An Uncomfortable Conversation With Josh Szeps: Media Silos, Disagreeing With Grace, Protecting Liberal Democracy, & What The 2024 Election Was Really About

Josh Szeps is a renowned broadcaster, host of Uncomfortable Conversations, and a former voice of Australia’s public radio who brings discernment to our most difficult dialogues. This conversation explores why genuine dialogue matters in an age of tribal certainties. We discuss the derangement of our information landscape, the erosion of shared truth, and how to navigate today’s most contentious issues with grace and humor. Josh is a rare voice who can untangle complex issues without amplifying division. Our exchange is both timely and necessary. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Aura Frames: Exclusive $35-off Carver Mat 👉AuraFrames.com Use code RICHROLL at checkout to save! Bon Charge: Use code RICHROLL to save 25% OFF 👉 boncharge.com LMNT: Get a FREE Sample Pack with any drink mix purchase👉drinkLMNT.com/RICHROLL Eight Sleep: Use code RICHROLL to get $600 OFF your Pod 4 Ultra purchase when bundled 👉eightsleep.com/richroll Momentous: 20% OFF all of my favorite products 👉livemomentous.com/richroll Roka: Unlock 20% OFF your order with code RICHROLL 👉ROKA.com/RICHROLL Birch: For 20% off ALL mattresses and 2 free eco-rest pillows 👉 BirchLiving.com/richroll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

  Eating well rarely falls apart because of one big failure. It's the daily question that wears you down, like, what am I actually gonna make tonight? What's in the fridge? And it's exactly why we built the Plant Power Meal Planner. It's a personalized, plant-based meal planning program that matches you with recipes based on your taste, your allergies, your cooking skills, and how much time you actually have. You build, through this program, a balanced, nutrient-dense plan for your entire household in a few minutes. Then it generates a grocery list for you with one click that plugs right into our delivery partners. All the recipes in the program are built by dietitians with culinary training. Plus, you get your own food coach to help you problem-solve along the way.

• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Democracy is predicated on us all sharing a truth. You need to be as scrupulous about what you put in your ears as you are about what you, like, put in your mouth. We are clearly, as a civilization, going through an information revolution, as profound as the discovery of fire or the industrial revolution was. The gatekeepers have been bypassed, and you get a splintering of reality.

• 1:30Rich Roll?

  In an age where outrage is currency and division is what's profitable, Josh Sheps has charted a very different course. As the host of Uncomfortable Conversations, he creates space for genuine dialogue in a landscape that's kind of engineered for conflict. He's what you might call a principled provocateur, somebody who challenges both sides of our increasingly polarized culture. Not to inflame, but actually to eliminate.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  I mean, I think the problem is us. In reality, we're ruining this country because we aren't talking to each other. This is why I spend most of my time looking at how we have conversations rather than taking a position about things. Turn the dial down, people.

• 2:13Rich Roll?

  But Josh's most valuable contribution isn't sparking controversy. It's maintaining ethical standards in an attention economy that rewards their abandonment. So while others exploit chaos, Josh is a guy who seeks clarity. And his story is about bridging divides and pursuing truth in an era where both seem increasingly rare. Today, we explore our fractured landscape. We talk about the role of new media in democracy and how we might find our way back to common ground.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Nothing less than the fate of the 21st century hangs on whether or not we can figure out a way to sustain liberal democracies, combat climate chaos, combat misinformation, maintain free speech, all in an environment in which we actually sound like we're talking with each other and collaborating on things instead of taking cheap shots at each other.

• 3:04Rich Roll?

  So how do we solve this problem, Josh?

• 3:13Rich Roll?

  It's great to have you here. I'm a longtime fan, first time caller.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Longtime listener, first time caller.

• 3:19Rich Roll?

  Whatever you say, in radio parlance.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny. When I started hosting radio properly and people would call up and actually say that, I'd be like, oh, people actually say that. Callers actually say that.

• 3:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Longtime listener, first time caller. And I'm like, what do you say to that?

• 3:34Rich Roll?

  I don't know. Yeah, I guess, right? Well, welcome.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 3:37Rich Roll?

  Welcome. You are here in Los Angeles at a very interesting moment in time that I think makes the potential for this conversation all the more interesting as a result. And I think of you as somebody who, maybe I don't agree with all the time, but but somebody who I appreciate for the level of intentionality that you bring to difficult conversations. You're wicked smart and not only are you willing to have these challenging, quote unquote, uncomfortable conversations. That's the Name of your podcast, but to conduct them with grace and wit and humor and intelligence and, and most importantly, like journalistic principles. So how, I mean, how do you think

• 4:20Rich Roll?

  about your approach to what you do?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. That's very kind. I agree with all of that, especially the good bits. The idea is basically that there are things that we have lost the ability to talk honestly about and that we're getting worse and worse at talking in a bullshit-free way with one another, especially across political and cultural divides. I think everyone can sort of sense that. And so uncomfortable conversations is not so much about like creating an uncomfortable atmosphere in the studio. In fact, quite the reverse. You sort of want to have a comfortable sense of comity in order to tease out ideas that might be uncomfortable. So like, the idea is get fascinating people to talk about some of the things that would make people uncomfortable if someone was to express a strident opinion about them

• 5:07Speaker 01

  at work, you know, at work or at a cocktail party or at, at the pub. I think we are so frequently speaking inside echo chambers these days. We're getting battered around by algorithms. You know, obviously, we all know that we are being presented with a vision of the world that is really just a mirror onto our own preconceptions. You know, social media looks like a, looks like a window, as they say, but it's actually a mirror that amplifies your own biases, that reinforces things you already believe, that demonizes things you don't believe. And so I see my role as just sort of trying to help nudge people 10% out of their bubble and talk in ways that are maximally sort of intellectually

• 5:52Speaker 01

  empathic, so to speak, and try to take the most generous version of my opponent's arguments seriously, rather than to caricature them. I mean, I think nothing less than the sort of fate of the 21st century hangs on whether or not we can figure out a way to sustain liberal democracies, combat climate chaos, combat misinformation, maintain free speech, all in an environment in which we actually sound like we're talking with each other and collaborating on things, instead of taking cheap shots at each other.

• 6:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Conversation matters. You know, I really think that it is the tool to kind of, you know, maintain the integrity of not just, you know, liberal democracy, but problem solving in general. But we are in this very deranging kind of media ecosystem where we are in these silos. And yet, we all believe we're the only ones that actually like are seeing outside of our silos. Like, the more siloed we are, the more we believe that we are not siloed, right? Like, and intelligence doesn't seem to have any valence when it comes to that.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  No, that's right. Some of the smartest people-

• 6:58Rich Roll?

  Our ability to kind of objectively perceive our own kind of perceptual limitations is is a very strange kind of human quality.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. And I mean, I and I'm not immune to that, obviously. I mean, obviously, I have my own preconceptions, and I have my own biases. But I think just being, as Aussies say, fair dinkum, which means like a straight shooter about the blind spots that you know you must have, is the key out of this. Like, you don't have to actually understand why a person would believe something that you regard as being beyond the pale, in order to know that they do believe that just as fervently as you believe the things that you do. And in order to sustain a thriving democracy, and in order to grope our way towards, you know, some kind of next phase of civilization, we're all going to have to be communicating with each other in, I mean, we basically, we don't have a choice, right? Like, we're not gonna, we're not

• 7:46Speaker 01

  gonna succeed. Like, so there has to be a way for Elon Musk and AOC to live in the same country, and not spend all of their time just shouting at each other. I mean, you can do that. You can have a world where you basically have a low-grade civil war humming along culturally in the background constantly, and nobody collaborates on anything. And it's a winner-take-all kind of, you know, Machiavellian sort of world, where whoever wins 50.1% of the vote just gets to be as tyrannical as they want to and shits all over the other side. You can do that. But why would you choose that over a world of understanding and collaboration? And like, every time I talk like this, I understand that there'll be a certain cohort

• 8:29Speaker 01

  of people who think, well, that's all very good. But like, I mean, if we'd spoken this way in the 1930s in Germany, then, you know, you would have been collaborating with Nazis. And like, there is no place for hate. And like, you know, what are you just going to allow the transphobes to steamroll everybody on Twitter? Or like, this is a moment of intense peril, Josh. Don't you understand that the fascists in the Trump administration are about to take us back to the 13th century? Listen, at every stage in human history and every place, there have been high stakes, mostly. Maybe not like the 1990s in America, right? But like, in most, at most times, there have been reasons to man the barricades. But you have to be extremely judicious about when you choose to do so. And you have to make sure that in doing so, you're not further inflaming and alienating the other side.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  I mean, one of the great tragedies, I think, of what's happened to the left in the past five or 10 years, as it's taken its eye off the ball. And I regard myself as broadly on the left in terms of economic justice and, you know, remedying disadvantage. But what's happened to the left in taking its eye off the ball of bread and butter sort of working class issues and becoming much more focused on elevating traditionally marginalized groups and turning the volume up on identity, is that I think it has actually inflamed the right. Like, it sees itself as the defender against the far right, but in being faintly ludicrous, it has pushed more people into the arms of the right. And I don't think you'd get a second Trump term if you hadn't had the great awakening,

• 9:58Speaker 01

  for example, although I'm not going to be reductive and say that's the only thing going on. So you're never going to be able to win over the extremes on either side, but to regard those extremes as being fixed in place and implacable, and to regard the middle as being unwinnable, is to be too defeatist. I believe that there's a silent majority of people who are fundamentally reasonable, who, if you came together on some of the most hot button issues, the ones that I touch on uncomfortable conversations all the time, that are tricky to talk about, whether that's immigration, whether that's gender rights, whether that's the Me Too movement, whether that's transgender bathrooms, whether that's, you know, what it's pick your, you know, hot button issue that if someone started talking about it, you know, in a bar, everyone's anuses would tighten up a little bit.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  On all of those issues, there's got to be at least 50% of people who are willing to

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Hear you out if they feel like they're being heard. Like, someone the other day was just talking to me, a friend of mine, who's very into LGBTQIA+ activism. And he was saying, like, I don't care if you think that the extremes of sort of woke social justice activism were a contributing factor to Trump's election. I'm not going to betray my own values. If I believe that a trans girl has a right to use a girl's bathroom, I'm not going to throw her under the bus because you don't want Donald Trump to be elected. And I was like, OK. But you would probably have been able to achieve more for the actual

• 11:31Speaker 01

  reality of trans rights on the ground if we had met people who had reasonable concerns, not the crazy transphobes, the soccer mums in the Midwest who have concerns about whether or not there's going to continue to be a safe space for their cisgendered daughters to be able to go to the bathroom, right? If you just met them and said, I hear you. I understand that you have concerns about this. Let's hash out some kind of thing that suits both sides. Maybe we have a third bathroom, maybe, like, you know, but let's just talk. But do so from a position of respect for other people's concerns and a fundamental willingness to believe in the capacity of conversation to change people's minds and to make progress, and things would be far better. You wouldn't have anti-trans bills being passed in states in this country if there

• 12:16Speaker 01

  hadn't been a hunkering down and an antagonism on both sides and this kind of ratcheting up where it's like a war of attrition and everyone's lobbying, you know, as much arsenal as they possibly can. And that just inflames things. It doesn't lead anywhere good.

• 12:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, politics are reactionary by nature now and all of the, you know, kind of amity that used to kind of exist between parties has been replaced with enmity. And it is a situation of win at all costs. And I'm often left thinking, like, how do you create that bridge back towards a situation in which you're not so focused on winning the battle? At the cost of losing the war and it requires like reaching across the aisle. Like I had Cory Booker here and he was, he gave example after example about how he's tried to work in a bipartisan way to like solve real problems. And that's really the only way that you can get things done.

• 13:14Rich Roll?

  And as somebody who grew, you know, I grew up in Washington and was, you know, around like an inside the Beltway kind of like environment growing up. And you go to a cocktail party that your, you know, your parents' friends or whatever. And there's Republicans and Democrats and like, they're all kind of like, they may have differences of opinion on policy, but they could like, you know, kind of cohere as a collective in a community sense. And that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. I was talking about this with, with a friend recently who, who also grew up in Washington. He's my age and he said, he said, you know, what changed at all? Was when they passed the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978. Because prior to that, airline travel was so expensive

• 13:59Rich Roll?

  that all the representatives, Congress, they all lived in Washington. So they were there having to like be around each other and, you know, all the time. But once airline prices went down, everybody just commuted. So nobody actually lives in Washington anymore.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Very kind of Malcolm Gladwellian, Thomas Friedman like reductionist. Like you actually, let's do a whole podcast episode.

• 14:19Rich Roll?

  They're not actually like hanging out anymore together, right?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  I'm skeptical of single industry, of single, of single explanations for things.

• 14:25Rich Roll?

