Murray vs. Smith: Dispatches from Podcastistan

Prepare for the unprecedented: I am about to admit I was wrong.

For years, I have celebrated the rise of new media and its impact on our ability to seek truth, challenge false narratives peddled by legacy institutions, and transform the way we conduct our public debate. The rationale behind my thought process seemed solid. After all, "the medium is the message".

The reason I thought our conversations about politics, culture, and entertainment had become so fake was the rapidly-shrinking soundbite and a media elite more interested in winning than learning. Journalism, academia, and politics merged into a monoculture, whose consensus rested primarily on the vigorous inhalation of gases emanating from their own backsides, into which they had firmly inserted their heads. "I don't know anyone who voted for Trump," was their mantra. Far from being a confession of ignorance and a lack of perspective, this phrase was uttered with pride at dinner parties to signal membership of the elite class. The response from this contingent to the sequential dismantling of their core assumptions about the way the world works was an attempt to use credentialism to make reality go away: "Experts think vaccinating newborns against COVID is essential. Now pipe down, mask up and follow The Science(tm)!".

In decades past, absent the ability to make their voices heard, the proles would have had to grumble away about Big Pharma in obscurity as people (mostly hippie lefties) had been doing for ages. But, thanks to the technological revolution–which reduced the cost of running a major broadcasting channel from millions of dollars to the price of a smartphone— the era of gatekeeping was well and truly over.

The discredited mainstream media continued to peddle lie after lie in an attempt to keep its political opponents from governing and being re-elected, but it then faced a powerful counterweight. Elon Musk ended the regime of censorship and enforcement bias in the digital public square of Twitter, declaring "You Are the Media Now" as major podcasts and YouTube shows secured audiences most mainstream media outlets can now only dream of. By the time of last year's presidential election in the US, the rise of new media had become undeniable, with many rightly calling it the "Podcast Election".

Curious, open-minded, inquisitive podcasters, unrestrained by the need to comply with corporate media message discipline and social media censorship, were finally able to speak freely, seek the truth and debate controversial ideas in good faith in front of grateful audiences of millions. So far, so wonderful. After all, what could go wrong with "democratising information"?

Well, as it turns out, quite a lot.

Just as the assumptions of the elite class were proved wrong by the actions of their fellow citizens during the era of Trump, Brexit and COVID, the assumptions some of us held about the future of the media are now crumbling before our very eyes.

With politics becoming the primary form of entertainment in Western society, more of us now get our news and opinions from entertainers rather than serious commentators and, just as importantly, we often struggle to tell the difference between the two. Having transitioned from a career in comedy to my current role as a writer, interviewer and political commentator, I can hardly complain about the meshing of culture, politics and entertainment. And I am not complaining, I am merely pointing out that the incentive structures and thought patterns we would typically associate with the entertainment business are not the same as those we would expect to see in journalism or academia.

This difference was perfectly illustrated in the recent debate between journalist and author Douglas Murray and comedian and podcaster Dave Smith on The Joe Rogan Experience, the world’s biggest podcast. Officially, the full 3-hour discussion was mostly about the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, with Smith being in the so-called "anti-war” camp and Murray being a supporter of both Israel's campaign to eliminate Hamas and Ukraine's struggle to retain its sovereignty and independence. These conflicts and both men’s positions have been debated endlessly; that part of the discussion is less relevant here.

The much more interesting fault lines were exposed on the fringes of the debate. The conversation began with a discussion of Rogan's decision to host Darryl Cooper, a man described by Tucker Carlson as "America's most important popular historian". Cooper himself has the self-awareness not to own the label of historian, instead describing himself as a "storyteller".

His latest work is a series whose aim is to show World War II from the perspective of the Germans. To those who have studied WWII extensively, like Murray, Cooper's comments on Tucker Carlson's show and in his podcast with Joe Rogan are obvious and, frankly, boringly familiar, Nazi apologia. Far from being novel, the idea peddled by Cooper that Churchill was a "warmonger" who "turned the invasion of Poland into a global war" because he was "funded by Zionist financiers" formed the core of war-time propaganda fabricated by Joseph Goebbels. The argument Cooper advances, that millions of POWs and civilians died on the Eastern Front because the Nazis failed to plan properly for the invasion, is simply a lie. There is extensive documentary evidence which confirms that the reason millions of POWs and civilians died on the Eastern Front is precisely because the Nazis succeeded in their plans.

Because Murray is educated on this issue, he assumes that everyone else, including Smith, is too. Exasperated, he tries to explain that, far from being revolutionary, these ideas have been pushed by discredited historians like David Irving for decades.

"Have you listened to his podcast though?" Rogan interjects. It turns out Murray hasn't, and this is later used against him after the episode airs. Unlike Murray, I have listened to Cooper's podcasts, including the one about the history of Palestine that people often cite in his defence. “He details the persecution of Jews preceding the events he covers so he couldn't possibly be anti-Semitic,” is their argument. From this, they conclude that he couldn't possibly be a Nazi apologist. The reason they make this logical error is that in the entertainment world words do not have meanings, they have feelings. And thanks to the woke left's misuse of the word "Nazi" for the last decade, in Podcastistan the term is not a descriptive label, but a vague, meaningless insult used to cancel people.

