A famous conjecture of Chowla states that the Liouville function λ(n) has negligible correlations with its shifts. Recently, the authors established a weak form of the logarithmically averaged Elliott conjecture on correlations of multiplicative functions, which in turn implied all the odd order cases of the logarithmically averaged Chowla conjecture. In this note, we give a new proof of the odd order cases of the logarithmically averaged Chowla conjecture. In particular, this proof avoids all mention of ergodic theory, which had an important role in the previous proof.