1: Navigating the Landscape of Modern Politics with Red-Tory

Hi, I’m Jesse Hirsh, and welcome to the first episode of Red Tory, recorded live in front of an automated audience. And we’re titling this our pilot episode.

And that this is really what we’re submitting to the big three networks so that they know never to put us on in the future. Jokes aside, this is really. There’s no plan. This is just you and I sort of talking about why we want to do this.

I know why I want to do this, which is anytime I get to chat with you, Alan, I get smarter, I get wiser. But why don’t you start us off? Because you kind of deserve the credit for the podcasting idea and that.

I was kind of depressed and discouraged and you were like, no, no, no. I think we got an opportunity here.

Well, this is simply a continuation of a conversation we have every Friday afternoon that we’ve been having. We go back some 20 odd years. Conversation started, of all places, on the golf course, ergo, our friend Shay Guevara up there.

We’re revolutionaries who love to golf. And, you know, it’s a mutual admiration society as well, that we’re different generations, we come from very, very different backgrounds and.

But have always enjoyed each other’s company and always enjoyed the insights that the other had and ripping off one another. And we thought, why not give this a go, see where it goes.

Well.

And, you know, every time we were playing golf, I’d be heading to the golf course and I’d have this list of questions to throw at you because, you know, on the one hand, I think what brings us together now is a desire for sense making.

And that’s what I’ve always loved about chatting with you, is that you have the combination of humility in that, you know, you know what you don’t know, but you’re curious and you’re curious in a way that I think I really both identify with and share. And that’s where I love the idea of us having these regular conversations. But furthermore, to record them, because I’m overwhelmed.

Like, I’m a news junkie on the one hand, so I’m totally following what’s going on in the news.

But on the other hand, I would greatly benefit being able to talk it out with someone on a regular basis so that we can sort of make sense of what’s going on to determine what’s the distraction that the Trump folks are trying to absorb everyone’s attention with and what we really need to be focusing on.

Well, I think that’s a mutual motivation, too, because, I mean, Both of us have spent our entire career kind of analyzing the world, trying to explain it to various and sundry audience, whether it’s through media or public speaking.

And if you use that frame of reference we’ve always used in the past, you will be nothing other than confused because, you know, everything has shifted. The criteria that people are making, their decisions are different today. The forces of sociopolitical culture, evolution are different.

There’s a dynamic out there. And, you know, the only good thing that’s supposed to happen when you get older is you get wiser.

And so it’s very unsettling as you’re getting older and you’re getting more confused.

So having the input of a good friend like you, and as we go forward with guests who will have you a point of view and a perspective that we can both input and riff off at the same time is, you know, is a source of considerable excitement for me.

Well, and I think the other part that you and I share in common is a kind of rejection of ideological rigidity. And absolutely, you know, I’ve always saw that as an obstacle to making sense and to understanding our world.

But I also felt really vulnerable after the presidential election because I honestly thought Harris was going to win. Like, I really believed the kind of Democratic hubris in narratives. And when she lost, I was like, I’m on the wrong side here.

I’m completely disconnected. You know, elaborate on that. Go ahead.

Single best predictor of presidential voting behavior was response to a question, do you believe the best years are ahead of America or behind America? 80% of Clinton voters said they’re ahead of us. 80% of Trump voters said they’re behind.

This is something that’s completely new in the post war phenomena.

The notion that, you know, significant portions of the population believe not only that progress isn’t necessarily normal, but that they’re falling behind.

And if you ask people today, you know, do you believe in the next three, four years you’re gonna be better off the same or worse off than you are now. Five years ago, it was kind of even one third, one third, one third. Now it’s kind of 40% saying, I’m falling behind.

And that’s where the polarization is. It’s not just an ideology.

It’s in this notion that you’ve got one quarter of the population flourishing, one quarter of the population treading water, and almost half of the population believing that they’re drowning. And that’s a brand new phenomena and creates a brand new set of panic and hysteria and longing for answers.

And in many instances, the answers they believe were more telling were in the past than in the future. So it’s no wonder that they are resentful of transgender toilets, because there were no transgender toilets then.

