
I like Waffle House.
I mean, there is something deeply impressive about the American commitment to quantity, salt, sugar.
Like, it's a very hedonistic cuisine.
It's true.
You can go to a Waffle House and the number of waffles and the fluffiness thereof and the number of pieces of fried chicken smothered in maple syrup that will be spilling off that plate, that platter.
of waffles is impressive.
But I think that's different from talking about the quality of cuisine.
Okay, okay.
Look, enough about America.
You can't defend your team.
I think we all agree that where you guys are now is a pretty good place for casual eating.
You could turn up somewhere with 1000 or 2000 yen.
And you will get something better than even Sydney.
In Bundaberg.
Better even than the local Bundaberg.
By the way, I love Chris's pronunciation of Bundaberg.
It makes it sound like we're in 1930s Germany.
It's Bundaberg.
Bundaberg.
But Bundaberg sounds more glamorous.
Sounds like a place where you might probably get a fondue or something.
It was settled by Germans, obviously.
Yeah, that's the thing.
Maybe I've got the original.
And I think that explains some of the local culture, to be honest.
I don't want to get into it.
I'll get into more trouble.
Yeah, yeah.
No, okay.
We're not going to shit on regional Queensland.
Beautiful place.
Beautiful place.
Lovely people.
Lovely, lovely.
If you want to find a kind-hearted racist, then Bundaberg is your place.
That's right.
Nowhere has the kind of racist.
We've got one right here.
On one head.
They're a bit racist, but they're a colourful character.
They are.
They're lovely.
Okay, so we're going to talk about what's happening to the media and podcasting and podcasters, Dan.
You guys recently did an episode, well, but you've done many an episode about Lex Friedman, which tickles my fancy because if there's one thing I don't understand about this new media landscape, it's Lex Friedman.
It's, I don't understand how a person, I mean, I don't want to be unkind.
Go ahead.
Look, there are various strands of the emerging new media landscape and podcaster stand and like bro tech culture and the decline of the legacy media and the rise of independent media.
Which are worth teasing apart and bringing together and analysing, I suppose, with greater clarity and specificity than maybe we sometimes do.
And all of them are exhibited in their worst form by Lex Friedman.
Like, here's the apotheosis of motivated reasoning, blind spots, biased questioning, and what offends me the most...
As a craftsman of this form, it's just how bad an interviewer he is.
His main offence is one of style.
I agree.
I mean, take Joe Rogan.
I hate the guy, but I understand why he's popular.
I get it.
With, you know, Lex Rydman will be sitting there talking to someone incredibly important and will say, so do you like puppies?
And that's his...
It's not that far from there.
But, you know, Josh sent a clip, Matt.
I think this is a good time to play it because it illustrates Lex's interview technique, you know, for people that might not be familiar.
So, yeah, there's...
I also have to say, you say that you hate Joe.
Obviously, I love Joe, even though I think he's a pernicious force in the world.
I love him as like I love a puppy dog.
And I think he's an immensely talented raconteur and conversationalist, which is what Lex is not, which is why Lex baffles me in a way that Rogan doesn't.
But so this clip is, I actually played this on my show when I had the comic Mark Norman.
He's an increasingly successful American comic, very funny guy.
And if you ever want an example of a guest who brings everything to an interview, he is it.
He is just coming out with the gags at like a machine gun fire pace.
So if you're willing to dance and rumble with him, it can be an incredibly entertaining interview.
And Mark had just been on Lex Friedman's show, and I listened to that.
As research before I interviewed Mark in case there was anything there.
And it was so intriguing to hear the difference between what Mark was bringing to the conversation and what Lex was bringing to the conversation that I actually played this clip for Mark live on my show to hear his reaction because I wanted to understand what his impression of Lex was.
So have a listen to Mark throwing some zingers at Lex and Lex deftly tap dancing away.
Are you married?
No.
Single.
Virgin?
Of course, yeah.
I can't imagine.
I bet you'd be great in bed.
You're ripped.
You have the best hairline in podcasting.
Yeah, I don't know.
I haven't tried yet, so we'll have to see.
All right, well, let me know.
Pretty big hog on you?
Yeah, I could see you packing a crazy, crazy tool downtown.
Does that matter to girls?
Apparently, yeah.
That's all I hear about.
Okay, New Orleans.
You grew up in New Orleans?
Yeah, born and raised.
Treme, outside the French Quarter.
You ever been?
Yeah.
Don't remember it.
Oh, you drink?
Yeah, I drink.
Of course I drink.
I don't know.
I can't tell if you have fun.
No, not really.
But Russian, I mean, Russian, of course I drink vodka, all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yes.
I don't know.
Vodka.
Beer was just labeled an alcoholic beverage in 2011.
Fun fact.
What do you mean?
In Russia.
It was just drinks.
It was just like apple juice before.
It finally got declared legally as an alcoholic beverage.
Which means you can regulate it, that kind of thing.
I guess so.
See, that's where your brain goes.
I just go, oh, these fucking Ruskies are...
I didn't even know there was rules about drinking.
This is good.
I'm learning about Russia from you.
So what's the difficult memory experience from childhood in New Orleans that made you the man you are today?
Did you enjoy that?
Oh, sorry.
So look, this speaks to the mystery that you were referring to, Josh.
Like, why?
What is the appeal of that?
I have a suggestion for both of you.
Please enlighten me.
I'm lost.
I'm a little sparrow at sea, like flailing around.
I'm comprehending.
I mean, I think part of the aspect is your friend Joe and Elon Musk, villain of the art, but long before he was on his current villain arc, he gave Lexa...
A leg up, because Lex wrote a paper saying that Teslas were...
Yeah, but lots of people have been on Joe's show.
I've done Joe's show seven times.
I'm not interviewing Vladimir Putin.
I'm not sitting there with Zelensky.
He's not answering my call.
So, did you have Elon Musk, right?
So, you did Musk and Rogen, the multiplying factor, but the other thing is...
So, that's the initial thing, but that isn't going to take you to the heights that Lex has risen to.
So, the other thing, and I think this is the key, it's my take, is that it's...
Unbridled sycophancy.
Untold levels of sycophancy.
But that explains why people will do the show, why guests will do the show.
But it doesn't explain why humans will listen to the show.
Or why I even listen to the show because of the guests.
I suppose it's like pulling yourself up by your shoelaces.
How does it happen?
I listen because I want to hear the guests.
Yeah.
And the guests are there because people listen.
But it's a chicken and egg thing.
How are people listening before he was talking to Zelensky?
Why does anyone want to listen to that conversation with Mark Norman when you can hear Mark Norman being interviewed by any number of human beings?
