Gatay, humans. Welcome to the safe space, the dangerous ideas. Here's a dangerous idea for you.

We're all getting soft, we're all getting too soft to be able to have real vigorous debates anymore.

Some cultures can do it. The French, for example, still seem capable of figuring out how to disagree as an art form,

how to actually cultivate the craft of disagreement and argumentation in a civil environment,

but that we in the Anglo-sphere have lost that knack. We just squabble in predictable ways.

It was that sense, that sense of a kind of civilizational

decline, that sense of being on a treadmill to nowhere that caused today's guest, Sarah Wilson,

to pack it all in. She had it all. She was the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine in Australia.

She was a host of Master Chef, the television show. She was a wellness

columnist and had millions of readers. And then she sold everything and she traveled the world.

She's now a nomad. She doesn't have a house. She is based in Paris because that is the place where

people can still argue.

And this is an example of an argument in itself.

Sarah and I disagree on a lot.

We have a kind of a mutual respect, a longstanding relationship, a kind of an intellectual friction, I suppose.

And we're both on Substack.

So this week we jumped on Substack live and we live streamed to her fans and mine.

This is a slightly unusual episode in the sense that it's not as buttoned up.

It's not pre-recorded like the normal podcast is.

It's a taste, really, for you to see what it's like and the kinds of stuff that we're experimenting with over on Substack if you haven't already joined us there.

We talk about everything from how population collapse could cause civilizational decline

to how much to blame the woke left or the Trumpists for the decline of conversation.

...