“Conspiracies, Echo Chambers & Culture Wars” with Sacha Judd

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps

Comedy Interviews, Self-improvement, Society & Culture, Education, Comedy

4.6 • 863 Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2025

⏱️ 107 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The internet is a dumpster fire. Are you a firefighter? Or an arsonist?

This episode is a cracker. Sacha Judd is an expert on internet subcultures. A former lawyer, she has become something like “the Mark Cuban of New Zealand” - a smart, left-wing investor in high-growth startups; advisor to businesses; and fierce commentator on Big Tech.

Sacha wants to bring back the “good internet”: a place fueled by genuine community, creativity, and connection.

She and Josh wrestle with online conspiracy theories, artificial intelligence, social-media content moderation, whether platforms like Substack have a “Nazi problem”, and whether Mark Zuckerberg just wants to say the R-word.

They get into a few fascinating arguments about free speech, transphobia, A.I., and whether Twitter’s content moderation was ever ‘woke’. Don’t miss this terrific chat.

Follow Sacha here and, if you enjoy this conversation, do bother to throw the price of a Venti Mocha Frappuccino into a monthly subscription. If you, our audience, don’t devote sixty seconds to subscribing, then this show dies. You’ll score more episodes, longer chats, no ads, and video livestreams that you don’t even know exist. Go for it right now. Right here.

For more on the Australian election, check out Josh’s Livestream with Peter van Onselen here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Gahy humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. This is a cracker of an episode. I loved it. I get into constructive arguments with a very smart person about free speech and transphobia and artificial intelligence and whether Twitter is killing us all. What's not to love? But first, the Australian election is worth just briefly touching upon.
0:24.6	If you want to hear a more extended dialogue between myself and another smart, funny Australian
0:30.6	political analyst, Peter Van Onsela in the morning after the election, then there's a link
0:35.6	in the description to this podcast to the
0:38.4	Substack Live, which we did. And in general, even if you don't want to pay money for Substack,
0:42.2	you should certainly subscribe to the Substack in order to be notified when I go live with such
0:48.0	illustrious people about pressing topical concerns that are probably moving too fast to be able
0:52.6	to address on this podcast. But a lot of
0:55.4	you have asked my thoughts about the Australian election and I've received some queries from abroad
0:59.4	about whether or not this was a repudiation of Donald Trump. So let me just say a few words very
1:04.4	briefly. The brief takeaway from the election, which was a massive landslide towards the government, the center-left government,
1:12.9	is less that it was towards the government than it was away from the centre-right opposition,
1:19.0	which ran a bumbling and confused campaign that was sometimes Trumpy and sometimes not-Trumpy,
1:25.2	and it was led by a deeply uncharismatic, unlikable and
1:29.7	sort of not particularly physically attractive, although that shouldn't matter. But of course,
1:33.3	it does person named Peter Dutton, who never managed to connect with the Australian people
1:37.9	or particularly resonate. It was a battle of two dour, middle-aged, white, straight males, the pale grey totems of their parties,
1:48.3	neither of them with particularly big ideas. But what's interesting about the scale of the electoral
1:54.4	victory is whilst, I think it's overkill to interpret it as repudiation of Donald Trump,
2:00.7	he didn't really didn't feature much in
2:02.1	the Australian election campaign at all. It is, I think, a repudiation of an anti-status quo,
2:11.0	anti-incumbent energy that has flared up most remarkably in the form of Donald Trump.
	...

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