It’s no wonder women aren’t in the kitchen making cookies anymore. And this is unsettling for parts of the population.

And I think it’s exacerbated, at the risk of rapping on here way too long, it’s exacerbated by progressives treating these people as baskets of deplorables. 80 million voters who cast Trump on their ballot are not fucking lunatics.

You know, these are people who have got a real grievance and believe somehow that the answer to that grievance is Donald Trump.

And to your point, I think where I kind of personally fucked up was assuming that young people are always gonna be left wing or always gonna be progressive. And there is a huge chunk of young people who have very little belief that the future’s gonna be better.

And they’ve totally fallen into the alt right pipeline and have completely embraced this make America better again, not because they have any nostalgia about something else, but because the left isn’t offering them any narratives that they can identify with or that address the malaise or the literal depression that they’re sort of facing.

Well, and the prerogative of youth was always supposed to be optimism. And young people were always the most optimistic about the future because they had a future. I mean, now you’re seeing 18 to 29 year olds.

I mean, it was the young voter that vaunted Justin Trudeau into, into the, the head of government. Now they’ve shifted considerably.

Considered is that they, they don’t, it’s not that they don’t believe the system is working for them, they believe the system is working against them. Yeah.

That Emerson poll about a month ago asked again 18 to 20, 29 year olds whether they believe that it was extremely, somewhat, not very or not acceptable at all that Luigi Mangioni shot the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, and 44% said it’s acceptable. You know, and again, that’s that’s, that’s nihilism. That’s not nostalgic. You’re absolutely right.

Well, I’m just saying, you know, shoot those fuckers. They’re. They’re working against us, that I’ve got nothing at stake here. And if you rip it all down, then how could it be worse?

Well, and not just to pick on the kids on the right.

The kids on the left are facing climate change, and I underestimated the real tangible nature of climate anxiety amongst some of these kids, because to your point, they don’t even know if they’re going to have a future. And this is where I feel the left, at least ideologically, isn’t really providing any alternatives. Right.

A lot of the language, with the exception of kind of Avi Lewis and Naomi, decline. Most of the language is really based on sacrifice.

It’s based on this degrowth kind of principle that most kids are going to go, wait a minute, that means I lose out. That means there’s nothing left. So I want to.

Amidst understanding the narratives that are working on the right, understanding the way in which the right is serving these diverse constituencies, how we bring about new narratives and how we create new policy solutions and new approaches that appeal to people in ways that the left is just not currently part of, even at the table.

Well, and you, and you touched on that earlier, and I think part of that is getting out of the straitjacket of ideology, because the straight track of ideology doesn’t provide any particularly good guidance. You know, at the most fundamental level.

You know, I’m a social scientist and, you know, the guardrails of civic dialogue always was science and evidence. You know, if you believed A and I believed in B, we had a disagreement.

But over time, if it became clear that the fact said that A is right and B is wrong, I change my point of view to A and we’d move on to something else. Yeah, we, we, we disagreed. Those guardrails are down now. So having a dialogue based on ideology is just a complete waste of time. It’s a.

In fact, all of it is a prescription for an intractable fight and the creation of more enemies. So unless you can start thinking, you know, opening your mind to much more, I don’t know what are we subtitling this?

Because we worked on this and it.

Was radical, unorthodox, and electric shit.

Eclectic shit. Exactly.

Yeah.

And that’s.

I think, I think that has to be the mindset of people who really do want to understand what’s going on in the world today and find an explanation that, you know, is not necessarily seamless, but kind of moves us towards a better understanding and allows us to protect a lot of the stuff that we really do value.

And that’s why, you know, I read your substack, you know, three times a week, and I see your outrage, and I see your fear for fundamental things like democracy and decency and civility and compromise and all of these things that we took for granted for decades upon decades and decades. And now we just. We don’t see it hardly anywhere.

And this is where I kind of want to cite our friend Jim Hogan, who wrote that book, I’m right and you’re stupid, as a kind of riff on how our public discourse has gone wrong. And to those who, as I would be, are critically listening to us and going, wait a minute, what are you guys saying?

