TALKBACK: How Josh Keeps His Poise… and Are Christians Under Attack?
Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
Josh Szeps
4.5 • 905 Ratings
🗓️ 24 May 2024
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We opened up the webcams for a live Zoom talkback episode. We discuss fascinating news stories, Josh shares a private essay he wrote to his friends who are having a dispute over Joe Rogan, and you’ll learn how he keeps his cool during testy conversations.
Keep an eye out for more live talkback sessions in the future, and make sure you’re signed up to http://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com to be part of the team.
http://youtube.com/@JoshSzeps_
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Gatay, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Today, your dangerous ideas, |
| 0:07.2 | your dangerous questions, my responses, and a little bit of interactive banter on this |
| 0:12.0 | talkback episode of uncomfortable conversations. If you're watching live on YouTube, |
| 0:15.9 | gaii from a beautiful day in Sydney, Australia. And if you're listening on the podcast, |
| 0:20.7 | lovely to have you |
| 0:21.2 | back again. One question that we had from a listener who can't join us, unfortunately, who's |
| 0:27.6 | just had to drop out, was Sasha, who said, we live in such a time of such inflamed discourse. How do you |
| 0:34.2 | maintain your poise during difficult conversations? This is a relevant question and one that I get quite a lot, especially this week after the episode with Jaron Lanier, the artificial intelligence expert, the man who coined the term virtual reality, the man who founded the first company to sell virtual reality products. If you haven't listened to that, |
| 0:55.1 | it is kind of interesting. He started off the conversation a little bit prickly and annoyed because |
| 1:00.5 | he wasn't able to log on. And I feel that that irritability just cast appall over everything that |
| 1:06.3 | we tried to subsequently talk about. And every time I tried to question the extent to which he is sanguine |
| 1:12.2 | about AI and dismissive of artificial intelligence experts' concerns about artificial intelligence, |
| 1:22.0 | I felt like he sort of got his hackles up and found a way to feel that the whole line of questioning was invalid, |
| 1:29.6 | without necessarily articulating exactly why it was invalid. It was a tone of dismissiveness, |
| 1:35.0 | which is a bit different to deal with in an interview than a tone of outright hostility, |
| 1:40.3 | which also sometimes happens when we're disagreeing about profound issues that |
| 1:44.3 | strike deeply at a person's core set of beliefs. And the answer to how you deal with it is, |
| 1:50.9 | I suppose just to let it be water off a duck's back and recognise that a person is engaging |
| 1:56.0 | with you using all of the normal, irrational, emotional aspects of humanity that define us all, |
| 2:04.4 | and to not treat that as being a trigger for me to respond in kind. |
| 2:09.1 | Like the object is to get to ideas on this show, the object is to be rational on this show, |
| 2:14.1 | the object is not to engage in a war of words, I don't want to dunk on people. I'm not about |
... |
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