Speaker 1: Point me to a time or a place in history
Speaker 1: where one side has had a monopoly on the truth
Speaker 1: and has been one hundred percent right. I can't think
Speaker 1: of one, I mean right. So it's obvious that that
Speaker 1: would probably be true right now. And it's highly likely
Speaker 1: that the current progressive woke orthodoxy has some flaws. And
Speaker 1: it's highly likely that the current conservative orthodoxy has some flaws.
Speaker 1: So if you believe either of them wholeheartedly, you are
Speaker 1: wrong a significant portion at the time. Hello, and welcome
Speaker 1: to the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome Josh Steps to
Speaker 1: the show. Josh is an Australian television, radio and podcast
Speaker 1: host who shake things up with his fierce intellect and
Speaker 1: infectious sense of humor. Josh's interviews with prominent figures and
Speaker 1: celebrities like Jen Goodall, Ron Howard, Russell Brand and Neil
Speaker 1: Patrick Harris have attracted billions of online views and sold
Speaker 1: out event tickets. Currently, he can be heard on ABC
Speaker 1: Radio Sydney and on his award winning podcast Uncomfortable Conversations.
Speaker 1: What an episode this was. We really didn't hold anything
Speaker 1: back in our conversation. We talk about lots of things
Speaker 1: that all surround the idea of thinking freely. In this
Speaker 1: social media age, it's become increasingly challenging to become an
Speaker 1: independent thinker. Our tribal nature and online echo chambers tend
Speaker 1: to re enforce ideologies we already believe in. Even the
Speaker 1: way we talk sounds scripted and produced, well not. In
Speaker 1: this episode. Here Josh and I discuss openly and freely
Speaker 1: how to generally search for truth so we can broaden
Speaker 1: our worldviews. We also touch on the topics of intersectionality, wocism, ethics,
Speaker 1: and racism. But really this conversation is about so much more,
Speaker 1: and the overarching thread that runs through all of this
Speaker 1: conversation is just the promotion of nuance and attempts at
Speaker 1: taking lots of different seeming opposite sides and looking at
Speaker 1: them as part of a larger hole, and also not
Speaker 1: completely identifying with your in group and not completely hitting
Speaker 1: your app group. We hope this episode helps you think
Speaker 1: more freely and powers you to think more freely. So,
Speaker 1: without further ado, I give you Josh Steps Hey bye,
Speaker 1: how you doing? I'm great? How are you? I got
Speaker 1: up from a nap so I'm still in half dream mode. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'm half half in dream state and half in waking life.
Speaker 1: But it's okay, it's okay. It's a very philosophical take
Speaker 1: on things. We should always be in a half dream state,
Speaker 1: half life. What is reality anyway, Scott? How do we
Speaker 1: know it's not all a dream? Scott tell me that. Well, Actually,
Speaker 1: my colleague David Chalmers, the philosopher, wrote a really good
Speaker 1: book that came out earlier this year called Reality, arguing
Speaker 1: that we're probably in a simulation. Right, Yeah, what do
Speaker 1: you make of the whole the whole simulation thing. Have
Speaker 1: I just opened up a four hour rabbit hole that's
Speaker 1: gonna Are we gonna plunge off topic for the next
Speaker 1: four five hours? We just don't know. The point is,
Speaker 1: it is entirely plausible that if you get artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1: or actually, I should say virtual reality to a certain
Speaker 1: point where it's indistinguishable from non virtual reality, then there's
Speaker 1: really no way for us to know we're not in
Speaker 1: a simulation. And the way that things have been going
Speaker 1: the past two years, it certainly feels like someone's fucking
Speaker 1: with us. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: which makes it with that shot, the probability is much higher.
Speaker 1: But it's like we reached some alternative timeline. I also wonder, though,
Speaker 1: if we just haven't been too acclimatized or acclimated, as
Speaker 1: you say, in America to a normality that was never
Speaker 1: actually historically normal, like the period between I guess the
Speaker 1: late sixties and probably maybe nine to eleven, or you know,
Speaker 1: depending on where you want to count it, the financial
Speaker 1: crisis or Trump, that that was just a short window.
Speaker 1: Like I mean, if you've been around in the sixties
Speaker 1: when matin Ley the King was shot and Robert Kennedy
Speaker 1: was shot and like the cities were burning, you would
Speaker 1: have been like, this is crazy. And if you'd known
Speaker 1: what a simulation is, you might have been like, we
Speaker 1: could all be in a simulation. Or when you found
Speaker 1: out in nineteen forty five that the Germans had just
Speaker 1: gassed and incinerated six million people, you'd be like, what,
Speaker 1: this has got to be some kind of a computer game.
Speaker 1: Where are we? But they didn't have computer games back then,
Speaker 1: so they didn't know what that was. So now we
Speaker 1: interpret everything through the prism of what the current technology is.
Speaker 1: And you know, back when there were steam engines, everyone
Speaker 1: was like the universe is just a system of pistons
Speaker 1: and steam engines and like you know, circulating orbs and things.
Speaker 1: And now we're like, oh, that's so parssaying we're futuristic.
Speaker 1: Now we understand about computers and simulations, so the whole
Speaker 1: thing must be that. And then in one hundred years
Speaker 1: we'll come up with some new brilliant theory and the
Speaker 1: universe will seem to conform to that one. The reality
Speaker 1: is that we're extrapolating by how fast technology has grown
Speaker 1: in our lifetimes. In my lifetime, it's ridiculous. The year
Speaker 1: I was born to now went from no computers existing
Speaker 1: too us having this podcast chat and being able to
Speaker 1: see each other, yeah, and through the verse, through the virtually.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm seeing you like I'm seeing you can
Speaker 1: see my floating Christmas head above my gorgeous Christmas sweater
Speaker 1: blending into the red background, perfectly across the ocean, Scott,
Speaker 1: across the world. No, I know, I was thinking I
Speaker 1: was talking on one of my many appearances on the
Speaker 1: Joe Rogan podcast, one of my many seven appearances on
Speaker 1: the most popular podcast in the world. Just thought i'd
Speaker 1: mentioned that Scott. Just thought i'd mentioned that that's not
Speaker 1: But I also I should mention it's not the most
Speaker 1: popular psychology podcast. Now that's true. That's what you're on reading.
Speaker 1: I know, oh, I know, and and the honor is
Speaker 1: all mine Scott. And I should say to listeners who
Speaker 1: haven't heard my show or Scott's fantastic appearance on my
Speaker 1: show Uncomfortable Conversations, that Scott's appearance on Australia's number one
Speaker 1: uncomfortable interview talk show hosted by a man wearing a
Speaker 1: red and green sweater Scott was fantastic because I my podcast,
Speaker 1: the number one Australian interview, uncomfortable show, red green sweater show.
Speaker 1: So you know, we all have our number one Scott.
Speaker 1: We do. We do ever and in every mother's eyes,
Speaker 1: you know, or a lot of mother's eyes, their child
Speaker 1: is that's right number one. When I was on Rogan
Speaker 1: one time, I was talking with I just my grandmother
Speaker 1: had just died. She died on the eve of her
Speaker 1: one hundredth birthday. She died at ninety nine and three
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty four days and she was born in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifteen during the Gallipoli campaign. Big big day for
Speaker 1: Australia and New Zealand. Don't know if anyone in America
Speaker 1: knows what Philippoli is. You can google it. And I
Speaker 1: was thinking about the amount of the number of things
Speaker 1: that she had seen in her lifetime. Like nineteen fifteen, right,
Speaker 1: nobody's flying anywhere. You know. Planes are made of like
Speaker 1: canvas and cardboard and have big flapping wheels and like
Speaker 1: crash into the hill, you know, after they've been in
Speaker 1: the air for twenty feet. There was one car when
Speaker 1: she was growing up. When she was growing up in
Speaker 1: New Zealand, they would know, they would see, oh, there's
Speaker 1: the car going by. There's the car that someone rich
Speaker 1: owns driving past. And then she had the space race.
Speaker 1: Cars became ubiquitous, she had computing, man on the moon, nukes, holocaust,
Speaker 1: like everything, and think of what had happened in the
Speaker 1: hundred years previous, or the hundred years before that, or
Speaker 1: the hundred years before that. It's like someone's taken the
Speaker 1: accelerated dial and it's just turned it all the way up.
Speaker 1: It's incredible. And then the most amazing thing is i
Speaker 1: was traveling through Europe shortly after that, and I'm wandering
Speaker 1: around Athens. A good buddy of mine lives in Athens,
Speaker 1: and I'm standing on the Agora the birthplace of democracy,
Speaker 1: like on the northwestern slopes of the Acropolis, the first
Speaker 1: place in the world, in the Western world at least,
Speaker 1: where people came together and said, you know, maybe we
Speaker 1: should start sorting out our ideas, but through discussion and
Speaker 1: discourse instead of just killing each other all the time,
Speaker 1: maybe we should have a say in this instead of
Speaker 1: being ruled by autocrats and kings and emperors. And that.