We’re not taking the rights approach to free speech in which everyone should have a voice, but we’re trying to say we have to have more compassion and empathy when we have these conversations, instead of just trying to dunk on everybody, instead of trying to feel like you’ve got a better take, because I recognize that a lot of that is happening in a response to fear, in a response to anxiety. So it makes people better to feel superior. It makes people better to feel morally right.

But what we need to be doing fundamentally is creating inclusive cultures, creating cultures that allow for dissent, that allow for debate. The right’s not doing that at all. It’s kind of tragic that the left is kind of caught up in that reactive cycle, that they’re not doing it either.

But that strikes me as what we’re trying to achieve here in terms of riffing off the notion of red Tory, in that we want to foster oxymoronic, contradictory conversations on the basis of respect, on the basis of compassion, and coexisting with each other in a world of crises, whether climate change or whether democracy.

In underscoring that we should make it clear, is that it’s red hyphen, Tory, neither of us are red Tories, that you’ve got red on one side, which is, you know, exactly what it is, and Tories on the other. With Tories respect for tradition and, you know, a more kind of evolutionary approach to change.

And the reds want to turn it all upside down and have the lumpen proletariat give a lump into the elites, and we’ll be happy to do both.

Well, and where I’m kind of anticipating this because like all contemporary politics, technology is kind of the context and a lot of our conversations have been that intersection of technology and politics as well as social science research.

Because I think that’s another overlap where you and I get along in that we both see kind of the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to make sense of society versus AI is obviously dominating our current society. It’s dominating the political discourse. And that’s where I kind of want to be conservative. Right.

Is say, maybe in some regards, we shouldn’t be foisting AI on every software tool and every political debate on every policy problem, while at the same time being radical about other ideas that maybe should be questioned. I’ve been looking at the immigration debate in the United States and how crazy it’s become. And I’m saying, well, maybe we should look at prisons.

Let’s look at abolishing prisons, which is a radical idea that America’s not ready for. But Red Dash Tory might be in terms of looking at these kinds of crazy ideas.

Yeah. And it goes, I think, to our. Back to our relationship as well.

I mean, one of the things that I’ve enjoyed so much about our company is that you’re just a very, very unique techno cultural anthropologist. I mean, you’re kind of the Margaret Mead of technology.

The same way she would look at the natives and try to figure out something about human behavior. I’ll never forget being on the golf course and you saying, you know, I think that that new iPhone is going to overtake BlackBerry.

And me saying, that’s nuts, Jesse.

I mean, because BlackBerry’s got, you know, the great keyboard and it’s got incredible encryption, and me and every person I know has one, and we’re not going to ban it for this toy. And he said, no, I think software is probably going to be more important than hardware.

And that kind of observation of what’s happening in society, I think is rare.

I mean, one of the things that you and I have talked about that we want to do is not just to review what is happening or to give an overview of what has happened, but also an underview.

What are the forces, the techno cultural forces at work here that are generating the things that we do see in the news, the things that we will be overviewing, the things that we will be reviewing and in exploring underneath there to try to find what the antecedents of some of these are, which would give us some insight both into directionally where things might be going, but also if they’re going in a direction that no one wants, maybe give us some insight into how to stop them or reverse them.

Well, and to use cryptocurrency as a great example of that. The public discourse has always been overview, here’s what you need to know, here’s what you need to know.

But no one has connected it to monetary policy. No one has connected it to the way we think of currency in general, which would be a good underview.

Because you look at Musk, you look at Peter Thiel, you look at the people around Trump, these are cryptocurrency hawks. And I don’t think contemporary policy circles are prepared for the chaos that they’re about to unleash.

Especially when you think about Mark Carney as someone who may be the next Prime Minister of Canada, who’s sort of being elected with this allure of monetary sophistication of the guy who can handle volatile markets. I’ve never heard him say anything about cryptocurrency ever. Except, though I’m not into that stuff.

Again, these are the conversations I would love to pick apart.

Well, and it’s a very good example because the conversation doesn’t go to the underview. What is currency, crypto or otherwise? Well, it’s a complete artifact. It is a construction, and it’s grounded in trust.

You know, you used to be barter.