  I mean, I, I, you know, I decline the temptation to be reductive about this, but I think there is something to be said for that. When you think of like the lack of, of kind of interest in reaching across the aisle in any kind of way.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  So there is that. I mean, there's, there are lots of interesting quirky anecdotal reasons why politicians are awful at the moment. I'm sure that if you spend all your time hanging out at like steak houses in Washington DC with members of, from across the aisle, then you're more likely to collaborate on legislation. But I actually think that's just too reductionist. I think the politicians are fundamentally, I don't blame politicians as much as most people do. I think they're mostly trying to do a good job and they're mostly reactive to public sentiment in a democracy. I mean, I think the problem is us. The problem is actually not them. We spend a lot of time on both sides, on Fox News and MSNBC,

• 15:20Speaker 01

  talking about how the other side's politicians are, you know, trying to ruin this country. In reality, we're ruining this country because we aren't talking to each other in a fearless, like, I don't want to be mistaken for calling for phony amity, right, or papering over differences. The point is to actually talk about the differences in ways that are real and that are fearless. And some of those differences sometimes aren't even across the political aisle. Sometimes those differences are within the political aisle. I mean, look at the civil war that's taken place on the left in the past 10 years over social justice issues and so on. So the struggle for the soul of what it means to be a progressive in America

• 16:05Speaker 01

  has been a kind of a tortured and highly, I think, censorious and judgmental and poorly carried out battle in over the past five or 10 years. It's been, you know, this shift that I was articulating of the left going from a place that cares about, you know, helping working people against the elites to an essentially elite, university-educated set of ideologies about social justice. That was carried out, not really through persuasion. It was carried out through threats. It was carried out through censorship. It was carried out through

• 16:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's a sense that the left is a bunch of scolds.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  A little bit.

• 16:47Rich Roll?

  And there's a condescension. We know what's best. We're going to create these programs that are going to make your life better. The parties have been flipped upside down. So the right sort of, you know, held domain over, you know, kind of moral rectitude for a long time. And they were sort of the scolds around like what you can and can't say or should or shouldn't say.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  I mean, this is one of the great hypocrisies of the right at the moment that as they bang, as Tucker Carlson bangs on about cancel culture. McCarthyism was cancel culture.

• 17:15Rich Roll?

  And then the moral majority.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  The moral majority was cancel culture. The concern about violent video games was cancel culture. The right pioneered cancel culture. The crusades were A cancel culture. What's happened recently is that the left, which was previously the side that cared about smaller liberal ideals and having, you know, the largest tent possible and, you know, letting your freak flag fly a little bit and sort of tolerating a diversity of opinion, has become quite puritanical, quite censorious, quite schoolmarmish, quite finger-waggy. Well, like, there's a theory that in politics, the side that wins is the side that seems to be having fun. And it used to be the case that the left was the side that had fun. If you were a rebellious young person in the 60s, you were on the left. You were at Woodstock, man.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  And now, if you're a rebellious young person, you're probably on a margarine.

• 18:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the UFC.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're probably UFC, right? So what's happened? So the left has gone from being this kind of rebellious, rambunctious place where a whole lot of people could think a lot of crazy ideas, and the right was this very 1950s sort of buttoned-up defender of conservative institutions, to now the left being a defender of elite, small-c conservative institutions, and the right being this bonkers clown car, which frankly, if you're a kind of disenfranchised young person, or someone who feels left behind by the system, seems kind of fun. Seems kind of fun.

• 18:42Rich Roll?

  You're less interested in incremental change. If you're a young male and, you know, perhaps not as well-educated as you might be, and you're looking around and you're not seeing a lot of opportunity, and, you know, a lot of people who are struggling and your job prospects are limited, and you're not hearing anything from the left that is really speaking to addressing those problems, other than this idea that inflation is going down and the job market is improving, but when you look around, you're not really seeing that. And then you have this chaos agent on the other side who wants to blow the whole thing up. There's like a dopamine hit with that. Let's just see what's gonna happen.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Yes, there should be leftist ways of countering that dopamine hit with more dopamine hits. Like, if we were the party of love and sex and, like, money for everybody. And let it rain cash and like a fun version of progressivism, then maybe there'd be dopamine in that. But there's no dopamine in being told that we live in an irredeemably racist society that, you know, you have to watch what you say and be careful what you think because your words can be violence against people who have been traditionally disenfranchised and make sure that you acknowledge the traditional owners of the land before you hold a meeting and make sure that you don't misgender someone. In fact, go further than that. You should be putting pronouns in your email signature now. And like, you can feel somewhat swept

• 20:06Speaker 01

  along by this like, okay, okay, I get it. Like, stop fucking telling me what to do every second of the day. Can I just be an independent human being bumping into other people in a, in a sort of a democratic cacophony? Do I, do we all have to be singing from the same hymn sheet? And yes, ma'am, yeah, this is okay. I'll do it this way. I'll do it that way. There's something very kind of institutionalized about the way that the left has become. And young people don't want that. Nobody really wants that. I mean, people of color don't want that. You know, minorities don't want that.

• 20:36Rich Roll?

  Well, the election was certainly like a reactionary referendum on that.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:39Rich Roll?

  Loud and clear, I think.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  I mean, but I don't know whether we're going to be able to take the, the lesson because I don't know whether our conversational institutions are up to the task, which is kind of brings us back to the purpose of my podcast. So I had a radio show on conventional radio in Australia. It was a daily three hour talkback radio show on the public broadcaster, which in Australia is a lot more popular than NPR is here. It's more like what the BBC is in the UK. And it gave me a front row seat to the challenges that legacy media face in both bringing in a diversity of views, because you don't want it to just be a bunch of straight white males, you know, as it was in the past, but at the same time, not allowing the sort of diversity mandate, the kind of institutionalized HR bureaucratic

• 21:26Speaker 01

  instantiation of diversity to be a way to chill different ideas. And it has become that. I mean, I think we sort of sense that there's a sameness to mainstream media at the moment. There's a, there's been a sort of a compliance with what seemed like edicts issued from, I don't know where. I mean, it's not like it's coming from the top down. It's more like a self reinforcing kind of pool of like, we've all just agreed that we only talk about things in this very respectful way that has been handed down to us by progressive activist groups.

• 21:58Rich Roll?

  Well, it's mirrored on the right also with Sinclair Broadcasting and Fox. And you know, there's a version of that that mimics the other side.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and the right does it worse, and they did it earlier. I mean, it's similar to what I was saying about cancel culture having been invented by the right and then being co-opted by the left. Shamelessly enforcing ideologically partisan news broadcasts was something that Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes perfected. And the left is not as bad. It still doesn't have an equivalent that is as shameless, I don't think, as the misinformation on the right. But we do have to check ourselves a little bit and confess that although we don't operate in as flagrantly and shamelessly a way in terms of like carrying water for our side of politics, we inhabit these kind of group think echo chambers where because we regard

• 22:51Speaker 01

  ourselves as being on the right side of history, we will allied, whether it's different ideas about lockdowns during COVID, different ideas about transgender pediatric treatment for kids, different ideas about the complexion of immigration or the rate of immigration, different ideas about how to integrate multicultural groups into society, different ideas about what should constitute inappropriate behaviour between the sexes at the workplace and whether or not people should be able to date or hit on their colleagues. Like, all of these things, it felt like as those hot button issues came up, people in the legacy media, people in my milieu, all kind of agreed on what the correct side was

• 23:36Speaker 01

  tacitly, and then just sort of continued inhabiting that side. And I think that alienated a lot of people. A lot of people were just like, where is the interesting, unexpected voice here? And that's why I left the legacy media and started doing Uncomfortable Conversations, because there is obviously an appetite from people for the interesting, unexpected angle, where it's like, oh, okay.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  People shouldn't tune into my show and be able to, if they, if they read what the subject is, they should not be able to jot down on a napkin in advance what my take on it is going to be.

• 24:07Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  It's sort of crazy that we've come up, that we live in a world in which if you tell me what you think about climate change, I can with some accuracy predict what you're going to think about corporate tax rates. Like, what the hell do the two have to do with each other? And I can probably predict what you think about transgender bathrooms, and I can probably predict what you think about immigration. It's like we've been handed a checklist of ideas, and we're supposed to hang our brains up at the door, and go down the checklist and go, alright, yeah, okay, so if you're on the right, then you have to believe this, this, this, this, this, and this, and if you're on the left, you have to believe this, this, this, this, and this. By definition, it's almost certain, unless you believe that we live in the first time in, ever in human history anywhere where one side is right about everything.

• 24:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  You're obviously going to be wrong about some things if you agree with everybody else in your thought bubble.

• 24:58Rich Roll?

  Right, and the institutions just don't make room for any of that kind of nuance. Like, I get that, and I think it's at the root of the distrust in legacy media institutions, and why, you know, they're on the decline right now, and, you know, viewership is now fractured across, we were talking about the atomization of, of media, I mean, basically, we have this new media landscape that's quickly becoming the new institution of media, right? And, and within that, obviously, there's a vast spectrum of voices and levels of journalistic integrity. But there is something to be said for the integrity of the fourth estate, and when

• 25:39Rich Roll?

  we have the kind of decline in journalistic trust, like, where does that leave us? You know, when you talk about like, how we're in our silos, and, and, you know, we rarely venture outside of them to have difficult conversations with people who, who don't see the world the same way, within that, like, is a bigger issue, which is, it's degrading not only our ability to communicate, but it's enhancing this idea that, that, like, we live in different realities.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely.

• 26:09Rich Roll?

  Like, if we, if we can't even agree on, like, what's real... Then how are we actually supposed to even have a productive

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:17Rich Roll?

  Conversation within that?

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Totally. And so I'm glad you raised that because there's both a conversational sort of cultural element to this division, which is the one that I've been talking about and that I am best placed to combat in having uncomfortable conversations in a bullshit-free sort of way. But then there's also a structural problem, which is the proliferation of new media and the decline of legacy media, where when you can cherry pick whatever it is that you want to listen to and how you want to consume your news, and when a majority of people get the majority of their news from social media algorithms, whose only mandate is to keep them engaged, you know, and to maximize time on site, and therefore to feed

• 27:01Speaker 01

  them things that they're likeliest to comment on or like or share, then the gatekeepers have been bypassed and you get a splintering of reality. I mean, my criticisms of legacy media and of public broadcasting are made in a spirit of wanting to bolster it and make it sort of infectious and ubiquitous. Like, I really believe that the only, I think public broadcasting in particular is indispensable, and I wish America would invest more in it. I mean, just to articulate for a second the wonky sort of philosophical justification for it, Habermas, who's this German philosopher, came up with the idea of publicly funding

• 27:41Speaker 01

  broadcasting and the news, because his idea was there are two big ways in which the information you receive can be biased. One is, it could be government information, in which case it's obviously biased towards the government. Or if you leave it up to the market and say, okay, free speech, government doesn't get to tell us what to say, then it'll be biased by the corporate incentives that powerful people want it to say, right? Because someone's going to own those news organs, someone's going to want to make money from them, and it's going to be perverted in other ways, you know? I mean, just look at the way that, so much of the media is captured by the pharmaceutical lobby or by the oil industry

• 28:21Speaker 01

  and so on. So his idea was, get the government to fund it, and then build a firewall that prevents the government from having any control over it. So you've carved out this kind of liminal space for a media organization to have total editorial freedom. And also total corporate freedom. It's not going to be influenced by big money. It's not going to be influenced by politics. That was the idea behind the BBC or, you know, the Canadian or Australian or European equivalents. Theoretically, it's the idea behind NPR and PBS, but they're so underfunded that they have to rely on sponsors anyway. And they can't produce content that people really want to watch or listen to on a widespread basis in the United States. But I think we need to like bolster and reinforce

• 29:03Speaker 01

  those places as playgrounds for a whole range of different ideas. Because what's happened in places that have, and also at NPR and PBS here as well. But I was going to say in places that have really powerful public broadcasters, they've become a little bit cute with their own sort of base of mostly white, university educated, social justice types, which means that they're no longer kind of brave, courageous playgrounds where the whole nation can come together and wrestle with ideas in provocative, controversial ways. They've now become ways to decide what's true, decide what's not true, decide who's good, decide who's bad, decide what's hate speech and what's not hate speech. I've created, ruffled a lot of feathers in Australia recently because Australia is trying to figure out what to do with online misinformation.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  And Australia has, for example, a, has appointed an actual, a role in the Australian government to oversee the internet and communications. Elon Musk calls this person-

• 29:59Rich Roll?

  There's something going on in the UK like that as well, I think.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah. So I was recently on a panel show in Australia, which is their big weekly, you know, television show that discusses the news. And I was on with the person who is the, who's in charge of all this stuff. And I was sort of making the free speech case, so to speak. Elon Musk calls this person Australia's censorship commissar, because he's always one with, it's a good turn of phrase. But the idea is try to figure out how to manage the explosion of bullshit online. And how do you do that in a way that doesn't tamp down on people's freedom of speech and doesn't sort of reinterpret every dissident idea as being beyond the pale? This came up when the London riots were on.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  You know, there were race riots in the middle of 2024. And you had some people tweeting things like, you know, civil war is inevitable is something that Elon Musk tweeted. And Douglas Murray was sort of saying, you know, I've been warning about this for years. And as a result, you had London police being encouraged to actually investigate and prosecute some of the people who were saying that they'd been warning about this because it was interpreted that the warning was itself an incitement, right, an incitement to violence. Now, that basically frames the problem of online misinformation and hate speech

• 31:25Speaker 01

  as being one in which it's impossible to warn about controversial things that might come to pass because in the warning of it, you're perceived as being like a participant to it. So then it basically means that there's a thought police who are preventing you from being able to articulate your concerns. I mean, similarly during COVID, it was like, you know, we all saw this sort of ideological crackdown against provocative or left field ideas where initially we were being told that it wasn't airborne and that you didn't need masks, but then, of course, you did need masks. And I think that if there had been a greater tolerance for diversity of viewpoints earlier

• 32:05Speaker 01

  on, you wouldn't have had the subsequent backlash of bullshit that's come about with ivermectin and vaccine skepticism. Now, it may be that there's a trade off there in terms of public health and you need to sort of tell necessary lies at some stages, but that's a job for government. That's not a job for the media. Like, the media and broadcasters should be much more willing to have much more courageous conversations than they are.

• 32:45Rich Roll?

  Right, the idea that public health initiatives should then kind of lord over talking points in the media.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, who are we working for?