No.
Okay, so this is the thing.
The one is that I think you're underestimating the level of sycopency that people are going to be treated to.
Like, that is, it's really high.
You think the listener wants it?
No, no, no.
So, I think, like, that explains, you know, the gas going on.
But then we live in a culture, and this is, like, part of the thing that we might talk about with other characters as well, where there's, like, a really pervasive atmosphere of Admiration for people that are successful, billionaires,
podcasters, Andrew Tate, whatever.
There's this desire for people to receive wisdom from people or to find out more about what makes them tick.
So if you see like, oh, there's a four-hour interview with this guy who's super successful and he's laying out his secrets.
I think once upon a time, people would have been more cynical and like, Why the fuck do I want to hear from some billionaire about his hard-knock life when he's jetting around in jets?
But the culture now seems to be like, yeah, let's get the wisdom.
If we have a really...
There's a hero worship that he's indulging in, in a way.
But his audience too.
Yeah, and I suppose it's true that if you...
The best thing I can say about Lex is...
If you just removed him from the equation altogether, the interview wouldn't be much better if it was just a monologue.
So, like, he's not doing any active harm in the sense that I could just, like, if he has...
I suppose I'm interested in hearing Zelensky talk for three hours about his worldview.
And I guess what Lex's show gives you is three...
It's like he's just collecting a bunch of people who can give their own masterclass.
Like, he's not questioning them.
He's not doing any journalism.
He's allowing the person a platform to espouse their worldview for three hours straight.
And I suppose there is a utility in that if you want to hear the person talking for three hours and there's no other context in which they would sit down in front of an open microphone and just talk for three hours.
Okay, Josh.
I think I can answer your question because I think there's a reason that isn't apparent to cynical men of the world like us.
And that is his style.
You know, that faux...
You know, like childlike wisdom, you know, this sort of blatant signaling of humility, that kind of thing.
You know, that light, like ultra-philosophy light stuff that he injects in there, talking about love and death and meaning and stuff like that.
And that kind of real, like to us, to me anyway, I don't want to speak for you guys, but it just sounds like utter saccharine bullshit.
But to many people, when he's talking about Kindness and truth and love.
They're going right on.
I like this.
It's a bit Brene Brown.
It's like, you know, it's like Brene Brown for men.
Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like he's the person who can make you feel like there is a pursuit of, yeah, of comedy and togetherness amidst the turmoil.
And why do we, I mean, his...
Diagnosis of the problem with the media, with the mainstream legacy media, which you guys addressed a bit in your recent episode about him, is almost exactly back to front.
He seems to think that the problem with the legacy media is that everyone is too enthusiastic about being aggressive and negative.
And in fact, yeah, that podcasting as well is too much about trying to go in on the attack.
We need to be less judgmental of other people's ideas and more understanding and hear them out.
What universe is...
I mean, I understand that there's a problem of, like, glib, grandstanding journalists trying to ask gotcha questions in short eight-minute interviews that they might get, you know, when they're interviewing the Treasury Secretary on, I don't know, you know,
I was going to say 60 Minutes, but actually 60 Minutes doesn't do that, like an inferior version of 60 Minutes.
But...
The idea that the main hallmark of the media moment that we live in is that people are too rigorous in their intellectual disagreements and not too sycophantic and, you know,
did he pay no attention to the interviews that Donald Trump was doing before the election?
Did he pay no attention to the whole ecosystem of sort of back-slapping, back-scratching?
I guess maybe I'm just living in an echo chamber of my own media diet, but I think I'm like the only person in the universe who's making a serious attempt to engage agreeably but controversially with...
Substantive intellectual points when the guest raises it and actually push back on them in the way that any one of us would if you were at a bar or a restaurant or a friend's place and someone said something that was patently stupid.
Like, we all in our, I think, social environments are much more tolerant of disagreeableness than we are in the media.
It's like we...
We're wearing kid gloves and treading on eggshells and being so afraid of offending people.
I don't understand where his worldview comes from, that he's this lone voice of friendliness in a sea of animosity.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the backstory to this is kind of the story of social media and the internet, right?
So when social media first came along, it was obviously, you know, very nasty, a lot of, you know, aggression, people.
Going off the handle for the same reason that people behave badly in cars, right?
Because there's that social distancing.
And, you know, this became a trope.
The bad faith, strawmanning type, all that bad stuff that sort of happens on the internet.
And, you know, that's all true.
And then they sort of developed this kind of reverence for, you know, good faith conversations, always assuming the best of intentions from the person you're talking to.
like this it became a real virtue amongst a lot of people and having mixed amongst the you know the free speech and the heterodox crowd online yeah they still and you know they're right in a sense
but that virtue has
I'm not sure that good faith is precisely right.
There's probably a couple of things being conflated here.
One thing that I do think is important is Granting as much as you possibly can to your opponent, such that you can attack the strongest version of their argument rather than the weakest one, you know, not strawmanning them.
Trying to be as conciliatory as you can and not needlessly antagonizing people.
So you're saying be nice to Nazis, basically, right?
Be nice, yeah.
Like, yes.
Just to some extent.
The argument against that.
Let me put it this way.
If I was arguing with a Nazi in, like, the 1930s, I wouldn't start by saying, you're a fucking Nazi.
I would start by saying, I understand that things are very difficult at the moment in your homeland of Germany, and there are lots of complicated reasons for that, and you have an understandable desire to restore German greatness.
However...
Some people have criticized Mr. Hitler for going slightly too far.
Josh, there's a...
You know, Lex often raises the question.
This is like his go-to question is, can you steelman the position for blah, blah, blah, right?
And I'm in favor of what you said.
Like, you know, you shouldn't try to strawman someone's argument.
And like, you can even grant a little bit more charity than it deserves in some cases to make the attack better, right?
Because you can show that, look, I'm not...
You know, if you want to criticize someone and you are...
If you're just...
Presenting the weakest version of it, it's like, even if your goal is to take it down, it looks like you're kind of not doing a good job.
But have you heard of the concept of star manning?
No.
So this is Eduardo, I forget his name, but he's a heterodox person.
I think associated with FIRE, the organization.
We need to not just steal man, but we should actually...
Elevate the argument to the best possible form.
So now we're superhero manning.
We're supermanning it.
I thought that the issue is, math and me often waffle on, but there's perhaps too much in terms of we're seeing it a bit too far in the positive direction.
But there's a value in academia, and I think in journalism as well, of the adversarial...
Yeah.
Like, the hard-nosed interview, right?