Speaker 1: I was just overwhelmed with how old that was and
Speaker 1: how ancient it is. And then I thought to myself, well,
Speaker 1: it's four thousand years. Four thousand years, right, My grandmother
Speaker 1: lived one hundred. You put my nana back to back
Speaker 1: her life spans, it's only forty It's only forty nanas
Speaker 1: since the dawn of all of Western civilization. It's only
Speaker 1: twenty nanas since Jesus Christ. It's only like three nanas
Speaker 1: since the Enlightenment, and one nana since all of that
Speaker 1: stuff that I've just talked about, planes, space race cars,
Speaker 1: like computing. What happens in another ten nanas a thousand years.
Speaker 1: It's so short. There are a lot of points to
Speaker 1: what you just said, is what I should say, Like,
Speaker 1: there's you know the fact that homo's sapiens are a
Speaker 1: mere speck in the talking about the history of the universe.
Speaker 1: It depends do you want to zoom how far do
Speaker 1: you want to zoom out? Or you can also zoom
Speaker 1: in on us, you know, in this generation, which is
Speaker 1: usually what I do in my podcast as we talk
Speaker 1: about about what's going on right now. Sorry, I just
Speaker 1: have a tendency to dominate the conversation place. I mean, no, no,
Speaker 1: I love it. I love it. I love it. But
Speaker 1: but you know, it depends the question is how far
Speaker 1: do you want to zoom out? Right? Like you could
Speaker 1: do a zoom even further and say, Homo sapien are
Speaker 1: really nothing. But I think there's another point there which
Speaker 1: I do think we tend to extrapolate and think, look
Speaker 1: at what we've done in a thousand years, the next
Speaker 1: thousand years, it's hard to imagine what we'll do. But
Speaker 1: I actually do think there's a limit to what we
Speaker 1: will do. I think that, you know, we discovered so
Speaker 1: many things and they're really radical, you know, compared to
Speaker 1: like a thousand years ago or even ten thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: But I think a thousand years in the future, there's
Speaker 1: it's going to be probably more of the same. If
Speaker 1: we still exist as a species, humans will still be
Speaker 1: human in terms of basic needs, in terms of fighting
Speaker 1: each other, in terms of the different divisions and tribes. Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: well none of that has changed, has it. I mean,
Speaker 1: none of that has changed. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: Who is who says says like where we're highly of
Speaker 1: you know we have Is it Dawkins who talks about
Speaker 1: us having godlike brains but primate like sorry, godlike tools,
Speaker 1: but primate brains or something? Well, that's exactly right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm whoever said that, kudos to that person. We still
Speaker 1: have stone age minds, and you know, in terms of
Speaker 1: the evolution of our mind happened mostly on a strip
Speaker 1: of the Savannah desert. And here we are in this
Speaker 1: modern world with all these technologies, and we're interpreting things
Speaker 1: through that lens. By the way, that speaks to why
Speaker 1: tribalism is so big on social media. I don't like
Speaker 1: to use the word virtue signaling. I'm not a big
Speaker 1: fan of that term, but I but why we see
Speaker 1: a lot of that is because, like the consequences in
Speaker 1: the Savannah of pissing off your tribe of ten p
Speaker 1: people wassation. How are you that I had a climatization
Speaker 1: and acclamation. You can do ostrasation. If you want ostracization,
Speaker 1: you'd be ultralised. That sounds more sophisticated when I phrase
Speaker 1: is interesting, how are you phrasing certain ways? It sounds
Speaker 1: wor sophisticated. In otherways you'd be left to die. And
Speaker 1: that's a big deal. That is a big deal, you know.
Speaker 1: But but nowadays it's like we don't really think, like,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, what if that random anonymous person on
Speaker 1: Twitter that doesn't even have a human as a profile
Speaker 1: picture right like doesn't like me? Who cares? But you
Speaker 1: can't But you can't turn it off, can you? I
Speaker 1: mean you don't seem to be able to. We don't
Speaker 1: seem to be able to turn that off, like it
Speaker 1: lands as it lands with as visceral and cutting a
Speaker 1: subjective sensation when you're being attacked by idiots on Twitter,
Speaker 1: as if you were being attacked by people you care
Speaker 1: about one hundred percent? And have you noticed that those
Speaker 1: who seem to call virtual signal that they don't care
Speaker 1: the most actually are the ones that care the most.
Speaker 1: So I've used you know, the ones that are like,
Speaker 1: I have no folks to give everyone home right, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, people like they're like so controversial and they'll
Speaker 1: say crazy stuff that they're like, I don't care what
Speaker 1: anyone thinks about. Why are you on social media every
Speaker 1: second looking to see what people sit? And it becomes
Speaker 1: deranging as well. And we all know some of those
Speaker 1: people who started out as dissidents or as like heterodox
Speaker 1: thinkers and have now just become total conformists for the
Speaker 1: for being provocateurs. There's like a clique of generally sort
Speaker 1: of alt righty kind of provocateurs. Some of them are
Speaker 1: left wing. You I know, I probably shouldn't use the
Speaker 1: term alt right because I get into trouble for using that,
Speaker 1: But I just mean that not to mean like fascist
Speaker 1: or white supremacist, but this kind of parallel universe of
Speaker 1: shit stirrs and provocateurs who think that it's really clever
Speaker 1: and edgy to constantly be whipping people up and outraging
Speaker 1: people and getting you know, and saying things that they
Speaker 1: think are controversial just for the sake of being controversial.
Speaker 1: And we've seen those people, and we've seen them descend
Speaker 1: over the course of really the past five years from
Speaker 1: being people who I respected to now being a number
Speaker 1: of them are just trolls essentially and have been captured
Speaker 1: by the right. And so I don't know how we
Speaker 1: avoid that, because I think there's a feedback loop that
Speaker 1: you're pointing to there, which is pretending not to care
Speaker 1: about what people think, and that pretense in itself becomes
Speaker 1: a shtick that cares very much about what people think. Right,
Speaker 1: So now I'm playing the role of the person who
Speaker 1: I just don't have two fucks to give, like I
Speaker 1: don't care, you know, I'm the bad boy. Everyone's become
Speaker 1: a kind of like milo Ianopolis part, you know, three
Speaker 1: point zero or something, and that becomes virtue signaling in itself.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I'm talking about right wing dickheads,
Speaker 1: but there's also the left wing dickhead phenomenon of people,
Speaker 1: you know, virtue signaling about how politically correct and woke
Speaker 1: they are. It seems like the silos that we're in
Speaker 1: and the tribes that we're in and the clubs that
Speaker 1: we're in are just drifting further apart and become self
Speaker 1: reinforcing social media feedback loops where the incentives are all
Speaker 1: aligned to extremify ourselves. So I mean, one thing that
Speaker 1: I'm trying to do in my media career on my
Speaker 1: radio show in Australia, on my podcast Uncomfortable Conversations, And
Speaker 1: one reason I love your show, Scott, because I think
Speaker 1: you're doing You're on a similar mission, is to try
Speaker 1: to have conversations that like disentangle all of those siloed
Speaker 1: perspectives and have conversations that, as we say in Australia
Speaker 1: faired income meaning free from bullshit and are straight, you know,
Speaker 1: and are kind of uncomplicated by pretense and nonsense and
Speaker 1: tribal affiliation and clubs. But because I don't know, I
Speaker 1: don't know any other way of getting out of the
Speaker 1: problems that we're in unless we can escape the kind
Speaker 1: of gravitational vortex of the social media pool towards pleasing
Speaker 1: our cleaque. I very much share that mission. I'm very
Speaker 1: serious about that mission. I feel like anyone who is
Speaker 1: serious about that mission shouldn't be a provocateur. So I
Speaker 1: think that if you are a provocateur by definition, you
Speaker 1: don't genuinely, genuinely care about that mission. There are tourist
Speaker 1: who clean They're like, is there so much division in
Speaker 1: the world? These things that like completely attacks a whole
Speaker 1: group of people, and they're like, oh, I'm such a victim. Well,
Speaker 1: it depends what you mean by provocateur, right, because some
Speaker 1: people would regard me as a provocateur for not caring
Speaker 1: about triggering the trip wires of cultural convention. You know,
Speaker 1: if I am having a conversation about one of those
Speaker 1: red hot culture war issues I don't know, like trans
Speaker 1: rides or something like that, then there is a very
Speaker 1: scripted way that you're supposed to speak about it on
Speaker 1: the left, and there's a very irritatingly offensive, bad boy
Speaker 1: way that you're supposed to talk about it on the
Speaker 1: right by saying like these are just you know, I
Speaker 1: don't know that sex is defines you forever, and that
Speaker 1: these are just men in dresses or something like that.