• 32:53Rich Roll?

  That really like, that was sort of a very inciting incident in terms of like denigrating trust in the media as a result.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:00Rich Roll?

  You know, you can do a full autopsy on that, which is beyond what, you know, anything I want to do today, but I think that, you know, there was a lot of fear and it was a quickly evolving thing and, you know, science was trying to get their hands on it and public health initiatives and talking points, you know, kind of came down as mandates, but this thing was always shifting and I think it left people with a, you know, a real distaste for being told what to do when it turned out that things might, you know, weren't exactly as they originally were conceived.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  So like one specific example on that, I know more than four people just in my friendship group of 50 people who in America left the left and have, you know, didn't vote for Kamala Harris because of the trauma that they endured opposing school shutdowns during COVID. They are, these are left wing people who felt that schools were being closed too readily and for too long and for speaking out on that were totally pilloried about how they were complicit in killing grandma and that they were, you know, COVID denialists or something because they wanted to see the balance of school closures. I mean, many Americans may not understand just how radical the school closures in some

• 34:19Speaker 01

  American states were by international standards. You know, people think about Australia as being like a poster child for lockdowns. Schools staying open were always a priority in Australia. I mean, there were, it was, there were only a few weeks when schools were closed in most of Australia. Here, you know, it went on for months or years and was that purely because of epidemiology? Or was that also because teachers' unions are powerful and fat 55 year old teachers who might be at high risk of dying from COVID didn't want to go into a classroom even though it would have been in the children's best interest to do so?

• 34:53Rich Roll?

  I think there's a higher level of compliance in Australia also.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:58Rich Roll?

  Like, just the sensibility around these sort of things is very different than it is in America. America is unique in the way it kind of values personal liberty.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 35:09Rich Roll?

  Personal liberty above all. In prioritizing that, we lose sight of the fact that personal liberty can only exist when there is a collective responsibility to the commons. That's what makes personal liberty possible, and that sort of gets lost in that equation.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Well, it's a very narrow conception of personal liberty. So it's personal liberty as defined as freedom from the government imposing a rule on me. It's not personal liberty defined as freedom and capacity to achieve the things I want and to live a flourishing life in general. It's a narrow libertarian, government-oriented conception of liberty. I recently had on my show, Uncomfortable Conversations, an economist who's just written a book about COVID and about Australia's response and the international response. And he's really interesting because he's not carrying water for anybody. He's an economist, so he's very data-oriented. It's sort of like the Freakonomics of the cost-benefit.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  How do you balance people's lives against the monetary cost, against the imposition on people's freedoms? And it's absolutely fascinating. Your American listeners should go back and listen to that episode if they're interested at all in what the hell happened in Australia. Because his basic take was, early on in the pandemic, there was the opportunity to shut Australia's borders completely and launch a massive contact tracing effort to eliminate community spread of the virus altogether. And we did. Within nine weeks of March of 2020, after the borders had been closed, every single person coming into the country was being housed in a quarantine hotel. Those were only returning Australians, obviously. No foreigners were allowed to come in at all from anywhere.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  And everyone stayed at home, huge contact tracing effort, and the virus was quashed. Then you look at the subsequent eighteen months when most of Australia was completely free. I mean, I remember in February of twenty twenty one, I would post it on Instagram of me, I was at Hamilton, you know, sitting with fifteen hundred other people, no social distancing, we're all wearing masks. February of twenty twenty one, the northern hemisphere was, this was Delta, right? No, it was, what was the one before Delta, whatever that was. I mean, it was horrendous. I mean, you know, there was no freedom, there was no freedom of action in most big metropolises in the United States and Europe in February of twenty twenty one, because there was a raging pandemic and nobody is stupid enough

• 37:40Speaker 01

  to want to go out to a bar if they know that they might get really sick for two weeks, that it's not worth it. So, how do you define freedom? I was with fifteen hundred other people watching Hamilton, and the comments on my Instagram were hilarious. I mean, all these Americans going like, this is literally giving me a panic attack, just looking at being, sitting around that, that sheer number of people. Then Australia dropped the ball completely by not getting vaccines quickly enough, but the, the whole illusion of the massive Australian lockdown happened because, once the vaccines were already arriving, then Delta, that was when Delta hit, all of the epidemiological assumptions that public health officials had made, went out the window with the infectiousness of Delta, and suddenly

• 38:22Speaker 01

  it, it escaped into the community. And so then Australia was faced with the question of, like, nobody in Australia has been exposed to this disease yet, so we're basically in the position that the rest of the world was in, in March of twenty twenty.

• 38:35Rich Roll?

  But at that time, if, if you wanted to travel to Australia, you had to quarantine in a hotel for like, two weeks, right, before you could then?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Totally. There was not, well, yeah, but I mean, so what basically happened was, we had to decide, do we do a hard lockdown while we all get vaccinated? And so that's going to be like, you know, a three month long process to vaccinate twenty five million people. And that was the decision that was made. And what was the reason why Fox News was going crazy and why people might have some vague memory of like, you know, wasn't Australia really, really harsh? Is because, long after the horse had bolted from the barn in the northern hemisphere, when everyone sort of thought, well, we just have to get on with our lives again because we're already almost two years into this thing, Australia was just experiencing it for the very first time, and had these very harsh lockdowns while we were all getting vaccinated. But it's more a time shift thing than an actual duration of lockdown thing. And if you actually look at the-

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Quite apart from the fact that we had 90% fewer Covid deaths than the United States did per capita, if you look at just in terms of the actual lockdowns and the duration of school closures and things, it was actually not severe in most of Australia. So I say all of that just to say like, this is an extremely complicated issue. A lot of misconceptions can happen about it, but the best way to sort of figure out what's true about it is to look at the data, to be respectful of other people's ideas, and to arrive at a conclusion that's sort of based on mutual empathy, rather than alienating other people by insisting that if they question school closures, they must be, you know, I don't know, on the side of misinformation or something.

• 40:08Rich Roll?

  Well, I think most people have a perspective on what happened, what went wrong, how it could have been different, and then they sort of seek out information sources that kind of confirm that perspective. And there's plenty of those people out there.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  So true. I was just listening to a podcast about Israel and Gaza, and talk about an issue on which people will find whatever they want to find. Like this Israeli, left-wing Israeli sort of pacifist analyst was saying like, so much of the commentary in the West is someone just Googling Palestinian leadership Nazism. And you know what? You'll get eight pages of results about how Palestinian leaders have said things that were pretty Nazi. And if you Google Israeli leader, you know, Zionism, Judea and Samaria, then you'll find lots of quotes from senior Israelis that make it sound like Israel is never going

• 41:04Speaker 01

  to leave the West Bank and Gaza and has always been a colonial occupying power. You get what you look for. I mean, there is enough stuff out there now. The world is complicated. Like, you know, the reason why the Israelis and the Palestinians have not been able to reach a peace settlement is not because they didn't listen to like Western progressives closely enough, it's because they know a lot more about the situation than Western progressives do. There is no way for us to appreciate the complexity of the world simply by cherry picking sources of information that are going to reinforce our pre-existing prejudices.

• 41:36Rich Roll?

  I had, you've all know Harari in here. Talking about like, you know, the fact that we have all of this information, access to information, this, this, this sort of implicit idea that we had that this would make the world better is, is actually, you know, proven to be false. Like the, the truth, the truth sinks to the bottom when you have that situation. And that creates a real problem in terms of creating a shared sense of reality. And for the average person to just figure out what's real, what's true, what's not true, and to kind of make sense of their own environments.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  I mean, I also love his point that democracy is predicated on us all sharing a truth.

• 42:20Rich Roll?

  Right. If you can't agree upon a shared truth.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:25Rich Roll?

  You cannot, you, you can't cohere as a collective.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  You are no longer a demos if you cannot cohere around a central thesis and a central set of ideas and then debate those ideas with each other in a way that is kind of respectful and, you know, free from partisan nonsense.

• 42:45Rich Roll?

  So how do we solve this problem, Josh?

• 42:49Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? It doesn't seem to be moving in the right direction.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  No.

• 42:54Rich Roll?

  Does it?

• 42:54Speaker 01

  I mean, parallel conundrum to the one that Yuval is pointing out is we invented social media with the objective of creating connection. That was Zuckerberg's original conceit, create connection. It's still Facebook's mantra, Meta's mantra, creating connection. Anytime you create connection, Rich, between two people, you're increasing harmony in the world. You know, we're increasing the, the thriving of human civilization by creating connections. It has turned out to be fatuous nonsense. Creating connection between a Russian troll farm and a low information voter in the Midwest is not a good connection to be

• 43:37Speaker 01

  making. You know, creating connection between a vaccine conspiracy theorist and the mother of a newborn child is not a good connection to be making. There are all kinds of connections that are terrible. Creating connections between terrorists is not, are not good connections to be making. What has ended up happening is because it's very hard to measure good connection, social media companies use proxies for good connections, which is, you know, engagement. As long as you're on the site. You know, writing things, sharing things, liking things, commenting on things, that is by definition in the eyes of the social media companies, a valuable thing. Now, it's valuable in a literal sense to their advertisers and to their bottom line,

• 44:21Speaker 01

  which is why they refuse to see that it might not be valuable in cultural ways. It's very difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it, as the old adage goes. So they seem to be clueless about the possible downsides of this. But we need a new way to measure what connectedness is. Because it's obvious that this tool that was supposedly going to build bridges, this tool that in the 1990s, when the internet was coming about, people thought was going to be a way to democratize information and bring people together. You know, no longer would people be divided by geography, no longer would people be divided by ideology, because we'd all be on this platform together,

• 45:05Speaker 01

  has actually just led to a fracturing and a splintering of all of us. And as we hunker down into our, you know, subcommittees and subgroups and thought silos. How do you break out of that? I mean, on an individual basis, I think people just have to stop having their information diet processed through algorithms. I mean, anything that is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that shows you what it knows that you want to see, or you really, really don't want to see, which is sort of the same thing, is odious and is contrary to, you know, forming a basis for a civilized society. But on a civilizational and like cultural and societal level,

• 45:45Speaker 01

  I think we need a radical reform of the way that social media companies do business. Like, I mean, I think you need to rewrite the algorithms, and you probably have to do that either through regulation or by just an exodus en masse away from social media companies that are using algorithms. There are a lot of interesting people, have a lot of interesting ideas about how you would do this. Like, I was talking to one tech advisor who was saying, "You could measure, for example, instead of just measuring time on site and engagement, you could measure, has a post been engaged with by a collection of people who otherwise have nothing in common?" So you would elevate posts that actually create connection between people who are

• 46:28Speaker 01

  outside, who are from different thought silos and different, you know, echo chambers. There are ways that you could build algorithms that actually enhance genuine communication outside of echo chambers, but we're not doing that because there's no incentive to.

• 46:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's no incentives. It's an incentive problem fundamentally. There's no incentive for any of these, you know, gigantic tech conglomerates to move in that direction short of, short of being forced to through legislation and, and, and regulation. At a minimum, it feels like the algorithm itself should be like an opt-in thing, like you should be able to see your timeline by default, like in the order in which the posts come as opposed to being fed to you.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  I mean, it's amazing, isn't it?

• 47:11Rich Roll?

  That's the way it used to be.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  That's the way it used to be.

• 47:14Rich Roll?

  When everyone talks about like, oh, wasn't it great in the beginning? Well, that's because there wasn't an algorithm making a decision about what you were going to see. You know, the idea that like, we're going to police the algorithms when we don't actually even understand how they work and the people that created them don't really understand how they're making those decisions.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Right, but I'm skeptical of that phony pushback. I'm not saying it's phony from you doing it, but I'm saying there's a lot of disingenuous pushback from the industry about that. Like, how could we possibly trust the government to make up rules about this? The way to do it would be you don't appoint the government to rewrite the algorithm. You would write a law that says that the social media companies have to make data about the algorithms available to independent researchers and you would entrust academics at universities and so on who are digital and tech experts and at human rights organizations and things like that to be able to get under the hood and look at the, look at the algorithm, understand how it's prioritizing things and how it's not prioritizing things. Cause at the moment it's a total black box. We don't know anything. And then you might have, so this is what Australia has been trying to do and, um, you know, with great difficulty because it

• 48:16Speaker 01

  gets great pushback from the tech companies and from free speech activists, um, sometimes rightly so, but it's been trying to force tech companies to reveal to, not to the government, but to independent researchers how the algorithms are working so that those independent researchers can then make advisory recommendations back to the tech companies about ways in which they might enhance the algorithms to be able to combat, you know, whatever it is, misinformation or disinformation or, you know, election interference or whatever it might be. And then if the tech companies don't come up with adequate guidelines, then governments could then as a last resort, governments might be able to step in. But your first resort would not be some government poobah trying to write an algorithm.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Like, there's a long way between the total Wild West that we live in at the moment and a big brother state governing all the tech companies.

• 49:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, over the next four years, that doesn't seem like it's likely on the horizon. We're about to enter an era of deregulation. We have, you know, the Silicon Valley's most powerful elites, you know, kind of lining up.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Not to mention, I mean, not to mention the first lady, Alonia Trump.

• 49:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see that relationship play out. Is there room for two megalomaniacs?

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Do you think that's going to detonate?

• 49:36Rich Roll?

  I don't know. I mean, historically, you know, in this sort of dynamic, a clash would be, you know, sort of predictably imminent because you have two very large personalities who both want to kind of occupy the top spot and both are very interested in how much attention they're getting. So at some point, it feels like there'll be, you know, something that will occur where there might be a conflict. I don't know. I mean, a lot of people are talking about that.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  It's such a shame in a way because there's a missed opportunity to do smart regulation. I mean, I don't even want, I mean, regulation should be a last, last, last resort. You know, I'm deeply skeptical of the capacity of the state to solve problems this complicated.

