SIO37: Josh Zepps of #WeThePeople LIVE

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode number 37. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Today's interview for Interview Monday, very interesting guy, Josh Zepps, somebody whose work I became familiar with. Well, you'll hear me say it in the interview, so you know what? There's no point in introducing it twice, but Josh Zepps is a really interesting guy. Great conversation. Somebody who's coming from a little bit different of a perspective. And I think largely we agree on stuff, but there's some interesting areas of disagreement that I found very refreshing to talk about. And he's got an incredible, interesting background story as well. So I was thrilled to learn all that. And without further introduction, how about I get right over to my interview with Josh Zepps, host of podcast, We The People Live. Here you go.

0:01:23 Thomas: Joining me right now is Josh Zepps of We The People Live. How you doing, Josh?

0:01:28 Josh: I'm wonderful. It's a sunny day in California because it's always sunny. Well, at least in this part of California, in Los Angeles, it's actually dully. It is like the weather here is so nice, it is boring. You know, but that's good.

0:01:38 Thomas: Well, you know, it's the funny

0:01:40 Josh: I mean, there are worse things.

0:01:40 Thomas: Thing. We were just talking off air and you said you'd been there since October, right?

0:01:45 Josh: Yeah, basically. Basically.

0:01:46 Thomas: You've experienced the worst, harshest winter of California's history. It was like for...

0:01:50 Josh: It's Actually funny. Because yeah, oh, throughout the winter, you know, it would, the, the temp, the temperature would drop into the 60s and you go outside and you see all these kind of supermodel type bimbos walking around with ugg boots and parkas, like snow parkas, and my husband's from New Hampshire and he just scoffs at them, all he's like, "You have no idea what you're even talking about." If people, I think it's just a fashion thing, people like it, you know, if it gets, it's below 72 degrees and all of a sudden you have to treat

0:01:54 Thomas: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it is a chance to break out the stuff that they never get to wear.

0:02:21 Josh: It like it's Aspen. Yeah. Exactly.

0:02:24 Thomas: Yeah, no, uh, totally, and and the funny thing is it's, it's, it doesn't really get cold, but in terms of the rain, you know, you actually got here when it started finally raining in California, so that must have been, so if you think that's normal, normal is just never rain ever, so that's just so you know going

0:02:40 Josh: Yeah. I mean, I come to LA a lot, like LA for me is like, it's a, it's a weird kind of vacation bubble where I come to a lot for meetings and things, and then I'm usually fairly happy to get out of, and I, you know, nothing has changed in my opinion there, everyone is always like, "Oh, it'll just take time for you to, for you to get used to LA and you'll love it, you just have to, you have to find," mind your LA? No, not really. It's just a, it's a pragmatic place where people who have a particular thing that they want to do come to do it.

0:02:41 Thomas: Forward yeah

0:03:09 Josh: It has no other, it has nothing else going for it. You know, I spent almost, I spend roughly 10 years in New York City, and there is nothing that you can't say about New York City that is at least interesting and stimulating, right? I mean, you might be one of these people who hate it, but you're not going to be ambivalent towards it. Whereas I feel like LA is just pure ambivalence and it is total neutrality

0:03:07 Thomas: Yeah that's exactly right no not really it is just a place that a bunch of people are pretty much like, it's not, there's nothing, yeah. I was gonna say this is what we came here to do today we're finally dishing on LA for everybody.

0:03:36 Josh: Us for getting like getting off on a weird tangent but but let

0:03:41 Thomas: Go, Josh. I first became familiar, and many people might have heard, or I get, was it video? I can't remember. It was just audio with Sam Harrison, Hannibal Buress, but and Joe Rogan. A lot of people might be familiar with you from that. That's when I first kind of caught on to what you were doing. And I pardon the, you the kissing up right now, but I was very impressed with your fairness and in listening to your stuff subsequently. I thought, wow, this is a really smart guy who I think does a great job of being objective and of asking people questions and challenging everybody. So I really admire what you're doing. You here today, but that said, I don't know much about you. You mentioned you lived in New York for a while. Do you want to to talk about your background a little bit

0:03:54 Josh: Yeah. Thank you. That's very kind. It is true that I am brilliant and also even-handed.

0:04:30 Thomas: Okay. Good, I was right, yeah.

0:04:33 Josh: If people aren't aware of the episode that you're talking about, it was an episode of my podcast, We The People Live, available on all good podcast outlets, as one is obliged to say these days, in which I was taping actually at Joe Rogan's studio, and it was going to be Joe and Sam Harris and me. And actually, I'm about to have Sam back on the show again, which is delightful, and I'm going to have him on the podcast. And I'm also about to go back on Joe Rogans' show.

So, you know, if people are interested in me And they also follow those other people Keep your ears out for me in other places as well And, yeah, that was only audio And if people were interested in that particular It's actually two episodes I think it was in September of 2006 And it's episodes maybe 51 or 50 Sorry, 2016, I always do that I can't believe that I'm like 10 years by myself 2016 2016. I think it's episodes like 51 and 52 or something. But that was sort of a culmination, I guess, of my attempt to have interesting conversations with interesting people in ways that not the normal ways that people have conversations. In other words, that are defiantly

0:04:33 Thomas: Oh, Awesome, I get it, you're big time I get you're, but no I'm just kidding. Name 2006, 2016, yeah, yeah, yeah,

0:05:42 Josh: And anti-partisan thinking and are actually just human beings communicating with one another outside of the—without triggering one another and without having tripwires that are going to cause people to take offense simply because you're speaking without bullshit.

0:05:43 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, there were a lot of tripwires on that episode

0:05:59 Josh: Shit, and and yeah, exactly, and the reason why it became a big deal was because it was, it, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy in which it, in which that episode became the very thing that it had been meaning to critique, right, by because Hannibal Barris, the, the, the great comic, uh, was there and took great offense at things that Sam Harris was saying about Black Lives Matter.

0:06:01 Thomas: Right it needs to be said that he was completely plastered.

0:06:23 Josh: He Was loaded, he was smashed. Uh he just he'd just done Joe Rogan's show and they'd been drinking, um, but my, so my background, I mean, I grew up in Australia. I grew up in Sydney and yeah, believe it or not, I know I sound like a Californian basically wanted to do broadcasting in some way. I wanted to be either a radio broadcaster or a television host and loved Letterman and Carson and Woody Allen.

Just there was a whole kind of New York vibe that I liked and I sort of wanted to live in New York and wanted to work in New Yorke, broadcasting, podcasting, it's really the capital of the world for it, for that industry, for so many industries, and uh, so went to, went to college for journalism and like social, political, historical studies, and it was kind of a philosophy wonk and a politics nerd and a science, uh, science geek, and yeah, got a job in in Australian radio, started out in producing, I, I had originally considered, considered going into stand-up because I was doing a lot of improv comedy, uh, and uh, I just kind of felt like that, that just struck me as the most thankless kind of career, like even if you go into journalism or broadcasting or producing and you fail, like you're still sort of okay, but

0:06:25 Thomas: Yeah so that didn't help what oh no Yeah.