Speaker 1: And then on the left you're supposed to say that
Speaker 1: there's no such thing as women and trans women to women,
Speaker 1: and you're supposed to mount a lot of platitudes. But
Speaker 1: I mean, I will just call the truth as I
Speaker 1: see it. Some people will regard that as being a provocateur.
Speaker 1: But the difference that I see is that my intention
Speaker 1: is never to provoke. My intention is to be rational,
Speaker 1: cool headed, try to understand the other side, try to
Speaker 1: give the benefit of the doubt, but not rehearse scripted
Speaker 1: lines of politically correct bullshit either. Yeah, so intentionality matters,
Speaker 1: and it matters a lot. I think that's a very
Speaker 1: good point. You know. There are some Twitter accounts where
Speaker 1: they're they're intentionally just saying things to with the aim
Speaker 1: of riling up a certain group. That's what I mean. Yes, absolutely,
Speaker 1: absolutely absolutely. Something that really really does upset me and
Speaker 1: has been on my mind lately, is I despise the
Speaker 1: Twitter account libs of TikTok. I like despised with it,
Speaker 1: like such a such a like like I'm not the
Speaker 1: kind of I'm like mister happy. Yeah, I'm like positive psychology.
Speaker 1: So to get me actually despising you, that takes a lot.
Speaker 1: That takes a lot. And this is the thing, is
Speaker 1: like I am all about talk. I'm all about like
Speaker 1: appreciating differences. You know, I like a big support of
Speaker 1: the neurodiversity movement. When I see trans people, I think, well,
Speaker 1: I actually put them under the umbrell of neurodiversity. I
Speaker 1: include them as part of gender diversity, which is part
Speaker 1: of like you can be artistic and be on the
Speaker 1: artism spectrum, you can be on the gender diversity spectrum.
Speaker 1: So that's just how I think about it. So I
Speaker 1: you know, I'm like, if you bully people who are
Speaker 1: just different just because they're different, that really gets at
Speaker 1: me in a really core It gets me, really it
Speaker 1: gets me. It makes me absolutely like the whole the
Speaker 1: importance of being able to hold more than one idea
Speaker 1: in your head at a time, Right, So, like, I mean,
Speaker 1: for me, should we be teaching eighth graders that there's
Speaker 1: no such thing as sex and pretending that the biology
Speaker 1: makes no difference, that there are no basic differences between
Speaker 1: the sexes, and that there's no correlation between sex and
Speaker 1: gender and that you can pick and choose whatever gender
Speaker 1: you want to be Or is that too confusing an
Speaker 1: idea for eighth graders to understand yet? And should we
Speaker 1: maybe include that as a university level kind of conversation.
Speaker 1: But should we just assume that sex and gender are
Speaker 1: generally consistent and then when young people feel that they're
Speaker 1: not in their case, we treat them with care and
Speaker 1: compassion and we try to investigate what's going on, but
Speaker 1: we don't embed this as a fundamental principle of what
Speaker 1: we teach young children. Maybe we can all agree on that,
Speaker 1: but you can hold that as being your opinion and
Speaker 1: also say that on the other hand, my friend who
Speaker 1: has a son who was born as a girl, assigned
Speaker 1: female at birth, and from the age of two, she
Speaker 1: was saying, what are you talking about. I'm not a girl.
Speaker 1: I'm a boy, always a boy, always been a boy.
Speaker 1: This is a phenomenon that exists, that has existed everywhere,
Speaker 1: that has existed throughout all of time. There is this
Speaker 1: thing where there are a young, young, young children of
Speaker 1: a very early age, before they've learned any quote unquote
Speaker 1: grooming or gender theory or anything. They are just one
Speaker 1: hundred percent I'm born in the wrong sect. I'm born
Speaker 1: in the wrong like my sex doesn't align. And that
Speaker 1: is a phenomenon that is a psychological phenomenon that we
Speaker 1: have to deal with. So we have to say, what
Speaker 1: are we going to where are those kids going to
Speaker 1: fit into our culture? Are we going to demonize them
Speaker 1: and persecute them and ridicule them and hold them up
Speaker 1: to live lives of shame and hardship with massive rates
Speaker 1: of suicide and self harm because they feel like they're
Speaker 1: broken people. I mean, like, screw that. It's not one
Speaker 1: or the other. We can have multiple ideas that may
Speaker 1: seem contradictory in our heads at once. And the job
Speaker 1: of us as responsible citizens, as members of a demos
Speaker 1: or a democracy, is to come together and have conversations
Speaker 1: like this one where we can flesh it out and go, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: what is too much and how far is too far?
Speaker 1: And how can we find the moderate compromise between these
Speaker 1: warring factions that we have, rather than having the factions
Speaker 1: in this war of attrition where it's all against all
Speaker 1: and whoever wins is going to you know, to the victor,
Speaker 1: go the spoils. That's not how democracies work, that's not
Speaker 1: how cultures thrive. We can only sort it out through conversation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to find a tweet I wrote because I
Speaker 1: want to reach you and see what you think of it.
Speaker 1: I wrote controversial, tiaq. You can take issue with something
Speaker 1: and have a reasonable critique of it without calling it
Speaker 1: the downfall of Western civilization. I put that all in
Speaker 1: a quote. Not every issue is the biggest issue in
Speaker 1: America just because it's the issue you care the most about.
Speaker 1: I wrote that because what I see is like, oh
Speaker 1: my gosh, this teacher is teaching, you know, a student
Speaker 1: about non binary this specific thing is going to lead
Speaker 1: to the downfall of Western civilization. Okay, can we just
Speaker 1: like take things case by case basis. Let's not like
Speaker 1: there's so many cognitive biases going on in the world.
Speaker 1: There's extrapolation, there's over generalization, there's black and white thinking.
Speaker 1: You go down the list of cognitive biases and you
Speaker 1: see it with everyone. You see catastrophizing as well. Right,
Speaker 1: and now, I'm not here to defend some things I
Speaker 1: do think are moral gray zones. You know, there are
Speaker 1: certain instances where you know, like I'm trying to think
Speaker 1: of as actually I think once they did show a
Speaker 1: video of a drag queen with a group of prescorers
Speaker 1: and the drag queen was like naked. There's like they're
Speaker 1: extreme examples. The thing is, I stop there, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't then extrapol and say all drag queens are groomers.
Speaker 1: That's literally the definition of heat and discrimination. Well, it's absolutely,
Speaker 1: I mean it depends. Look, it depends on the prevalence,
Speaker 1: doesn't it. I mean, I suppose the reason why people
Speaker 1: are freaking out about that is because they're assuming that
Speaker 1: it's taking place in every classroom in America. And if
Speaker 1: it were, then it would be a problem worth freaking
Speaker 1: out about. I mean, you know, Andrew Sullivan makes the
Speaker 1: point that drag queens, there's a lot of misunderstanding about
Speaker 1: drag queens, just as an asside in this whole drag
Speaker 1: queen story out thing. Drag queens are not sexualized creatures
Speaker 1: in their natural habitat. What drag queens are for people
Speaker 1: who aren't in the world of drag and I happen
Speaker 1: to be married to a guy who's who's sort of
Speaker 1: you know, who has a lot of friends who are
Speaker 1: trans and a lot of friends who are who play
Speaker 1: up with drag. What drag queens are are clowns. They're clowns. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's like pantomime exactly in the United Kingdom. It's they're
Speaker 1: a hugely exaggerated cartoon characters of women. They're actually atle
Speaker 1: bit sexist, if you want to look at it through
Speaker 1: that lens. They're taking the tropes of femininity and exaggerating
Speaker 1: them into these grotesque stereotypes, right, and they're mocking them
Speaker 1: and satirizing them. There is a small band of drag
Speaker 1: queenery which will blend into you know, sexual deviancy or
Speaker 1: whatever you want to call it, or provocative sexual behavior
Speaker 1: that of course has no role. I mean that should
Speaker 1: have no place in the education of children. But the
Speaker 1: idea that you would have huge larger than life clown
Speaker 1: like figures entertaining children and reading them stories and getting them,
Speaker 1: you know, encouraging their love of reading. There is nothing
Speaker 1: gloomery or sexualized about that. You wouldn't say that if
Speaker 1: it was a clown. And you know, largely the way
Speaker 1: that most of these things are being done is by
Speaker 1: men who are portraying female clowns. Right, I think that's right,
Speaker 1: and there are a lot of misunderstands about that, but
Speaker 1: you see what's going on. I mean, there's just this
Speaker 1: real judging of someone beast on their sexuals because it
Speaker 1: doesn't fit within their idea of sexual purity or especially
Speaker 1: if you're you know, a Christian conservative, right like they
Speaker 1: view any instance of a deviation from what they view
Speaker 1: as the rate and proper God or dean sexuality, any
Speaker 1: deviation from that is immoral. Well, isn't the risk there,
Speaker 1: Scott that actually the number of people who believe that
Speaker 1: is not enough to create the heat of the culture
Speaker 1: war that we're seeing at the moment, the number of
Speaker 1: people who are actually religiously devoted to heterosexuality as the ideal,
Speaker 1: and who believe that any alternative forms of sexuality or
Speaker 1: gender expression are deviant and should be you know, opposed
Speaker 1: for almost cosmic orthodox reasons. They're a small minority, but
Speaker 1: what's happened is a whole bunch of other people, the
Speaker 1: James Lindsay's of the world, you know, who are not religious,
Speaker 1: have I don't know if they've spent too long online
Speaker 1: or if they if they are identifying something real that
Speaker 1: that you and I are too blind to see, But
Speaker 1: one way or another, they regard them as being a
Speaker 1: sil vilizational level clash of the forces of disorder, chaos,
Speaker 1: and authoritarianism on the left against forces of community, family, tradition,
Speaker 1: and democracy on the right right. And they regard all
Speaker 1: of the fabric that has come together to build Western
Speaker 1: civilization as being assailed by this crazy sort of quasi authoritarian,
Speaker 1: woke leftism that wants everyone to be everything and for
Speaker 1: there to be no structure in the world and for
Speaker 1: us all to be like just pingpong balls bumping into
Speaker 1: each other, choosing our gender, choosing our sexuality, choosing our whatever.