You know, you’d come and shovel my walks and I’d give you a cow and you could take that cow and you take it to the butcher and he’d give you $25, and that would be the established value of shoveling, shoveling my walks. When they stop taking that cow at the slaughterhouse, you’re not going to accept it as my payment for shoveling, shoveling my walks.

You know, circle C or 711 are not taking cryptocurrency right now. And there’s a reason, because there isn’t that basis of trust.

And absent that, you’ve got this kind of wild west lunacy that goes on where Donald Trump can issue a meme coin in his name and generate $50 billion, so called $50 billion of value. Absent that, and it’s not going to happen under this administration.

But it would be very interesting to see what Mark Carney might do if he became leader.

Is that if the bank of Canada said, you know what, we’re having our own digital currency, and yes, we’ll use blockchain as the back and we’ll have all of the sensibilities that Bitcoin has, but it’s Canadian coin, and all of a sudden the value of all of those cryptocurrencies will drop to zero to Absolute zero that second.

Although this will be something I think we’re going to both have to discuss and find guests who can sort of help us get into the weeds of that. Because I’m not entirely convinced.

I still kind of think this is a Trojan horse, that there are different economic forces at play if you think about how markets work both in terms of supply and demand. But this is why I think we have a lot of potential in terms of stuff to dig into.

Because the other, I think, interesting psycho geographic dynamic of this podcast is our relationship started when we were both in Toronto all the time and we would play golf, we would sort of. We’re in the same kind of cultural milieu. But now you’re in Mexico a lot of the time. I’m in eastern Ontario all the time.

So our geographic perspective is kind of appropriate given for this NAFTA part three world that we’re heading into or where America is giving indications that maybe they want to annex Mexico and Canada. I say this because our podcast was kind of triggered by an American election.

And now that we’re starting, we’ve got an Ontario election and a federal election. To what extent are any of these contests going to feature policy and policy debates?

Or is that the kind of work that the podcast and the podcast world is kind of foisting upon itself?

Because it seems like we’re going more and more horse race and kind of inside baseball than actually talking about, for example, whether the bank of Canada should have a digital currency and what impact that would have.

I mean, it’s interesting. I’ve been studying decision making, how people arrive at conclusions for. For a long time. And while a lot of the criteria that is used is.

Is both subconscious and emotional, the. The actual process is surprisingly rational. Is that people ask themselves without actually saying the words two things.

You know, are they like me and are they for me an intersection of self interest, you know, are they like me? And self image, are they for me? Now, policy can drive that.

You know, if I’m an old person and the politician is talking about seniors benefits or something, you know, clearly there’s a policy link to what we’re talking about. You don’t see much of that in political dialogue right now. It’s much more at an emotional level.

And going back to what you’re saying about the center left is one of the reasons that they’ve lost, for example, blue collar workers is to that question, are they for me? You know, increasingly blue collar workers are saying liberals aren’t for me.

And it’s only been in the last decade that conservatives have kind of understood how important that constituency is and how vulnerable that constituency was for Democrats and liberals. Because this is part of that group that’s saying, I’m left behind.

Yeah.

In fact, things used to be better as, again, progressives have increasingly shifted to identity politics and abandoned class politics, forgetting that new focus on class and elevating people based on socioeconomic status will elevate the most vulnerable as well. Minorities and people who are discriminated against tend to find themselves at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder as well.

So it goes back to the very premise that.

That we want to have this conversation on is the decision making process is changing because the criteria in the world is so much different now than it was.

You know, my generation, I mean, we grew up believing that progress was normal and the next car was going to be faster, the next house was going to be bigger, the next paycheck was going to be fatter. You talked earlier about young people. They don’t believe any of those things. Quite to the contrary, they believe there is no house.

You know, if there is a car, I can’t park it downtown, that’s for sure. And paycheck, fatter, Forget it. Old farts like Allen are clogging up the promotion ladder for me right now.

So when you believe that progress is normal, when someone said, you know, you have the right to expect more than I had when I was growing up, or if you work hard and put your mind to it, you can be anything you want, or a good education is the key to success in the future. You believe those things and you had an experience that corresponded to those beliefs.

So it was a very generous society, because whatever success I had isn’t going to detract from what success you have, because success is infinite.