0:07:36 Josh: If you go into stand up and you fall, you're just a hopeless wreck of a human being living out of motels in some shitty part of the country, you know, on semen stained sheets and just like getting bedbugs or not even making a living at all, so I was like, I'll take the safe path, and my, I came from a performing family, my dad is a, is a fairly well-known, or was a fairly well-known actor in Australia, he's still alive, but I'm just saying, like the kids the kids wouldn't be that hip with him uh these days, uh, and uh yeah, he was a TV star and and my brother had gone into acting, so I was like, "I'm not going to be that predictable dickhead who just goes into the same, the same tradition as their parents," uh, so I'll go into, I'll going to broadcasting and try to scoot over into performing from having been a producer.

0:07:58 Thomas: Now nobody knows who he is, I get it. Yeah yeah see my parents were both podcasters. So I, uh, no, I'm just kidding, it'll come from a long line of podcassters.

0:08:21 Josh: That's not true, isn't it amazing that in the future that will actually be able, that people will actually be saying that yeah my dad was a podcaster, his father was a podcaster it's father before him exactly, uh someday, um, although that actually, let me take another tangent here, isn't interesting that the idea of podcasting will probably go away because it'll

0:08:27 Thomas: Yeah someday yeah his father before, damn it, son, you're going to be a podcaster yeah oh, and it will just be broadcast like talking

0:08:49 Josh: Just be, well, that's right, because the idea of radio will go away, like someone was pointing out to me the other day that like, when was the last time you heard someone talk about the internet or the World Wide Web

0:08:50 Thomas: Yeah yeah right yeah, I have said oh my, that's so funny, I said, I've said the same thing, people, I bet you, uh, you know, because when I, when I started having kids, which is happening soon, I bet you they won't get what the internet is, like they'll just be like, no, this thing I do things on this thing that I have, what do you mean the internet?

0:09:01 Josh: Yeah no yeah you mean you mean the world, you mean life, you mean networked life because everything is networked

0:09:17 Thomas: Yeah it it will take explaining to be like now this, your calculator that doesn't have internet, your phone, that, oh, there won't be calculators, but I'll pick up an old thing

0:09:24 Josh: Yeah well but But I mean, the calculator will have internet. The point is that in 20, like in 20 years, everything will be networked and everything will be communicating to everything else. And your car will be communicating with the calculator on your phone or whatever it is that you're, whatever device you're using.

0:09:31 Thomas: Yeah yeah that's true Right. Yeah. But I'll pick up a dusty old calculator and I'll be like, I'll have to explain like, this doesn't have the thing that I'm trying that you can't even conceive of that exists. And I've totally had that exact thought. That's funny.

0:09:46 Josh: Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, that's kind of like podcasting as well. It's like in, in, uh, in 200 years, like no one's going to be like, I'm a podcaster. There's gonna be, well, I'm just a broadcaster, because radio doesn't exist anymore. Um, Well,

0:10:04 Thomas: Right. Well, I thought you were going to make the joke too, that you might just say I'm a citizen because just everybody has a podcast, but there's also that angle.

0:10:11 Josh: There's That, that's, that's, I mean, that's kind of a funny way of spinning it, but I mean, just even in terms of technological evolution, the idea that there is a thing called radio and a thing called podcasting and a things called the internet and a think called not internet is, is going to be meaningless. Everything

0:10:13 Thomas: Yeah, it will be gone. And podcasting has been interesting because it reveals a lot of what works and what works is talking about gruesome crime. And like that, every podcast is a crime podcast now because people love it. It's disturbing to me because I'm not, I mean, I liked cereal because it was good and, you know, interesting and all that. But a bunch of my friends and apparently everyone on the earth decided, oh, I'm going to listen to every podcast that talks about gruesome murders that there is. And that's hence a whole new genre was born.

0:11:02 Josh: Yeah.

0:11:03 Thomas: But let's get back to you, though. Let's direct this back to You.

0:11:03 Josh: It's it's funny, but before we get Before we get back to me, I just have to say literally 49 minutes ago on my Twitter feed, the most recent tweet that I tweeted was, by which episode of S-Town podcast am I allowed to admit it is not compelling? It's

0:11:07 Thomas: Oh, is it not? OK, because I haven't checked it out, but that was one where because it it was sort of cereal related. I was like, oh, maybe it'll be good, but no, no good.

0:11:25 Josh: Very much like Cereal, it's very well produced, the host is perfect, it's great in every way, it's lavish. I'm just like, you know what, I get it, you're producing a very lavish, like, mystery podcast. I'm juste not, I just want a couple of people talking in my ears, basically, on a couple of people bullshitting at me. I'm sick of this, like, NPR style, This American Life style stuff.

0:11:46 Thomas: Yeah, stuff. For me, I'm not that everybody has to have my taste, but I just want to learn stuff. I'm just tired of, I've gotten to the point in my life and my career where I just need to know things. So the people who provide me the best knowings of things, like that's what I'm into. The people who give me good information. I don't know. But it's because I'm not. What am I going to do with all these stories of crimes from 10 years ago that I'm not doing anything with that? I mean, I know it's interesting, but anyway, all that aside, let's get back to you.

0:12:12 Josh: No, I, I hear you, but we should also talk about, about, if we get to it, about what, what getting information means and how that differs from having stimulating conversations. But let's put a pause button on that so we can get back to me. Yeah, so I did communications and journalism and all that sort of stuff. Got a job as a producer on Australian talkback radio, Australian conservative talk radio. And I was good at doing impressions.

So I sort of started doing some on-air stuff and, like, filling in, and basically made found my way into, into, into writing and voicing a weekly satirical comedy sketch on a, on a Australia's biggest AM talk network, and that turned into a daily gig when the show that I was, um, that I was on got promoted from the, from the drive time slot, which is four to six, to the, to the more, to the, what we call breakfast, which is called mornings in the states, which is six to nine in the morning. And, and basically convinced the, the guy who was, was the host of the show, to allow me to go and do it from New York.

0:12:14 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm. OK. I

0:13:15 Josh: My rationale being that I would be able to read the Australian newspapers when they came online at about midnight or 1am Sydney time, which would be 9am New York time. And I could write the comedy sketches overnight, Australian time. Then when he got into the office at four or five in the morning for his 6am shift, he'd be, be able to edit them, send them back to me, I'd record them in my apartment in New York, and then email the audio files back to Sydney, where the technicians would cut them together and add sound effects and stuff, and they'd be ready to go right after the 7am news, which is the peak listening time of the entire day. And he fell for it. God bless him.

0:13:55 Thomas: Was going to say it really was just

0:13:57 Josh: It was an elaborate ruse to let me go to New York, because I basically wanted to do improv at UCB theatre, at the Upright Citizens Brigade, and this was, a this was just a ruse to enable me to try to figure out how to move to New York without having to upend my career, and not, and, you know, and move to a new country with no money and not have a visa either. I mean, so I, you know, I was able to get a visa that way. All of this talk about, like, immigration reform and undocumented workers and everything, I, people often forget, it's not actually easy to come into this country legally and just work here. I, like, there are a limited number of visas. I think a lot of Americans just think that you can just come here somehow.

0:14:12 Thomas: Smart. Yeah.