Like, I think the difference between Kathy Newman, or was it Kathy Young, the one who, Kathy Newman?
Kathy Newman interviewed Jordan Peterson.
Right.
That is in, like, and I think with good reason, that's like a sort of a hippie's attempt, right?
Yes.
Like, a kind of gotcha question.
But Helen Lewis.
Helen Lewis's was perfect.
Yeah.
Absolutely perfect.
But for a lot of people online, especially, like, and I would say, like, for Lex Friedman or, and for Jordan Peterson himself, he saw that.
The same way as like a brutal attempt to like...
I don't think they do.
I don't believe that they genuinely do.
I mean, I don't believe that they don't see a difference between...
They just like the fact that Jordan won one and lost the other.
And he lost the other because Helen is formidable and he won the other because Kathy is not.
But Jordan and people...
I've heard Jordan talk about Helen multiple times.
It sounds like he has a dartboard.
Well, of course he does because he...
You know, he's so core to his own self-identity is that he's this sage.
And for him to be shown up as a bit of an emperor with no clothes by some uppity journalist is insulting to his self-identification.
Perhaps especially a feminist journalist.
But in that case, though, for Jordan, I don't think he's pretending that he thinks Helen is a...
A bad thief interlocutor with, like, you know, a kind of agenda to take him down, like that she was acting maliciously by asking her questions and whatnot.
He seems genuinely very upset with her as a person and the way she approaches things.
He's talked about her, like, being possessed by the, I don't know, the demon of anger or something like this when he talks about it.
So it seems to me that, like, not just our audience, but them, and this applies to a lot of heterodox podcasters as well.
They genuinely take that as an attack, an attempt to besmirch them.
You know, asking those kind of questions is doing the same thing as Cathy Newman.
I think they just say that.
I think they just say that because they're embarrassed.
I think if you got drunk with Jordan Peterson or high on payloads or whatever else he was addicted to.
And I think if you really interrogated him about it and asked him what he thinks that Helen was doing, I don't think that he would...
I don't know.
I doubt that he would be saying that she's demonically possessed and has the heart of an angry woman.
I think you're wrong, Josh.
It's an experiment.
We should get him drunk and see what...
You know, the thing that this made me think of is like, so your interaction with Rogen, famously the myocarditis one.
Matt, do you remember that?
Yeah, I remember that.
Okay.
I have a clip here, which I'll play for people at home.
Okay.
So if people don't know, in January of 2021, I went back on Rogan's show for the seventh time since 2014.
And it was while he was in that snafu that people may remember the controversy about vaccine misinformation.
And he said something that was not...
True.
And it then became briefly a very viral moment.
And everyone sort of like CNN was reporting it as if he got owned on his own show, which completely baffled me.
But it was...
He did, kind of.
Let the listener judge him, I suppose.
I'll play the clip, Mark, just to remind us.
For young boys in particular, there's an adverse risk associated with the vaccine.
It's like a two- to four-fold increase in the instances of myocarditis versus hospitalization.
You know that there's an increased risk of myocarditis among that age cohort from getting COVID as well, which exceeds the risk of myocarditis from the vaccine.
I don't think that's true.
It is.
No, no, no.
I don't think it's true that there's an increased risk of myocarditis from people catching COVID that are young versus...
Increased risk of myocarditis from the vaccine.
No, there is.
There's both.
Well, let's look that up because I don't think that's true.
Myocarditis is more common after COVID-19 infection than vaccination.
But is this with children?
Yeah, we're talking about young people.
Men and boys aged under 30 after this is what it says here.
With children is the issue.
Well, no, we were talking about 15-year-olds.
Well, we're talking about young children.
It's a child.
It's 12 to 17. 12 to 17, Molek developed myocarditis with three months of catching COVID at a rate of 450 cases per million infection.
This compares to 67 cases of myocarditis
Yeah, so you're about eight times likely to get myocarditis from getting COVID than from getting the vaccine.
That's interesting.
That is not what I've read before, but also it's like...
Even when we're reading these things, it's like, what are we getting this from?
Is this from the VAERS report?
But even from the VAERS reports, when they report this stuff, it's like the amount of people that report, like it's the under-reporting.
Josh, before you defend Joe and mention, I know that you interviewed a relevant professional and kind of highlighted the actual issues around that topic after.
But the reason I wanted to mention this is because regardless of how you framed that and framed Joe's follow-up reactions to it.
That is like a case where you are disagreeing with Joe, right?
Friendly, but you're saying, no, I think that's wrong.
And wait, no, but we were talking about 15-year-olds, right?
That's not...
So you are like kind of...
You're calling him out the way you were to friend, right?
If you're arguing with him.
And very recently, I don't know if you'll have had time to hear it yet, but Douglas Murray just went on Joe Rogan with...
No, I didn't hear that.
I heard Douglas on Lex.
Oh, Douglas went on with Dave Smith.
I saw that that happened, but I haven't heard it yet.
So it starts off and...
And just explain who Dave Smith is.
So Dave Smith is a libertarian in America.
He's a comic, right?
He's a comic, and he basically got a profile boost from Rogan as well, appearances there.
And he's libertarian, very pro-Palestine in the Israel-Gaza conflict, and has also was kind of...
Endorsing Trump before the election, right?
And is quite isolationist?
Yeah, kind of like in the vein of the Noam Chomsky version of Western imperialism is a lot of the problems in the world, right?
So there's overlaps, right?
And poor Putin was just backed into a corner.
Exactly, yes.
So you predicted that.
So Douglas Murray, fair to say, holds a lot of different geopolitical opinions on that, right?
Very strong advocate for Israel.
Some might say propaganda.
I think we would all say too strong an advocate for Israel.
And also, as we played in the recent thing, very strongly critical of Putin and people that offer apologetics.
Now, in the Rogan episode that you haven't heard, remarkably, at the start, He specifically calls out Joe at the very start of the interview and directly says, you've been having people on that aren't experts, that are very skewed to one side,
and it's been going on for multiple years.
And they have a 40-minute back and forth.
With Douglas Murray being quite strong and direct at times, and it gets relatively heated, including with...
Rogan and Dave Smith.
It was obviously going to get heated between them, but he calls out Rogan.
Now, Douglas Murray being Douglas Murray, he ends up in a kind of difficult position because he's saying you should have more people with actual expertise who have been to the region, who understand this conflict, at the same time that he's saying experts are consistently wrong about...
He then goes on the lab leak and he talks about...
And they are saying, well, this is inconsistent.
So you're saying...
We should hate it, right?
So he gets in trouble.
But the whole thing for me was that the first part was very cathartic because it's one of the really rare times I've heard someone raise criticism to Joe directly to his face.