Speaker 1: And they regard that as being a chaotic dystopia that
Speaker 1: forces its rules on everybody. That is at the same
Speaker 1: time anarchic and also authoritarian, because anyone who doesn't, who
Speaker 1: hasn't drunk the wok kool aid, is going to be excommunicated.
Speaker 1: And here I think the left, although we're being critical
Speaker 1: of the right, I mean I have to put in
Speaker 1: a vote for the enormous own goal that the left
Speaker 1: has made, and the failure of the left to articulate
Speaker 1: a traditional left wing vision that appeals to sort of
Speaker 1: working class people all across the Western world, really, and
Speaker 1: the obsession, the obsessiveness with which the left has begun
Speaker 1: to cling to identity politics and to the empowerment of
Speaker 1: minority groups as being its load star, as being the
Speaker 1: light on the hill, instead of how a working class
Speaker 1: family and appalatua is going to be able to put
Speaker 1: food on the table or afford healthcare, Like those things
Speaker 1: are no longer the things that democrats are talking about.
Speaker 1: Democrats are talking a lot about intersectionality and a lot
Speaker 1: about how you have to say the right things about
Speaker 1: you have to use the correct transgender pronouns, and you
Speaker 1: have to call latinos latinxes, and that is an enormous,
Speaker 1: enormously off putting distraction that to me, pushes this other
Speaker 1: cohort into the camp of the extreme religious conservatives that
Speaker 1: you were talking about. If we were just dealing with
Speaker 1: extreme religious conservatism as the problem, I think we would
Speaker 1: easily defeat them. The problem is we've empowered them to
Speaker 1: form a coalition with a whole sway of reasonable minded,
Speaker 1: vaguely conservative people who regard the excesses of workism as intolerable.
Speaker 1: So now we've got a much bigger, a much bigger
Speaker 1: right wing enemy than we needed to have. Yeah, I'd
Speaker 1: like to amend what I said then, because I think
Speaker 1: a lot of it does come down to my colleague
Speaker 1: Jonathan Heights a notion of moral foundations. There are very
Speaker 1: different moral foundations, so a lot of it on the
Speaker 1: right has to do with it. It's considered disgusting there.
Speaker 1: It's a moral because to them it makes them feel
Speaker 1: sick to see a transgender person. For whatever reason, when
Speaker 1: I see a transitive person, I don't get sick, so
Speaker 1: I don't really understand exactly what what is so sickening
Speaker 1: about it. But but for for a good number of people,
Speaker 1: it gives them the actual visceral feeling of of of germs,
Speaker 1: you know, like that feeling, the same kind of feeling
Speaker 1: you see with germs or you see with something that's
Speaker 1: a that's a pathogen, you know, in the same way
Speaker 1: that they did with with gay people, you know, a
Speaker 1: generation ago. Right, I mean, my lifestyle of being married
Speaker 1: to a man was introducing as recently as the nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties or nineteen nineties, and now it's not. And in fact,
Speaker 1: one of the great triumphs of the gay rights movement
Speaker 1: was to take it away from take the conversation away
Speaker 1: from sexual acts, and turn it into a conversation about
Speaker 1: gay people wanting to be normal and wanting to be clean. Right,
Speaker 1: I mean, to follow this line of thinking, right, Andrew
Speaker 1: Sullivan's argument was, we want to be exactly the same
Speaker 1: as you. We want families, we want you know, structure,
Speaker 1: we want to be part of the community, we want
Speaker 1: jobs just like the rest of you. Like once you
Speaker 1: shifted the conversation away from from behaviors and you turn
Speaker 1: the conversation into one about having the right to be normal.
Speaker 1: Andrew Sullivan's groundbreaking book was called Virtually Normal, in which
Speaker 1: he made the first mainstream case for gay marriage. Virtually normal.
Speaker 1: He wants he just wanted people to be virtually normal.
Speaker 1: Was that was the triumph. And I think that was
Speaker 1: by turning off that disgust switch that you're talking about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: turning off at discuss switch. And you know, the left
Speaker 1: cares there are more financial foundations about fairness, right to them,
Speaker 1: fairness Trump's feeling sick looking at someone who's different from you, right,
Speaker 1: so it's like what Trump's what within your personality structure? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And justice. I think they care a lot about justice,
Speaker 1: don't they. Well yeah, yeah, that's yeah. I'm kind of
Speaker 1: making the two equivalent in a way fair enoughs Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's without I'm trying to I'm trying to
Speaker 1: give the most. I'm trying to steal a man the
Speaker 1: disgust towards trans position, right, so that we don't caricature it.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to sure And I can say that there's
Speaker 1: other reasons as well why there are critiques of the
Speaker 1: trans movement, the idea of trans I can see it
Speaker 1: from the point of view of those who I guess
Speaker 1: are called turfs. You know, they're saying, well, there is
Speaker 1: a legitimate difference between a biologically born female and a
Speaker 1: trans female. Yeah, they had different life experiences, they should
Speaker 1: have different rights, you know, to a certain degree. Like
Speaker 1: there's a different set of experiences if by the same
Speaker 1: reason that you know that woman Rachel who identified as
Speaker 1: black and she was born white, Well, no one liked that, right,
Speaker 1: But I still don't. No one's given me a convincing
Speaker 1: agreement where that's really different, different, right, Yeah? I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, Jermaine Greer, the great Australian feminist who wrote
Speaker 1: The Female Eunuch in the nineteen seventies, makes the same
Speaker 1: has You know, She's gotten pilloried for making the same
Speaker 1: point and has actually been disinvited from writers' festivals in
Speaker 1: Australia for making that point. She her basically, her basic
Speaker 1: point is there is something fundamental to being a woman
Speaker 1: that involves growing up as a girl in a sexist society.
Speaker 1: Being a girl in a patriarchal society is a fundamentally
Speaker 1: life shaping experience. If you grew up as a boy
Speaker 1: and then you later joined the womanhood, good for you.
Speaker 1: Happy to call you a woman. You're not the same
Speaker 1: as someone who grew up as a girl. You're not
Speaker 1: the same as someone who went through puberty as a girl. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and JK. Rowling and Jermaine Greer are completely So this
Speaker 1: is where I'm thinking. So does the disgusts which get
Speaker 1: activated by the left's insistence that what Jermaine Greer is
Speaker 1: saying is bigotry. Like, for example, I have a friend
Speaker 1: who's not trans who insists that it's transfer but it's
Speaker 1: super super woke, who insists that it's transphobic to have
Speaker 1: to not want to sleep with a trans person. That
Speaker 1: if you, Scott don't want to sleep with a woman,
Speaker 1: right further explaining it to me, let me explain it
Speaker 1: exactly what will involve, and all the dangly bent I
Speaker 1: get the argument, because do we want to start calling everyboney?