0:14:34 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:14:35 Josh: It's very tricky. It took me years to figure out how to do it legally.

0:14:36 Thomas: I'm pretty ignorant of that because I've never had to come into this country to work. It's totally true, like, most Americans, obviously, we're just like, yeah, we're all here, isn't it just come here, it's easy, yeah, it's

0:14:44 Josh: Yeah, of course everyone just comes, yeah, exactly. And it is easy in a way to, like, just wander across the border, if you can well, it's definitely easy to be born here and if you that's right? Well, how, how easy was it for you to be born in Australia?

0:14:50 Thomas: It's to be born here. Let me tell you I don't know what your problem was. Oh, You

0:15:00 Josh: Huh, pretty damn hard. Boom. Uh, and then, and then I managed to get, I basically just got a, what they call an extraordinary talent visa, uh, after having been here for a while, which was basically, you basically just have to prove that you've reached the top of your field in your home country, which basically means that you pay a fancy immigration attorney on Madison Avenue way too much money to bullshit for you in front of over, underpaid and overworked immigration officials who just go, all right. But it takes a long time and you have to, well,

0:15:01 Thomas: Got me, damn, So, that's, that's our policy and this, this is, of course, is all pre-Trump, so that our policy that we can only take you if you're the top of your country, then we'll let you in.

0:15:39 Josh: No, it depends on what visa you want, right? So if an American firm had wanted me to work here and said that I had skills that a local couldn't do, then they would have applied for a different visa category. And if I was coming here for, I don't know, to set up a business and there would have been a different Visa category, they've all got numbers and they've They've all got letters associated with them. The visa class that I went for, which was the only one that I would be eligible for, was an O-1 visa, which is an Alien of Extraordinary Talent visa class, which basically is for sports people, scientists, and entertainers who are coming into the United States. It's the visa that Russell Crowe comes in on to shoot a movie, right?

0:15:39 Thomas: Oh, okay. Right. Right right. How

0:16:20 Josh: And that was the only plausible way by which I could claim to reside in the United States and be allowed to live here.

0:16:26 Thomas: Long do they let you do that, three

0:16:28 Josh: That's a three-year visa. So I ended up getting three of those back-to-back, and got an agent, and basically was shopping myself around as primarily a television host, and got a show on Discovery Science Channel, which was my first gig in the States, which was basically, Discovery wanted to do a ripoff of The Soup, which was then Talk Soup, and but like for science and nerd news, and they had, they'd been looking and auditioning a bunch of kind of wacky comedy-ish scientists to try to host it, and none of them worked. So then they were like, well, maybe we should just get an actual host who's

0:16:30 Thomas: Years? Okay. Oh, yeah,

0:17:08 Josh: Interested in science, uh, to do it. And so I did that, and I was the creative producer of that show, and that was a weekly thing, and that, that was good fun. I was called Brink. Um, unfortunately, it launched in 2008, and the economy was just, just fell off a cliff, and it was not a great time to be a small expensive show on a boutique network like Discovery Science that was also topical, so it couldn't be sold into reruns on other networks in the future. So that lasted for three seasons, uh, and it was good fun, and then, then that ended. Uh, and with a little bit of hopscotching around, I eventually found myself at HuffPost Live, which was before it launched, um, and I, I've spent essentially the past four years there, until the wheels came off that caboose about a year ago. And then, since, since then, I've, I've been focusing entirely on doing my podcast.

0:17:12 Thomas: Well that sounds fun. Yeah wonder, uh, was HuffPo Live, I think I've heard you mention that, that was all about the kind of soundbitey stuff where they just, you recorded a long time and then they grabbed a soundbite, is that the kind of thing you were wanting to fight back against with your podcast? Yeah, sure.

0:18:14 Josh: Yeah, that's right, I mean, actually I wouldn't criticize HuffPost Live for that necessarily, I mean, that was just a, that was the, that was the nature of what the, the online beast turned out to be. I mean, HuffPost Live was being devised in 2011 and 2012 by people who had created HuffPost and who were thinking, well, all right, HuffPost disrupted newspapers by becoming a gigantic hoover that would just vacuum up a whole bunch of different articles, produce its own blog content, hire its own journalists, and and vomit out a massive quantity of content, and get people to click on it using click-baity headlines. If Strong Business model. If you were to re-evaluate the television broadcast space the same way that we had the newspaper space five or six years ago, at that time, then what would you do in the video space? And, I mean, they sort of thought...

So it was a sort of a thought experiment, like if an alien came down to planet Earth and thought to themselves, how should people be having communications and getting information about the things that are going on in the world around them, then in 2012 no alien would be like, oh, you know what, we should do, we should have an old white man for half an hour in the evenings talking at people, right? I mean, it would be something that was more participatory and more interactive, it'd be something faster and nimbler, and it'd be more, you

0:18:20 Thomas: Yeah, strong business model, yeah, would

0:19:47 Josh: Know, reliant on social media well,

0:19:47 Thomas: It be like seven or eight talking heads on at once, with nine or ten scrolling text things going, like CNN or what did you, because that's what happens Now that's just throw as much information and hope something sticks. Yeah.

0:19:57 Josh: Yeah. No, I don't think it would be that, and I think that part of HuffPost's problem was that it didn't keep up with the way that the internet changed between 2012 and, and when it, uh, essentially sort of, you know, came apart in 2016. I mean, it still exists ostensibly, but

0:20:13 Thomas: I was gonna say, I didn't know. So it came apart, I was going to ask if it came part for just you, or, or if it came apart in general, yeah.

0:20:14 Josh: Uh um, Uh, it did come apart in general. Um, it basically, between about 2015 and the end, January of 2016, uh, so over that, over the course of that year, basically, yeah, throughout 2015, um, it lost the support of management. AOL, which owns the Huffington Post, was bought by Verizon. I mean, you know, if you want to be producing a quality creative product, my, my hint, my tip is don't get bought by massive telecommunications companies, companies. And so basically what it turned, the, the whole studio, the whole idea of having, you know, eight to twelve hours a day of studio-based content where there were long-form interviews with serious production values in them, that, that began being wound down towards the end of, uh, 2015, and was basically eradicated in early 2016, and now the brand lives on as sort of, I'm a a producer for half post and I'm out on the street with an iPhone doing a Facebook Live stream talking to a baker who, who doesn't want to bake a gay birthday cake, and that, that sort of stuff.

0:21:26 Thomas: Let's get his views Yeah.

0:21:28 Josh: But, but it's not the same as what we were doing into, in its hate, in the heyday of 2013 and 2014, when I think we were actually doing really interesting, um, content and long-form interviews, and it was one of the few places where celebrities and newsmakers could go and sit down with me for 30 or 40 minutes. Well, not just sit down with me, sit down with a smart person who could talk to them for 30 or 40 minutes. And, as you said at the beginning of this question that I'm answering in a very long-winded way, the, the, the way that that would make money for half post was, you know, I sit down for Michael Moore, with, for 35 minutes, he says two minutes worth of really clickbaity, interesting stuff.

0:21:53 Thomas: Yeah, Right.