The same thing that happened when you were talking about the myocarditis.
And I'm curious for your take as somebody that is like more broadly sympathetic to the heterodox kind of ecosystem.
Why that?
Is so verboten, given all the values that they say, you know, that we are for the marketplace of ideas.
Criticism is okay.
And yet any time it happens, you can see online now, everybody's in an absolute tizzy about saying, you know, Douglas Murray will never be invited back and so on.
And the same thing happens, of course, with Sam Harris, right?
When Sam Harris has the temerity to disagree publicly with any of them, everybody melts down and there are these, you know...
You know, essays being written on what's happened to Sam.
So, yeah, like it is a thing, right?
Yeah, I mean, but people, I mean, firstly, I would not ascribe too much.
I don't know how representative people yelling online are.
Like what's relevant to me as a player in the space rather than like someone who's just typing away on Twitter about what Joe Rogan is doing is the cowardice of the average guest.
Really.
I mean, what's remarkable is not that Douglas and I are willing to talk to Rogan as if he was a friend and colleague.
What's remarkable is that so few people do.
It's incredible the reaction that I got after that exchange with people saying, oh, that was so bright.
And honestly, I remember coming out of the studio and waiting for my Uber to go to the airport.
And doing a mental catalogue of, is any of this going to get me in the shit with my employer?
Is any of this going to blow up?
And I sort of mentally went through the three hours thinking, are there any landmines here that I should be mindful of?
And there were a few that I identified that didn't cause any kind of a ripple.
And that one, I remember, did not come up at all in my brain.
That didn't land, that didn't code for me at the time as being anything.
Remarkable whatsoever.
And then that was the one that became a shitstorm.
I think just because people...
And this may be partly an American thing.
It may just be a cultural difference between Aussies and Americans.
Americans are polite.
Like, Americans don't think they're polite.
They think they're uncouth.
But they're actually super polite.
They think that British people are polite and that Americans are swaggering boobs.
But actually, in which country would you be more likely to find a family sitting down and saying grace before a meal or holding the door open for somebody behind them as they walk through or vomiting in the street?
Brits and Aussies, we're much more likely to interrupt.
We're much more likely to call people out.
And I think there's a certain decorum that has developed in American podcasting where the norms are quite gracious, actually, and especially when a person has power.
I guess they're also starfuckers more than we are, so they're more intimidated by the king in his lair and coming in and not wanting to challenge him in some way.
And maybe it's not a coincidence that Douglas is a Brit and that I'm an Aussie in the sense that...
Yeah, like, who gives a shit?
Aren't we here to have, like, an interesting conversation the way that you would with colleagues and friends in any other context?
Constance Kissinger is doing a good job of adopting that culture as a British person.
I feel like he's, him and Andrew Gold, they're holding up the British side of the sycophantic.
Yeah, I mean, I'm also sometimes, it's interesting that people, you know, in terms of platforming controversial people and, like, why is Dave Smith?
You know, being listened to and shouldn't we be listening to experts and stuff?
I obviously cop the critique of why do I have Douglas Murray on the show?
Why do I have Douglas Murray on the show?
You know, every time I say anything about Israel or Palestine, someone will get into my mentions and say, this coming from the man who platforms the likes of Douglas Murray.
And it's not even worth replying.
Well, what about the Palestinians who I platform?
Like, do you not see it?
But there's something contradictory about thinking that I endorse the views of every person who's on when I have people on who have wildly different views.
Or Antony Lowenstein, who was just on the show, who's the most anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist journalist I can think of.
And sort of balancing the...
I'm basically just interested in people who have interesting ideas, and I'm interested in interrogating why those people have those ideas.
That doesn't mean that I would have an unreconstructed fascist on the show, because those ideas probably wouldn't be very interesting.
Candace would be the
I have a question about that, because this would be my criticism of listening to that with Candace.
I can understand, you know, I also, I even can understand Lex's argument for having Kanye, although there I think there's much bigger, like, you know, mental health possible issues as well, right?
Because Kanye generally seems unhinged.
But there is an aspect which overlaps, and it's like Candace Owens, as you covered in the episode a couple of times when you referenced things before, it's not like she's just on the block and we don't know.
What her perspective is, right?
We know from Candace being in the discourse sphere for many years that she is a conspiracy theorist.
She is a polemical, partisan, very loquacious, but she endorses all manner of conspiracy theories and of a particular stripe, a particular anti-jury stripe more recently.
But she's not, I would say, somebody who demonstrates She's good at talking.
She's good at getting an audience.
So if you talk to her and you also know that she's a polished media person, so she can give answers, right?
It's not the first time she's heard someone say, "Aren't you an extremist?
Aren't you a conspiracy-prone person?"
So isn't it the case that you're basically just...
Giving her like a little bit of a platform and giving her another chance to say the same shit that she's been saying for years.
Well, hopefully not.
Hopefully not, right?
I think there is a craft.
This is where sort of like without wanting to sound like a total wanker, craft does come in to some extent in the sense that it's very, there's no, you're right that there's no point in doing a gotcha.
With a person like Candace because she's so good in an adversarial debating environment that she can own anybody.
But I do think there's something interesting about a person who started out very far left.
She was like, she founded a website that was apparently going to dox anybody who wasn't, you know, a social justice warrior.
And then that fell apart because she didn't understand the internal logic of the social justice movement, and she thought she was being an ally, when in fact she wasn't, and they turned on her.
And so then she started sort of flirting with this, you know, I'm a black person who stands up to black people orthodoxy, and then became an anti-Semite.
And that's a really weird trajectory.
And she has one of the most popular podcasts in the world.
And so I think it's interesting, A, to interrogate what it's like to go on that journey, and then B, to try to expose her in ways that she's not going to find confrontational or that she might not even be bright enough to understand her happening in the conversation.
Like there's a good maxim in journalism, which I think podcasters could do more to appreciate, which is if you want to, if you suspect that your guest is a liar, Or you suspect that your guest is a hypocrite.
Or you suspect that your guest is operating in bad faith or is mistaken.
Don't say to your guest, are you a liar?
Why are you a liar, sir?
That is probably what Lex Friedman is responding to when he's saying that there are bad versions of gotcha questions.
That's just not a very good question.
The best thing you could do if you suspect your guest is a liar...
Is to reveal to the listener that they're lying in some way.
If you think they're a hypocrite, then find a way of constructing a conversation such that the listener will go, huh, that guest sounds like a hypocrite.
Or if you think they're mistaken, have a conversation in which the listener is going to go, surely that guest is mistaken.