• 50:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I see that, but I also think the idea that, hey, we're just platforms and we have no culpability for anything that gets published on there isn't the answer either.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  It's bullshit. If you've got an algorithm, like, I did a show at the Melbourne Comedy Festival just before the pandemic, which is a one-man show about, it was called Why Social Media Is Ruining Everything. And I went back and looked at like the genesis of Facebook and what it was when it first went big. Like, Facebook used to be, as you say, a reverse chronological list of all of the posts that people you follow have with no algorithmic tweaking at all. It was just chronological. And there was no like button. You couldn't engage with it in any way. You just looked at it. And when you scrolled to the bottom of the page, it ended.

• 51:07Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, there was no, there was no, Matt, remember when there was no infinite scroll?

• 51:12Speaker 01

  You could get to the end, you could literally finish Facebook. I mean, it sounds weird now, but you could just finish. You'd be like, all right, I've just done Facebook. And then you could put it away. What's entered the picture is, in addition to infinite scroll and the like button and everything, is the algorithm. And once you've got the algorithm, then as far as I'm concerned, you are a publisher because the algorithm is making editorial choices. And you do have some responsibility and culpability for what goes up there. Now, they say, we can't possibly be held responsible for all the things that people are saying on our platforms. I mean, there are billions and billions of things that are said. Well, okay. But imagine we lived in a world in which McDonald's was not liable for each of its franchise outlets around the world. And people were occasionally getting sick from McDonald's hamburgers.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  And you said, we really need to regulate this company. And McDonald's said, how can we possibly regulate? You know how many burgers are made by McDonald's franchises every single day? We don't even own these franchises. We just license the golden arches to them and give them the recipe. Like, we can't be held responsible for what McDonald's in regional Sri Lanka is doing. And that would sound perfectly plausible. But you know what? They make absolutely fucking sure that every single burger is good to go. Nobody's getting sick from a McDonald's hamburger.

• 52:24Rich Roll?

  But it's an easier test. Is this burger safe for human consumption versus the, you know, the infinite gray that is like content moderation? Like, that sounds like the worst job in the world. Can you imagine?

• 52:36Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a harder logistical thing to do to make sure that a hamburger in regional Sri Lanka is good because, I mean, that's actually, that exists on the ground out there in the real world and needs someone to check it. Everything that is in cyberspace is presumably checkable by people who live anywhere. I understand what you're saying about it being a gray area, but this is why we shouldn't be really playing in the space of like, what exactly is hate speech and what is incitement? I'm talking about clear bullshit lies, like, you know, just start with the really obvious stuff of like, oh, the election isn't being held this Tuesday, it's actually next week. Or your polling place is not actually here, it's actually here. Can we all agree that there's no utility, there's no free speech utility,

• 53:19Speaker 01

  in a platform maximizing an algorithm amplifying a demonstrably false claim that interferes with an election?

• 53:28Rich Roll?

  We could agree on that. The pushback would be, well, that's a slippery slope, Josh. If you're going to say that, then what about like, you know, the next like, well, the polling place is opening an hour later, or, you know, there's a lot of traffic on the way to the polling place. Or, you know, you start to very quickly get into the gray areas.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  You do, and that's why it needs to be treated carefully and judiciously. But this comes back to a little bit about what I was saying about the American conception of freedom being this very narrow anti-government conception, rather than a positive conception of what best amplifies the flourishing of human beings in a society. Yes, the downside is that there's a risk that edge cases will be difficult to adjudicate, and that in some instances, someone who was making an honest claim about there being a lot of traffic, or made an honest mistake about the day or place of the election, might have their post de-amplified. Remember, we're not talking about locking anyone up or criminalizing speech. That would be against the Constitution of the United States, anyway. We're talking about whether an algorithm amplifies

• 54:31Speaker 01

  or demotes particular content, right? And whether a social media company has a duty to at least reveal the ways in which its algorithms are amplifying or demoting such content. The downside of allowing a free-for-all in which Elon Musk is able to ramp up and amplify election misinformation, just as an example. Or if you love Elon Musk and you want me to take another example, we could say that Blue Sky, you know, chooses to demote some true thing that the right is saying. The downside is that you end up living in a society which is completely chaotic and riven by a low-grade civil war, where nobody can collaborate on anything or communicate on anything or solve any major problems,

• 55:15Speaker 01

  because nobody sees eye to eye on anything, and we're in a bunch of warring factions in perpetuity. That's not great either.

• 55:23Rich Roll?

  I feel like that's where we're at right now.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  And that's, well, it's gonna get worse, isn't it? I mean, with artificial intelligence. So unless we are willing to tolerate and push back on, to some degree, the American narrow conception of freedom as being just sort of freedom from regulation of any kind from the government, we're not going to be able to turn up the dial on the freedom of informed citizens to be able to collaborate on things that lead to a flourishing life.

• 55:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we're just at the starting gate. Like, if we're already staring down, you know, the highway of fractured reality, introducing AI and the rapid advancement of these tools that are gonna just, you know, exponentially derange ourselves, you know, in terms of like what's real and what isn't, like, it's, it gets dystopic pretty quickly.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  What's your long-term feeling about AI? Is it dystopic, or utopian, or neither?

• 56:18Rich Roll?

  It's tricky. You sit with Yuval Noah Harari, and it looks pretty dystopic pretty quickly. And, and that's while acknowledging that, you know, it's gonna solve a lot of problems and be very helpful, and we already use it here in the studio for a variety of purposes that's been very helpful. But it's almost like it's, that's like luring us in, you know? Like, it's sort of like hypnotizing us into, and acclimating us to it in a way that maybe is blinding us to where it's leading us. I think there are real concerns, and I think that the rapid advancement, like the gestalt with which we're kind of like developing these tools, doesn't have an adequate amount

• 57:00Rich Roll?

  of kind of cautionary research going into it. We give lip service to like, hey, we gotta slow this down, we need to really think about the ramifications, but like, are we really doing that? I know there's smart people that are, but it seems like there's too much money, too much excitement, too much possibility and potential. It's only going to accelerate. But then I go to a conference with the Google people, and it's like, I wouldn't say it's Pollyanna, but like, you hear a whole different version of like... How amazing these tools are and the limitlessness of like the problems that they can solve. So it's not one thing or the other, but I think there's real existential concerns that we need to, you know, spend some time really thinking about.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, parking the existential stuff for a moment because I completely agree that even if there's only a 2% chance that there could be an alignment problem and that the the systems could become clever enough and shrewd enough to sort of have their own priorities that differ slightly from our own and that that could create a total shitstorm someday, once that once, you know, general artificial intelligence is just better at everything than a human brain is. So obviously, even if that's a very, very, very unlikely scenario, it's so bad that you would want to be investing a lot more than we are in figuring out how to avoid it. In the medium term, I mean, my sense is that in the short term, it's going to be a total shitstorm and in the medium term, it's going to be

• 58:27Speaker 01

  amazing. And then in the long term, I don't know. Like, in the medium term, like, everyone's going to have a personal assistant and an accountant and like an attorney and a PR person, you know, and a shopping assistant, you know, and a travel agent just around us all the time. I mean, you know, it's amazing to me that we will listen back on this in 10 or 15 years and be astounded that the two of us right now live in a world that is not populated by creatures that we talk to and interact with all the time who do stuff for us. Like, we don't really live in a world. We have sort of Siri, which is

• 59:11Speaker 01

  no good. But like, before we know it, we're going to be living in a world with creatures all over the place. I mean, artificial creature, I don't mean physical things, but we'll walk into a room and we'll instantly it'll be normal to have a conversation with the room or with some device on our body that assists us in.

• 59:32Rich Roll?

  I don't think that's that far away.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Not at all. I mean, that's what's amazing about it. In fact, what's amazing about it Is when you look back in time, like so, you know, the ubiquity of the smartphone right now, right, the idea that we're just carrying around in our pocket a supercomputer that gives us directions to everywhere and, you know, has email and social media on it. If you think back in time, so when nine eleven happened, just to sort of set the timeframe here, if you're of a certain age, nine eleven is still in your, you know, adult memory. The iPod had not been released. The iPod had not been released on nine eleven. The first generation, big white brick that only contained like five songs on it and

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  weighed, you know, fifty pounds, had not been released with the dial, with the scroll dial. That was released in October of two thousand and one, a month after nine eleven.

• 1:00:29Rich Roll?

  That is crazy to think about.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  So then fast forward through, like, if you think about, like, for example, the election of Barack Obama, two thousand and eight, I think YouTube, I don't want to get my dates mixed up here, but something big happened in two thousand and seven, which I think was YouTube.

• 1:00:44Rich Roll?

  The iPhone.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  The iPhone, was the iPhone two thousand and seven.

• 1:00:46Rich Roll?

  I think the first iPhone was two thousand and seven.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Right, so Obama was considered to be hip because he was the first president who had a BlackBerry. In other words, any kind of personal device, right?

• 1:00:55Rich Roll?

  And he also was the first, first presidential candidate to fundraise like in, in low-dollar amounts from the populace by leveraging the internet.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  Right, because they could on the internet for the first time. So just think about the fact that like when we were walking around in around the era of, you know, nine eleven and the Iraq war, nobody had smartphones in their pockets, really. They certainly didn't have, you know, iPhones. You know, as recently as when I was in my teens, if you made plans with somebody to go to the movies and they were going to be late.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  You just stood there outside the movie theater and you just you just gazed at passersby or looked at the clouds because there was no way to spy on what strange what arguments strangers were having with each other on the other side of the world, which is what we do now. You know, we open up Twitter or Instagram or and infect our brain with we contaminate it with all of this shit. There is something to be said for the era where you just had to stand there and watch the clouds when your friend was late to the movies. And hey, if your friend had been otherwise occupied and couldn't couldn't make it at all, you just had to pick a time at which you would just wander off. Yeah, like there was no, there was no calling your friend because he didn't have a mobile phone.

• 1:02:08Rich Roll?

  It's always shocking to like, tell stories like that to my kids.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:02:12Rich Roll?

  You did what?

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  I know. Or like, you know, my kids.

• 1:02:14Rich Roll?

  We had a party line at my house when I was a kid. Do you know what that is?

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:02:20Rich Roll?

  So obviously before the internet, before cell phones, just a landline telephone hanging on the wall in the kitchen. But when you picked it up, like we to like lower our our monthly phone bill, we had what was called a party line, which meant that we shared a phone line with some other stranger. So occasionally you'd pick up the phone to make a phone call and you there's somebody having a conversation that you don't know with somebody else.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Was this during the?

• 1:02:49Rich Roll?

  And you would have to hang up and wait until they were done in order to make a phone call.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  Rich, were you born during the Hoover administration?

• 1:02:55Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  What is this?

• 1:02:57Rich Roll?

  Anyway.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  But yeah, so.

• 1:03:00Rich Roll?

  And now, I mean, that's like, it's so innocent and it's like the acceleration of these changes are only continuing to like ramp up exponentially.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  That's right. And I mean, that's sort of my point about the about, you know, reminding people how recent a lot of this stuff is. I've got a bunch of other examples I could go through, but I don't want to get the dates wrong. But like the arrival of YouTube and then the arrival of Twitter and then the arrival of Facebook. These things all happened really recently, actually. And it won't be long before we look back on today as being an incredible moment when we were all just starting to understand AI or like to talk about AI. And we are clearly as a civilization, going through an information revolution as profound as the discovery of fire or the industrial revolution was. We are currently in terms of our relationship to social media, to algorithms, to artificial intelligence, even to the internet writ large. We are currently.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  A baby giraffe covered in placental goo with wobbly legs trying to figure out how to stand up. And the story of our lifetimes is going to be a story of how well we managed to stand up, which means how well we managed to get on top of the information revolution and rule it rather than having it rule us.

• 1:04:27Rich Roll?

  Switching gears, much has been said over the past couple of weeks about this election being the podcast election.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:04:35Rich Roll?

  I'm interested in your perception of that. Is that a reductive take? Is there truth in that?

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, both. Yes, it's reductive and it's also true. It's interesting, isn't it? I do think there is something incredibly powerful about a candidate being able to sit down with a person who a lot of people have a really strong parasocial relationship with, which means a kind of, you know, a feeling of friendship, even if they don't know the person directly like Joe Rogan, and hear that candidate riff with the person. I wish that Kamala Harris had done podcasts like Joe Rogan's. I think it could have given her an opportunity to seem more human to a bunch of people who, most of whom probably wouldn't have voted for her, but some of whom would have. It's a gigantic audience.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  And it seems like the reason why she didn't was because some of her aides, who are super social justice progressives, felt that we shouldn't be platforming someone as full of hate as Joe Rogan, which is just ridiculous, just contributes to the echo chamber-ification of everything and the group think, the thought silos, you're never going to reach people unless you actually talk to them in the places which they listen to. But at the same time, I struggle a lot with the responsibility of people to hold power to account. So Joe does his show as he does his show. I like Joe. I've done Joe's show seven times. Joe has been incredibly supportive to me. And at the same time, his show is just a place where he shoots the breeze with people.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  And it cannot be expected that someone like him is going to carry on his shoulders the weight of doing all of the journalistic pushback against a candidate like Donald Trump. So we can't allow candidates to get away with only doing podcasts and only talking to, you know, and thinking that it's a substitute for holding them to account for their lies, to simply have them have an amicable conversation for three hours with a bunch of podcasters. Like, so I'm sort of conflicted. Like, I'd like all of the candidates to do the podcasts. But I am wary that that could become a substitute for actual journalism.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  And I think it's totally outrageous that both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump were so unwilling to engage with legacy media. I mean, the Harris campaign also was just allergic to putting a foot wrong and to any kind of misstep. It was so cautious. It reminded me of many of the problems with the legacy media that I saw firsthand, where there's this hypercautiousness and risk aversion, where you don't want to get criticised for anything. Your main priority is making sure that someone doesn't say something nasty about you in the Murdoch press or on Fox News. You're just paranoid about something about saying or doing anything that could go viral on social media in a negative way. And as a result, you're so clammed up and tight-arsed about everything that you don't seem like a real person.