0:22:06 Josh: They clip that, put it on the main half post site, which gets 40 million views like a millisecond, uh, with a headline about, just splashed up there about what, what it was that he said, and then there's a link at the bottom of that article to the, the long form interview. So maybe the, the actual segment itself only has maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of viewers when it's going live, not much, but that clip gets tens to hundreds of, of millions of, of views within the first 24 hours on HuffPost. However, that, what, what ended up happening was, you know, if you're an accountant and you look at the, the money that you're investing into sustaining these studios and everything, and you, you say, well, why don't we just get the two-minute clip without having, without doing the 35-minute segment? Problem is, that's a misunderstanding of what hosting is like.

0:22:38 Thomas: Yeah, right Right.

0:22:57 Josh: As you know. You don't get the good two-minute clip without, out all of that redundant investment in the 35-minute conversation, because I can't just sit down with Michael Moore and say, hey, say something really interesting and controversial about Hillary Clinton, you know?

0:22:57 Thomas: Yeah. Exactly. I'm, well, I'm, I don't know, yeah, you say that, I would know, I mean, I, I get what you mean, but I'm anti-profit in general, I just like to have a small show with no clickbait that nobody listens since two. No, I'm just kidding. But it's interesting.

0:23:22 Josh: But when I say you know, what I mean is that you would have an appreciation that after you've been talking to someone for half an hour, they're willing to say things that they wouldn't be willing to Say if you just stick a microphone in their face.

0:23:25 Thomas: Yeah. But to give an example of this, I am remembering that one of the episodes I listened to of yours was with Gad Saad. We can maybe talk about that, but he waged war against this one Bill Nye quote. And then I think it ended up having been from an interview of yours, right? Did you have that right?

0:23:50 Thomas: Yeah. It's so crazy I the crazy coincidence. Yeah.

0:23:49 Josh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. I didn't realize he seems obsessed with that. I don't even remember the quote. I I didn't even know about it.

0:23:53 Thomas: Oh, just about him. Yeah, about a global warming's responsible for terrorism in some way, and, uh, yeah.

0:24:01 Josh: I mean, Bill Nye, the science guy, was saying, I didn't even think anything of it when he said it because it's a factually true statement, which is that one of the many contributing factors to the Arab Spring and to the social unrest that evolved in the Middle East between 2007 and 2011 or 12 was just extraordinary skyrocketing food prices and instability in the prices of grains and things. And a lot of that had to do with weird things that were going on with water. And all of those things are exacerbated by droughts and weather patterns that are in turn exacerbated by climate change. And that's a very easy position to

0:24:02 Thomas: Yeah. Defend

0:24:41 Josh: Caricature by being like, oh, it must have nothing to do with Islam then. I'm sure that Bill would not say that. He would say that it's a multifactorial problem. But if you've got one component that is there, then you can point to that component. And for people like Gad, like, that becomes a punchline. Well, Bill Nye thinks that ISIS is caused by climate change. Okay.

0:24:44 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:25:03 Josh: I mean, if you want to play that game, that's fine.

0:25:03 Thomas: It's such an anti-intellectual thing to do. It's what's been driving me a little bit nuts, but, I, you've talked about, you mentioned off air, I think for the past year, maybe a year ago, you would have been more in the mindset that you needed to poke out the left a lot more, but, but maybe not so much anymore. Talk about how that's been for you. And I have a lot of questions about how you've been able to have these conversations with people that I, you know, frankly, I've had a hard time get to ever talk to me. But that's another story. Why don't you talk a little bit about that?

0:25:37 Josh: I just hate labels, and I hate, hate groupthink, and I think it partly comes from living in a country where I didn't grow up. So, so there are a whole lot of assumptions that are taken for granted in the United States that I just don't buy into automatically, that I just think are silly. Like, if you're on the left, then, I mean, I got into an argument the other day on Twitter for saying that I thought that the word undocumented is a silly euphemism. I mean, they're just illegal immigrants, right? No, I don't mean that in a disparaging way. I'm just saying that the word undocumented doesn't add any information to the simple fact that if you're here illegally, then you're hier illegally. So, like, this was a conversation about, should we be using the term migrant for the European migrant crisis, or refugee, or asylum seeker? I think words really matter here, and someone had proposed, you know, maybe we should call them undocumented workers.

I was like, what do you mean, undocumented workers? You're working without the, the right to work here. You snuck across the border and now you're working here. Now, it might be offensive to people to call these people illegals, because all they, all they're doing is coming here and mowing our lawns, and we're complicit in that, but

0:25:46 Thomas: Oh, interesting.

0:26:01 Thomas: Yeah.

0:26:47 Josh: Let's not pretend that undocumented solves anything. All it is, is just a nicer word for the same, for an illegal person who came here illegally.

0:26:52 Thomas: So you're just saying it doesn't solve the issues to change the nomenclature.

0:26:57 Josh: Well, right, so I mean, I only raised that as one example of many, many, many examples, and others might be, I don't know, abortion or whatever, where I feel like my attempt to just not peddle in bullshit and euphemisms can make people on both sides of politics think that I'm either an ally or an enemy. And all I'm doing is trying to describe reality as I see it in a way that is free from jargon. And that's basically the point of my podcast.

I mean, I want it to be able to abridge the sort of conversational chasm that has erupted, I think, especially since the election of Donald Trump, but I mean, I think 2016 was just a bad year in general for our ability to communicate with one another on a rational basis, not just in the United States but everywhere. I think that fed into Brexit in the, in the UK, and feeds into the rise of right-wing populist parties all over the world. I guess when you say that, like, when you mentioned that I had mentioned that that 12 months ago I might have regarded it as being a bigger issue to kind of pick fights with the left.

That's true because 12 months earlier, I would have thought there's a lot of identity politics bullshit on the left. I don't think that it helps anybody to attack people for using the wrong transgender pronoun. I mean, I've been on Joe Rogan's show a bunch of times and we used to always talk about how ridiculous it is that there would be, you know, university campuses that are erupting in outrage over some tiny little transgression that was politically incorrect.

0:27:13 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:28:29 Josh: And nowadays, I don't care about that stuff anymore, because I feel like the game has sort of shifted. And there's a bigger thing at play, which is there are these kind of tectonic forces that I can see slowly moving in directions that could fundamentally undermine our commitment to liberal democracy, and that for me is a much bigger fight than picking battles with the left about about why they're and

0:28:35 Thomas: Yeah.

0:28:52 Thomas: A a homicidal clown with no regard for truth, I, in power, in control, in the highest office in the land, for me, uh, what I feel is that that's the people in power, uh, are more important, and the, the groups in power are more important to criticize

0:29:08 Josh: And not I mean, not just the groups in power. I know I also wouldn't necessarily call him a homicidal, but, uh, but I, but the, even if we, even if you ignore the people who are in power and make this not about Trump, but just make this about the, the groups that are vying for power, are on the ground in the United States. If you think about, and everywhere, if you think about it as being, there's the alt-right, which is this kind of loose coalition of people who are fundamentally, I think, antithetical towards the project of liberal democracy, who really are, who like throwing shit at the walls for the sake of throwing shit at the wall.