So my job with someone like Candice is to get as close as I can to making the accusation so that the listener understands that the accusation is being made.
And to get her to reveal something about herself at the same time as not overtly alienating her so that she just shuts the conversation down or goes into antagonistic mode.
And there is a craft to that which you can only get from tens of thousands of hours of interviewing, I think.
I have a clip, Matt, of Josh interviewing Candace that will maybe be relevant at this point.
So I'll play it for you to hear.
Don't you sort of find what you're looking for?
And if you keep hunting for ways in which The mainstream narrative about everything is corrupt.
It could sort of send you around the bend.
No, I just think that that's not like a small inconsistency.
Whether you were born a man or a woman, I don't know, I feel like that.
But this isn't just the only thing, Candice.
I mean, we could play a bazillion clips or talk about a bazillion different things, whether it's about 9-11 or about Frankists or the Jews or COVID epidemiology or vaccine medicine or online doxing or transgenderism or World War II.
There would be a number of things that we could talk about where it strikes me that...
You know, with the greatest respect, it might be a little bit like the experience you had initially with the social bullying thing where there's a whole ecosystem that has its own internal rules and ways of operating.
You come in unaware of them.
I mean, you said at the beginning of this conversation that you were sort of blindsided by the way that that whole doxing and harassment, Gamergate ecosystem worked.
You know, you proudly...
Call things as you see them, to your credit, because you're powerful and independent-minded, but you're sort of unfamiliar with the soup that you're swimming in, and then the people who are familiar with it point out to you the ways in which you're unfamiliar with it and the reasons why you're wrong,
and you regard them as imposing upon you speech codes and harassment, and then you get to sort of play the victim.
When in actual fact, it's just that you don't really know what you're talking about.
I don't think that's a fair assessment.
I like that.
I feel embarrassed even listening back to that because you can hear me just trying to not say the thing for so long.
I'm like, you're very intelligent and powerful, but also, okay, I'll just say it.
You don't know what you're talking about.
Have you considered that you don't know what you're talking about?
You know the point you made about like the...
Whether or not you confront someone or not, whether it's useful to do that in an interview.
And I take that point because I think that question there is a good illustration of it.
But you know the streamer Destiny?
Yeah.
He had Candice Owens on a bit before, and it was back when he was more inclined to reach across the aisle and try to speak to some people on the hard right.
And he would argue with them, but he would do it politely.
He's since moved away from that because he said that like the way he took it was like he could have a conversation with them, but it was always him extending the kind of nice word or saying, you know, you are a thoughtful person.
And like then they would still endorse all their conspiracies.
They would still do the thing and they would still present like the left constantly as a caricature.
So it was all on his side.
And then before the election.
He had Bacha Ungar Sagan from the Free Press.
This is when he kind of had lost patience with that, right?
She's the opinion editor of Newsweek.
I had her on the show before the election as well, on my show.
And she is probably the most articulate pro-Trump intellectual in journalism.
Yeah, articulate.
But just today, she wrote out a thing about how bad Barack Obama was and all the stuff that they did in 2008, one year before he became there.
President.
He's like, remember when he passed all this legislation in 2008?
But in any case, she went on with destiny and she just before a week before the election or something, she presented herself as I'm a liberal.
I don't know who I'm voting for.
And he he said, you know, you're not like you are.
And he was rude.
Like she.
He basically said, you do know who you're voting for.
You're absolutely voting for Trump.
We are not the same.
We're not on the same team.
And subsequently, as it went on, it's very clear she is, like you said, a very strong advocate for MAGA.
So Destiny could have been more interpersonally receptive there and said, oh yeah, look, we all agree that it is important.
I would say two things about that.
One is, Destiny's playing in a different...
I think of Destiny as being a left-wing version of Ben Shapiro or something, where the argumentation is the point.
I love Destiny's content.
I think he's really interesting, and he's a fascinating debater, but he's really not about, I don't think, teasing out truth.
He's about owning the guests when he disagrees with them.
Secondly, there is a time and a place for...
For going in hard.
When I had Bhatia on my show before the election, I kept asking her about things that, to defend things that she supported in Donald Trump.
And she kept saying, she kept doing this rhetorical move that really irritates me, where she would say, like, if you go and talk to people in, you know, rural Pennsylvania, then what, then they feel betrayed.
And I said, Bhatia, like, and I went in and I was like, at some point you have to give up this shtick about saying, like, The hoity-toity elitist podcaster doesn't understand the little man.
I'm asking you why you support this policy.
I'm not asking you to be a soothsayer who's like a little man whisperer, to whisper to me what the populace is feeling.
I'm having an intellectual conversation with you about tariffs.
Stop telling me what people in middle America think about tariffs and start talking about tariffs.
So yes, you sometimes need to course-correct and go like...
This conversation is not working for me because we're not on an agreed, you know.
But I don't think that this is rocket science if you just take it out of the universe of an interview and put it into the universe of a pub.
I think we all know how to do this interpersonally.
Well, most of us who are good at community, some of us don't.
Some of us just smash a glass and stab the broken glass into someone's face.
But many of us know how to gently navigate and negotiate disagreements with friends and colleagues.
It's just we assume that the moment you turn the microphone on, it's verboten.
I was going to say, I think broadly we totally agree because in the general principle of showing rather than telling.
And it's far better if the people that are listening are coming to the conclusions themselves rather than being lectured to.
So even with that stuff, I mean, we let it slip heaps, but we know what we ought to do, which is, you know, you show the material, show the evidence, make the extremely uncontroversial deductions from that and let people...
Decide for themselves.
I mean, we ultimately often do just, you know, let it rip just for fun.
But that is much stronger than getting up on your high horse and ranting and raving.
And what we've found is a lot of the other people who criticize the same people that we criticize, firstly, they're often doing it for different reasons, usually because they just don't like their politics.
You know, they're the enemy.
We don't like that they're stupid, mainly.
And also, I feel like they're only preaching to the choir.
You know what I mean?
Like, if you've got your little dedicated audience of haters, then they will love to hear you get very strident, but you're not convincing anyone else.
So, yeah, you know, a more laid-back approach generally works.
Something that we've noticed, right, is obviously because of the people that we usually cover, Our audience skews left, right?
Like, obviously.
And Matt and I are academics, you know, left-leaning academics, right?
So that will inevitably attract an audience that skews that way.
But as a result, if we cover Yuval Noah Harari or someone like that, not really any issue.
Also, even Jonathan Haidt, people didn't care that much.
Like us being critical, right?
That's fine.
If we cover...
Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek, who's the most recent one?
Naomi Klein, right?