Now, when success is defined, whenever success you have is the potential for my failure, all of a sudden you’re a threat rather than a potential fellow citizen or neighbor.

And that kind of dynamic is really what’s fueling the polarization and the tremendous animus that we’re seeing against, you know, immigrants, against transgender people, against, you know, helicopter pilots who might not be white. That’s unfathomable.

You know, that Trump press conference yesterday after that terrible disaster in the Potomac, that this is a function of dei you go, are you a lunatic?

Yeah.

And what did he write it off to? Common sense.

Well, and under normal to be true.

Because I have common sense.

Under normal circumstances, that would be grounds for, you know, impeachment. Right. That level of Incompetence and a decision maker. But it’s. It’s kind of par for the course now. And.

And you said something there that I kind of want to unpack in a future episode, which is people are working longer in life and where we used to imagine that people would retire, a lot of people, and for good reason are still continuing in their professional capacity, which I think is changing the workforce and changing the way that younger people get opportunities.

But the other thing you said in terms of class politics versus identity politics, without us getting too deep into it, because again, I think this is another issue that we will unpack in a future episode. It strikes me that the issue of Palestine is really hurting left parties, especially the ndp.

But more and more, I think it is still hurting the Democratic Party in the United States. But here in Ontario, for example, there is huge support for Palestinians in Muslim populations, in young populations. Yeah.

And there have been demos in Ottawa and Toronto and Hamilton nonstop since October 7th.

And yet the NDP is completely silent on the issue of Palestine and have even kicked out members who were pro Palestine and didn’t kind of stay within kind of party communication channels. Do you see that as an example of kind of favoring identity politics rather than class politics? Even though Palestine’s a complicated blend of both?

It’s that. But your premise there also, I think comes into play. And that is all our social iconography around age has shifted tremendously.

And again, we haven’t taken that fully into account. When I was 18, Elvis Presley was 30 years old. And for me, he was a greasy hillbilly. And Frank Sinatra was 45 years old.

And he was an old man with a hat. Today, look at Polestar and see who are the top grossing live musicians, musical acts in the world. And 80% of them are over the age of 60.

You know, Mick Jagger is 86 years old. Wow.

I mean, Timothee Chalamet is creating this Bob Dylan resurgence, which again, is phenomenal. Bob Dylan’s ancient. And yet these young people, for good reason, are rediscovering them.

So you’ve got this shift in social iconography that Mick Jagger isn’t an irrelevant old, he’s still cool.

I mean, you look at that devastation in Gaza, it is like way worse than probably anything other than Nagasaki and Hiroshima in terms of just absolute inhabitable devastation. And they’re saying it’s going to be at least 15 years to rebuild.

Well, if I’m a 24 year old saying the world isn’t fair, that would be a tremendous example to me, underscoring that absence of fairness.

So again, here’s one more social, cultural, geopolitical phenomena that’s occurring in that we’re using an old frame of reference, an old template to try to understand it. Are these radicals just like the Students for Democratic university in the 70s? No, they’re completely different.

Completely different and coming from a completely different place. And to understand where they’re coming from, you have to have a perspective that is radical, unorthodox and eclectic.

Absolutely.

And to your point, I was also in my head trying to think of how many young leaders do we have in our society compared to the Stokely Carmichaels or the Huey Newtons or the wave of young leaders that you saw in the baby boom.

And I could think of Greta Thunberg and maybe Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, but there really aren’t a lot, you know, at least on the left and at least in progressive circles. And maybe that could be one of our missions on Red Tori is to find some of those young people and talk to them and try to get them as guests.

They’re certainly smart, but again, in terms of the shifts is they just do not have the opportunities at the ages that they’re at at previous generations have.

I mean, I started my company when I was 27 years old and that was young, but not that much younger than a lot of my competitors who were like 28 and 29 and 30. You know, today the assumption is if you’re 35 years old, you’re really not ready to leave.

You might still be in your parents basement.

Well, which they often are, which is horseshit.

But it’s supported by the evidence because again, a lot of opportunities are blocked and these young people are living in a completely different set of circumstances where if they work hard, they can’t necessarily be everything they want. They have got a good education and it hasn’t proven to be the Key to success. And as I say, the fatness of the paycheck is there for the testing.