And anyway, let's put, I won't need to, I don't need, need to describe them any further, and then on the other side you've got their kind of counterparts on the left who are identity politics obsessed, uh, like the worst edges of kind of, uh, apologists for Islamism, you know, bury their head in the sand, kind of, you know, jihad apologists, and, and maybe extreme feminists, and maybe the, the fringes of the Black Lives Matter movement. People for people. People for whom there is a rigid ideological orthodoxy that if you transgress that, then you will get attacked as being a fascist, even if you're not, even if you're just someone who used the wrong, again, transgender pronoun or something like that. And then the third group is just like people in the center, or people who are trying to figure things out but aren't particularly ideologically or politically affiliated. I think you'd be crazy

0:29:09 Thomas: Yeah Well, that's a, why

0:30:37 Josh: And...

0:30:38 Thomas: Are you, why are, I mean, there's also just the left, right? Or am I misunderstanding what you're trying to say? I mean, there is the broader Democratic Party that doesn't really honestly have too much of the taint of hardcore leftist in it, really. And when you look at the laws that the left is trying to pass, the Democrats are trying to pass, they're not the same, and they're not the extremist left, whereas the laws that the right tries to pass are oftentimes the extremist right.

0:31:07 Josh: Yeah, maybe. Maybe. So I think that you're talking about that center that I'm alluding to. So maybe that reasonable center is 90% of all of the people who are actually affiliated with a political party who are in that center, maybe 90% of them are Democrats and 10% of them are Republicans. But you know what I mean? I certainly know Republicans who are in that group. I mean, I just mean anyone who you can have a conversation with without rolling your eyes at their intransigent ideological position.

0:31:14 Thomas: So you think they're both on the center? OK. Oh, OK. OK. I see what you're saying. Yeah. So I think more of the. Gotcha.

0:31:36 Thomas: Yeah. Well, I will. So just push back again, though, I I will say that there are a lot of people who I wouldn't consider alt-right, and I wouldn't at all consider far-left, but when they argue with one another, they really can't communicate either. I mean, it's a little better, but it's still, wow, you think trickle-down economics is the way to go, and, you know, I think we ought to give everyone health care. I think you're including those people in your center, and I'm just, I guess, a little bit alarmed because I don't know how much they agree on anything except that they're not completely completely, uh, unstable, completely outrageous.

0:31:39 Josh: Hmm.

0:32:12 Josh: Well, I think what they agree on is the importance of agreeable disagreements, right? I think what they degree on is a project of civilization and Just a humility and skepticism about their own beliefs. So you could disagree with someone completely politically about tax policy and an immigration policy. I mean, I know people like this. I don't know, Hugh Hewitt, for example, the Republican who I've interviewed on HuffPost Live. He's a radio host. He moderated one of the Republican primary debates. He and I would disagree on almost everything, and we would have a cordial relationship, and we both believe that the other one has a genuine interest in the future survival of the United States as it is currently constituted and the world order as as it currently exists, and if one of us made a mistake and said something that the other person found offensive, we would not assume the other people's worst instincts, and we would not assume that they're an evil person.

0:32:22 Thomas: Okay. Right.

0:33:16 Josh: We would try to argue with them. We would try and figure out what each other means. That's kind of what I talk about, what I mean by this kind of center. And the only reason I try to break America into these groups in this analogy, I mean, this is the first time I've done it, I'm just talking out my ass, so I'm sure there are lots of flaws with this particular analogy, but the only reasons I try and do this is Is to try to get my head around this kind of anti-regressive left, you know, we are the left wingers who are criticizing the left thing that has gotten more and more strident since the election of Donald Trump, which I think risks now becoming just part of the alt-right, right, because if you think about the big tectonic forces that are going on in the world, it's not, I don't think it's actually been that long that civilization has been broadly peaceful and prosperous.

It's basically since World War II. And in the grand arc of human history, this is a blip. And I honestly feel like this is the first, like, we've just gotten far enough away from World War II that we now have people whose grandparents were not touched by it and who feel so sanguine about it that they just assume that democracy is the status quo and you can start screwing around with the edges of it. And I worry about that a lot because I don't think there's anything that we should take for granted about global stability,

0:33:31 Thomas: So what you're here for. Yeah.

0:33:47 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, well,

0:34:42 Josh: About the network of alliances that we've been able to build up through network, through NATO and through the European Union, about the stability of American hegemony. I mean, things can go bad really quickly, as they did. I mean, in World War One, I mean, some random ass archduke gets assassinated and all of a sudden you find yourself in scenarios that you just did not expect. Like, this is, we are on a, we, we have had a delicate balance for a number of decades, and I think we've taken it for granted. And now, in the rise of the far right and in kind of the anti-elitism of Donald Trump, I think we feel like we can start fucking around with things that I think are dangerous to fuck around with. And if I were going to spend all of my time pointing out why it's ridiculous for universities to be de-platforming Milo Ianopolis, I just, that would be a waste of my energy at a time when there's a bigger, there's bigger danger around the corner.

0:35:34 Thomas: That's interesting. I, uh... I guess I've got to think about that, because, yeah, I spend a lot of my time, most of my own time now, actually, ever since the election, um, covering what's going on in the world and what's doing on in administration, because I just think it's... I don't... I think my... Just to speak for myself, something my show would have been completely different had Hillary been elected. I was I was paying attention to politics for the past year and a half intensely, which I hadn't before in my life. But I started caring about it intensely. And it only got worse when it became a realistic threat that Trump would be president. And for me, that's that's such a big deal. It is we I think we're always fighting. I know it's been said a lot, but we're all we're fighting this normalization effect where we all want to just normalize.

0:36:20 Thomas: We all know Trump is president. He's a normal president. And it's my opinion that he's nothing close to a normal president at all. I mean, he's nothing close to normal politician. He is nothing close. He is incredibly harmful. He incredibly ignorant. He has no experience. There are a lot of things that I find vastly more important than whether or not Milo can speak. At the same time, I think Milo should be deplatformed because he called out a transgender student by name and got a crowd of fellow students to that student jeering and laughing at that person. That's somebody who should not be allowed to speak at a university anymore. Not because, oh, he's made some points that I'm afraid of, but because that's a disgusting thing to do. And that's something when it comes to student safety that you have to think about.

0:37:06 Thomas: I think we can kind of keep this all in our head at once. Right. And deal with these issues as we as we see them. You know what I mean? I don't know. So I go ahead.

0:37:15 Josh: I mean, I'm, I... I do think that I, I think once, I think the problem is inviting the person and then disinviting them. I mean, we don't need to go down this rabbit hole. But I think, once a legitimate organization at a legitimate institution, like, I don't know, the conservative Republican students group at Berkeley or something, has invited somebody and that invitation has been extended and accepted, then I think that you just have to, thenI think the idea of protesting in order to prevent that person from being heard is just in the long run, quite apart from anything else, counterproductive because it makes you seem like, well,

0:37:23 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Well, that's a specific situation because I spoke to some Berkeley students, actually, and the the the black block people come in there and there's like 10 of them and they cause violence. The people protesting, they were the guy I talked to was like, yeah, I was disappointed when the event was canceled. I wanted to just show that I don't support Milo. He can talk, whatever. I can hold my sign saying this guy sucks or whatever it would say. And a small group of these, there's sort of these fascists that know that this is an opportunity to start causing violence. They're not students.