Like, every time that happens, people...
But, like, this is one of the differences, is that, you know, there's various threads on Reddit, or there's people, Matt and Chris haven't studied Marxist economics.
Like, the thing works, except when they cover people that we like.
But it's the thing that I find is, like, People were talking, you know, when that happens, does that make you not want to cover those kind of people because you're going to get blowback or whatever?
And it might be Matt's personality or character, but when that happens, I'm like, I'm going to do this more.
I'm going to do Gary's economics.
I know it's going to annoy people, but for us, it isn't intended as like, you know...
Like a political podcast?
No, no.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, why does everything have to be politicized?
It is interesting.
I mean, I don't have quite that luxury, I suppose.
I do have to be more mindful of it now a bit because I just find that in my guest selection there are frequently more interesting people who are more willing to say more provocative and unusual things who I'm drawn to.
Getting in the ring with who are on the right than on the left.
I think maybe the social justice ethos of hyper-caution and censoriousness and fear of being pilloried has led people to be much less keen to...
Even in politics, there's an Australian election coming up and the conservative side of the aisle are fairly willing to come on the show.
Governing Labour Party don't seem to be quite so keen.
And I don't know what that split is, but it does make me...
Like, one newspaper called me an edgelord.
I really offended me last year because I was like, it's such an unfair way.
I want to be Helen Lewis.
I don't want to be an edgelord.
You know, I don't want to be...
Are you going to say, Josh, isn't that?
Yes, yes.
Because I sympathise with you, but on the other hand, it could be the case that the more interesting and fun types of views...
I'm just wrong, right?
Like, often the truth is boring, right?
And, you know, this is one thing, you know, just in research and science and stuff, you know, like, you know, we have all the replication crises and stuff like that.
And, you know, if you're a psychologist, you want to get something published.
And it's going to be sexy.
It's going to be amazing.
This changes everything.
You know, it's a bright, sparkling, exciting thing.
And you just read the title and you go, I'm 99% sure this is bullshit.
Before you even look at the methods, right, that you confirm that.
So, I mean, I think, you know, and I think...
Hang on, but you're embedding in that critique an assumption that a wrong, a person who holds a wrong idea is a less...
The conversation with that person is going to be a less constructive, less illuminating conversation than a conversation with someone who's right.
It may be the reverse.
Yeah, I wouldn't go as far as that.
I wouldn't say that's bad to talk to them.
Just pointing out that they could more often.
Crazy people.
Right, but I mean, take the Douglas Murray example, just because, you know, you'd raised him, Chris.
You know, I did a tour in Australia with him because, and we booked it before October 7th.
Some people thought it was in response to October 7th.
But, you know, I think he's interesting.
Like, we also invited Slavo Zizek, who was going to come and then had health problems on a tour, right?
And so, like, you know.
Both of those people, I think, are really interesting.
Anthony Lowenstein also is a really interesting journalist, lived in East Jerusalem, is a fiercely anti-Zionist critic of Israel.
These are interesting people who it's interesting for me to talk to.
And one of the most interesting things about my tour with Douglas was every night him and me arguing in a slightly different way about...
No, it's not like I was sitting there like Lex Friedman, just saying, the floor is yours.
You know, what's New Orleans like?
You know, I was pushing back.
I was like, how can you say that it's in the long-term interest of the Jewish people to have this state hanging around their neck like an albatross?
You know, anyway.
Look, I just think we need to get you back on Rogan and you can talk to him about the massive structures underneath the pyramids.
That's all we were talking about this morning when I met him.
Have you heard the moves?
Two miles into the bedrock.
Josh, this is a question.
I feel this is an uncomfortable question to ask, but you haven't been back on Rogan since...
That interaction.
No, that's true.
But I don't live in the United States anymore.
And I've only been back there once since, at which point I did send him a text.
But, I mean, he's gone from...
When I was first on the show in 2014, he was a big fucking deal.
But he wasn't, like, the most powerful person in media.
I think, and I get asked this sometimes, like, would he have me back on the show or has he blackballed me or banned me?
Um, blacklisted me.
What's blackballed?
What does blackballed mean?
Is that a term?
Is that just my romantic fantasy about Jaroni?
I suspect that if I had a book out that he found interesting and if he still checks the phone, his number, I have.
Then he would have me back on.
I don't think he's petty.
He tweeted after that thing something very nice about me and said he thinks the whole blow-up is silly.
Who knows?
Who knows?
I mean, it's impossible to say.
Douglas Murray with Dave Smith, there was a bit in that.
I mean, this was the thing.
We had this experience already with Douglas Murray when he was talking to Lex because he was very good on pushing back on Ukraine.
He did that thing.
What you're talking about with politeness, that you can't say directly to Lex, Lex, your opinion on this is naive.
The things that you have said, like Russia joining NATO, is ridiculous, right?
So what Douglas does for that interview is, some people have argued that, you know, and this is a naive position, right?
And then Lex is also responding, saying...
But there are people who always call Naive who are actually very smart.
He literally said that they're actually very smart.
Yeah, that will be proved in the long run to be correct and that kind of thing.
But Douglas Murray said to Rogan and Dave Smith when they were talking about the mainstream media and the power that the mainstream media has these experts on.
They're doing all these things and they get things wrong.
And Douglas Murray said to them, you guys have power.
This is power.
You have the biggest podcast.
You have an influential podcast.
You have power now.
And we are often talking about, you know, the alternative media is better than the legacy.
But we have to then admit that what we do makes, you know, I'm starting to talk like, what do we do?
But I was like, yes, yes, that's right.
You know, that's the thing that, like, if you are going to talk...
Every episode, we just covered Chris Williamson and Joe Rogan, and I'm friendly with Chris Williamson, but I've said this to him interpersonally as well, that they were like, the legacy media is dying, and it just spends all its time talking about alternative media,
and we are the kind of new king dicks on the street.
That was the general message.
And I consume a lot of alternative media.
It is rare that I hear an alternative media episode that doesn't mention.
The mainstream media in some part to complain about it or to cover stories from them.
So like they presented it that the mainstream media is parasitic on the alternative media.
But like from my perspective, the alternative media cannot shut up about mainstream media.
Even as it steals stories completely.
Yeah.
I mean, look at the whole, you know, the way that I think one thing that's important to note in this whole conversation about the fate of the legacy media and the rise of new media
is the importance of Investigative journalism from legacy media sources.
There is just no substitute in the new media for the kind of investment that you need to hold politicians accountable by investigating possible corruption or having a foreign bureau who can actually be on the ground.