• 1:07:30Rich Roll?

  Right. And you, yeah, you come off like the prototypical politician that alienates people. I mean, I think, like, look, so my friends Colin and Samir did a little video about this. And they shared some stats that I thought were really interesting. Trump did 14 podcasts that resulted in 124 million views on YouTube. Harris did five podcasts, which garnered 4 million views. I think she did Charlamagne the God, she did Call Her Daddy, and Bernae Brown, right? So she's self-selecting shows with audiences where she's fundamentally kind of speaking mostly to the people who are already on her side.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:08:10Rich Roll?

  Trump, you know, kind of did the, the, the more bro-y podcasts out there. Harris being somebody who is more concerned about control, I think, like Trump's shooting from the hip, hip and say what you want about him, but like, he's able to go on those shows and talk as long as those people want to talk. And there's something, you know, human about that, that I think connected with people. And I think the Harris campaign, to its detriment, by trying to control the media outlets, their strategy was out of a playbook from a bygone era that doesn't really appreciate or respect the tectonic shifts that have occurred in media.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:08:49Rich Roll?

  And I think if you're a young male between 18 and 28, no matter what your interests are, if you're into video games, or you're into UFC, or you're into whatever, right? Like, there's a podcast for you. And that's where those people are tuning in for their, not just their hobbies, but like, kind of their information. And if you're not showing up there, like, you're missing an opportunity. And I think the kind of attitude that, that, oh, you know, we're not going to go on this show because of what this person represents, is a missed opportunity to, you know, speak to the people who are on the other side, right? Like, you know, you might be able to connect with if you take advantage of that opportunity. So I think it was, it was a misstep. And I think it is reductive to say, like, the election

• 1:09:33Rich Roll?

  came down to podcasts, but I think they played a part. And I think there's a lot that the left, you know, can learn about, you know, kind of in reviewing how that all went down to figure out a different way forward next time.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  Totally. It also just shows how much more group thinky the left has become than the sort of messy heterodox Rogan sphere, in the sense that, like, Kamala Harris going on Brene Fox and Brown, I mean, seriously, like, it's like, the number of people who listen to-

• 1:10:06Rich Roll?

  She's just speaking to her base.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. How many, you know, people who listen to Brene Brown were not already going to vote for Kamala Harris? Whereas, ask the reverse question of Joe Rogan. How many people who listen to Joe Rogan were not already going to vote for Donald Trump? A lot. Probably a lot. A lot of people would listen to Joe Rogan who were not convinced that they were going to vote for Donald Trump. So you can actually reach, there's actually greater upside for Kamala Harris to go on Joe Rogan than for Donald Trump to go on Brene Brown, for example, because the left in some ways is more censorious and closed-minded. And the right at the moment is this kind of chaotic cacophony of a fairly messy alliance of different factions.

• 1:10:47Rich Roll?

  Bernie got castigated for going on Rogan for the reasons you just articulated, and has been very vocal recently about like how that is such a mistake. And I think he's right. And I think his kind of statement in the wake of the election is pretty spot-on and apropos. This idea that like, hey, if you abandon like the working class, like don't be surprised if they abandon you, which is kind of like what happened. And so I think there's a lot to be learned by really paying attention to how the media has shifted in such a fundamental way. I don't know that like Podcastlandia is mainstream media. It's a different thing altogether. It's not really alternative media at that very high level.

• 1:11:32Rich Roll?

  It's like its own thing. And I think it brings up like an interesting conversation around the ethics of like bringing a presidential candidate onto your podcast. Certainly, anybody should be able to talk to whoever they want. But if you are going to make that decision and sit down across from somebody who is campaigning to be the leader of the free world, I think you have a responsibility to kind of come prepared and to not, you know, Sam Harris recently talked about this, like launder their talking points. You have to be able to push back a little bit.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  I mean, it depends who you are, doesn't it?

• 1:12:08Rich Roll?

  But I mean, I think it, yes and no. I think you can't just say like, hey, don't listen to me. Like, you know, I'm not somebody you should pay attention to when you have an audience at scale. Like, I think that does come with some level of responsibility.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  At what scale?

• 1:12:24Rich Roll?

  I don't know.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  I mean, how, again, how do you measure that? It's a slippery slope thing, right? I mean, Joe Rogan got famous by shooting the breeze with people and talking about whatever he wants to. That's his bag. My bag is if I have someone on who is spinning bullshit, I will hold them to account. My brand is I will not let you get away with bullshit in my studio. That's not Rogan's brand. Rogan's brand is not, I won't let you get away with bullshit in my studio. It's, feed me the bullshit, let's play with the bullshit, let's inspect the bullshit. Hey, next week, we'll have someone spinning a different kind of bullshit, and maybe that'll contradict this kind of bullshit, right? Like, if that works, at what point do we start requiring him to behave in ways that are not the way that he naturally behaves, in order to comport with our ideas about

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  what democracy should be, should be? Like, I think it's a bit unfair. Like, he had Trump on, he invited Kamala Harris, she declined, they know the game. Like, we as a society and as a culture should not be outsourcing the interrogation of our political candidates to podcasts like Joe Rogan. But I don't think it's incumbent on Joe Rogan to necessarily conduct an interview in any particular way. Like, he's just doing his thing. And yes, if he then tomorrow stands up and goes, everybody should listen to me because X, Y, Z, then I'm gonna go, well, hang on a second.

• 1:13:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, fair enough, fair enough. I think you just, you can't have it both ways. You can't say, this is the podcast election, or podcast is now the way that you campaign, or whatever, and also say, like, hey, I'm just a knucklehead, like, don't pay attention to me. And I'm not saying that, I'm not saying that Joe is saying that.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 1:14:00Rich Roll?

  I'm just saying, to the extent that somebody is, you know, trying to speak out of both sides of their mouth with that.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think people are. I mean, I think they're two different people. You know, I think Rogan would say, don't listen to me, I mean, I just have conversations with people. Like, if you wanna get a feel for the vibe of the person, then come to my show. If you want investigative journalism, then go and watch 60 Minutes. But other people will then say that, like, I mean, you would have to be making the argument that it's a good thing that it was the podcast election, which I'm not even sure that a lot of people are doing. I mean, the other interesting thing, before we leave that subject, is that the cautiousness of the democratic machine, the party machine, that is, the Kamala Harris machine, is illustrative of how many taboos now exist on the left. Because...

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  What happened when Trump first came to power was he disregarded a whole bunch of shibboleths on the right and he just steamrolled through a bunch of transgressions. I mean, saying that, you know, John McCain was not a war hero, saying that the Iraq war was a mistake, saying that, you know, so many things that he said that Republicans thought would just make him unelectable. You cannot say that in the Republican Party. He could, and he did, and he now owns the Republican Party, and there's almost nothing that he can say, there's almost no taboo that he can't transgress that will bring him down. Contrast that with Kamala Harris's, you know, acceptance that if she went on a show

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  like Joe Rogan, she would have to have a little machine in her brain that is constantly going, how are you going to respond to this without pissing off your base? How are you going to say this without alienating, you know, this particular activist group? How are you going to say this without, you know, being, you know, thrown under the bus by XYZ partisan lobby? There are just many, many more speech strictures around what you can say on the left, which is leading, and becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop, right? Where candidates and spokespeople for the left and elite organs of the left, like in the media, will become increasingly cautious, and then that caution leads to a tightening of the rules around what can be said, because there are fewer people showing, you know,

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  making an example and trying to do what I do, which is like, hey, look, you actually can talk about this stuff and the sky doesn't fall. You know, the sky doesn't fall if you say, like, do we need to have gay pride anymore? Will there come a time at which we don't need to be so proud of being gay, at which it's actually better for the flourishing of young queer people if you turn the volume down instead of up on their sexual identity? Like, I wrote a piece about that and it wasn't allowed to be published because I was right, I was working for the, for the public broadcaster and they regarded that as being, you know, taking too controversial a stance on a public issue. I think if we were more willing to model how you can have those, you can broach those uncomfortable topics, and if we were more willing to model it in a rational and sane

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  way, rather than yielding that territory to the Donald Trumps of the world, you know, if the only people who transgress taboos are maniacs, then you're going to end up with maniacs in power, because people like taboos being transgressed and they don't like being bossed around and told what to do. My position is, let's all transgress taboos a little more, let's all be a bit more courageous and a little bit, let's try to tread on some more eggshells and trigger some more tripwires conversationally. And let's just show that the sky doesn't fall and then maybe some of the people who feel like the conversation has been a bit too puckered and a bit too sort of constrained recently, will come around to our side and will join the team, rather than feeling like

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  the only people who speak in a bullshit-free way are Donald Trump and, you know, the far right. It's a bit like, you know, David Frum, the Republican strategist, used to have a line about immigration, which was, if the only people who are willing to like enforce the border are fascists, then people will vote for fascists to enforce the border.

• 1:17:56Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Right? And similarly, if the only people who sound like they're making sense about some of the most controversial issues, or who are even addressing or acknowledging some of the most controversial issues, like the rate of illegal immigration, the failure at the border, you know, the challenge of balancing women's rights with transgender rights, the question of whether or not race sort of should be a trump card in hiring practices, you know, if the only people who are willing to really get their hands dirty wrestling with those things and ignoring the things that they're supposed to say are right-wing assholes, then people will give space for right-wing assholes and they might even vote for right-wing assholes. So like, you know, at the risk of drawing too long a bow from Kamala Harris's reluctance

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  to go on Joe Rogan, I think it's indicative of this broader thing. Like, you gotta step into the ring, baby, like, you gotta bring it. You gotta start talking about stuff and not giving a shit that some lobbyist is gonna send you an angry email, or that someone's gonna write nasty tweets about you. Do you think that that...

• 1:18:58Rich Roll?

  Is possible like a candidate could arise who just doesn't get puckered about like anything, you know, and so is unthreatened by like any kind of question and has the facility to kind of gracefully navigate like through all of those landmines that like kind of keep people in abeyance right now? Or does the, does, you know, everybody at the DNC need to get fired and they need to kind of build, rebuild like the left from the ground up?

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know, I don't know enough about the structure of Democratic Party politics in the United States to be able to comment about the DNC because I don't know how much power it can exert, but I, my suspicion is that this is a cultural problem, not a party, political one, not an institutional one. In other words, that what is being responded to are cultural cues like MSNBC hosts getting angry and, you know, some progressive activist lobby getting angry and, you know, Americans for a kinder future for Latinx, you know, people getting angry or whatever organization it might be. And I can feel it. What I, my prediction about the Trump administration is that people aren't going to like it and

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  he's not going to be a popular president and his base is gonna, you know, well, his base might stay with him, but the, the additional 20% of people who, of Americans who voted for him just to give him a shot because they were dissatisfied with how expensive everything is and, you know, thought the Biden Harris administration wasn't great, that those people are going to be totally dissatisfied in a couple of years. And there's then a space in, in Democrat, on the Democratic side of things for somebody who seizes this moment and can smell in the air that we've reached, that we're a bit fed up with social justice orthodoxies and with the censoriousness and self righteousness of the left and can have someone who is transgressive.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  I mean, think about how alien it would have seemed in 2003 to contemplate the election of Barack Obama in 2008, just five years later, like when the Democratic establishment was all like, oh, I'm John Kerry, I'm, I'm a war hero and like, it's just very. It was a party of Al Gore and John Kerry. And then in comes this magnetic revolutionary, once in a lifetime candidate, and changes everything. I think we could be ripe for another one of those.

• 1:21:16Rich Roll?

  I think in the meantime, it's important for everybody to keep your eye on the climate and not get caught up in the weather.

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:21:25Rich Roll?

  Because it's just, every day is going to be insanity. There's going to be, we're going to be fed all sorts of things to react to. And I think if we get caught up in that kind of like cycle, then we're sort of allowing ourselves to play into a narrative that we don't have to, that isn't really helping anybody.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  This is one of the things I love, Rich, about not having a daily talkback radio show anymore, is that I actually don't have to follow what's I don't have to know what's going on today. And I think that's actually healthy. I think there's a principle in psychology that a lot of your mental health is related to the metric of where you're focusing your locus of attention. So if you think about spheres of control, for example, at the center of a bullseye, there'll be the things that you have total control over. And then there's a set of concentric rings outside of that of decreasing control.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  And at the very outer edge are things that you have no control over, which might be presidential politics in the United States, or climate change or something like that, or very, very limited control. And where you spend most of your time, in which of those rings you spend most of your time, is closely correlated to your mental health. And if you can basically retain focus on the spheres that are within your control, if you can focus on your little garden patch, your neighborhood, being a good person. And funnily enough, this is an ethos that transcends right and left, because you hear Jordan Peterson banging on about how, "You gotta start by making your bed." It's like, get yourself, get your own house in order before you start talking about how you're going to solve the world.

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  Like, having agency is important. And to wrap that idea with regard to your attitude towards the news. I have come to the conclusion that if something is not newsworthy enough to make it into the Weekend New York Times or The Economist magazine, you didn't need to know about it in the first place.