Speaker 1: Just do you want to call everyone eracist if you
Speaker 1: don't sleep with a black That is another conversation that
Speaker 1: I have. Yeah, I mean, and you know what, I
Speaker 1: don't have no time for it because like a black
Speaker 1: friend of mine used to who's gay, would always say,
Speaker 1: because there's a lot of racism in the gay in
Speaker 1: the like white gay, white guys can get away with
Speaker 1: a lot racism than straight white guys can. I think
Speaker 1: there's a kind of really I think so, I think
Speaker 1: there's a casual, sassy, kind of yes girl, yes queen
Speaker 1: sort of white supremacy in the super camp gay world
Speaker 1: that is quite dismissive of people of color and openly so.
Speaker 1: And so this black gay friend of mine was saying, Look,
Speaker 1: you might think that you don't want to. You might
Speaker 1: just be like, oh, hey, you know, I'm not racist,
Speaker 1: but I just don't want to sleep with Asians. I
Speaker 1: just don't want to sleep with black guys. But his
Speaker 1: point was, well, you should probably interrogate where that comes from,
Speaker 1: Like does that come from Nowhere? Were you born not
Speaker 1: being sexually attracted to those people, or through puberty and
Speaker 1: your youth, did you form ideals about what it means
Speaker 1: to be a man and what it means to be
Speaker 1: a sexualized being and did that shape you? And because
Speaker 1: I'm quite fluid in my thinking about our sexuality in general,
Speaker 1: because I think I look at ancient Greece and ancient
Speaker 1: Rome and places where there's been a lot more kind
Speaker 1: of casual sexual fluidity between gayness and straightness. Paris in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century and a lot of like South Pacific
Speaker 1: cultures and things like that, And because my own personal
Speaker 1: experience was one in which I had long and fruitful
Speaker 1: and loving romantic relationships with girls and also guys, and
Speaker 1: then I sort of happened to find a guy who
Speaker 1: I wanted to spend my life with, and that was
Speaker 1: the person who I chose to be with, because my
Speaker 1: experience has always been one in which I just assumed
Speaker 1: that when I was young, that I was uniquely open
Speaker 1: minded in thinking that, of course, attractive people are attractive,
Speaker 1: and charming people are charming, and charismatic people are charismatic,
Speaker 1: And who are we kidding if we don't think that
Speaker 1: there's some kind of sexual frisson When a young guy
Speaker 1: is walking down the street and sees a massive Abercrombie
Speaker 1: and Fitch billboard with a naked torsau of a young
Speaker 1: man on it, there is some kind of arousal there
Speaker 1: that we have been acculturated and trained to funnel into
Speaker 1: sort of maybe self love or some sort of aspiration
Speaker 1: to have that body. But then in another culture, in
Speaker 1: another era, in another time, in another place, it's conceivable
Speaker 1: that that could land as attraction rather than as something aspirational, right.
Speaker 1: I do think these things are messy and they get
Speaker 1: influenced by culture, and in that respect, yeah, maybe my
Speaker 1: lack of sexual interest in a particular race of people
Speaker 1: is sort of fundamentally racist. And so maybe there is
Speaker 1: something in the revulsion that a straight man might feel
Speaker 1: towards sleeping with a trans woman that comes from bigotry
Speaker 1: or transphobia, and in another universe they wouldn't feel that.
Speaker 1: But I just don't think you win any friends or
Speaker 1: you gain anything strategically in the cultural argument by demonizing
Speaker 1: dudes who don't want to sleep with a woman with
Speaker 1: a penis as being transphobic bigots and insisting that you know,
Speaker 1: the only way to get on board the trans train
Speaker 1: is to is to go all in, one hundred percent
Speaker 1: with everything that the most extreme trans ideologues insists that
Speaker 1: you agree with. That's just not going to win the case.
Speaker 1: You're extraordinarily open minded to consider the nuance and things.
Speaker 1: So I really like that about you. So let me
Speaker 1: just ask you this then, because I was wondering what
Speaker 1: your thoughts are on whether reverse racism exists. I believe
Speaker 1: in reverse racism. I don't believe in this kind of
Speaker 1: new definition of racism that has come about recently where
Speaker 1: it has to be bigotry plus power. I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't think it's useful. I mean, I think if you
Speaker 1: want to say that there's a uniquely pernicious racism, when
Speaker 1: racism interlocks with institutional power structures and sort of invisible
Speaker 1: cultural norms which some people might call, say white supremacy,
Speaker 1: then that can be useful. If you want to say
Speaker 1: that it's uniquely pernicious when a majority white country that
Speaker 1: has a history of slavery and a history of Jim
Speaker 1: Crow and a history of racism, when a white person
Speaker 1: in that context expresses racism, that that's a particularly bad
Speaker 1: form of racism, then I'm fine with that. But you
Speaker 1: can't say that's the only form of racism, and that
Speaker 1: when a black person is smashing up a Korean corner
Speaker 1: store because they hate Koreans, or is setting a synagogue
Speaker 1: on fire because they hate Jews, that that's not actually
Speaker 1: racism because black people have never been the oppressors, because
Speaker 1: black people aren't coming from a position of power. Well,
Speaker 1: not only have you just abandoned reason and a command
Speaker 1: of the English language, in my opinion and clear thinking
Speaker 1: you've also alienated so many people from what they regard
Speaker 1: as being their common sense attitude towards racism and bigotry
Speaker 1: that you are never going to win over the population
Speaker 1: and you're probably going to trigger a white backlash against
Speaker 1: such foolhardy nonsense. So what game are you even playing
Speaker 1: at that point? Well, that's an interesting question. What game
Speaker 1: are you playing? Yeah? I think that if you do
Speaker 1: play genuinely the game where you want to unite people
Speaker 1: and you want to have a kind of a humanistic approach,
Speaker 1: as I like to take, well, there are certain ways
Speaker 1: of thinking about people in the world that naturally follow
Speaker 1: from that opinion. I would like a world in which
Speaker 1: we didn't think stereotypically about a person just based on
Speaker 1: knowledge of the color of their skin or or even
Speaker 1: their gender, you know, like insure there's some world where
Speaker 1: you say, oh, Johnny's black, and your mind is blank
Speaker 1: about agnostic about who Johnny is. Do you know what
Speaker 1: I mean? I mean that shouldn't be controversial to say.
Speaker 1: I would. I would love to live in that kind
Speaker 1: of world, you know. And I do think there are
Speaker 1: valid criticisms of wokeness, and there are some non valid
Speaker 1: criticisms of wokeness as well. But I think some valid
Speaker 1: criticisms is that we run the risk of using identity
Speaker 1: as such a divider that we suddenly think we know
Speaker 1: the rest of a whole person, you know, and we
Speaker 1: can fill in the blanks too quickly based on their
Speaker 1: sort of level of oppression. You know that we have
Speaker 1: said that, well, if you're this, you know this kind
Speaker 1: of identity, then it's this level red level. If you're this,
Speaker 1: you're blue, if you're white, you know you're the do
Speaker 1: you you know what I mean? And further dividing people
Speaker 1: that way, that's not in common with my mission of
Speaker 1: a humanistic way of thinking about it. But no, I mean,
Speaker 1: and we all know people. I mean, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: sure you've bumped into my friends Colmin Hughes and Camille Foster.
Speaker 1: You know John mcwater a picture of me and Camille Great, well,
Speaker 1: he's a good buddy of mine. And you know, these
Speaker 1: are people who would would readily say that they are
Speaker 1: not hopelessly disenfranchised and disadvantaged because of the color of
Speaker 1: their skin. There are challenges, there are challenges for everyone.
Speaker 1: There are challenges to being Jewish, and there are challenges
Speaker 1: to being shorts. There are challenges to being ugly, there
Speaker 1: are challenges to being gay, there are challenges to being
Speaker 1: bad at sports. There are things that people are going
Speaker 1: to tease you for and pick on you for. And
Speaker 1: none of that is to say that those attributes are,
Speaker 1: as you know, as profound as the history of discrimination
Speaker 1: against African Americans over the over the centuries. That's not
Speaker 1: my point. My point is that right now, at a
Speaker 1: snapshot in when you look at the life challenges and
Speaker 1: life experiences of individual X, who is an IVY League educated,
Speaker 1: highly articulate, professional Black American, and individual Y who in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two is an uneducated white person from a
Speaker 1: mining fat family in the Midwest, that those two people
Speaker 1: you can't just split them apart and say that the
Speaker 1: black person is disadvantaged and the white person has white privilege.