So investigative journalism, reporting, all that stuff, I think will never be replaced or not anytime soon.
The legacy media excels there.
The concern is that in the opinion analysis, Commentary, panel conversation, interview space, that it has become a bit stale, a bit too talking pointy.
Everyone sort of knows.
You can basically predict if I give you the name of a news outlet and then I give you a particular topic, be that transgender athletes or the Me Too movement or Indigenous rights in Australia or climate change or something like that, you can jot on the back of a napkin in advance what...
Roughly, you're going to hear the kind of talking points that you're going to hear.
And that's what people are rejecting and why they tune into shows like mine, I suppose.
Yeah, I got a question for you, actually, about the ABC and the BBC.
But I just have to mention to, yes, Andrew, a bit.
Like, it's unpleasant, but often I find that when I'm reading an article from a standard newspaper, yeah, it's often like when they're talking about something I know about, like, you know, generally a bit more online, it's kind of embarrassing.
How lazy it is.
And just how so many things have been gotten wrong.
Like one example was a Guardian article I read and it was about AI, right?
AI, you know, the AI wars and, you know, destroying artists and stuff like that.
And, you know, the Hayao Miyazaki quote where he talks about the AI as being, you know, like a threat to human dignity or something like that, right?
And the thing is that, like, the quote was completely taken out of context, which you can...
You can find out.
There's no mention of the fact that Homer is a bit of a freak, frankly.
There's no reason why.
Anyway.
And in general, the summary was just this, by the numbers, basically, anything to do with AI or AI art is bad.
Think of the poor artists.
It was just a boring, conventional take.
So, yeah, there's that.
But I wanted to ask you, So what do you think about the publicly funded outlets like the BBC and the ABC?
Well, I think they're crucial.
I absolutely disagree with people who think that they've lost so much credibility that we should defund them or do away with them.
I think we should reform them and reinvigorate them and fund them properly because I think a lot of the problem is that they've suffered so many funding cuts and so many attacks from the Murdoch press and from others and from unscrupulous politicians that...
They've ended up hunkering down.
I mean, I think this was why my tenure at the ABC left was that there was just a management structure that was extremely risk-averse and was exhausted by, you know, and was just in a mode of hyper-cautiousness.
And so people who were a little bit more spicy like me, you know, triggered the immune system of the organization.
But I think you need to...
I don't think that means that you punish the organization and strip away its funding.
It means that, like, that's part of the problem is that you've been punishing it and stripping away its funding.
Like, I think it needs...
I look at the landscape in the United States and I just think, ugh, like, there but for the grace of God.
I do not want to go there in terms of how divided the media is.
I think everyone having a common source of news, of just information, you know, you can go out and you can talk about all that.
I think there needs to be a much...
I mean, my advice to public broadcasters is reinstitute a firewall between news and opinion.
Clamp down hard on activist journalists, especially younger activist journalists, usually of colour, who keep talking about how we have to share the stories of the lived experiences of people.
No, that's not for news.
That's not for news.
Get back the light on the hill as being some kind of objective.
Journalism in the news pages.
Do away with jargon.
Don't allow yourself...
In the news pages of the ABC, the most obvious example lately is just LGBTQIA plus stuff.
It's so obviously...
In the push for diversity, and it's important to diversify newsrooms, and it's a good thing that they're not all staffed by middle-aged white straight males anymore.
But my argument...
I wrote a piece recently arguing that...
Diversity should be done in a story-agnostic way, so that you should hire a diverse newsroom and then be agnostic about the stories that an editor assigns.
Whereas what's happened is that it's inconceivable that you would have a, like, quote-unquote, queer story written by anyone other than the queer staffers, and it's inconceivable that you would have a story about race written by anyone other than journalists of colour.
And I think that has got to stop.
I think that is just leading.
It's pushing audiences away because so much of the coverage is written in a jargonistic style that doesn't actually raise any of the little niggling concerns that the reader might have if they're not already on the team.
So it actually makes it harder to be critical, for example, of President Trump's executive order on gender because the reporting is written from such an obviously partisan perspective using...
Terms like affirmation care, you know, instead of, I don't know, gender transition or something like that.
It's just not written the way that human beings talk.
It's written the way that activists talk.
And so I think stripping that out of newsrooms, getting newsrooms back to being just about the bread and butter of what happened, and then having actually a much more generous first-person attitude towards commentary, towards what's technically called content, which is a horrible word, but that's what the ABC calls it at least.
My fate was sealed because I was straddling those two worlds where technically I was in the content division because I was hosting a three-hour-a-day talkback radio show, which is not in the news division.
So you're supposed to have more latitude.
But there's an informal assumption that you're going to pull your neck in and toe a certain line of caution.
And I think the muddiness of exactly the rules around that and the uncertainty on the...
Part of a viewer or a listener or a reader about, is what I'm reading or watching supposed to be just the facts, ma 'am?
Or is this also allowed to have some spin?
And if it's allowed to have some spin, then it should be allowed to have tons of spin from all kinds of different directions.
And I think the public broadcaster should be more courageous about allowing a much wider range of views, whether that's against COVID lockdowns or floating ideas about the lab leak or whatever it might be.
It should be a much more rambunctious space in the commentary realm and a much less personal, feels-y kind of activist space in the news realm.
That would be what I would do if I was emperor of the world.
Yeah, that sounds fair.
Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of universities where they've become more corporatised, become more cautious and risk-averse.
And I think I like little, scared little puppies rather than...
Sort of independent institutions with a strong voice.
And I'm actually more keen to clamp down on academics who are inconvenient in terms of the reputation of the university.
I'm a good boy.
I'm a good boy.
Everyone from my university is listening.
I'm very...
Actually, I guess you made me think about...
I guess sometimes the messaging around that the activism stuff can be counterproductive.
There was a thing that came across my feed recently, which was from an activist organization that was pro-gay adoption and parenting.
But the graphic was probably AI generated or something, but it was two extremely muscly, oiled up, shaved guys, like naked, like holding a baby.
They don't look like any gay parents.
Wow.
That's not helpful.
I mean, you haven't seen my partner and I. We can put on a show if you want.
We'll be giving Chris a private dance later on.
I know how you guys are.
I know how it goes.
Like, I thought, you know, the things like...
You know, the Flint Dibble, I don't know if you know him, but like the archaeologist that had the debate with Graham Hancock on Joe Rogan's show.
And it was like a three-hour thing.
He gave a PowerPoint presentation, right?
And I particularly enjoyed it because he made Graham Hancock look like a fool.
But that would not be a format that fits, you know, like a BBC.
I don't know the ABC, but I'm thinking the BBC.