• 1:23:31Rich Roll?

  That bullseye is very narrow. There are very few things that we actually can exert control over, and yet we spend most of our lives, you know, kind of future-tripping on, when it comes to politics especially, like future-tripping on things that haven't happened yet. And it's not that, you know, as sort of, you know, part of citizenship is being concerned about things that are happening in the world and how it's going, and it's our responsibility to express our opinions and vote and do all of that, but fundamentally, like, to occupy that space of always thinking about, like, this bad thing that might happen is obviously, you know...

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, also, just to say that it's our responsibility, I think this can be a misleading thing. I think people can get a bit too caught up in thinking that it's their responsibility to care about things. I think it's your responsibility to know when you can, when you are capable of taking action, and it's your responsibility to then adjudicate whether or not that action is likely to yield results. So think about, just to exit, because there's so much partisanship in America, I don't want to make it about Trump, let's just take Gaza as like a less controversial and more obvious example. I, in Australia, am routinely hounded and pilloried for being a kind of a, like, oh, both sides are type, oh, I'm actually just sort of probably an apologist for the Israeli colonial settler state because I try to sort of both sides it.

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  In reality, I'm the grandson of Holocaust survivors, I have not traditionally been a Zionist, I've been deeply concerned about Palestinian cause all my life, I firmly believe that you can't keep people rotting in open-air refugee camps in perpetuity and expect that to be sustainable, and I think it's criminal that Israel has not found a way to relinquish the territories from 1967. All that being said, it's fucking complicated, and I've spent many podcasts trying to articulate to people that this is a wretched situation, and the precise ways in which it is wretched, and the precise ways in which we might be able to progress beyond it.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  That is an unpopular and uncomfortable position to be in because it lacks the visceral frisson of moral clarity that so many people have around this issue. So many of my colleagues in Australia, where the climate is pretty different from in the United States, where I think the centre of gravity is much more pro-Palestinian, much more like Western Europe. Most of my colleagues think this is a clear-cut case of genocide, and when you see an evil being perpetrated, you have a responsibility. This is coming back to your point about having a responsibility to be an informed citizen. You have a responsibility to speak out. If you are not posting about the crimes of the bloodthirsty Zionist state on a regular

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  basis, you are a moral coward and you should be ashamed of yourself. So, the first question is, is this an issue about which I can take action? Well, yes, I can take action. I can post lots of bloody pictures of dead Gazan children, and I can telegraph my outrage on social media. The second question then is, is that action likely to yield positive results? Well, no. That's not likely to yield positive results. It's not even likely to yield any greater sympathy for your cause, because it's likely to inflame a backlash among people who might have been winnable if you'd sounded more reasonable and less strident. So, yes, be informed to the extent that the information and your being informed is going

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  to be able to contribute to an action that you can take, but even then, question whether or not the action is worth taking. Because a lot of the action that we're taking is performative, virtue signaling, useless...

• 1:27:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's not really action.

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  It's not, exactly.

• 1:27:14Rich Roll?

  It's certainly not productive. And I would agree with that by saying that, like, what you do have control over and what you should take responsibility for is exercising discernment with your relationship with your information stream, right? So, that is something you can control and perhaps restrict. And I think disabusing yourself of this idea that you have to have an opinion on everything, for the very point that you just made, which is that most of... These things are incredibly complicated.

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:45Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:46Rich Roll?

  And the incentives or their, you know, the temptation is to like have a hot take or like to to have like total conviction or clarity around issues that are are indeed very complicated.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:59Rich Roll?

  And that's why they're so intractable and persist, right?

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:28:02Rich Roll?

  That's part of the reason. But I think that raises the larger kind of issue of of our distrust, not only in media and institutions, but also of like quote unquote experts, right?

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:28:17Rich Roll?

  Like, oh, well, there's experts who've devoted their entire life to understanding this particular issue or who are, you know, at the head of some, you know, regulatory agency and they're making decisions that impact us downstream. But we have such a distrust of these people, we were convinced they're, they don't know what they're doing or they're corrupt or what have you. I think that in turn makes people feel like the onus is now on them or that they have to, you know, find these alternative sources that they deem to be more trustworthy. And I think the denigration of our kind of perspective on expertise in general, you know, is also, you know, part of this this problem that if we don't figure out a way

• 1:29:00Rich Roll?

  to solve, you know, sort of threatens like our ability to kind of cohere as a as a society because we need, we need institutions that we can trust and we need experts that we can rely upon, like we need that.

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:29:11Rich Roll?

  We can't be a healthy society without those things.

• 1:29:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've gotten quite reflective about this lately, about, I suppose I feel a bit of self recrimination and guilt about maybe playing into the climate of distrust for institutions. Like if I have one regret about the past five years, it would be that

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  I suppose my sort of community, to call it that, of heterodox people, who eight years ago might have had quite a lot in common. Bret Weinstein, Eric Weinstein, Douglas Murray, Majid Nawaz, Sam Harris. You can sort of list the Barry Weiss, the kind of... What did they call them? What was the name of the club that Eric came up with? The Intellectual Dark Web.

• 1:30:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the IDW. That was Eric's thing, right?

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is... In some respects, I'm on the periphery of that group. And it has led to a lot of soul searching, I've got to say, over the past 12 months. Because that, well, three years, really. That group has splintered in crazy ways. And I feel uncomfortable having potentially contributed in some way to its corrosive, sort of snarky attack on institutions that are actually vital. Which is not to say that the institutions aren't to blame for much of this. The group think in legacy media organizations,

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  the false certainty of public health officials, the smug lying of government officials and parties about whether that's about Joe Biden's cognitive decline or about the importance of mask-wearing or vaccines on community transmission of COVID, or whatever it is you might want to pick. They've definitely contributed to the loss of trust in them. But Sam Harris kindly invited me to co-host two episodes of his podcast throughout 2024. And one of them was about the institutions of knowledge

• 1:31:26Speaker 01

  and about how we come to gain and filter what is true and what is not true through meticulously established institutions of knowledge, basically cultural institutions of knowledge. So this is in the scientific... In science, in the university academy and in newsrooms and journalism. We have established like long, difficult systems of truth filtering. So in a newsroom, I think... Anyone who thinks they can get their news from podcasts and from like Mike Cernovich on Twitter or something does not understand how a professional newsroom works. Like, I've worked in a newsroom, and if you're at the New York Times, or the Wall Street

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  Journal, or the Washington Post, and you have a really strong belief that something has happened, you know, you will find all the sources you want, and you will go to your editor, and they will say, "You don't have it yet. You need a third source on this particular fact." And you'll be like, "But it's obvious that it's true!" And they'll go, "You don't have it yet, not up to the standards of this organization." And sometimes mistakes will be made, and then those mistakes will be corrected, and it's part of the iterative process of, you know, an organization like that to self-correct. But it is so many light years away from the kind of heedless speculation that gets thrown

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  out on podcasts and on social media, where conspiracy theorists and cranks can just kind of hear something and repeat it. You know, they'll just be like, "Oh, you know, apparently, you know, COVID doesn't affect, you know, Jews and Chinese people the same way that it does other people." And all of a sudden, that becomes like a known factoid, like a talking point that is circulating among podcasters-istan.

• 1:33:16Rich Roll?

  And the more outrageous, the more quickly it travels.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:21Rich Roll?

  And the more difficult it is to, you know, kind of disentangle.

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  And so I think the correct solution, in addition to being critical of, like, institutions, is to say to people, "They're still much, much better than the alternative." And you need to be as scrupulous about what you put in your ears as you are about what you, like, put in your mouth. Like, a lot of people, you know, would be careful about not eating shit all the time. But then, when they turn on the radio or podcasts, they don't really have a good way of determining what is true and what is not, because they're quite comfortable just listening to people spitball ideas with dissident experts. And the spitballing becomes a kind of a layer of...

• 1:34:04Speaker 01

  Of a sort of morass of semi bullshit that occupies the same space in their consciousness as facts do. So on the one hand, you've got these institutions of knowledge, science, the academy, journalism, which is really where we should be getting all of our information from and where we should be getting our data from, so that we can then go off and have conversations in podcaster stand. But instead, we're getting information from podcaster stand as well, because we've had our trust eroded so much in those institutions. And I think it's been it's been an error of the sort of heterodox group of people to throw so many stones at the failings of elite institutions that they've bred a distrust that is now coming back to bite us in the arse.

• 1:34:47Rich Roll?

  And there's a fair amount of that distrust that's earned. And and so it's understandable. But when when you look at that heterodox fear and the various kind of faces and personalities that populated it at that time, how do you account for kind of the the fracturing of it? Because you've seen so many of these people like go kind of pretty far off the reservation in terms of their relationship with reality.

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  No, I mean, as I said to Sam Harris when he was on Uncomfortable Conversations most recently, you know, are you just a bad judge of character?

• 1:35:20Rich Roll?

  So many of of those people that he associated himself with have become, you know, fairly lunatic.

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  I mean, to his great credit, he's the one man standing, isn't he? Like, he is the titan who has managed to retain his head amidst the madness. So amidst the swirling kind of chaos of people just spinning off the centrifuge left and right and going into crazy town, I think Sam has maintained an even keel and has remained, you know, a person of of reason and integrity through it all.

• 1:35:50Rich Roll?

  How did he respond to that question?

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  Uh, I think he dodged it a little bit by sort of saying, well, it depends on who you're talking about. Like, you know, I didn't, a lot of these people I didn't have very close connections with. If you're talking about like Candace Owens, I barely knew her, you know, it was it was more about like trying to parse the exact details of it rather than respond to the to the characterological assassination that I was attempting. But I mean, I love Sam and the and, you know, I don't I don't hold that he can't possibly have known what he didn't know, and nor could I. You could write a really interesting, you know, psychology thesis about how, you know, take, at the risk of getting myself into trouble, take Marjorie as an example. I don't know if people know who Marjorie Nairwaz, but. This is a good case study, I think, of how you go into crazy town.

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  This is a person of great integrity originally because he was locked up as a, for like Islamist, for being part of an Islamist group in Egypt. So he was locked up by the military regime in Egypt and like rotted in a prison along with a bunch of other Islamists and jihadists. And Amnesty International got him out and he went to the UK. He's a Brit, an Arab Muslim Brit, and he founded a nonprofit to de-radicalize young British Muslims. I mean, you know, what better thing could you possibly think of doing? And he and Sam Harris wrote a book together about Islam. And, you know, Majid was really doing, fighting the good fight.

• 1:37:18Speaker 01

  And then COVID came and the lockdowns happened and vaccine, you know, punishments for not getting vaccinated happened. And he had a radio show in the UK on LBC and he started getting increasingly, he started diverging increasingly from public health information about the vaccines and started talking about vaccine, you know, started peddling vaccine misinformation and he got fired. He now has, I believe, a case against them for unfair dismissal. And subsequently on his, you know, podcast and independent show, he's become convinced, seemingly, that the whole thing was just a great con, essentially.

• 1:38:01Speaker 01

  And it was a way for governments to start testing our resilience, our capacity to stand up for ourselves and that, you know, they, it's a way for sort of Chinese Communist Party style control to be forced on the rest of the free world by, yeah, testing our willingness to go along with insane rules. You can imagine, from a psychological point of view, how that is a logical, psychological response when your priors have been baked in by being thrown in jail by a military regime for your Islamist beliefs, right?

• 1:38:40Rich Roll?

  Sure. If you've suffered a trauma and you've been persecuted, it's not a leap towards viewing the world through a lens of threat that leads to becoming... If that gets fed and incentivized, it's not a surprise that that person can become conspiracy adult.

• 1:39:04Speaker 01

  That's right. And so it seems perfectly logical, psychologically to him, to be maximally skeptical of power. And of course you would be if power once rounded you up for your ideas and threw you in prison. Similarly, with Bret Weinstein, the experience of being excommunicated from the left and hounded by social justice warriors for taking a principled stance at Evergreen College, and I won't go into all the details of that, but some people will know it and you can listen to many a podcast with him if you don't, has created in him, I think, a righteous psychological need to be the defiant truth speaker, right?

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  That institutions of power are out to silence you, they're out to hide the truth, they're out to beglib, they're out to enforce their own orthodoxies, that it's a game of struggling against dogmas and hunting for every crack in the artifice. You know, a conspiracy theorist is very good at knowing a lot about a subject because they're constantly picking apart all of the inconsistencies in the official story. But it can be deranging. And you can understand why psychologically they feel motivated to do it because they get their sense of meaning and self-validation from being the brave dissident who is standing up to the all-powerful machine that is trying to hoodwink you.

• 1:40:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  If that's your worldview.

• 1:40:36Rich Roll?

  The validation piece is important, though, because when you have that heuristic, like you're seeing the world through that lens of, you know, that is becoming increasingly conspiratorial by nature as a result of your past experiences, some of which are understandable. And then you share that in a public forum and you're celebrated and publicly validated for that. And then you're financially incentivized, you're going to move kind of towards that audience that has, you know, like a great appetite for that type of story because those sort of stories that get to the heart of like this problem that you have that's answered

• 1:41:20Rich Roll?

  through, you know, these other people who don't have your best interests at heart. Like, it's not your fault. Like, what is happening to you is not your fault. There's a cabal of evildoers over here who got together and created this thing that is this great mystery that I'm now unveiling for you.

• 1:41:35Speaker 01

  It's a neat story, isn't it?

• 1:41:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  I mean, it puts you as the protagonist of a hero's tale.

• 1:41:38Rich Roll?