Speaker 1: That's far too simplistic. We all have our challenges, we
Speaker 1: all have our attributes. And if we're going to break
Speaker 1: things down on identitarian lines and favor some people over
Speaker 1: other people and privilege some categories over other categories because
Speaker 1: those categories have been historically disadvantaged, then I think you're
Speaker 1: opening a Pandora's box. I mean, my fear is that,
Speaker 1: as someone who's very interested in history, a lot of
Speaker 1: people forget that in most times, in most places, most
Speaker 1: of human history has been tribes of people warring with
Speaker 1: other tribes in a zero some game where they think
Speaker 1: that the pie is finite and they're just scrambling for
Speaker 1: the spoils. I mean, look at any empire, look at
Speaker 1: any civilization. These are places where people conceive of themselves
Speaker 1: primarily as members of a group or a clan, and
Speaker 1: they want to defend that clan, they want to defend
Speaker 1: that family and that tribe, and it has caused enormous
Speaker 1: hardship and stultification and backwardness. And the sort of revolution
Speaker 1: of the past few centuries in the West has been
Speaker 1: the Enlightenment idea that first and foremost, we should think
Speaker 1: of ourselves as individuals. We should treat each other on
Speaker 1: the merits. We should judge each other by the content
Speaker 1: of our character, not the color of our skin, as
Speaker 1: Martin Luther King said. And the idea that we would
Speaker 1: do away with that now because so many work people
Speaker 1: think that that's naive, that you should be colored blnes.
Speaker 1: It's naive to think that you should aspire towards a
Speaker 1: world in which the color of people's skin is about
Speaker 1: as relevant as the color of their hair, which is
Speaker 1: a world that I would like to see. The Workerati
Speaker 1: will tell me that that's so naive, that I'm basically
Speaker 1: a white supremacist for even suggesting it, and that we
Speaker 1: all have to think about ourselves as our plans. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. I may be a white guy and I
Speaker 1: have that going for me, but I'm also gay, and
Speaker 1: I'm also a Jew, and I'm not crazy about fostering
Speaker 1: in a world it hasn't gone so great for Jews
Speaker 1: and gays in the past when we've started encouraging straight
Speaker 1: white guys to think about themselves as straight white guys
Speaker 1: like it's this is not a game that we want
Speaker 1: to start playing. This is not a Pandora's box that
Speaker 1: we want to start opening again. We've seen what happens.
Speaker 1: We've seen what happens when people think of themselves as
Speaker 1: members of a group instead of as individuals. In a
Speaker 1: culture and a society where every individual is deserving of
Speaker 1: respect because they are an individual, not because they are
Speaker 1: a member of a disadvantaged class, not because they are
Speaker 1: a member of an oppressed class, because they are an individual,
Speaker 1: and I think we're getting to a point at which
Speaker 1: the backlash is a real risk. I mean, the thing
Speaker 1: that worries me the most about workness is not the
Speaker 1: wokesters themselves. I don't think they're going to create an
Speaker 1: authoritarian Marxist regime. I think what they're going to do
Speaker 1: is alienate the Middle America and Middle Australia and Middle
Speaker 1: Europe from the left and create an easy path for
Speaker 1: people like Trump, or people more charismatic than Trump and
Speaker 1: Savviia than Trump, like Tucker Carson or whoever. The next
Speaker 1: generation of right wing authoritarians could be to march into
Speaker 1: power like a cakewalk, Because once you start triggering people
Speaker 1: to think about themselves as members of a tribe, the
Speaker 1: majority tribe will start thinking about it. I mean, the
Speaker 1: middle the working class white guy is only going to
Speaker 1: last for so long with every single other Rainbow coalition
Speaker 1: all having the right to defend their own interests and
Speaker 1: to think about themselves as a class of people. But
Speaker 1: what I'm the only person, says the straight white working
Speaker 1: class guy. I'm the only I'm the member of the
Speaker 1: only class that can't be proud of itself. Everybody else
Speaker 1: gets to have a fucking day. You've got the Puerto
Speaker 1: Rico Day, You've got the Black Lives Matter, you got
Speaker 1: the Gay Pride month. Everyone gets to have a fucking party.
Speaker 1: And I'm the only person in the world who doesn't
Speaker 1: get to be proud of being a white guy. Screw that.
Speaker 1: I'm here as well. Camille meet a very good point
Speaker 1: the other day, and I've been thinking about it ever since.
Speaker 1: He said, well, why are we proud about our intrinsic
Speaker 1: characteristics that we had no choice over? And should we
Speaker 1: be proud of like what we do in our lives,
Speaker 1: like the hard work we put into something. I just
Speaker 1: that point is, I've just been just reflecting on it
Speaker 1: NonStop because I think about it in terms of like
Speaker 1: the gifted education community, Right, should you be proud if
Speaker 1: you're a gifted student, Like, like all the tests come
Speaker 1: easy to you, right, Like I would think I'd be
Speaker 1: more proud if I, like was not a gift student.
Speaker 1: I put so much work into it, and you know,
Speaker 1: my through my character, you know, I became something. So
Speaker 1: you know, it's just I've been thinking about I've been
Speaker 1: really reflecting on that. I have worked questions and answers,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it's so funny that you say that thing
Speaker 1: about pride, Scott, because I just did an episode of
Speaker 1: Uncomfortable Conversations, my very good podcast, which everyone should subscribe
Speaker 1: to right now. You can pull your phone out of
Speaker 1: your pants and just click subscribe. And one episode that
Speaker 1: you should look for in addition to my terrific conversation
Speaker 1: with Scott earlier, is a solo monologue that I basically
Speaker 1: did about gay pride. So the podcast network was doing
Speaker 1: a big Pride sort of month where they would have
Speaker 1: podcasters from around the world on this Pride train doing
Speaker 1: sort of monologues about how important pride was and what
Speaker 1: pride meant to them, and I was the person selected
Speaker 1: for us to do the Australia one, and then you know,
Speaker 1: I would hand off to some queer New York show
Speaker 1: and everyone's doing this great oh you know, pride, pride,
Speaker 1: pride and why pride so important, to why visibility is
Speaker 1: so important? And I was like the black sheep, of course,
Speaker 1: always always being the person with the contrarian opinion who
Speaker 1: and I spoke for about I think about an hour
Speaker 1: about my thoughts about pride, and I made exactly that
Speaker 1: point that you're attributing to Camille there, which is I
Speaker 1: really think that pride ought to come from something over
Speaker 1: which you have some control. I mean, I don't feel
Speaker 1: ashamed of being gay, and I don't feel proud of
Speaker 1: being gay. I don't feel proud of being six foot.
Speaker 1: I don't feel proud of being white. These are just attributes.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I feel proud of what I've done.
Speaker 1: I feel proud of what I've accomplished. Now, if I
Speaker 1: were living in Nigeria, right if I were living in
Speaker 1: a highly homophobic place, if I were living maybe in
Speaker 1: some deeply religious evangelical parts of the Deep South, still,
Speaker 1: then I understand the utility in confecting a notion of
Speaker 1: pride in order to counterbalance the shame with which gay
Speaker 1: people have been inculcated. But really, if you're listening to
Speaker 1: this podcast, or if we're listening to my podcast, odds
Speaker 1: are you're living in a large metropolitan center in a
Speaker 1: reasonably you know, forward thinking part of the world. You're
Speaker 1: probably in the West, and you're probably in a place where,
Speaker 1: if not right where you are right now, probably nearby
Speaker 1: there's a significantly there's a metropolis with a significant gay population.
Speaker 1: And I mean, let's face it huge companies are run
Speaker 1: by gay people. I mean Apple is run by gay people,
Speaker 1: like I think Dour Chemicals is run by you know,
Speaker 1: I mean a gay guy. I mean we are around
Speaker 1: you know. Media is saturated at the moment with gay stories.
Speaker 1: Every great Netflix hit seems to have you know, non
Speaker 1: binary or gay characters in it. Now, the one of
Speaker 1: the few things that you could say in an office
Speaker 1: situation that would get you hauled before HR would be
Speaker 1: to be openly homophobic about something or open being basically
Speaker 1: being openly homophobic or openly racist now are the worst
Speaker 1: possible things that you Or openly sexist are the worst
Speaker 1: possible things that you can be in a professional environment.
Speaker 1: Like at some point you have to say we've won,
Speaker 1: we really have won. Does that mean there's no homophobia, No,
Speaker 1: of course not. Does it mean there's no racism, No,
Speaker 1: of course not. But there's a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: everyone's fighting battles. You know how much of a penalty
Speaker 1: it is to be short. You know how much of
Speaker 1: a penalty it is to be ugly. They've done studies short.
Speaker 1: I don't appersonally, you don't, of course, God, because you're
Speaker 1: you're a seven foot goliath. You're a beautiful man, I
Speaker 1: mean you are just you're a god essentially, this adonis.
Speaker 1: I'm sure it's very hard, but I'm sure it's very hard. Listen,
Speaker 1: it is difficult. You know, they've done studies where you
Speaker 1: had job candidates are discriminated against if they're short and
Speaker 1: ugly versus if they're tall and beautiful. Like everyone has, everyone,
Speaker 1: there are penalties to everything, basically, and at some point
Speaker 1: my point about pride, Don't be proud of shit that
Speaker 1: you can't control. Don't be proud of being pretty, don't
Speaker 1: be proud of being tall, don't be proud of being gay.