Yeah.

The other kind of subject I wanted to touch upon before we end is this is almost an overture of sorts as we sort of map out what we want to talk about in broad themes. The other thing you and I have always shared in common and that I’ve enjoyed talking to you about is, you know, Canada.

And since we’re expanding this to North America, our relationship with first nations and our relationship with Indigenous peoples right across Turtle island in North America, in that here in Canada, we kind of had a decent period, kind of post truth and reconciliation, where it seemed like the country was open to, you know, more voices, more participation from first nations people. But as we face a potential poliev government, even if it’s just a minority, do you think that climate is changing?

Is there concern that this kind of MAGA xenophobia that’s down south could start influencing Canadian politics or perhaps reframing that in a more optimistic way? What can we be doing to make sure that the truth and reconciliation process that further empowering and respecting Canada’s First Nations?

What can we be doing as part of this podcast to help advance that? Because I think that’s something that you and I see as part of the solution, right.

As part of the way we move to a better society here in Canada and in North America.

Well, no question. I mean, the history of Canada is to kind of both misunderstand, ignore, and then betray Indigenous people, usually that order.

And there’s no question.

Why do I know nothing about this? Residential schools?

I mean, I went to a junior high school in Edmonton that bussed in kids from a residential school who didn’t have over grade six education from St. Albert, a small town outside, and they were ghosts. I never spoke to one of them for two years. My brother, who we adopted, was a product of 60 scoops.

We knew nothing. We knew nothing of that.

So Murray Sinclair and the Truth and Reconciliation Humility Commission forced us to open our eyes to that and to your specific question, I do not think we’re going back because Canadians again, for, you know, all our frustrations and for all of our anxiety and uncertainty, you know, continue to see ourselves at the end of the day as good human beings. And that this is a stain on our history, this is a stain on our culture, this is a stain on the Canadian character.

But again, like everything we’ve been talking about before, if we think the solution is just to give more government grants to Indigenous peoples, good luck with that. You know, look how first nations are reacting to Matey getting new rights.

Look at what’s happening to the distribution of funds from the Robinson Treaty Settlements right now, which is just creating another whole inter tribal warfare that is going on. We have to look at some very, very fundamental things like the fact that Indigenous people on reserves cannot collateralize property.

So it’s no wonder they’re at a disadvantage in terms of investment now. That’s starting to change.

And I mean, I still do a lot of consulting work and there’s not a major corporation left in Canada who doesn’t have now someone who’s responsible for Indigenous non indigenous relations. And they see this as more than just kind of performative, kind of virtue signaling. They know that the differences have to be real.

And they know also they’re learning, they’re known is that you tread on very, very dangerous ground when you get here because the rules are different and the time frame is very different and it’s going to take us some while. But again, there’s fantastic young Indigenous leaders out there that we should get on this show for absolute sure.

I remember talking to Lloyd Axworthy when he was the president of University of Winnipeg, which as you know, has got the largest urban Indigenous population in Canada.

And him saying, you know, if we can get these kids past grade eight and into high school and get them graduated, all of those problems start disappearing. You know, recidivism, incarceration, diabetes, all of these things.

And so what they did is they bought the high school, University of Winnipeg and says, we’re getting these kids in here in order that they can come here. And again, it was thinking outside the box.

It was, you know, how does the, how do Canadians, financial institutions, what can they do to ensure that there’s access to capital? Almost every first nations now has got a director of development on reserve who’s responsible for investments and making sure.

And, and listen, they’re winning 99 out of nine out of every 100 court cases that they take. It may take 20 years, but you Know, the, the law is on their side.

Well, and, and as we see this kind of attack on, on day on diversity, equity and inclusivity in the States, it kind of strikes me that, that that commitment to reconciliation inoculates us a little bit against that kind of cultural push.

And I bring it up also because the more I learn about kind of the history of first nations people in North America, the more it changes my quote, unquote ideology, the more it kind of moves me beyond ideology, partly because of the community, culture and tradition.