0:38:21 Josh: They think of themselves as anti-fascist, right? They call themselves Antifa. They're anti- fascists, but they come in covered in wearing black with hoods on and they smash up fascists.

0:38:27 Thomas: In this, well, in this particular instance, I don't think it was them. There was an instance actually in Sacramento where there was an anti-fascist group that, boy, did they end up looking terribly fascist. So I totally agree that that is a problem. They were protesting some very tiny, I think it was some white pride thing. It was like a handful of people wanted to have some sort of white pride protest at the Capitol here in Sacramento. And it would have been absolutely nothing. No one would have cared. No one would've covered it. Nothing would've happened. It would've been six shit kickers holding some some stupid offensive signs. However, this anti-fascist group came and bloodied people and got their fights. And it was a huge scuffle, a huge event. That certainly happens.

0:38:32 Josh: No?

0:39:18 Thomas: I don't think in the Milo case it was that. I think it's a different group, but it's not worth going down this thing. But at any rate, that's not students. I mean, it's just a group of people. I think the one thing you and I hopefully can both agree on, and I think is very important to to note is this, the, the school never disinvited him. The students just protested. Uh, and, and it was this group of a-holes.

0:39:39 Josh: Right, right. But I also don't think

0:39:41 Thomas: You go ahead.

0:39:41 Josh: It's a nothing burger to worry about intellectual diversity on campus either. I do think there's something here. But the fact that there's something here doesn't mean that it should be the main focus of people who proclaim themselves to be the true liberals. Because, you know, like, yes, there is too much ideological conformity in campuses. I experienced it on my campus. I was the editor of the student – one of the editors of the Student Newspaper for one ofthe years that I was at university in Sydney. And I was a cocky little asshole who was kind of – I was basically a libertarian at the time. And just loved sticking it to the self-confessed sort of socialists and Trotskyites and Marxists who ran the student union, the student council. And they were incredibly censorious and just so sanctimonious and so anti-diversity. I mean, we were elected

0:39:48 Thomas: Sure.

0:39:57 Thomas: Yeah. Well, yeah, sure.

0:40:38 Josh: To edit the student newspaper precisely on the basis of the fact that one of us was a conservative, one of us was a liberal, I was a whatever person. And the idea for students on campus that there would be some voices that were not just the same dreary left-wing drivel that they were getting, like this is something that happens all over the world. There is a serious dearth of diversity of thinking on university campuses, and I do think it's a problem, if only for the fact that you want the left to be able to understand the reasons why it believes the things that it does by bumping up against people who are making arguments.

0:41:12 Thomas: Okay. I, I agree. I agree with that. I think that the mistake that's being made though, is Ruben et al are saying, boy, um, free speech literally says, ah, free speech is now a right-wing issue. Okay, take a look at right wing universities. They're worse. Liberty University, you are not allowed to hold certain opinions and be faculty at Liberty University. You have to sign like a pledge that you agree with all these right wing Christian worldview items. They are worse. The right wing is worse at this. It just so happens that they have fewer universities. The left has control of more universities. I think it's a bipartisan thing. So building a new party is not the way to go. And this has been what I've been wanting to say to Ruben. I was actually scheduled to speak with him at an event and then he pulled out, not because of me or anything, pulled out because of some scheduling thing.

0:41:16 Josh: Yeah,

0:42:06 Thomas: And I really regret that I don't get to try to throw this at him. But there's been this move to, as you said a minute ago, almost become a part of the alt-right in the name of free speech. And it doesn't make sense. If I say this neo-Nazi has the right to to protest or the right to speak or something. That doesn't mean free speech is a neo-Nazi position. That means, you know, you defend free speech. And the mistake that's being made is really going down this alt-right rabbit hole in the name of free speech, really?

0:42:37 Josh: I mean, I actually think there's more than a kernel of truth in the claim that the left has less of a tradition historically of a fidelity to free speech. I don't think... So I... Yeah, I actually don't think that... I actually... So there are a couple of... I don't want to be misunderstood here. I agree with you that this is a red herring. That this is basically getting used right now by... You know, to say that the main thing that we ought to be talking about all the time is that free speech is a right wing position and liberals don't understand free speech. That's just a camouflaged way of basically basically being a right winger.

0:43:20 Thomas: Yes.

0:43:20 Josh: I don't think that that is an important issue right now. I think we could all just agree that free speech is important and leftists are silly when they oppose free speech and that nobody should have their car burned or their university campus trashed or be punched in the face for saying something. I think that is quite uncontroversial and we could could establish that in about five seconds In fact, I just did, and now we can move on, and all of a sudden you have no show anymore.

0:43:51 Josh: Okay, you don't need to keep talking about it, we're all on board basically. However, I will give a bit of a bit of credit, I don't think, again, I don't think it's the nothing, I don't think it's totally nothing, I think you're underestimating that the the small l liberal traditional commitment to, um, oppose what you say, but I defend to my death your right to say it, that kind of the, as the Voltaire quote goes, that that sensibility is actually somewhat more common among conservatives, traditional conservatives, maybe not the conservatives of 2017, now they've been polluted and contaminated by the alt-right than among the left, like leftists and Marxists and 1960s uh hippies, it's never been about exchanges of opinion, it's it's largely been about the fact that they're right, now that exists on the right as well. Well, but I don't think so, this is what makes this whole conversation a little bit trick, a little bit complicated, because, you know, there's nothing more dangerous than having a kernel of truth and then inflating that kernel of truth into beyond that's

0:43:32 Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah yeah.

0:44:25 Thomas: Well, yeah. But I, yeah, but I, I look, I mean, I'm not a historian And I'm going to be U.S. centric. And I don't know if fact you that you came from Australia has anything to do with with our difference on this view. But I mean, you know, Berkeley was the birth of that that free speech stuff in the 60s. And then who were the, what was the, party of, of suppressing like war protests and what was the party of the red scare? A lot of things that were anti-free speech, anti-exchange of ideas. And, you know, that, that didn't come from a liberal, uh. Place. I mean, that. That came from a, a, uh right wing, uh place. So I, yeah,

0:45:26 Josh: True that's true, I suppose that might be, that might be the result of the fact that you, that this country has always been pretty much the most right wing of the liberal democracies, and so it has always been, it always, it has, has always been positioned at the at the conservative end of the of the spectrum, I mean, yeah, a McCarthyite would would have said that that the kinds of attacks on free speech that they were defending by attacking free speech in America were much worse than the attacks that they were making for example Cuba or the Soviet Union or something right

0:45:56 Thomas: I, I think, I mean. So my point is, I think that historically, I would disagree, but I wouldn't say liberals own free speech by any means. I think it's a bipartisan thing. I would call it a draw. I would not worth bickering about which side has been better to free speech. Personally, I feel like it's not worth it. I think now both sides are pretty terrible sometimes, and both sides are pretty good sometimes. I think the extremes are both terrible. Have you ever... let me ask you this actually, and maybe we can transition a little bit here. If, if, uh, if you're okay on time, have you tried to speak to a Trump supporter in your show? I have you tried to have them on your show.

0:45:58 Josh: Oh all the time all the the time, yeah. Yes. Uh, I've

0:46:39 Thomas: How has it gone?

0:46:39 Josh: Had not well, not well, um, I'd love to talk to a, I'd love to speak to a smart articulate Trump supporter who doesn't merely support Trump because they think that he's the best tool to avoid you the socialization of the United States under a Clinton hegemony or something, but I haven't been able to find one. I can find people who who just love the fact that he's screwing with shit, who just resent identity politics and just hate being, hate political correctness, but I don't know anyone who actually thinks that he's the right man for the job who makes much sense to me, um, well, yeah, no, I think you're right. I mean, I do think that you need to to have just an enormous blind spot towards... You just have to have a disrespect for intellectual discourse or for expertise. To have someone who is only so uninformed about world affairs and uninformed about the American political system, but also expresses so little interest in finding out and proclaims himself to know better than the generals do about warfare and know better

0:46:41 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Maybe it's cause it's not possible to think, but anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:47:54 Josh: Than the bureaucrats do about health care and whatever, and then says, like he did recently after meeting with the Chinese, with the leader of China, oh, it turns out that China can't fix the North Korean problem. I mean, what do you think the Chinese government thinks when the United States president says something like that? So I find it incredible that an American would not be embarrassed by that.

0:48:08 Thomas: It's, it's been insulting lately.

0:48:20 Thomas: Oh, I know. I, I am. The reason I asked, though, is because I I haven't found that the that Trump supporters are somehow more willing to engage or more accommodating of alternate points of views. If anything, they're worse.

0:48:33 Josh: Oh, no way. No, no, no. No way. I mean I think they're way worse. I think the true problem of, like I say, if you sort of want to bring the question back to these kind of different groupings with the alt-right and then kind of some kind of reasonable center and then the far left, the same way that the anti-fascists who wear black and wear hoods and smash shit up are very similar in conduct to fascists, the far right and the far left are basically the same.

I mean, I think there's a, you know, this is not a single line spectrum. This is a horseshoe where the extremes sort of become, you know, very, very similar to one another. The disrespect for free speech at both ends is striking. And, I mean, I think the question for me is less about – I sort of feel like the whole free speech thing, as I've said before, is a bit of a red herring. Like, it depends on the speech. Like, what is the speech that's being said? I think that's what's important to me. Like, I don't think that it's terribly important to defend the free speech rights in the abstract of people who are merely hurling insults. And I don't think it's terribly important to police, on the other side, for the left to be policing the language of people, depending on what words they use, without looking at what is coming out of their heart. But, like,

0:48:35 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, sure. Sure.

0:49:49 Josh: I mean, I'm one of the, again, from not being an American, I am one of the few commentators who has had to sort of decide to use the word nigger when I am talking about the word nigga. Of course, I would never use that word in hatred at somebody, right? I mean it is the worst word that there is. But I don't think that we achieve anything by using the term the n-word. And I understand all of the arguments against it, but I just, can

0:50:03 Thomas: Somebody. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I agree. I actually have a friend, Ishmael, who who does a podcast actually called Angry Black Rant. And he's come on here and told me to to say the word and not say the N word.

0:50:26 Josh: You bring yourself to?

0:50:28 Thomas: Yeah. Now it's too now it's it would be too superfluous. There's no, but if I, if I need to, if there's a story that requires it, sure, sure.

0:50:29 Josh: Can you bring yourself to say it? So, I mean, yeah, so, right. So I think to attack people as racist, for example, for talking about the existence of that word and using the word, or to attack people for being transphobic for using the wrong pronoun is just as silly as banging on constantly about the free speech rights of some neo-Nazi who just wants to spout, hey, it's like,

0:50:56 Thomas: Let me, however, let me ask you though, because this is, you mentioned you're going to talk to Sam Harris. I wonder if I could put in a polite request to, I

0:51:09 Josh: You're going to give me a question for Sam?

0:51:12 Thomas: Am a huge Sam Harris fan. I really love the guy. The most disappointed I've ever been with him though is one when he had Gad Saad on because he has nothing interesting to say and he's he's terrible, uh, but also when he added Jordan B. Peterson on and allowed him to basically say the most idiotic paranoid stuff about a Canadian law that's completely false, it has no truth whatsoever to what he's saying, and standing there and say, well, that's all great, we agree on that, now let's talk about other stuff, uh, it was really disappointing. And there's a difference between someone for saying the wrong, for misgendering or whatever. That's, yeah, if people are intolerant of people who make mistakes, that's bad. But there's an entirely different level that is Jordan B.

0:51:58 Thomas: Peterson, which is badly misrepresenting a Canadian law, which merely just adds sexual identity to a long list of things that are already protected, like race, gender, religion, all this stuff. It adds gender list and allows people to have recourse, trans people, if they get fired on the basis of being trans, if they are denied being able to rent someplace on the base of being transgender. It merely adds that protection, which minorities, people of religion already have. And he spun that into some just disgusting thing that really is transphobic. And Sam Harris didn't challenge him on it at all or look enough into it. And that was disappointing. So I'm just throwing that at you.

0:52:42 Josh: Well, yeah, I mean, I can't I can't speak, I can't speak for Sam on that, but I can say that I didn't know the the ins and outs of that law, but I I, it, what it does make me think is is it's always important, I think, to recognize the kind of historical contingency of where we happen to be at at any given point in time culturally, by which I mean it's easy to, like, people will often say this is political correctness gone mad, why are we talking about this, why is everyone so hung up on x y z. Well, everything, at every single point in time in the past, any time progress has been made, half the country or half the world, half the constituency has always said this is ridiculous, they're just, they're stepping out of them, out of their their position, why are we caring about this when there are more important issues to in the world at any given point in time.

You can always say that about the the kind of expanding arc of human freedom if you want to say that, or inclusiveness of some kind. And so, I, point in time, all of us have to pretend to our opponents that our ultimate goals are not what is being satisfied by an incremental win-win, right?

The ultimate goal of people who believe that there's nothing wrong with being gay is total equality between gay people and straight people. That is what they want. That is what we want. I want equality. But it's a little bit disingenuous to pretend that, when you're arguing with somebody who does not want that, who fundamentally thinks that there is a difference, that there is a real important theological difference between straight great relationships and gay relationships,

0:52:45 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:54:23 Josh: For me to say, well, we're just going to allow them to have sex, but it's not going to actually, it's no going to change anything overall, is a little bit disingenuous because hopefully it will change something overall. At any given point in time, it's easy to poo poo things that seem trivial to you, especially if you're in a position of power, but think about how they're going to look in 20 or 50 years time.

And so when we, when we talk about how irrelevant it is, I don't know that the trend, you know, when Jordan B. Peterson whines about how ridiculous it is that that gender should be one of the protected classes added to the to this Canadian law, yeah, of course it seems ridiculous to him right now, in this historically contingent moment, in his sack of flesh hanging around his particular spirit, animal, but in but in 20 years or 50 years there'll be a different perspective, so I always do try to think, like, I'm only, we're always just a needle on a record player at a particular point, a particular groove on the on the record, what would it look like

0:55:06 Thomas: And this Kermit the Frog voice, but yeah, go on.