Speaker 1: It's all just They're all just attributes. Well, yes, I
Speaker 1: mean there are certain contacts and certain characteristics where if
Speaker 1: you said you're proud of them, you would come across
Speaker 1: as narcissistic by any reasonable standard of narcissism. But then
Speaker 1: there are other characteristics where if you say them, you're exalted,
Speaker 1: as enlightened. I guess, well, so there is kind of
Speaker 1: a hypocrisy there to a certain degree. Now am I saying,
Speaker 1: am I making the case that people who say they're
Speaker 1: proud of their sexuality or being narcissistic? No, I'm not
Speaker 1: saying that, but I'm just saying from larger for logical consistency, right,
Speaker 1: like why, I'm just asking the question. I dare to
Speaker 1: ask questions. I've found this ever since I was like
Speaker 1: two years old. I always wanted to know if I
Speaker 1: was the kid in the classroom there was like I
Speaker 1: have more questions than answers. I really do, Like, like,
Speaker 1: for like why I always question things about logical consistency.
Speaker 1: I was like, well, if you're gonna say X, like,
Speaker 1: are you gonna have to say why too? I feel
Speaker 1: like no one can kind of talk that way these
Speaker 1: days getting in trouble, right, absolutely. I mean that's what
Speaker 1: my whole career is based on, is asking those questions
Speaker 1: and making it okay to ask those questions and making
Speaker 1: it okay to hear answers from people who might be
Speaker 1: outside the mainstream or might not necessarily you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's incredible to me that so many of us are
Speaker 1: talking on a predictable script at the moment. Scott like,
Speaker 1: if I that's true, and this is being worsened by
Speaker 1: social media, it's being worsened by the mainstream media, by
Speaker 1: Fox News and by MSNBC, Like it's extraordinary to me
Speaker 1: that if I ask you what you think about whether
Speaker 1: or not corporations pay enough tax I can probably tell
Speaker 1: from your answer what you think about climate change. Now,
Speaker 1: why is that the two things are completely unrelated? Corporate
Speaker 1: taxation and climate science have nothing to do with each other.
Speaker 1: But the vast majority of people will have picked from
Speaker 1: column A or column B, and their tribe, their team
Speaker 1: will have certain beliefs about a whole set of completely
Speaker 1: unrelated things, from inequality to climate science, to transgenderism, to whatever,
Speaker 1: and to religious freedom. And most people will fall predictably
Speaker 1: inside a silo of thought. They have inadvertently ticked a
Speaker 1: list of checkboxes about their beliefs, and they've subscribed to
Speaker 1: a team that has a certain set of beliefs. That's
Speaker 1: why I so admire people like you and me and
Speaker 1: the other people who in our culture at the moment
Speaker 1: are making a concerted effort to escape the silo and
Speaker 1: to escape the checkbox and say no, screw that, that
Speaker 1: we don't have to play that game. We're allowed to
Speaker 1: have a bunch of different thoughts in our mind at
Speaker 1: the same time. We're allowed to explore wherever our curiosity goes.
Speaker 1: We're allowed to ask uncomfortable questions and have uncomfortable conversations,
Speaker 1: as the name of my podcast suggests, and we're allowed
Speaker 1: to hopscotch between the checklists. And has there point me
Speaker 1: to a time or a place in history where one
Speaker 1: side has had a monopoly on the truth and has
Speaker 1: been one hundred percent right? I can't think of one.
Speaker 1: I mean right. So it's obvious that that would probably
Speaker 1: be true right now. And it's highly likely that the
Speaker 1: current progressive woke orthodoxy has some flaws, and it's highly
Speaker 1: likely that the current conservative orthodoxy has some flaws. So
Speaker 1: if you believe either of them wholeheartedly, you are wrong
Speaker 1: a significant portion at the time. So if you're truly
Speaker 1: an independent thinker, and if you value reason, and you
Speaker 1: value the virtue of conversation and of of intellectual thought,
Speaker 1: you're gonna find yourself being the target of hate campaigns
Speaker 1: from one side or another because your your opinions are
Speaker 1: just not going to align neatly with the two silos
Speaker 1: that we've created. And that's a good thing. I think
Speaker 1: part of the frustration of being a free thinker, and
Speaker 1: I wouldn't want to be any other way, but is
Speaker 1: that I don't even like reducing people to the idea
Speaker 1: like woke people, because there are certain things that I'm
Speaker 1: sure I could say that would make me sound extraordinarily woke,
Speaker 1: you know, And I'm sure there are things I would
Speaker 1: say that would make me sound very different than woke.
Speaker 1: I like to kind of mix and match different things
Speaker 1: based on what I think of them, independently of each other.
Speaker 1: So I really like to mix and match different political policies.
Speaker 1: I like to mix, mix and match things that some
Speaker 1: people would call wokes with some things that they were
Speaker 1: going to do. If things make sense to me, they
Speaker 1: make sense to me. There are things coming from the
Speaker 1: so called woke people that make a lot of sense
Speaker 1: to me, and there are a lot of things that
Speaker 1: come from the so called wok people that don't make
Speaker 1: sense to me. I think it's just a shame that
Speaker 1: we live in an climate where you have to pick
Speaker 1: a side, and when you pick that side, you have
Speaker 1: to agree with everything on that side, and if you
Speaker 1: decided you're not on the other side, you have to
Speaker 1: disagree with everything on the other side. That's what infuriates me. Yes,
Speaker 1: So how do we de escalate that? Well? Maybe I
Speaker 1: hope the kind of conversations we're having. I hope more
Speaker 1: people can have honest, compassionate conversations like this that that
Speaker 1: are in the in the nuance zone or in the
Speaker 1: gray zone. That would certainly be one way. But also,
Speaker 1: you know, like people like Andrew Yang is trying to
Speaker 1: form a whole third party, you know, the Forward Party,
Speaker 1: because he's like, well, we creating this binary is not
Speaker 1: good for him, so maybe can we stop just pitting
Speaker 1: binaries against each other? And with Abraham Maslow called dichotomy transcendence.
Speaker 1: That's the phrase he used, which I love that. That's great. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's just a fancy way of saying having two ideas
Speaker 1: in your head at the same time, I or more
Speaker 1: than two ideas in your head at the same time.
Speaker 1: I do think that on a personal level, Pickle often
Speaker 1: ask me what I think the solution is, and as
Speaker 1: you say, there might be structural or political solutions, like
Speaker 1: a third party. I think on a human level, on
Speaker 1: an everyday level, the best thing to do is to
Speaker 1: try to note when you're not being generous to people
Speaker 1: you disagree with to their ideas, when you're caricaturing them.
Speaker 1: I think that's the most useful thing because so frequently,
Speaker 1: like I was. I was pitching a show, an idea
Speaker 1: on my radio show. I wanted to do a segment
Speaker 1: about nuclear power the other day. Now, one of my
Speaker 1: producers is young, a young, woke female. I said, if
Speaker 1: we're going to be serious about climate change and about
Speaker 1: fighting the fighting climate chaos, then I want to understand
Speaker 1: why the environmental left is still so opposed to nuclear power,
Speaker 1: because my understanding is that new nuclear reactors are extremely safe.
Speaker 1: You know, you're not going to get a Chernobyl again
Speaker 1: if we're using the new designs in you know, and
Speaker 1: setting them up the way that western liberal democracies would.
Speaker 1: So what exactly is the objection If this is going
Speaker 1: to be a you know, our ticket a short term
Speaker 1: you know, maybe when you use them for one hundred years,
Speaker 1: until renewables get better, until batteries get better, what exactly
Speaker 1: is the objection? Is it rational or is it a
Speaker 1: kind of an anti nuclear superstition because I've read things
Speaker 1: online that lead me to believe that that nuclear power
Speaker 1: is safe. And she rolls her eyes a little bit,
Speaker 1: this producer and goes and she goes, yeah, I've been
Speaker 1: to that segment of the internet as well as if
Speaker 1: to say there's this segment of the Internet that is
Speaker 1: easily dismissible where right wing idiots are promoting nuclear power.