But there’s some really fascinating analysis that argues that the European Renaissance was a response to contact with first nations, that seeing the freedom and democracy practiced by a lot of first nations in North America directly influenced a lot of Enlightenment speakers. I think a lot of the racism of Europe, colonial powers has obfuscated that link.

But I think to your point, the more that we empower First Nation communities, the more that we empower First Nation leaders, I think the better that we as a society come as a culture, as an intellect, as an economy.

The earliest part of Canadian history was precisely that. I mean, you know, Champlain encouraged the first settlers to marry up by taking an Indigenous bride.

You know, here is a real relationship between the Crown and nations. So, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of despair because of the wrongs that have done. But I think there’s, there’s increasingly a lot of hope as well.

Well, and to bring us back full circle, I kind of feel this is where rigid ideology prevents people from having these conversations. Right. They, they. It’s the whole way in which confirmation bias has become almost the dominant ideology.

Because people, whatever view of the world they have, the earth’s flat.

They’re going to go look for information that confirms it, versus, I think what we’re describing in terms of Red dash Tori is the opposite, that we want to look in the underviews, we want to look at the fraying edges, not as a way of creating something rigid, but quite the opposite of creating something alive, creating something dynamic that serves our primary purpose, which is sense making, which is to try to understand what’s going on in the world, but also satisfies the deeper desire of wanting to respond to the fascists, wanting to respond to the racists and the hate that’s kind of taking over our world. I mean, one last Sort of thought. And this is again in the overture brainstorm. But who do you think we should be having as guests?

And I don’t mean specific names, I mean like archetypes. Because your point about young indigenous leaders, I think is absolutely spot on.

Who are the other types of people that you think we should be courting and inviting? And if they’re listening to this right now, thinking that we’ve got a place for them?

Well, as smart as we think we are, I think the shortest answer is people who have an expertise and perspective and experience that we don’t.

Yeah.

And that, and that also, that experience and perspective, you know, bears on the current events that we want to, we want to discuss. I mean, we are starting with news. This is not just kind of, you know, dig deep below the surface.

It’s below the surface of what’s happening right, right now.

And, but, but again, I think, you know, trying to search out not the usual suspects out there and getting voices that might not be otherwise be heard in more traditional areas and not being afraid to take on someone who might be a little out there to find out where out there is at this particular point in time. Because it also goes, you combine those two things about who should we be talking to?

And sense making and using that to combat, you know, bad things that are happening in society. I mean, you look at any research on tolerance and the, the basis of tolerance is founded on contact. You look at civil rights movements.

I mean, for hundreds of years, the abolitionists said slavery is wrong, slavery is bad, and nothing changed. And you know, Plessy versus Ferguson saying separate is equal. Nothing changed. In fact, just good. Jim Crow just got worse and worse and worse.

It was only after Brown versus the Board of Education saying, no, separate cannot be equal by definition. It is not. You must start integrating. Is that, you know, all of a sudden my neighbor was Bob. Bob is a hell of a good guy.

He’s not a lazy, shiftless crook, you know, and let’s go play baseball with our kids tomorrow. And then all of a sudden you started to see more and more tolerance as a consequence of that interaction and contact.

The channels of distribution and communications that you’re talking about, you know, that basically discourage that interaction that create those silos, that create these kind of hermetic seals of ignorance and give great consolation to being ignorant because you’re not alone in your ignorance. You’ve got a whole bunch of other people who share that point of view is very dangerous.

Yeah. And that’s where I think you as a social science Researcher were kind of ahead of the game in recognizing the role that emotion plays with reason.

Right. We used to separate that in the West. We used to think that logic and emotion were different, but in fact, they’re intertwined.

And if we want to look at why people make the decisions they make, emotion is central to that. And empathy really is a byproduct of closeness, of proximity, of contact, and it’s something important to foster.

The one thing I will mention, though, is what was really, I think, fantastic about your Toronto Mic appearance, and this is where I will shout out as our first episode. I’ve been studying at the Toronto Mic Podcasting School for the last year, so that certainly reflects this.

But I think we should have some history as part of this podcast.