  And it's also very entertaining and engaging, right? What that leads to is not only an increased kind of sense of conspiracism writ large, but also kind of this galaxy brain mentality where now you're suddenly an expert on everything and then all the world's issues get filtered through that heuristic and kind of get spit out the other side, you know, for that audience to feed that appetite. And suddenly, whether you're an evolutionary biologist or you're a psychologist, all of your opinions on immigration, on vaccines, on, you know, authoritarianism, on Gaza, they all have equal valence, right?

• 1:42:23Rich Roll?

  And I think this is like deranging not just the heterodox sphere, but like all kinds of people on social media right now. And it's very problematic, which goes back to, you know, the discernment that we all have to have about...

• 1:42:38Speaker 01

  The people and the sources of information that we're exposing ourselves to. Yeah, why does everyone have to have an opinion about everything? It's such bullshit. Like, we're all like on social media. You shouldn't. It's like, what do you think? I'm not qualified to say anything about most things. Yeah, so, me too. It's like, it's like we're all, it's like we're all little kings who are like reading from a decree about like, if you want to know what I, I hereby, I hereby announce that Josh Szeps's position on, you know, Gaza is that killing babies is bad. Oh, how morally courageous of me to have this moral insight. This is why I spend most of my time looking at how we have conversations rather than taking a position about things. I mean, my interest is in analyzing what's working and not working about the way that we have conversations about things.

• 1:43:20Speaker 01

  Because you're totally right that once you get into the game of this is what's true and this is what's not true. And have you ever noticed that like what they told you about this wasn't really true? Therefore, can you, you should be suspicious of this over here as, as well. It can be somewhat maddening. And as you say, it's like there's almost a kind of a god complex thing where I've got this galaxy brain that is going to provide you with all of the answers that, that you need about everything. It's sort of a template or a heuristic that you can apply to, to anything at that point. And that's a dangerous place to, to be. I mean, it's, when I say that it's psychologically understandable that these people have, have ended up there, that's not to excuse it, you know, because they could have done otherwise.

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  And if they're so smart, why didn't they? Well, in some ways geniuses are ill-equipped at life. Like, I sometimes get into arguments with people who object to me saying that someone like Eric Weinstein or James Lindsay is a genius. Because they're like, well, they're just, they're crackpots who are taking potshots at things that, you know, are, sound conspiratorial. No, they literally, I believe, have genius brains, a lot of these people. They're incredibly high IQ. But as a result, sometimes they see connections between things that don't exist. It's like the, it's the, you know, you break into the serial killer's lair and there are like the strings on pins,

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  like all over the wall. Right. It's like. And when it's motivated by a persecution complex, like, it's not going to go well. And then amplified by what you were just saying earlier about like the sort of audience capture phenomenon of like, when I do more episodes about X, then I do get more listeners and I get more. Money, like I, sometimes people frame that as a very cynical interpretation, which is not the way that I interpret it. I don't think that people, I don't think that podcasters who've gone to crazy town are insincerely pretending to believe the things that they believe because it makes them more money. What I think happens is that we all could potentially believe a whole range of different things, and we all have different levels

• 1:45:33Speaker 01

  of belief in a whole range of different things, some about which we're more certain and some less. And, you know, people ask me about this, about Tucker Carlson, people like that as well. If you flipped all of the incentives so that the money that they made was exactly reversed, would they hold exactly the same beliefs as they currently do? Well, no, of course they wouldn't, and nor would any of us. So it's a sort of a bit unfair. It's like, you start to produce things and you see a kind of a feedback loop happen, and that encourages you to think in more particular ways about stuff. It's like, people sometimes say as an analogy, do I believe that Donald Trump believes all of the lies that he says? I think that's the wrong question. It's not about belief

• 1:46:16Speaker 01

  in truth or falsehood for him, it's about what works. It's true if it gets the outcome that he wants. Like, it's sort of irrelevant, it's immaterial to him whether or not there were actually the correct, you know, what number of ballots were cast where in 2020. The point is that the 2020 election was stolen is true to him because it gets him to win the 2024 election. So by definition, it's true. That is so depressing. It's like this kind of hidden, it's like a sort of solipsistic kind of like version of truth. Like, truth is functional, right? It's this idea that, I don't, I don't think he rationalizes it this way, I don't think he thinks about it this way, but I

• 1:46:57Speaker 01

  think he just instinctively believes that as a winning organism, you win by doing the things that enable you to win, and therefore the truth is the stuff that gets you towards that goal. And similarly, when you talk about podcasters, Dan, and like how how audience capture works, I think it's not that people are saying things they don't believe because they'll get more listeners if they do. It's that there is an incentive to tweak their content slightly towards the things that will get more listeners. And that then makes them believe that a little bit more. And it's functionally, I mean, it works. It works. And I have to be incredibly mindful of this because the last thing in the world I want

• 1:47:41Speaker 01

  to do is pander to my audience because unlike most podcasts, I think my audience actually comes because they don't want to be pandered to. And they know that, as you said at the top of the show, very kindly, even if they disagree with me, they're going to hear me be straight about something and call it as it is. And they're going to enjoy watching my brain kind of wrestle through how to be honest about it. But I mean, I'm interested also in how you deal with that. Like authenticity and quality of content is for you and me the primary thing. And then you just hope that the audience will come along for the ride.

• 1:48:14Rich Roll?

  I mean, I try not to make decisions about who I invite on the show based upon like whether they're going to, you know, work on YouTube or garner a bunch of attention. Like, I really try hard to make that decision based upon the people that I'm interested in, that I think have something interesting to say, and somebody who I'm well suited to have that conversation with, right? And I'm sure, you know, like everybody, I have my biases and I'm sure somebody who's listening or watching this could probably has a whole opinion about how I'm doing that wrong or whatever. But I definitely don't invite people on just because like, oh, this will be, I'm not courting controversy. You know, I actually try to avoid it.

• 1:48:59Rich Roll?

  And I'm not making like platforming decisions based upon, you know, how many. How many, like, how large their audience is or something like that? Or how outrageous their opinion is. Like, this is not what I do.

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  No, that's right. And there's also, I mean, there is, one of the risks of audience capture is that you end up stuck in a rut that then doesn't go anywhere when the winds change and people no longer want what you're selling. Like, if you, you hitch your wagon, in other words, so much, like, you started out as a fruit seller, and then everyone was like, "Oh, we love the oranges, we love the oranges." Then you end up only selling oranges, and then when they don't want oranges anymore, you don't have any apples to sell them. And it's like-

• 1:49:34Rich Roll?

  I mean, I think authenticity, integrity, like, you know, just I'm playing a long game. Like, I don't get caught up in the ups and downs of what's happening weekly or monthly on the show. It's just like, I've been doing this for a long time, and in order for it to stay interesting to me, like, I just have to trust my curiosity and make decisions based upon that and what feels ethically correct to me.

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  Yes, and I think that comes through. I think that, I mean, that's why I like your show, and I think that's why a lot of people resonate with you, is that there's a sense that underneath your intellect and curiosity, there's a heart and there's an integrity, where a lot of these guys, and sometimes even me, are sort of brains in a vat, like, floating in blobosphere, you know, talking very rationally about things, but not deeply connecting with people, which is, I think, something that you've got. I mean, on, on the question of getting stuck in a rut as a result of some of the audience capture, I think that's starting to happen now with the anti-woke shtick.

• 1:50:32Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. But now they're the establishment.

• 1:50:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, that's right.

• 1:50:36Rich Roll?

  So, so what are they gonna decry?

• 1:50:37Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, they'll, you know, they'll, Fox News is gonna keep, Tucker Carlson will keep banging on about, you know, some, he'll find some viral video of some transgender teacher, you know, reading from a gay book to kids and say that it's the end of the world. But the, the sort of, the sense that there was something important and transgressive about calling out the censoriousness of the left. I think is now a pretty old hat.

• 1:51:02Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:51:02Speaker 01

  And that was sort of part of my thing as well. I mean, that was, you know, my initial um success was being a person of the left who was talking about the ways in which the left was being too scolding and too obsessed about identity politics and insufficiently attentive to the needs of working people and was losing an entire generation, an entire class of people. In fact, just as an interesting aside on that, it pans out, it plays out really interesting in, in really interesting ways in America specifically, this failure of the left because of the question of race here. There is such a tight correlation between poverty in America and race, I mean, such

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  a disproportionate overrepresentation of black Americans, that what often codes for Americans as racism can appear to an outsider like actually class inequality, that, you know, if you're, I mean, if you enter a store and someone comes shuffling in and they smell of urine and, you know, you're worried that they might steal something, then your reaction to that person can seem quite bigoted and prejudiced, you might be the shopkeeper in this example, might seem quite bigoted and prejudiced and judgmental because of the sheer class, you know, class difference there, the sheer inequality that is staring you in the face. Like, you're dealing with a statistical reality that this person is probably not going to

• 1:52:32Speaker 01

  be a profitable shopper. They're probably going to cause trouble. And so your reaction to that, because of the persistent existence of this underclass of people in, in America that is not as bad in other Western countries, which have better social safety nets, your reaction to that person is now in America coded through a racial lens because the likelihood that that person's black is higher than the likelihood that any random person coming in is black. And so I think part of the whole social justice movement in America, one of the problems with it has been that it has sort of distracted Americans from the real game, which I think is inequality and class.

• 1:53:11Rich Roll?

  The ever-growing socio-economic.

• 1:53:14Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, this persistent underclass of people, you know, the sheer difficulty of escaping being truly working class in America in comparison to in other places, the lack of mobility between the working poor and the economic elites in America is the tragic story that the left ought to be focusing on. What can you do to create greater flourishing and advantage for people who are just mired in really low-paid shitty jobs? And, you know, might be single moms with lots of kids working four jobs or whatever. And because it's become this thing about America is an irredeemably racist society that is a white supremacist society, and we need to change the narrative with the 1619 project

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  and wake up white people to understand that the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's all felt a bit hectoring and divisive, where you probably could have made much more practical gains that improved the lives of more people if you coded it as like, we are Americans, we believe in egalitarianism, we believe in equality, we believe in being the land of opportunity, so let's lift up everyone who's disadvantaged. And then, sort of by accident, most of those people, or a disproportionate number of those people, would be people of color. I think strategically, that would have been a better way of, you know, of redressing injustice than focusing relentlessly on picking out which groups deserve to be referred to in particular ways and who gets to be elevated and not.

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  There's something a little bit sort of authoritarian about that way of doing things.

• 1:54:46Rich Roll?

  I mean, I think it's important that the DNC and the Democratic leaders have a long, hard look in the mirror and really take account for like, what is... Not connecting with working class families and people across America and figure out like how they're gonna, how they're gonna become the party of those people again. Like, that's their mandate. And somehow, that's become, you know, kind of deconstructed and taken over by the right. And until they figure that out, like, I think they're in real peril.

• 1:55:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:55:20Rich Roll?

  But I think the point, under a Trump administration, like, what is your forecast for what then becomes, like, what is transgressive, then? Given the fact that, like, that kind of transgressive narrative became like an attention magnet, and, and now we're in kind of a new world, what are all those people gonna do? Like, what does that look like?

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:42Rich Roll?

  Like, you know, what is, what is that, what is the transgressive heterodox narrative become?

• 1:55:46Speaker 01

  Well, I mean-

• 1:55:46Rich Roll?

  When that whole world has now, you know, has been institutionalized in power?

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  Yes. It's a great question. And fortunately, I have an answer to it, to it, which is that the transgressive thing is gonna be to be reasonable.

• 1:55:59Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:56:01Speaker 01

  That's what I'm banking on.

• 1:56:02Rich Roll?

  How dare you?

• 1:56:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean, I really do. I think that, you know-

• 1:56:05Rich Roll?

  To be nuanced and reasonable.

• 1:56:07Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. I mean, some people have said to me, like, well, what's gonna happen to your show if it's, if your whole point of uncomfortable conversations was to have uncomfortable conversations about taboos? And now you've got an administration coming into power in the United States that intentionally transgresses all of those taboos. And even there's a hot conversation on the left about whether or not identity politics and wokeness and cancel culture drove us into a ditch. And so this soul searching is now starting to happen in the open. We're starting to understand that maybe we should be a little bit less judgmental of each other on some of these hot button cultural issues like trans issues and immigration and so on, identity politics. You know, what will happen to your podcast, Josh? And I have no concerns whatsoever-

• 1:56:52Rich Roll?

  I'm not worried about that.

• 1:56:54Speaker 01

  Because the point was never to attack a particular target. The point of my show is to model how to have rational conversations, often with adversaries, that grope our way towards some kind of superior understanding of each other and superior way of talking to each other that makes people feel a bit more heard and that makes people feel like the other side is not quite as crazy as they thought that it was. And to show that we don't have to be antagonistic towards each other when we when we disagree and that at the same time, we can really call each other out on our bullshit. And, you know, I mean, I made headlines in like, I don't know if you remember my last, the last time I was on Joe Rogan's show, but it was during the, it was just after the pandemic.