Speaker 1: But I don't really have to investigate that because I
Speaker 1: just sort of know that it's role now. That to
Speaker 1: me is an example of where you should catch yourself
Speaker 1: and go, that's not thinking. It's not again, it's I'm
Speaker 1: inside this silo. Of course, it doesn't occur that way
Speaker 1: to her. To her, it occurs that she's being enlightened
Speaker 1: and she believes in justice and environmental equity, and these
Speaker 1: other people are finding pretexts to promote something that is
Speaker 1: environmentally damaging. But constantly catching yourself in those moments where
Speaker 1: you're dismissing something you disagree with and going, why have
Speaker 1: I given it the benefit of the doubt? Here? Have
Speaker 1: I really done the work to actually hear out what
Speaker 1: its most logical proponents are saying? Am I meeting them
Speaker 1: as close to the edge of what I think is
Speaker 1: reasonable from their perspective as I can go without losing
Speaker 1: my own credibility or intellectual credibility. That's what I'm always
Speaker 1: trying to do. Whoever I'm talking to, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: see the world through their eyes. And give them as
Speaker 1: much ground as possible so that I'm not creating a
Speaker 1: straw man of their ideas, because that not only makes
Speaker 1: it easier to find compromises and to conciliate and to
Speaker 1: have a healthy, flourishing democracy and culture, but also makes
Speaker 1: my ideas much stronger. I mean, if I don't understand
Speaker 1: what the opponents, what my opponents really believe, then I
Speaker 1: don't really know why I believe what I believe either.
Speaker 1: I mean, I have to be able to defend my
Speaker 1: positions in the face of the most power of the
Speaker 1: strongest opposition to them, not the weakest. So it makes
Speaker 1: no sense for me to go around only knocking over
Speaker 1: the weakest version of my oppon and arguments. I have
Speaker 1: to be able to take down the strongest ones. So
Speaker 1: I have to hear them, I have to engage with them.
Speaker 1: I have to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Speaker 1: I have to sort of assume that they are right
Speaker 1: to some extent and then start picking apart what's wrong
Speaker 1: with their ideas from inside the worldview that they have
Speaker 1: not just firing arrows at their opinions and at their positions.
Speaker 1: From my point of view, that's going to get us nowhere.
Speaker 1: So when I think about the solution to this, I
Speaker 1: think we need to change the incentives of social media
Speaker 1: companies for them to make them as much money as
Speaker 1: they do just on the amount of time that people
Speaker 1: spend on the site, because the algorithms are just extremification
Speaker 1: machines that make us, you know, that make us crave
Speaker 1: posts that are that either we agree with or that
Speaker 1: we really vehemently disagree with. You know, nuance is not
Speaker 1: rewarded on social media. So you need to change that,
Speaker 1: and you need to change the way that we interact
Speaker 1: with each other so that just on a personal level,
Speaker 1: we're doing less dismissing of positions that we think are
Speaker 1: wrong or evil and more understanding of those positions, even
Speaker 1: if it means that we're not going to be one
Speaker 1: over by them. I think that is three quarters of
Speaker 1: the battle. Well that's it. But my default is that
Speaker 1: I just I have a radically open mind. That so
Speaker 1: I feel like whenever I'm talking to someone and they
Speaker 1: say something to me, I don't care how ridiculous it sounds.
Speaker 1: I take it in, I process it, and I think,
Speaker 1: oh that's interesting, let me see what the evidence is.
Speaker 1: But that's my default. I don't know why I'm so
Speaker 1: weird in that why or why is everyone else so weird?
Speaker 1: Why is everyone like that? Well, yeah, but I mean no,
Speaker 1: I think you are weird, and I think I am.
Speaker 1: I think we can take that just in the sense
Speaker 1: of being not normal. I mean, most people are tribal.
Speaker 1: Homot apiens are tribal. We're primates. We want to be
Speaker 1: in the klan, and people like you, like you and me,
Speaker 1: for some reason, either don't have that jigsaw piece or
Speaker 1: we think that it's virtuous to overcome it. I think
Speaker 1: in my case, it's just that I try to be
Speaker 1: virtuous in overcoming it. I don't. I don't lack the
Speaker 1: temptation to join a club I have. I feel this
Speaker 1: and I regard it as being pernicious, and so I
Speaker 1: try to run from it. I think it might cause
Speaker 1: I'm just radically curious, and that's just that's my default
Speaker 1: state of being that just trumps everything else. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of like, you could say something
Speaker 1: that a horrible, horrible thing, and I'd be like, huh
Speaker 1: is that true? Like like you're not even supposed to
Speaker 1: entertain that certain horrible things could even be true. And
Speaker 1: you know, like I don't want to start by examples,
Speaker 1: but do you know I just like that. My default
Speaker 1: is is that like, if I process the information and
Speaker 1: I don't pross it through a lens of like, oh,
Speaker 1: what should I not entertain? What should I entertain? What
Speaker 1: should I That's what a good philosopher or psychologist does, right,
Speaker 1: I mean? And this, you know, if you don't want
Speaker 1: to give any examples, I'll give an example that I'm
Speaker 1: stealing from my friend Sam Harris. He won't mind, but
Speaker 1: Sam says, you know, part of the point of philosophy
Speaker 1: is that you're you're supposed to entertain outrageous ideas. You
Speaker 1: might be in a philosophy class and the professor might say,
Speaker 1: you know, why is it wrong to eat dead babies? Right?
Speaker 1: I mean, like the babies are already dead, you know
Speaker 1: where we have them. They're edible, they're nutritious, they're high
Speaker 1: in protein. If the parents are okay with it, or
Speaker 1: if the parents are dead as well because they all
Speaker 1: died in a car accident or something. This is food.
Speaker 1: Why are we wasting resources producing other food when we
Speaker 1: already have these dead babies that we could be eating.
Speaker 1: And he makes the point that if you were to
Speaker 1: just grab that line from the philosophy professor and pull
Speaker 1: it out of context and put it on social media
Speaker 1: and say why aren't we dead babies? Right, then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, that would just sound like the most
Speaker 1: horrendous thing. But in order to understand why we value
Speaker 1: what we value and why our moral universe looks the
Speaker 1: way it does, you actually do have to push at
Speaker 1: the edges of it with questions like that. And then
Speaker 1: of course someone cheekily made a meme that went on
Speaker 1: social media of Sam Harris saying why can't we just
Speaker 1: eat dead babies? With a picture of a pen ominous
Speaker 1: looking picture of Sam Harris's face. So, but that's the
Speaker 1: kind of thing that you're talking about. I mean, you
Speaker 1: have to, I agree, you have to be able to
Speaker 1: entertain any and all questions. Otherwise you're just floating along
Speaker 1: on a bunch of inherited assumptions and you're not actually
Speaker 1: getting to the CrOx of why we believe what we believe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and how can we separate the search for truth from
Speaker 1: like the compassion issues. It's a different issue to me,
Speaker 1: like I would or teae anything. But then, like if
Speaker 1: you started to say like, Okay, well this is true,
Speaker 1: but then there's implications for hurting people. Well, then something
Speaker 1: else clicks in my head, Like there are different things
Speaker 1: that click in at different times, right, Like I'm a
Speaker 1: caring human. I'm a caring human, but I also care
Speaker 1: about the truth, Like why can't we have both? Yeah? Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: that's great. That's great. My man. You said you had
Speaker 1: to go to a meeting at four fifteen? Is that
Speaker 1: is that I do? Unfortunately, I have to produce a
Speaker 1: radio show. I do three hours of live radio a
Speaker 1: day on ABC Radio in Australia, ABC Radio, Sydney, So
Speaker 1: I'd like I could just stay here all day and
Speaker 1: chat with you. But it was super fun. Other people
Speaker 1: want to hear these dulcet tones as well. Yes, I
Speaker 1: got you. I don't want to hug you all to myself.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate you having this conversation with me and
Speaker 1: being able to talk in the grey zone. It's it's
Speaker 1: very refreshing when I could talk to someone in the
Speaker 1: gray zone. It's great to you, Scott. I came off
Speaker 1: when when you were on my podcast Uncomfortable Conversations, which
Speaker 1: people check out. It's a great because you'll get insights
Speaker 1: into Scott that you may not otherwise have. I came
Speaker 1: off that recording and yeah, it was like I was
Speaker 1: floating along on a cloud. It was really great. It's
Speaker 1: just lovely to throw ideas around with you. I think
Speaker 1: you're you're a terrific asset and the contribution that you're
Speaker 1: making is fantastic. We need more people like like you,
Speaker 1: throwing ideas at the wall and just having these conversations
Speaker 1: that are stimulating and you know, free from free from
Speaker 1: the usual nonsense. Well, thank you, Josh, Well all the
Speaker 1: best to you. Thanks Scott, make you care jeez like.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to react and way to something you heard,
Speaker 1: I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusycology
Speaker 1: podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page thus Ecology Podcast.
Speaker 1: We also put up some videos of some episodes on
Speaker 1: our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check
Speaker 1: that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of
Speaker 1: the show, and tune in next time for more on
Speaker 1: the mind, brain, behavior and creativity.