They wouldn't like that format because of, you know, I think Graham Hancock alone, they did give him series before Channel 4. But the...
Thing to me is when people talk about the podcasting space and alternative medium, whatever, they are usually singling out that they mean they don't like Joe Rogan, they don't like Sam Harris, they don't like Tim Pool, the kind of ecosystem there.
But what they do like, if they're critical of those kind of things, is they will like QAnon Anonymous, Conspiratuality, they might like Mary Hassan's channel, and they're not putting them into the same...
I'm not saying they're all of equal, like, levels of, you know, standards or quality, but I mean that the independent media is a big, wide array of things that allows a whole bunch of things that we like, you know, history podcasts or, like, random podcasts like ours,
decoding the gurus or yours, right?
But I don't see why.
I mean, I guess I see from the viewing things as a zero-sum thing, but, like, mightn't me make a podcast about gurus?
We talk for hours about obscure people and play clips of them, right?
And there's an audience for that.
But I've never been like, you know, the mainstream media, they can't do what they're like, and I'm doing.
I'm just like...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, there's a whole shtick, isn't there, of which I've probably been guilty like three or four years ago because I think it needed to be said then, but now it's become a tiresome cliche about elites, you know, sort of not listening and not being responsive.
I think there was a real thing in 2021 where the school closures during COVID in the United States, the kind of punitive attitude of the post-George Floyd moment on race relations, the censoriousness of the trans ideology,
those things really did need to be called out.
And elites did a bad job and the media did a bad job in being...
Upfront and nonsense-free about calling out those things and there was a lack of courage and people were losing their jobs if they did call them out in many cases.
Now, that's just become a trope.
It's just like, you know, the claim that the elites are betraying us and don't know anything has just become...
You're not allowed to talk about this, Josh.
A stupid point that people make usually to feather their own nests or give increased credibility to their independent media sphere.
So I don't bang on.
I mean, regular listeners of mine will notice that I don't bang on about that anymore.
I mean, I don't talk about how elites have lost the trust of the little man or something like that.
I think we need more elites, not less.
And I mean, even, as you say, Chris, the difference in the media landscape is...
Fast in podcasts to stand.
Even the three people who you mentioned, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris and Tim Pool, I mean, could not be more different.
You know, Tim Pool's a fucking idiot.
Joe Rogan is a really curious and talented conversationalist.
And Sam Harris is like a rigorous...
And courageous genius.
And none of them is without their flaws.
But yes, it's a very large landscape.
I think what people are talking about when they're talking about, you know, podcaster Stan as a phenomenon is a particular type of I mean, you guys cover this well on your show, which is like the weird combination of conspiracy mindedness mixed with credulity.
Mixed with skepticism.
Like, you know how the conspiracy theorist is also really credulous about certain things?
And I think that's kind of what we're talking about.
Like a kind of dude, bro, podcaster, dumb guy, smart guy.
Like, what a dumb person thinks a smart person is.
Talking to people in a really uncritical but professorial, kind of contemplative...
Way about bullshit.
Without much pushback.
There's one thing that I meant to mention.
It ties this.
I know we should wrap up soon, Mark, because we're going to go eat nice sushi.
We're going to go eat food that's better than Australian and American food.
Don't send me pictures.
I don't like the pictures.
It's going to be pearls before swine.
He wouldn't even recognize.
He'd be like, this isn't as good as my local Bundaberg.
So, we recently covered Chris Williamson's appearance on Rogan, and one of the things that got to me a lot, I've expressed it quite clearly on the episodes, but was that there was this lamenting about how partisan people had got, how people bond together over hatreds of outgroups,
and how, you know, kind of like Lex, you know, the platitude in this, shouldn't we all be more charitable?
Shouldn't we be?
And within one minute, they had moved to talk about how The Tesla attacks were being funded by USAID and NGOs and academics were corrupted by China to promote communism.
And then they would switch back and be like, yeah, and these guys just demonize our groups and they bond over hatred.
And I was like, you can't do this.
You have to wait at least five minutes.
What I want is someone there.
In that case, it happened to be Douglas Murray.
Not a matter, I'm super fond of, but he, you know, someone that says, hold up, guys, aren't we bonding over hatred of my group?
And it just seems like that is, unfortunately, like, rare.
Yeah, so if you could do that, Josh, if you can insert yourself.
But it's also particularly fatuous because it's true that we are bonding over.
I mean, you guys literally have a show in which you just shit on other people.
But that's fine.
That's fine.
There's a place in the world for that.
And analysis does often involve shitting on other people.
That's why it's analysis and not sycophancy.
Yeah, that's right.
With style.
Anyway, yes, I think the point has been made.
Should we go and eat sushi then?
Oh, the very last thing.
Matt, last time that we had you on, he had this really important question that he wanted to ask.
He wrote it down.
He forgot to ask it.
Matt's shaking his head right now.
No, Matt, I've got it for you.
I know you were talking to me about it on the phone after.
I didn't bring this up to Josh.
I didn't.
Like, wasn't there a kookaburra that you wanted to ask him about?
What?
The mascot from the Olympics.
What?
Why do you remember this?
I'll explain it to you.
I can explain it to you, just on the basis of the word kookaburra.
During the 2000 Olympics, in the 1990s, when I was in high school, I was a voice actor.
And I got cast as one of the mascots in the Sydney Olympic as the voice of one of the mascots in the Sydney Olympic Games.
His name was Ollie.
The kookaburra for the 2000 Olympics as a teenager.
And then they kind of just sidelined.
By the way, you don't get in the suit.
There are dancers dancing in the suit.
And then the voice actors are in the studio pre-recording it.
And the only thing that we, they kind of shied away from the idea of using mascots at all because it was a bit cheesy.
So they didn't really appear.
I don't even think they appeared in the opening ceremony.
But, you know, the biggest thing that we ever did was an album called Sid, Millie, and Ollie, who were the three mascots, sing your favorite Olympic tunes.
And the one country where it sold massively was Japan.
Wow.
The Japanese love Sid Millie and Ollie sing your favorite Olympic tunes because it was a platypus, a kookaburra, and an echidna in front of a cartoon opera house.
Wow.
Maybe the sushi restaurant, I should ask if they have it at the CD.
I remember, I only remember one track which went Olympic Games, Olympic Games, we're having fun at the Olympic Games, Olympic Games, Sydney Olympic Games.
Wow.
Well, what a remarkable career you've had, Josh, to end it on.
Who would have thought that that high school student who was singing as a kookaburra about the Olympic Games would someday go on to be sitting with the likes of you two in the Japanese NBA.