And I say that in the context of some of our guests, because I think what people of your generation, even people of my generation, make false assumptions, is that younger people have even been exposed to any of this history. And that’s where the digital revolution allows people to tune out, allows them to opt out.

So where my TV years involve shows like World War II in color and all these, the documentary channel, non Stop History, most of that stuff is gone. And at the same time, we are currently in a privileged position of being able to make history, because I am also old enough to remember that podcast.

I would never have thought I could do this easily, make a show with my friend just by having conversations.

So I do feel we have an opportunity to both document this moment, but also look at how history, 20th century history, I don’t mean ancient history, has influenced why we are in the moment we are. And I think that’s crucial.

It’s a cliche, but it’s true. You know, those who ignore history are doomed to relive it.

And, I mean, I had my show on TV Ontario for 19 years, and some of my favorite guests were the old farts, you know, and so I’d have David Suzuki on there and Mel Hertag and Stephen Lewis and Marg. What was her name? Marg Barlow.

And what I loved about him is as they got older and older and older, they got more and more and more radical because they knew that their time frame for change was shrinking and it was pissing them off. And again, it was just always a joy. And so we shouldn’t preclude that at all. Young and old.

Yeah. I would love to get David Suzuki as a guest because to your point, every time I had contact with him, he would be more radical time after time.

No question, no question. Angry.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because he’s. I mean, for him, he’s been talking about this stuff for decades, and from his perspective, we’ve done shit like zilch.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure.

Right on. Any last words?

No. This is fun, Jesse, and I’m really going to be looking forward to it. We’re going to do this. I think we’re going to try.

Three times a week, notionally.

Yeah. You know, well, ease into it.

The other thing. The other thing that, again, is background to. To this whole conversation, too, is that Jesse was really encouraging me to start writing again.

I did a lot of writing and that I felt, you know, really, really frustrated that, you know, because of the disintermediation of communications, you just feel like you’re barking at the moon. And no one’s watching this podcast. Not. Not a. Not a person used to go on ad issue panel. It’d be 1.2 million people.

You know, my friend Peter Mansbridge does a podcast. He’s got 16,000 subscribers. I told him, I said, that’s fewer than the number of people live in Keswick, Ontario.

That’s your audience these days, buddy. But.

And he’s ragged to the top of the country.

It is. It is what it is. But Jesse wanted to really encourage me to start writing on Substack, which I’m going to start in the next couple of weeks.

And Jesse’s been there and I’ve been following him. As I say, I read him three times a week.

And that we’re going to use the stuff that we are publishing in text also as kind of a starting point for a lot of the conversations we’re going to have, largely driven by the stuff that Jesse has talked about. Mine tends to be a little bit more sociological, a little bit more autobiographical, whereas, as I say, Jesse’s is more techno cultural anthropology.

Although the privilege I had in being your golf buddy for so many years is you’ve got some really fantastic stories.

And that’s why that Toronto Mike episode has been so electric and popular within the Toronto Mike universe, because, again, your generation, you were there. So you kind of take for granted that you know these stories. But even us Gen Xers, it was kind of distant from us.

So, you know, them hearing you talk about the free trade elections, that was a huge hit because they sort of experienced that as consumers, but you experienced it kind of at the front of the line, right, as a participant. And I think you underestimate how interesting those stories are going to be, especially to young people.

So this is why I’m really glad that you’re writing that substack because you have a lot of really, really fantastic stories that I think if you don’t tell them, if you don’t publish them, would be lost to history. And they’re incredibly entertaining, to your point.

To a culture that thinks Keith Richards is a young hipster who’s still got it, so it’s all relative.

That he’s still kicking is remarkable to me. Forget that he’s still considered iconic. It’s unreal.

So you never know, this could be the year where Keith finally decides to retire, as crazy as that may sound. So that brings us to the end of another fantastic episode.

I’m going to work on some tunes, some interstitials, but really for this pilot, we just wanted to start press record. So now that I’ve got an actual file that I can put onto YouTube, put onto the podcast networks and allow Redtory to actually exist. So thanks, Alan.

That was fantastic. I’ll talk to you Monday.

We’ll talk before that for sure. Jesse, you take care.

Right on.

All good. Take care, Ola.