• 1:57:35Speaker 01

  It was in early 2022, I think. And it was when Joe was going through his whole Spotify thing and he was being accused of missing vaccine misinformation and all this sort of stuff. And I was on his show and he said something untrue about vaccines. He was talking about vaccines causing myocarditis, which is true. They do, uh, in some cases. And I said, yeah, but you know that the, the incidence of myocarditis from getting a fully fledged case of COVID is worse than the incidence of myocarditis from the vaccine. And he was like, I don't think that's true. Jamie looked it up. It turned out to be true. And then of course, all this, and Joe and I had no beef about that. Like CNN goes off on like, you know, Rogan owned on his own show by Australian journalists and all this, like,

• 1:58:19Speaker 01

  you know, trying to beat up that this, that, you know, he was kind of slapped down. Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. The two friends couldn't, I said, I just said to him, like, I think that's bullshit, Joe, or something like that. And people were like, oh, oh my goodness, someone dared to go into the Rogan lair and actually speak up to the big, I'm like, he's not a fucking giant behind a curtain. He's not the Wizard of Oz. He's like, you know, what are you talking about? We're two mates. We're having a conversation. We disagree about this particular thing. We call each other out on it. If you do that at the pub all the time, don't you? I remember when that happened. You do. So what will become transgressive is just opening up the space to have more conversations like that for us all to relax our assholes a little bit and breathe out

• 1:59:04Speaker 01

  a bit and go, you know what? We're grownups. Crazy orange man in charge right now. That's fine. That'll be what it'll be. And, you know, the left is going through its, its thing. There will be no shortage of topics on left and right for me to point out where we're failing ourselves in the conversation and model better ways of having that conversation. Like if anything, that is a more pressing need now. than it was four years ago. And I'm frankly liberated to be sort of unshackled from the expectation that I'm always going to be banging on about how ridiculous the woke left is. Because at the end of the day, it's not that interesting. The excesses of the social justice movement were a bit silly, and tragic, I think, for the political fortunes

• 1:59:49Speaker 01

  of the left. But they're more interesting things to talk about. You know, I'd rather talk to you, I'd rather talk about artificial intelligence, rather talk about how we solve the big problems, you know, and how we all get along with each other. There's only so much banging on about, you know, wokesters that I want to do.

• 2:00:03Rich Roll?

  Well, I mean, everything that has needed to be said about it has been said, right? At this point. And it's time to move on, I think, to greener pastures. And I'm not worried about you finding fertile terrain to invest your skill set.

• 2:00:19Speaker 01

  I'd love to be put out of a job by everyone becoming super rational.

• 2:00:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't think that's gonna happen. But maybe we can kind of end this with some insight or or advice that you could share about like the art and skill of engaging in uncomfortable conversations. Because I think right now, like, a lot of people are like, whether it's in their workplace, or in the homes, or with extended family, like, there is a rift. And within a lot of households, like, you know, people are on different sides of the, you know, kind of political spectrum. And there's a lot of kind of, you know, chilly silence at the moment, and fear around like, how to, how to, you know, kind of broach conversation and do it in a healthy way.

• 2:01:03Speaker 01

  You want the

• 2:01:04Rich Roll?

  And we're all kind of, you know, like, a lot of people are just sort of like, whether they're losing friends, or alienated from family, like, that's its own kind of like tragedy in all of this. And to the extent that bridges can be built, and repaired, you seem like someone who who might be able to have some

• 2:01:20Speaker 01

  I've got a couple of thoughts.

• 2:01:21Rich Roll?

  For people who maybe aren't as, you know, aspurgery as you, and kind of do care what other people think about them.

• 2:01:29Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah, I'm like, yeah, Homo sapien ought to say this at this juncture. I'm like, my robot brain kicks in and I try to figure out how to deal with the messiness of human beings. I have a few ideas about that. I mean, the first thing would be that there are some topics on which people will claim to have a great deal of knowledge that totally diverges from your own, which may not be the best places to start. So I'm thinking specifically about the 2020 election, or like, climate change, or whether COVID vaccines are safe. You know, people might be extremely set in their ways on particular things. So don't start with those issues. Start with issues where it's more a matter

• 2:02:11Speaker 01

  of opinion than a matter of fact, right? Because then you can win people's opinions easier than you can change their minds on facts. And begin by acknowledging what is correct about their side, or what is justified about their position, and what is wrong about your side. So take, take trans as the issue that, you know, Donald Trump capitalized on so much in the campaign, and that is getting sort of blamed for so much of the left's derangement. This is fundamentally a matter of opinion. It's not really a matter of, there isn't a huge dispute about the facts, unless you're talking about some rhetorical question of whether or not, even when you say, like, do men and women exist, or are trans women women, you're not really talking about facts, you're talking about values, because you're

• 2:02:56Speaker 01

  talking about what the interpretation of the meaning of the word is. Let's suppose that I'm the person on the left, and I'm having, you know, a Christmas dinner with a family member who is, who thinks that, you know, transgender activists are grooming our children, and that we need to, you know, pass anti-trans legislation. The place to start would be by saying,

• 2:03:24Speaker 01

  I get that things have moved very fast and that there's been a lot of nonsense on the pro-trans activist side, you know, and that it's not helpful or constructive to have loyalty tests where you ask people, you know, can you define a woman? What is a woman? Or like, you know, are trans women women? And it's not helpful to say things like, anybody who disagrees with us has the blood of trans children on their hands, you know? And it's not helpful to insist that there is no relationship between biological sex and gender. So, you know, acknowledge all the failings of your own side and give credence to whatever their concerns are.

• 2:04:07Speaker 01

  You may even just want to ask them, and, you know, what are you worried about here? And they're probably going to say something about women's sport, or they're probably going to say something about women's restrooms, because really it's in the edge cases that get people riled up. And you might just want to concede that it's a really tricky question, exactly how you divide up sports. It's a little bit arbitrary, like we even divide men and women into different categories in like table tennis, ping pong, like that shouldn't really matter, but like we do it anyway culturally. So you might want to encourage them to think about why we break things up into sex, that some of it might be arbitrary anyway, and there might be some kinds of sports where it doesn't matter, where you just have like an all-sex grouping, but in areas where it

• 2:04:49Speaker 01

  does matter, then, you know, where there's a clear biological advantage to having gone through puberty as a male, then, you know, maybe we need to rethink that. And similarly with with girls' locker rooms. I mean, if there's a concern about predatory behaviour, then that should certainly be addressed. And you can speak maybe in vague terms about that, but then say the thing that you actually, then you get to the thing that you actually believe, which is probably something along the lines of.

• 2:05:18Speaker 01

  Throughout all places and times, there has been like a tiny minority of the population who from the very earliest ages believes that they were born into the wrong sex. And these transsexuals are currently having a horrendous time because they're copping an enormous amount of flak for something they didn't choose. And like, do you believe in equality? Like, do you believe in egalitarianism? Do you believe that a person should be able to be discriminated against when they're trying to rent an apartment because they happen to have been born with this dysphoria? And then the person will probably go on about, yeah, but I mean, you know, you've got 15-year-old classrooms of girls who are all deciding that they're non-binary and like, you know, wearing boys' clothes.

• 2:06:01Speaker 01

  And you'll say, absolutely, absolutely. And there may be a social contagion component to it. And it's worth being specific about what we're talking about because, you know, there may be kind of a gender fad that is sort of happening as well as a result of this. And at the same time, there is still this minority of people. So I wonder if there's a way in which we can uphold the rights of those people and just be as decent a person as I know that you are, you know, so that those people don't aren't allowed to be fired from jobs, aren't allowed to be discriminated against, aren't allowed to have their healthcare taken away because we're reacting to this kind of, you know, silly gender fad or getting anxious about whether or not the girl swim meet is

• 2:06:45Speaker 01

  going to be contaminated by biological boys. Like, something like, you know what I mean? Like, find the common ground.

• 2:06:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, essentially, regardless of the issue, I mean, essentially what you're saying is lead with empathy, you know, respect somebody's emotional response to whatever issue is inflaming them. And instead of seizing the opportunity to, you know, pounce on them and tell them all the reasons that they're wrong, instead say, well, tell me more about that, basically. Like, you know, lead with curiosity and be open and kind of model that openness as an antidote to kind of the intensity that generally kind of surrounds whatever issue it is that is like triggering, basically.

• 2:07:29Speaker 01

  Yes, and find common values that you can pin. The conversation around, like, I think one of the great triumphs of the gay rights movement a generation ago was, and it's a shame that we haven't followed the same playbook for trans issues, because it would have been a lot more successful, was to argue for universal values that everybody agreed on, rather than arguing for specific rights for that minority group. So what I mean by that is that in the era of like Stonewall and like, you know, gay liberation, the activists who were writing, especially in the 1990s about, you know, gay rights, were basically saying, do you believe that everyone should be treated equally? Do you believe that people should be punished for who they love?

• 2:08:14Speaker 01

  All we're asking for is the same stuff that you have, nothing special. We want to be able to visit our loved ones in hospital.

• 2:08:20Rich Roll?

  It's kind of the Andrew Sullivan approach.

• 2:08:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, he wrote a whole brilliant book called Virtually Normal about this in the 90s. We want to be able to visit our loved ones in hospital when they're dying. We don't want to be turned away as if we were a stranger, just because we're of the same sex. We want to be able to rent apartments without being discriminated against. We want to be able to open joint bank accounts without, you know, not being counted as the most important person in each other's lives. We don't want to be able to be fired from a job. Like, do you believe in the basic values of like American democracy? This is a land, this is a fair land where everyone is treated equally before the law? Then come on board. And people buy that. People buy that. People will buy that. And if that had been the rhetoric around the trans issue, just to sort of flip the tables now and be more critical of my

• 2:09:07Speaker 01

  side of politics of the left on this, if it had been, all we want is what everybody else has, we just want basic rights, we would be so much further ahead. Instead, we've triggered this backlash by asking for much, much more and requiring that you, you must agree with us that, you know, a person who feels inside internally, a man who feels like a woman, is exactly the same as a woman. Isn't just a person who deserves the same rights, same legal rights, but you're allowed to feel however you want to about them. See, what the gay movement didn't do was say, you have to like gay sex. You have to like the idea. You have to like the idea.

• 2:09:49Speaker 01

  You have to, you have to endorse me getting a blowjob from a guy. You know, you have to picture that in your head, grandma, when you're gonna vote on gay marriage or something.

• 2:09:58Rich Roll?

  And you have to feel the same way about that, that you do about heterosexual sex.

• 2:10:01Speaker 01

  Exactly, you have to feel just as good about a couple of guys banging at it, you know, going at it, as you do about. They didn't ask for that, they didn't make that demand. They said, it's not about sex, it's not about any of that. It's about basic equality and fairness. By contrast, what the transgender movement has done, and I don't mean to be critical of trans people here, because I have tons of, I mean, I'm married to a guy, if people don't know. I mean, I'm part of the community, so to speak. Um, and, you know, many of my trans friends feel the same way as I do about this. Where this has actually really been driven is this same kind of university-educated, like, elite, kind of, critical theory group who've foisted, you know, a lot of identity politics on us and who've been the most aggressive about pushing a trans agenda

• 2:10:44Speaker 01

  agenda that has not been good for, for trans people. But instead of simply saying, we just wanna be treated the same as everybody else and don't think too much about what our wobbly bits look like. Don't think too much about what's between my legs. Um, that's sort of irrelevant. They instead took a maximalist position of, you need to express fealty towards the, the claim, our claims about our own identity. Otherwise, you're erasing my identity and there's not even a starting point for having a conversation about this. Well, what a great way to win people over, by telling them that they have no standing to be part of the conversation. Unless they sign up to agree with you before they've even had the conversation and before they've even thought it through. Because you're a transphobic bigot from the outset,

• 2:11:27Speaker 01

  unless you agree that trans women are women, whatever that even means. Before you even have a conversation about what that means. Or about what woman means. Or about whether there's something fundamental to the experience of being a woman that entails growing up as a girl in a sexist society, which some feminists think. But to even make the claim that you need to grow up as a girl in a sexist society in order to be. A participant in the full community of womanhood is to mark you as a TERF and as a transphobe and as a bigot and therefore the conversation doesn't begin and therefore people get on, get put on the back foot and therefore it becomes adversarial instead of collaborative and therefore you end up in the environment that we're currently in, which is terrible for trans people and terrible for really everybody on this issue because

• 2:12:11Speaker 01

  it's so irrational and it's so hot. You know, turn the dial down, people. Like, turn the reason up and the heat down and find the areas on which you can identify values around which you can collaborate. Because when you speak to people about their deepest values, fairness, equality, justice, then you can actually get somewhere. Then it becomes less about my side, it becomes less about my facts, it becomes less about my position, and it becomes about, okay, let's cut the bullshit. How do we get to a deal?

• 2:12:49Rich Roll?

  I think that's a good place to end it.

• 2:12:53Rich Roll?

  Final thoughts on having an uncomfortable conversation. Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

• 2:12:59Speaker 01

  Thank you, Rich. I loved it. Love you.

• 2:13:02Rich Roll?

  Love you too. This was super fun, man.

• 2:13:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's great. Absolutely. I feel fabulous.

• 2:13:07Rich Roll?

  All right, man. We'll come back and let's do it again sometime.

• 2:13:09Speaker 01

  Fabulous.

• 2:13:10Rich Roll?

  Enjoy your trip here in the United States.

• 2:13:12Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 2:13:13Rich Roll?

  Cheers, buddy. Yeah. Uncomfortable Conversations, you can subscribe to it wherever you subscribe to podcasts, you're on YouTube, Substack.

• 2:13:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, the Substack. You know, you can pay your little, you know, your shekel a month and get bonus content and no ads and all that.

• 2:13:28Rich Roll?

  And we'll link all that up in the show notes.

• 2:13:29Speaker 01

  Sweet.

• 2:13:30Rich Roll?

  Cool, man. Cheers.

• 2:13:32Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 2:13:44Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can Find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors, who keep

• 2:14:28Rich Roll?

  this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com/sponsors. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis. And thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management.

• 2:15:13Rich Roll?

  And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support, see you back here soon. Peace. Blanks.

• 2:15:25Speaker 01

  Namaste.