0:55:25 Thomas: Well, sure, but I mean, you can't

0:55:26 Josh: If I zoomed right out

0:55:26 Thomas: Get totally relativistic with it. I mean you still have to have values and you still have to, I mean I, is

0:55:28 Josh: No no, that's that, that's kind of what I mean, that, like, so choose, choose the values and have fidelity towards your values rather than to what just feels to you to be silly because you happen to be in a time and place where it looks silly.

0:55:46 Thomas: This a long way of dodging my request to have you ask Sam Harris about this? I think that's what this is.

0:55:51 Josh: Pretty much.

0:55:54 Thomas: Well, but it's important because whatever, it's another thing that's being framed as a free speech issue that is not a free speak issue, and it allows a lot of people who hate trans people to say, yeah, yeah.

0:55:55 Josh: Yeah, no, but I'm agreeing with you, I mean, I mean I'm agreeing with that, that, that, that people who oppose that law are trapped in in their localized sense of its ridiculousness, but if you ask them to look at it from the perspective of 2025, it wouldn't look ridiculous at all, it would look like the logical extension of human rights.

0:56:10 Thomas: Okay.

0:56:27 Thomas: What does that accomplish for us, I guess, to, I mean, because they would say, no, no. This is backwards, like 2025, I hope it goes back, you know. They'll say maybe we're going a little liberal crazy now, but sooner or later the tide will turn the other way is probably what they they would say.

0:56:43 Josh: Yeah, that's, I mean, that's my concern, my concern has been that throughout our lives so far it's been obvious to me that people who say that women's rights and gay rights, uh, and minority rights are ought to be wound back, or that they're moving too fast, or that there's too much multiculturalism, or that that there's too much diversity, that those people have clearly just been on the wrong side of history. And it's just been obvious to me that we will win, that kind of peace and tolerance and diversity and kumbaya will ultimately prevail because it has been steadily working, operating that way in fits and starts for more than half a century. And what 2016 did was shake my faith in that, in the inevitability of that.

0:57:29 Josh: Like that they could win, I think in the long run we'll win, but as Keynes said, in the long run we're all dead. Uh, so, you know, that we could enter, we could easily enter a 20, 30, 50 year period of of seriously awful backtracking before we progress again.

0:57:46 Thomas: Well, absolutely. And one vehicle For, That will be if we happen to lose a few justices here and they're replaced with horrendous people like Gorsuch and people who really do want to take us back to what they think the founders intended. That will be a way, a vehicle by which that can happen. So I'm really conscious of the fact that I've kept you for a really long time. I want to make sure we just, if you don't mind, put a button on, I think it's interesting what you're saying. I didn't necessarily, oh,

0:57:49 Josh: Yeah I I let's I also, we should I should get, I should get you back on, I should get you on my part as well, and we can talk, we can flesh out some of these things as well. But as you say, I do need to run. But give me your final wrap-up question.

0:58:26 Thomas: I'd love to. Okay, sure. Just as a, just to put a final button on the, the reason that you don't see criticizing the far left as as much a priority. I, I want TO make sure I understand that because that's kind of different than what it sounds like my reasoning is, which I'm fascinated to hear, uh, that we're coming from different angles on that. So it's just if you could put a final word on that, then I'll let you go.

0:58:50 Josh: What's your reason?

0:58:51 Thomas: Because I just think that Trump is a far bigger threat. But it sounded like you had a bit of a different narrative going. And by the way, sorry, just one more little thing. I do think we should criticize the left. It just doesn't mean abandoning the Democratic Party because of whatever's happening on the fringe left, which is what Rubin and others have been doing.

0:58:59 Josh: Right.

0:59:10 Josh: I think I broadly agree, but I am hesitant to frame this as a Democratic versus Trump kind of thing, because I think people immediately get alienated the moment you start talking politics. So I prefer to talk about ideas, and I think my only difference would be that my main priority right now is not defeating Donald Trump, like that, I think enough people are doing that job in the media, and I think he's doing a pretty good job of it himself, uh, I don't think that we're living in a time where, like, I was, after when Trump was elected, I was as traumatized as everybody else, and I was speaking to a friend of mine who's one of the smartest people who I know, who is a senior journalist for the Wall Street Journal over in the, over in Europe, he's a British guy, and he was saying don't worry about this being the moment at which America turns into a a tyrannical dictatorship.

He said the moment you have to worry about that, historically, is when everybody's on the same page, like, He was, he said that the moment to have worried about that was, was after 9/11, when

0:59:41 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Hmm.

1:00:19 Josh: George W. Bush had an approval rating of 92%. And Nobody was asking any questions about anything. And fortunately, we dodged that bullet for a number of reasons. But in a nation as complicated and robust as the United States, with institutions as antithetical to one another, I don't think there's a scarcity of anti-Trump sentiment in this country. So, like, so my, my worry is about how we all consume information, about how we can trust the information we get, about how we can find common ground and get on the same page about what is true and what is not true, and what is important and what it's not important, and how, how we can not be seduced by promises of populism and divisiveness and isolationism, and find a way to make compelling to regular people the vision that has come to be seen as being elitist,

1:00:23 Thomas: Interesting.

1:01:20 Josh: Which is a sort of globalized, internationalist, inclusive, progressive vision. I think that, for me, is more important right now than let's defeat the orange madman. Does that sort of make sense, yeah

1:01:26 Thomas: Interesting, I. Okay, I will try not to say too much because I know you got to go. I don't want to. I'll let you go. Interesting I think that ultimately what you're advocating and what you're trying to solve there is something that would solve the next Trump. So it's it's a little bit of I don't think my goal isn't take care of Trump and then President Pence is fine. So I mean, I do kind of agree with you there. So interesting. I'll I'll let you go there. I really didn't even get to like a lot of what I want to ask you. But that's OK. I think it's because this is a really fascinating conversation. It's great to talk to you. I've really enjoyed it. But Josh Zepps, definitely check out We The People live, everybody. Thanks so much for coming on, Josh.

1:01:47 Josh: That's right I mean I, I kind of think I'm, I'm yeah No, great to talk to you. I'm happy to come back anytime, and you come and do my show, we can treat it as an ongoing conversation. I

1:02:17 Thomas: Oh, excellent. That sounds great.

1:02:32 Thomas: That's it for today's show. Thanks so much to Josh for coming on. I really do look forward to continuing that conversation. I don't, I think by now it might be too late for me to lobby for him to ask Sam Harris about that. Someday, hopefully someday I can, and hopefully someday I can talk to Ruben, but it's looking slim despite your guys' best efforts. Thank you so much to everybody who has retweeted that tweet, but I think it's kind of a lost cause unfortunately by now, but I will always keep trying. And I look forward to the next time I get to talk to Josh. So So with that said, thank you so much for listening. Thank you especially to those who pledge over on Patreon.com slash SeriousPod. You really do make the show happen. Thank you guys so much and I will see you on Thursday.