Unlike his opponents, Murray clearly understands that the term "Nazi apologist" has a defined meaning, and the fact that most Nazi apologists are anti-Semitic does not mean that you have to be anti-Semitic to fit that description. The Grok definition of a Nazi apologist is “someone who defends, justifies, or minimizes the actions, ideology, or atrocities committed by the Nazi regime, often by excusing Nazi policies or promoting revisionist narratives that distort historical facts”. Since Cooper does precisely this in several appearances on major podcasts how his series on Palestine would change this reality is clearly as confusing to Murray who hasn’t listened to it as it is to me who has.

Indeed, one of the main areas of misunderstanding in the discussion is the role of expertise. "He doesn't claim to be an expert," is Smith's riposte to Murray's suggestion that Cooper doesn't know what he is talking about. He uses the same defence when Murray questions Smith’s own willingness to opine on geopolitics. The central critique of Murray here is that he is arguing from authority, which is what mainstream media has done for years to gaslight the public about everything from transgenderism to COVID to war. Smith and his supporters argue that the concept of expertise has been so discredited that he (and anyone else for that matter) is entitled to express any views about any issue they want. The audience, they say, can judge these views themselves. Murray’s attempt to dismiss such views on the basis that they don’t align with expert opinion is seen as an ineffective argument at best and an attempt at credentialism at worst. There is a sliver of truth to this criticism: engaging the argument someone is making directly is a much more powerful approach. But to suggest that arguments from authority are entirely invalid is silly.

Almost everything you believe is based on an argument from authority. Light bulbs, for example, are a fairly unsophisticated and omnipresent part of our lives. Yet the number of people reading this article who are capable of explaining how they work without resorting to arguments from authority will be vanishingly small. I am not just talking about the fact that most people couldn’t explain how electricity works, I am talking about the fact that almost everyone who can will only be able to do so by quoting the work of other people, rather than experiments and research they themselves have conducted.

While Rogan seems to side with Smith in this exchange, it is highly unlikely he would adopt this same approach to his own areas of expertise. When it comes to mixed martial arts, his interview guests are the best of the best—the dazzling array of UFC champions, top MMA coaches, respected trainers and other experts does not appear to include comedian Dave Smith. There is a popular clip on the JRE Youtube channel in which Smith “breaks down” why Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. I was unable to find one of him breaking down BJJ moves, despite Smith possessing a similar level of expertise on both subjects.

Smith and Rogan are irked when Murray expresses his befuddlement that Smith has become a prominent voice in the debate about Israel and Palestine without ever having visited the Middle East. The shock at the idea that someone ought to see things with their own eyes before commenting on them is palpable. Indeed, in the aftermath of the debate, Smith promoted a popular video in which Murray’s statements to this effect are contrasted with his previous ridicule of the concept of “lived experience”.

This is very low quality thinking. If you do not see things with your own eyes, your opinions are, by definition, not your own. They are an agglomeration of opinions and facts you have gathered from other sources whose veracity you cannot properly evaluate. That doesn’t necessarily make them wrong. Indeed, most of our opinions about most things are not our own. You know why? Because we get them from people we consider to be authoritative on the subject in question. You might call them “experts”.

The great trick being deployed here is to allege that experts can’t be trusted while relying on a different set of experts. On Ukraine, the non-expert Smith is using the ideas of people he considers experts like John Meirsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs. On WWII, the non-expert Cooper deploys the arguments of people he considers experts like David Irving. And so on and so forth. “All opinions are valid and should be given a hearing!” scream the people whose entire media diet is made up of people who only push their preferred perspective.

This is where Smith obtains the arguments he makes about countries he has never visited: from other people. And the arguments are then judged not on whether they are true, something Smith does not have the expertise to assess, but on whether they sound true. This is why he routinely makes basic cognitive errors of the kind I described the last time he and I sparred over my viral Israel video.

As for experience, the woke concept of “lived experience” was not ridiculed because experience doesn’t matter. You would have to be deeply dishonest to deny that experiences are informative. If Michael Jordan claimed that there is a “correct way” to dunk a basketball based on his experience and conversations with Kobe Bryant, do you imagine Smith and his defenders would screech about MJ just using “arguments from authority” and “lived experience”?

The reason many of us pushed back against “lived experience”, other than the grating tautology, is that it was used as a way to say “you can’t have this opinion on a certain societal issue because of your race, sex and/or sexuality”. This expanded the concept of “experience” from personal experiences that all of us as individuals have, to a kind of generalised knowledge that certain groups allegedly possess by virtue of their skin colour or other immutable characteristics. If Murray had claimed that Smith is unqualified to comment because he is not a Middle Easterner, for example, his critics would have a point. Instead he merely pointed out that Smith might become more informed by visiting the region he opines about with such confidence and regularity.

Which brings us, finally, to the biggest sticking point of all. “This is the strongest evidence of thought policing I have ever seen,” says a popular comment under the debate video. And it’s true: on numerous occasions throughout the discussion Murray commits the greatest sin available in Podcastistan: suggesting that certain people shouldn’t comment on certain things and that others should not elevate their voices. Such is the inability to think clearly about this that you would almost certainly receive less pushback for denying that slavery harmed black Americans or claiming the Holocaust didn't really happen. They simply no longer understand the difference between censorship (“this must be banned”) and morality (“this is a bad thing to do”).

The world of entertainment is not driven by truth-seeking, and the claim that someone’s ideas are false is no longer an effective critique. Podcastistan is a place where people scold the mainstream media for failing to live up to their standards on honesty and accuracy while having none of their own.

Cooper is a case in point. Even among his defenders, few claim that what he is saying is actually true. That’s not why they like Cooper. They like Cooper because he ticks every one of the 5 boxes on the new media checklist: