Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “Free Thought vs Free Speech” with Jenara Nerenberg

Transcript

“Free Thought vs Free Speech” with Jenara Nerenberg · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day, humans. Welcome to The Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas.
• 0:06
  Here's a dangerous idea for you. In this crazy world, where everyone seems to think that
• 0:11
  everyone else is too hostile and too disagreeable. The actual problem may be that we are not
• 0:17
  disagreeable enough, or rather that we are insufficiently disagreeable in the right
• 0:22
  sorts of ways. We're losing our knack for constructive disagreement, so sheltered
• 0:26
  are we in our own echo chambers, so insulated from good arguments on the other side, so untrained
• 0:32
  and unprepared for real disagreement. That's the claim of today's guest, Janara Nerenberg.
• 0:38
  She is the founder and host of the Neurodiversity project. She's a Harvard graduate who lectures
• 0:44
  widely on neuroscience and diversity. She runs workshops at big institutions like the Stanford
• 0:51
  Graduate School of Business, and her new book is called Trust Your Mind. Embracing nuance
• 0:57
  in a world of self-silencing, it investigates the psychology of self-silencing, the toxic
• 1:03
  impact of group think, and I thought, huh, that's just the cut of my jib, so I hope you
• 1:08
  enjoy as much as I did the one the only Janara Nerenberg.
• 1:14
  One of the things that interests me is the distinction that you make between free speech
• 1:19
  and free thought, which I think is useful, a useful distinction to start with maybe because
• 1:25
  we spend a lot of time talking about free speech these days, and not necessarily, and it
• 1:30
  becomes this kind of phony binary where we have, like, either you're on the side of free
• 1:33
  speech or you're on the side of censorship, and there's a lot that that doesn't capture.
• 1:37
  What do you mean by free thought?
• 1:39
  Yeah, I mean, I talk about that a little bit in the book. It's like, I reference something
• 1:46
  called thought exposure censorship. It's like, if you censor what you are letting into
• 1:53
  your mind in the first place, then you're limiting yourself, right? You're sort of like
• 1:58
  you're limiting your exposure to reality in a sense. So, I mean, true free speech or,
• 2:06
  you know, enlightened free speech would come from being like very informed in the first
• 2:13
  place, right? So, if you're like limiting your exposure, you're sort of limiting your expression
• 2:20
  in a way. What I really talk about in the book is really getting under what we currently
• 2:26
  think of as free speech, what we think it means is like the freedom to just blurt out
• 2:32
  whatever, and I think that what we're missing is like accessing what's deeper and underneath,
• 2:39
  and actually people being able to even speak about emotions and feelings, which people
• 2:44
  are just not really trained to do, you know, Twitter X would be like a very different place
• 2:50
  if people were going to a deeper place. So, that's another side to free speech.
• 2:55
  Yeah, I mean, go there. Do you think that we are better or worse at speaking truly
• 3:02
  and deeply than we have been in the past?
• 3:07
  I think it's evolved. I think as, I mean, I don't know how much you follow like the wellness
• 3:15
  spaces and psychology and pop psychology and all these things. And, you know, I'm like
• 3:20
  somewhat critical of how these terms are over employed, like sort of like pop psych
• 3:25
  on Instagram and whatnot. I talk about that in the book. At the same time, I do think
• 3:31
  that we have seen this amazing sort of expansion of people knowing themselves and accessing
• 3:40
  their own truths and insights and being able to share those. So it's, I mean, yeah, I
• 3:48
  think we've made a long way. I think, you know, even 20, 30 years ago, people were not
• 3:53
  open about mental health stuff, and now we're like saturated in that. But if you think
• 3:58
  how far we've come in terms of being open about mental health stuff or emotions or learning
• 4:03
  how to work with your emotions, we've definitely evolved. But it's still and it's infancy
• 4:08
  and people I think are kind of a little, what's the word, like kind of goofy, like learning
• 4:16
  this language to really express themselves, if that makes sense.
• 4:20
  Yeah. And I mean, as you say, you've been critical of this space in part because there's
• 4:24
  also a certain performativity or inauthenticity to the displays of authenticity, right? You
• 4:30
  know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of, let me show you just how raw and self expressive
• 4:35
  I'm being in my vulnerability, which itself is a power is a like a big dick move.
• 4:41
  Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I do talk about that in the book, but I think that what people have
• 4:47
  mistaken vulnerability for outrage, you know, there was like this huge vulnerability revolution
• 4:53
  with Brunei Brown, her TED talk going viral and that was like amazing. Again, that kind
• 4:58
  of opened up a space. But then I think people just went way too far with that and they
• 5:02
  think that, you know, just like complaining and just blurting out whatever, like that's
• 5:09
  being vulnerable, but it's still a kind of cover up, like it's people not taking their
• 5:15
  time to be measured and to like really examine whatever it is that they're experiencing.
• 5:23
  Is there a link there between that kind of performance and the social media performance
• 5:31
  of sincerity and apology that has, that we've come to know and to test after somebody
• 5:38
  is caught doing something that transgresses, you know, some sort of social justice rule.
• 5:46
  I'm just thinking aloud here, but there's, there's a kind of a script, there's a pro
• 5:50
  performer, Stalinist thing that you're supposed to go on the internet and say after you've
• 5:54
  been caught accidentally using a racial slur or an incorrect transgender pronoun or having
• 6:00
  been caught, you know, wearing blackface at a party in 1983 or whatever it is where you
• 6:05
  come out and you give this performance of sincerity. That is not, that it strikes me as not entirely
• 6:11
  dissimilar from the sort of phony sincerity that we see all over social media, whether it's
• 6:17
  people, you know, bleeding their hearts about anti-Semitism or gas and babies or the threat
• 6:23
  that Trump poses or, you know, whatever it might be, your sort of mission to juror is to exhibit
• 6:31
  a kind of rawness and authenticity. Yeah, that follows certain internal, certain explicit logic,
• 6:39
  I suppose. Right, right. Like I made this misstep because of X, Y and Z or something.
• 6:45
  Yes, and there are certain things that, you know, I can, you could jot on the back
• 6:49
  of a napkin in advance what the, what Ashton Kutcher is going to say when he apologizes for having
• 6:53
  been insensitive towards Arabs. You know, it's, he's going to, it's now is a time for listening,
• 6:59
  it's not a time for speaking. I have a lot of learning to do, you know, I'm going to step back and
• 7:05
  be introspective. And it's all this kind of rhetoric of self-help, but it's for the purposes of,
• 7:10
  I would suggest social status. Yes, I think that's a great point. And I think that it's different,
• 7:19
  like if you're talking about celebrities and celebrity culture and the performance of vulnerability
• 7:23
  there. And then the sort of lay person version of that, which is not always about making some
• 7:33
  mistake, right? Because your average lay person is not granted the forgiveness and sort of
• 7:41
  space to be so publicly wrong about something or apologetic, right? Like they risk getting fired
• 7:49
  and whatnot. So yeah, I see what you mean. There's definitely kind of a script there when it comes
• 7:54
  to celebrities. I'm much more concerned with what's happening with culture more broadly. And just
• 8:02
  like on a mass scale and what's happening to our sort of ability to relate to one another and
• 8:09
  our interpersonal relations and what happens when people think they're being vulnerable,
• 8:16
  but don't really know how to be vulnerable. And like there's this weird mismatch between an
• 8:21
  internet culture that demands vulnerability, but people like don't really know how to do it. The
• 8:28
  training and working with your emotions to be truly vulnerable is not there yet. It's not
• 8:34
  meeting the technology that we have. So I think it confuses people. People think that they're being
• 8:41
  vulnerable. And maybe it's a step towards actual vulnerability. But yeah, you know, it's again,
• 8:51
  I'm kind of concerned about this blurring too. Like if people are sort of training themselves to
• 8:56
  be vulnerable online, but it's not quite hitting the mark. How does that transfer over to like
• 9:02
  real offline life, right, with your partner or a friend or a colleague? Yeah. And vulnerable
• 9:09
  is one angle. But I mean, you spend a lot of time in the book talking about the kind of self-silencing
• 9:15
  that we do to avoid conflict because we don't really know how to dissent from another person
• 9:22
  anymore. So it's not just about, you know, bearing our soul. It's also about
• 9:28
  having the tools to engage in constructive disagreement and losing those tools.
• 9:36
  Absolutely. Yeah. I'm very interested in conflict and people's ability to
• 9:43
  sit with their discomfort. I mean, your podcast is called Uncomfortable Conversations,
• 9:46
  which is fantastic. And yeah, I mean, these themes have been explored a lot, you know,
• 9:54
  in the last five to seven years in terms of self-silencing, self-censorship,
• 10:00
  cancel culture. I became really concerned about this several years ago, just like noticing
• 10:09
  like extensive groupthink on the internet, especially on what was called Twitter. Twitter went
• 10:15
  from being this place that was a place where you could just share things freely. And then you
• 10:19
  started seeing people acting like they were performing scripts. And it just- When did you notice this?
• 10:27
  I mean, I think I gradually noticed it. You know, I mean, I know people talk about 2014,
• 10:32
  2015. There was this kind of turning point. In 2019, I was putting together a conference,
• 10:40
  and I myself kind of got like mobbed online. People were unhappy with the speakers that I chose
• 10:46
  for a conference. And that kind of just cemented it for me. This was 2019. So it was six years ago.
• 10:51
  And I was just like, this is such a strange like dissonance. Like this thing that I'm putting together
• 10:59
  is in the service of, you know, this emerging kind of neurodiversity space. And there's all
• 11:05
  these people who are complaining that it's not neurodivergent enough. And they didn't know
• 11:10
  anything about the speakers. And so it was just like, you could see people getting caught up in
• 11:17
  something that wasn't real. And so it kind of- it scared me. It freaked me out. And I didn't engage
• 11:24
  because I just was like, this is so stupid and ignorant. But it sat with me. And then, you know,
• 11:31
  a few years later, I decided to write the book. I mean, you're lucky that you had the perspective
• 11:35
  at the time to notice it as mobberhathy and as stupid and misguided because the experience that
• 11:42
  many of us had between 2012 and 2018 or maybe even 2022 was of the world being extremely fraught
• 11:54
  and potentially hazardous. And the penalties for misstepping being extremely intense. And it was
• 12:01
  hard to identify at the time what now seems obvious, which was that it was a mob behavior phenomenon.
• 12:07
  These things happen from time to time. It's easier to whip people up to storm the village with
• 12:12
  pitchforks and go and burn a witch. You don't know when you're the witch and the mobs at your door,
• 12:19
  you don't really notice that they're misguided mobs. You just think the world is a terrifying place
• 12:26
  and you're about to get burned at the stake. You know what I mean? And I think there's a bit of
• 12:33
  rewriting of history going on now because many people, many of my peers on the social justice left
• 12:38
  want to downplay what happened. And because as you say, a lot of it has to do with self-silencing
• 12:44
  and not cancellation, you know, the progressive left will often say, our cancel culture is just
• 12:49
  a beat up. It's just nonsense word invented by conservatives like who has really been cancelled?
• 12:53
  JK Rowling is still a multi-millionaire. You know, all of the people who were supposedly cancelled
• 12:58
  are now off doing shows in the independent media about how cancelled they are. But that fails to
• 13:04
  capture the people who never got around to being cancelled because they never had the ability or
• 13:10
  strength or courage to say the things that in a flourishing society would have been said,
• 13:16
  but were never said because they didn't notice the mob as being a mob. They didn't conceive of
• 13:24
  themselves as being worthy dissenters. Or they did conceive of that, but they didn't have the
• 13:30
  courage or the way with alter. Say the thing that needed to be said, nonetheless. So it's very
• 13:35
  messy. And I'm worried that we're now pivoting to a post-work culture in which we just sort of
• 13:41
  paper over what happened and carry on as if it never did, assuming that the far right and the cultural
• 13:48
  right and the ascendancy of Trumpism dropped from the sky from nowhere without reconciling ourselves
• 13:56
  to our own complicity and maybe creating conditions in which it was possible to come about. But do
• 14:03
  with that what you will. Yeah, I think you're making some great points. It's great to hear your
• 14:07
  perspective. And yeah, I mean, I think that period was shocking and scary, like I mean, as you're
• 14:16
  describing 2012, 2018 or so. And I think that it's interesting what you're saying about people maybe
• 14:24
  kind of wanting to like sweep it under the rug and not really reconcile with it. I think
• 14:29
  to some extent that was the angle of the book because the book is really a psychological
• 14:40
  exploration of groupthink and the psychology of groupthink and what happens to people on the
• 14:45
  role of the internet and the algorithms and social media in cementing groupthink and how to pull
• 14:51
  away and sort of reclaim your humanity and see the humanity and others. And I didn't want to
• 14:59
  get into specific policies or instances or case studies necessarily because
• 15:07
  these themes transcend all of that, right? They transcend the specific manifestations
• 15:13
  of these psychological trends. And the important thing is that we that we all start to understand
• 15:21
  and to have a little bit more agency given the incredible role that the internet and social media
• 15:30
  play in our lives, we have to understand this. And yeah, it was a fascinating journey. I mean,
• 15:38
  diving into psychology, it took me to looking at extremism, what drives extremism, what drives
• 15:45
  fundamentalism? Because essentially we're seeing extremism and fundamentalism on a like a
• 15:52
  mass scale or like in everyday behavior and people don't realize it. Like you're saying people
• 15:57
  don't realize that they're getting caught up in mobs and behavior. How do you define extremism
• 16:04
  and fundamentalism in that idea? What do you mean by it? Yeah, I mean, I play with those concepts
• 16:12
  in like it's sort of like an obsessive and excessive focus on like one aspect of something.
• 16:26
  That's that's how I would think of extremism and fundamentalism. And you can see how the
• 16:31
  internet with the algorithms would kind of reinforce extremism, right? If you're constantly being
• 16:38
  exposed to one strain of thought or one group of influencers that all share the same perspective.
• 16:46
  I mean, it's related to echo chambers in a sense, right? Like that one narrow point of view is
• 16:50
  constantly being reinforced. And yeah, I mean, I interviewed scholars and different theorists and
• 17:01
  psychologists and found these discussions really fascinating. And one aspect of extremism and
• 17:11
  fundamentalism is looking at how an individual's needs compete, right? So we all have different
• 17:18
  needs for belonging, purpose, safety, shelter, all of these things. And so you can kind of start to
• 17:25
  see this on the internet when people do display extremist behavior. It's a need to be seen.
• 17:32
  It's a need to be heard. You know, in the case of violent extremism, those same needs essentially
• 17:40
  crowd out other needs like needs for survival, for example. So it's kind of an interesting lens
• 17:47
  to start observing human behavior. And frankly, for all of us to be aware of in ourselves, right?
• 17:53
  Since we're all like spending so many hours a day on the internet.
• 17:57
  How much of just sticking with those extreme forms of extremism before we come back to all of us.
• 18:02
  But when you're looking at, for example, violent extremism, do you have a theory of the case about
• 18:07
  how much is motivated by self glorification versus how much is motivated by an altruistic sense of
• 18:14
  devotion to a cause or a really good question? I don't know if I have a working theory on that.
• 18:23
  I mean, I did look a lot at religion in the book. Just because religion is such an interesting
• 18:31
  example of how people get caught up in these kind of like other worldly ideas. And obviously group
• 18:40
  think plays a role in religion. I mean, you know, it doesn't have to be religious either. You can
• 18:47
  think about Luigi Mangione as having this messianic, you know, self conception that's probably
• 18:53
  motivated. Who knows? But it might, it, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a highly altruistic
• 18:58
  sense of duty in his psychology. It's, yeah, it's just an interesting thing to noodle on.
• 19:06
  And when it comes back to nonviolent forms of sort of capture and deco chambers, I'm also
• 19:11
  interested in your thoughts about how we police the boundaries of our communities. You know,
• 19:17
  it's not just about finding meaning and belonging in the community. It's also about being afraid
• 19:23
  of transgressing. And so the sort of enforcement of consensus is something that I think is interesting
• 19:34
  in your work, but the way that the internet has facilitated an enforced consensus that probably
• 19:38
  didn't exist back when we were bumping into more different kinds of different people. I can never
• 19:43
  tell whether that's true or whether actually it's just nostalgia for a past that never existed.
• 19:47
  And when we were in the physical space without digital spaces, we were probably just as isolated
• 19:53
  into like-minded communities as we currently are. Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, there's
• 19:58
  a few themes there. One, I think about the theme of constraint quite a lot. I mean, it's different
• 20:06
  than consensus, but I think for the first half of the book, I was very concerned with, you know,
• 20:12
  parsing out group psychology. How do you parse do group think? Make sure you don't get sucked into it,
• 20:17
  but then towards the second half of the book, I was like, well, but everyone does need a little bit
• 20:23
  of belonging. Everyone does need a little bit of community. So it's, you know, how do you decide
• 20:30
  how much to- what is that give and take? What is that dance, right? Between like being yourself,
• 20:36
  being your authentic self, you know, that we all talk about, and then making room and accommodations
• 20:43
  for others because you actually value some kind of group or whole, like a homeless that you want
• 20:48
  to belong to, right? I think one of my main takeaways is like finding other people who
• 20:56
  value dissents, who value disagreement, who value conflict so that you know that you're in the
• 21:02
  company of people who are always kind of keeping it real, right? Not- I don't know. There's a lot
• 21:10
  of like people pleasing energy out there in the world, and I think that it's really bothersome
• 21:17
  if you are frankly like one of these kind of heterodox types. Like I think we talk a lot about
• 21:25
  having an allergy to group thing, or you can kind of sense when people are going along with
• 21:29
  things, and I don't know about you, but it like makes me really uncomfortable, and I'd rather be
• 21:35
  around people that I strongly disagree with, because I know that they're being firm in who they are.
• 21:43
  That makes sense. Yeah, definitely. I mean, the other oddity about this in the sort of
• 21:49
  heterodox kind of new media space, of course, is that there are then group thinking tribes of
• 21:56
  heterodox people too, right? Whose form of conformism is a cozy consensus about how conformist or
• 22:05
  the other mainstream media types are, and how we're, you know, bold, courageous truth speakers.
• 22:12
  It reminds me of the life of Brian, you know, multipython scene where the Messiah says to the
• 22:17
  huge square full of people, you are all individuals, and they say, yes, we are all individuals.
• 22:24
  And one bloke up the back goes, I'm not. It's like, you know, you can also be a conformist
• 22:30
  group of non-conformists, which is something that I think we've seen over the past couple of years.
• 22:34
  Definitely. Yeah, I agree with you there. Yeah, so yeah, I'm trying to think of the other
• 22:41
  aspects of your question around. Well, I mean, I guess, yeah, you can take it as maybe you can
• 22:47
  pick up the thread of descent, because one of the interesting, well, I mean, actually one of maybe
• 22:51
  my favorite thing in the whole book is a term that you cite from another person who's an Australian
• 22:55
  based social psychologist who I haven't heard of, Professor Gelanda Jetton, who has written about
• 23:01
  what they call constructive deviants. I want to put that on a bumper sticker on my car,
• 23:08
  you're tail getting a constructive deviant. So you write, we think of descent as a lack of
• 23:15
  loyalty, when in fact, challenging group norms often implies deep concern for the longevity of
• 23:20
  a group's value system. That spoke to my soul because frequently I'm accused of betraying a
• 23:29
  team when I regard my commitment to correcting what I see as the errors of group think within that
• 23:38
  team as being a actually a fidelity and a dedication to a deeper value that on the goods, the group
• 23:47
  than mere conformism to its current members. How do you think about that battle?
• 23:54
  Yeah, well, I love that and thank you for sharing that and I'm really glad that you pulled that out
• 24:01
  because I think that is something that really just gets missed in all of this. Like whenever you see
• 24:07
  a dissenter or you know, people get labeled as a reactionary and I really don't think it's that I
• 24:12
  think that there are people who have a strong sense of values actually and there are people who
• 24:22
  who really care about the group, they care about the longevity of the group, they care about
• 24:27
  preserving sort of like a core social contract and when they start to perceive that people within
• 24:35
  the group are deviating from that, they, you know, sort of like these red flags go up, right?
• 24:41
  And they say something or they ask a question and it's a really sad fact that those same people
• 24:50
  tend to be viewed as difficult or they're too challenging or they're too much or something and so
• 24:58
  yeah, Jolanda Jettens work, you know, she talks a lot about being a positive deviant, being a moral rebel
• 25:07
  and how you can sort of reframe how you think of dissenters as people who actually care
• 25:14
  extensively about the group and preserving the group and that's why they're speaking up and wanting
• 25:20
  that to get the group back to, you know, whatever their core values are or just looking out for
• 25:26
  the group, protecting the group, which sounds like kind of what you're describing. It's a very strong
• 25:31
  loyalty essentially. So yeah, I would love to see us talk more about that in general just like
• 25:39
  in the culture. Yeah, that's right. It's, I mean, I wonder what do you have a relationship to any
• 25:47
  identity group that you're a member of that you find personally conflicted by that resonates in
• 25:54
  that aspect of your research? That's a really good question. Do I reserving the group? You know,
• 26:04
  God, like I let me give you an example. Yeah, I'm married to a guy and I'm frequently a person
• 26:11
  who is called upon in the press to give a dissenting view about the traditional LGBTQIA plus
• 26:18
  perspective on things like pride or, you know, with some other form of what is regarded as being
• 26:26
  a consensus, which sometimes makes me a bad guy. Similarly, I'm a Jewish child of Holocaust
• 26:33
  survivors who is deeply ambivalent about the Zionist project and about what the Netanyahu
• 26:40
  government is doing yet frequently gets caricatured because of my Jewishness as being, you know,
• 26:48
  soulless or heartless towards gardens or something like that. These are all groups in which I feel like
• 26:56
  defying the consensus is the truest thing to do to be, to create the greatest amount of good and
• 27:05
  encourage the greatest amount of comedy, but gets perceived as a betrayal of peers and there is
• 27:12
  a real deep moral conflict, I think, between people who tether themselves to universalist values
• 27:21
  as I attend to and people for whom morality is about picking your friends and sticking by them,
• 27:28
  picking your community or being, you know, a loyal member of your community and showing loyalty to
• 27:35
  the individuals who are in your tribe. I don't know any way to reconcile those two.
• 27:41
  Yeah, well, I love that and I actually think that we're going more in that direction. So in the book,
• 27:49
  I talk about something that I call identity orphans and it was just a term that kind of just
• 27:56
  like came to me because it captured how I feel. So to answer this question and one of your
• 28:03
  earlier questions about like dancing around consensus and things, I had a really, really unique
• 28:09
  upbringing in like the heart of San Francisco where I was not tethered to a group and this was like
• 28:18
  something that I really couldn't talk about like pre, you know, I don't know, not until the last few
• 28:24
  years. Why? Well, okay, because until recently, people were not willing to look at the nuances
• 28:34
  of identity, right? They just think like, okay, you are white. This is your experience or you are
• 28:40
  gay. This is your experience or you're a neurodivergent. Like, this is your experience, you're black,
• 28:44
  your experience, your trance, like, like that was a big motivator for this book. I just became so
• 28:51
  frustrated with this excessive check box way of thinking about the world and I realized that
• 28:59
  I wasn't seeing a lot of public discussion about people who actually
• 29:05
  broke through those things, right? So I grew up, I'm like my mom was raised Baptist, my dad was
• 29:11
  raised Jewish, but they raised us behind. My stepmom is an Iranian Muslim, my husband is a
• 29:20
  Nepali Buddhist. I was raised like very, very progressive when it comes to politics, but very,
• 29:29
  very conservative when it comes to like social beliefs because I was raised very religious.
• 29:35
  Sorry, which faith were you raised in? There was a love floating around there.
• 29:39
  I know exactly. So I was raised, I was raised behind. Is there such a thing as deeply orthodox
• 29:45
  behind? I just think of behind as being like live and let live folks. It's not, I wouldn't say it's
• 29:51
  orthodox, but if you take it seriously and if you're like, if you really, you know, kind of
• 30:01
  internalize some of the core teachings, yeah, it's conservative. It's very conservative.
• 30:07
  And so I didn't really relate to a lot of things in pop culture about like, you know, being a
• 30:17
  white woman, for example, like my life was so different from what I saw in pop culture.
• 30:23
  That's the surest sign of internalized white supremacy and structural racism, as you know.
• 30:29
  Is what not being able to really? No, is your belief that you're actually not a part of the
• 30:36
  problem. I'm just, I'm just channeling the, you know, the Ibromex candies of the world that,
• 30:42
  right. Exactly. Obviously, there's a kind of a circular logic, which is your refusal to see
• 30:48
  how much of a white supremacist you are is evidence itself of your white supremacy.
• 30:53
  Right, right. And you know, I don't doubt that I had some, you know, privilege or whatever,
• 30:59
  like I, you know, we can debate that. But what I'm more concerned with is like my internal
• 31:06
  conception of who I was and who I related to and the narratives that felt true to me and who I
• 31:13
  was drawn to. My neighborhood was primarily black. My school was primarily Asian. So my norm,
• 31:20
  like, you know, as a child, you're growing up in the world, like that's just normal. I didn't,
• 31:24
  it's not like I think a lot of people do have the experience where they grew up in a white
• 31:30
  neighborhood or their whole, their family is all white or all black or all Asian or something.
• 31:35
  And like I just didn't have that experience. And so I think that is another part, it's another
• 31:40
  layer to this work. Like I didn't feel tethered to one group per se. And so I think that's been
• 31:47
  part of my confusion. Not understanding why people were so not willing to examine nuances.
• 31:54
  And it was so liberating, I guess, to interview people for this book and to realize that there
• 32:01
  were other people, you know, who had these very nuanced perceptions of themselves and others. And
• 32:07
  you know, Eric Smith, baby, you know him, he's really great. And he talks very openly about
• 32:13
  spending part of his life in a black neighborhood and not feeling black enough. And then he was in a
• 32:18
  in a white neighborhood. And people were accusing him of being like he was like he couldn't fit
• 32:27
  an either one. He was too white or too black. And you know, and then that kind of like inspired
• 32:32
  his journey to just sort of like cut cutting through all of this stuff. But so all to say that I don't
• 32:39
  I don't feel tethered to a group. I think a lot of people have felt that sense of disorientation
• 32:44
  over the past 10 years. A lot of people on the non-super social justice he left. I mean,
• 32:50
  I hesitate even to use that term because who doesn't believe in social justice. But you know,
• 32:56
  I put scare quotes around it in the sense that most, I mean, I don't know about most, a significant
• 33:03
  number of people who are committed to the left wing side of politics. We grew up in cosmopolitan
• 33:13
  big cities. We went to school with large, I mean, especially in the United States and Australia
• 33:19
  and Canada and the UK. We went to school with lots of people of color. You know, we our friends were
• 33:26
  from all over the spectrum. We've been our parents were the kinds of people who would have been
• 33:31
  cool with us being queer. Or you know, and so the idea that there's suddenly an online social
• 33:41
  justice reckoning in which we have to be assigned a label and wear an arm band of some kind that
• 33:49
  denotes us to be one thing or not another thing did feel a bit reductionist. And it was hard to
• 33:58
  understand or to perceive that as a form of progress. Clearly, it wasn't a form of progress because
• 34:04
  I think they so badly lost that cultural argument that they've bequeathed us much worse alternative.
• 34:11
  But perhaps that's a conversation for another day. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's interesting
• 34:16
  because I do talk a lot about like I think a lot of this stuff started out with really good
• 34:20
  intentions. And I actually think it has had like some impact in a good way. I think people are so
• 34:29
  hyper aware of this stuff now. People who didn't grow up in environments like we did, for example.
• 34:37
  And I think that a lot of the people that I spoke to for the book were people who did have some kind
• 34:45
  of early imprint, like early immersion in difference. And so they did not grow up in these very
• 34:52
  siloed environments that a lot of other people do. And so it's very possible that these sort of
• 34:58
  early kind of heterodox people were just the ones who kind of just had a different start. And
• 35:06
  we're like maybe a decade ahead just by virtue of our childhoods or how we grew up or our families
• 35:15
  being very mixed culturally or something that we just couldn't relate to these very dominant
• 35:20
  narratives about race and social justice. So now everyone's had the exposure, which is great.
• 35:26
  But now I just think it's time for a way more nuanced conversation to happen. And I think people
• 35:32
  are ready or they have to become ready because now the whole conversation on DEI is rapidly
• 35:37
  changing. That's what I think. I'm not sure that I buy this framing that I hear a lot, which is
• 35:44
  that we just went too far, but now we're pulling back and that it was necessary to go that far in
• 35:53
  order to get the laggards up to speed with where we were because we were in light and cosmopolitan.
• 35:58
  I do think there was a difference between the kind of, I don't know, but I can't speak to
• 36:06
  your upbringing. But certainly the style of multiculturalism that I was inculcated in respecting
• 36:14
  was a very egalitarian and colorblind one in the 1990s. The light on the hill was very much a
• 36:20
  Gandhiite Martin Luther King, even Obama style conception of universalism and you know,
• 36:31
  communitarianism and individualism like that changed that that was cast aside for a renewed
• 36:40
  emphasis on collectivism, tribalism, identitarianism. Yeah, that's true. Defined by race and defined
• 36:51
  by sexuality and defined by sex and gender identity. And I do feel that that that was linked to a
• 37:02
  kind of fatalism and pessimism about the universalist project in that we're never going to overcome
• 37:09
  racism. We're never going to overcome division. The only thing to do is to fight for a larger share
• 37:14
  of a finite pie because the white supremacist power structures are always going to fuck you at the end
• 37:20
  of the day. And that was different. That wasn't just an excess of Martin Luther King universalism.
• 37:28
  That was actually a deviation back into something that I think had more in common with white supremacy
• 37:35
  and racist tropes of old in the sense that it put a very very high level of importance and value
• 37:41
  on racial identity and turned its back on the possibility of turning the volume down on
• 37:49
  difference rather than up like both both the social justice warrior and the neo nazi want the
• 37:55
  volume of racial difference to be at its maximum. And the universalist wants to turn it down.
• 38:01
  And so in that sense, I regard myself as being not just a milk toast version of the social justice
• 38:09
  cause but actually antithetical to it. Yeah, it's really well put. I see what you're saying.
• 38:19
  I think I agree with with some aspects there. I think I don't know. I mean, I have to believe
• 38:27
  that a lot of that social justice energy was genuine. I think people leading protests and
• 38:35
  marches and wanting things to be fair in the workplace. I have to believe that some of that was
• 38:43
  genuine. I mean, I think all of it was genuine. But what do we mean by genuine? I mean, I think it was
• 38:47
  a genuine response to genuine disparities of justice and to genuine senses of that progress was
• 38:55
  going too slowly and genuine inequality. And I think it was a genuine attempt to remedy
• 39:05
  genuine problems. And at the same time, I think it came from a worldview or an outlook on
• 39:15
  humankind that was sticky and contagious and sensorious but ultimately not consistent with
• 39:24
  universalism and with the best path forward. Like something can be genuine and also misguided,
• 39:30
  right? Like the Lenin was genuine. Like the Bolsheviks were genuine. And even the early Nazis
• 39:37
  were probably genuine in trying to fix what they saw as the tragedy that Germany had found
• 39:44
  itself in in the 20s and 30s. I hear you. I think what I mean is like I don't I don't think it was
• 39:54
  just a power grab. I mean, although, you know, I probably some people were guilty of that.
• 40:03
  I think that I mean, comparing social justice activists to neo-Nazis, I think we need to get
• 40:10
  a little more granular there because I think that I think maybe what you're saying is that some of the
• 40:18
  psychological apparatus could be similar, right? Right. And the conception of how
• 40:25
  how cultures and societies optimally function. The idea that they function best when communities
• 40:34
  cohere and communities defined by their racial identities are maintained maintain a certain level
• 40:42
  of purity. Right. So I think there's a difference here between like the method, the framework,
• 40:53
  the way of thinking, right? There's sort of like there's a lot of like force dominance involved.
• 41:01
  There's a lot of censoring. There's a lot of self-silencing. You have to adhere to this belief.
• 41:07
  It's like a script. It's like a religion. I could totally see that parallel. I think what I'm saying is
• 41:15
  the content is so obviously different. And I do agree with you that it is counter to the kind of
• 41:25
  universalism that you're describing and that, you know, like Coleman Hughes wrote his book and
• 41:31
  and about. And I completely grew up with that same kind of ethic and it sounds like you did too.
• 41:37
  So I do see that. Let me clarify. I'm not making a moral comparison here. And I understand your
• 41:42
  your your queesiness with the the perhaps the implication, which I should have made over it. There
• 41:48
  is no there's no there's no moral equivalence between someone making I think an error of tribalism
• 41:57
  if they're coming from a historically disadvantaged and presently disadvantaged community versus
• 42:03
  someone who wants to perpetuate a long legacy of brutality and colonization and you know and tyranny.
• 42:13
  So yes, let's allow that to be said. I'm talking sort of you know, I'm talking as a cultural
• 42:19
  phenomenon and and as a question of whether or not we have our eye on the prize of the right
• 42:26
  way forward. I think they're both making a similar cognitive and cultural error. Yeah.
• 42:35
  So do you do you think that we need to return to that kind of basic colorblind universalism?
• 42:41
  I think it would solve a lot of problems. And I think if you if we had if the left had
• 42:47
  found a way of maintaining its focus on the egalitarianism on uplifting the working poor
• 42:57
  on making life easier for on really on class. I mean, which I think is the elephant in the room
• 43:02
  to a large extent on on addressing inequality in a colorblind and universalist way and carrying
• 43:11
  forth that that torch then we probably would have saved ourselves quite a lot of squabbling
• 43:19
  quite a lot of self-sensorship and we probably wouldn't have the rise of the far right in Europe
• 43:25
  the way that we do. And I think we certainly wouldn't have had Trump. Because they wouldn't have been
• 43:31
  this allergy to you know all of this is wooders and putters and shutters and I'm not 100% blaming
• 43:38
  the left here because of course obstruction as Republicans have refused to pass any sensible
• 43:43
  you know immigration reform or you know to support proper health reform in you know the states
• 43:48
  and so on. But it's yes I think a huge amount of the causes behind so many problems at the moment
• 44:00
  come from losing sight of economic justice and replacing that with
• 44:07
  identitarian conceptions of of justice. Yeah I agree there and I think that
• 44:16
  it was interesting working on this book because in some ways it was kind of like a long argument
• 44:23
  for stating the obvious like what to me felt obvious because we did grow up with this very
• 44:28
  different sense of social justice in terms of that kind of like universal humanistic sense and
• 44:35
  it seems like the current generation like it's like Gen Z for example they're so saturated in the
• 44:44
  kind of identity based and category based way of thinking about other human beings that it's
• 44:52
  hard to imagine something like this and it's been very shocking and surprising
• 44:57
  to see articles coming out describing pluralism as some kind of new idea or theory or like
• 45:08
  oh what about this other thing there's this whole other framework we should consider pluralism
• 45:13
  and it's like I think I mean that's what we grew up on and so this is where I get really curious
• 45:19
  because I'm like okay this is this is completely the internet and social media is fault then
• 45:26
  because that kind of rigid reinforcement of which box do you belong in which box do you put
• 45:34
  in your bio which pronoun which racial group you know all of these things which do you put in your
• 45:40
  bio is a complete product of existing in life as an avatar right online and figuring out your profile
• 45:50
  image and figuring out what keywords to put in your bio and so it's kind of interesting to think
• 45:57
  you know if we do return to pluralism if this does become a kind of hot buzzword or like narrative
• 46:06
  that we suddenly shift towards then it makes the last 15 or so years just look like this weird
• 46:12
  little blip hmm how optimistic are you that that happens because I see two paths forward now
• 46:20
  because the right side of politics at least in the United States has become completely
• 46:27
  deranged by an authoritarian personality cult in my opinion and is exhibiting the worst forms
• 46:36
  of tribalism and the most predictable and boring ones the sort of white supremacist ones
• 46:44
  the left hand side of politics now faces an existential choice of whether to double down on the
• 46:51
  instincts of the past decade or two and retaliate with yet more and to to join the fight basically
• 46:59
  on Trump's terms and and perpetuate this war of of groups or to return to a universalist sense
• 47:08
  of economic justice and find some way of side stepping the whole debate and appealing to
• 47:17
  people's common Americanness and common humanity I don't know what preconditions we need for
• 47:22
  the one versus the other do I think it's a great question I this is why I actually think
• 47:30
  psychology is very important because I think that this is largely like a narrative issue I think
• 47:37
  I think it's great that you know Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published abundance but I also
• 47:43
  think that it's like a very practical set of ideas like it's like I don't think that we I think
• 47:51
  that's very important but I think there's this whole other half that we need to look at which is
• 47:56
  like an emotional story and a narrative um this is where I like I agree I think the left is just
• 48:03
  there's no common story there's no agreement I think around what needs to shift because I think
• 48:12
  that I think a lot of people on the left have not been willing to to face reality because if you
• 48:19
  really face reality you see that a lot of the struggles and injustices that that we talk about
• 48:27
  um are really just a part of being alive and a very ancient story of survival and resources and
• 48:37
  and wanting to get ahead and so I think part of my goal with with this book was to tell the story
• 48:45
  of the emotions underneath um so that we don't get so caught up in like these noisy policy issues
• 48:52
  and really kind of reconcile with you know what it means to be alive what it means to be a human
• 48:59
  being what it means to have an embodied presence in the world have a physical body
• 49:05
  and kind of like relate to each other on that basis to transcend some of these identity categories
• 49:12
  so in a weird way it's like it is a return to that pluralism it's a return to that universalism
• 49:18
  but I felt like I had to really kind of swim through all of these very psychological studies to kind
• 49:25
  of bring that to people again because it just seems like we've forgotten um and so I think
• 49:35
  I think there's hope if people can slowly let go of some of these categories and boxes and
• 49:43
  way of seeing each other and way of grouping each other I think there's a lot of power in that
• 49:49
  but um to kind of circle back to the beginning of our conversation I think there's a lot of vulnerability
• 49:54
  required in that and there's a there's a kind of there's a level of maturity that people need to have
• 49:59
  and be willing to develop in themselves to just be real about um you know about what it means to
• 50:08
  to be alive rather than using all of these weird fake categories and labels to to relate to each
• 50:15
  other it's interesting that you make the point about our physical body because that's that's a point
• 50:19
  that struck me in the book as well that you attribute quite a lot of the of this problem to the problem
• 50:26
  of being an instantiated virtual creature who is much more impervious to her is more
• 50:35
  invulnerable than a human being and than a physical human being is and there are all kinds of ways
• 50:40
  that we behave in the digital space that we wouldn't behave in physical reality simply because
• 50:46
  our flesh is is vulnerable in a way that you know ones and zeros online aren't and I thought
• 50:53
  that was just as kind of stark an interesting way of putting a phenomenon that we all sort of know
• 50:57
  which is that people will say a lot more shit when they're hiding behind you know and on
• 51:02
  emity that they will in person but to link it to the I guess the the real tactile messy sweaty
• 51:12
  bloody poopy like uh reality of having a body that has to continue to exist in a physical
• 51:21
  space and could get punched or kicked or shot or something is an interesting way of kind of
• 51:29
  underlining the difference between real life and virtual digital life.
• 51:37
  Yep I mean we're we're human beings we have this strange virtual technology that sort of
• 51:44
  made us disconnect from ourselves and from each other and I think a lot of
• 51:51
  um it's like colleges and researchers are are interested in this as well because when it comes to
• 52:00
  you know effective communication effective conflict resolution you know built the basic
• 52:07
  building blocks of of life and society right like a couple two spouses and you know raising
• 52:14
  a family young people learning how to be in friendship with one another so much of this is about
• 52:20
  reading each other's cues physically and being with each other in a physical space and so um
• 52:28
  yeah are are really excessive virtual presences have um kind of twisted or thwarted our
• 52:38
  abilities to to to relate to one another so it remains to be seen right if we can just kind of
• 52:46
  get more human again maybe there's you know maybe there's some hope. I mean it's interesting the
• 52:53
  you know the way in which engaging with each other on social media and online
• 53:00
  encourages us to think about ourselves as identities as a set of checkboxes instead of as messy
• 53:06
  individuals is not only it's not only an artifact of the fact that we have to create an avatar
• 53:13
  and think about ourselves as this thing as this combination of um attributes but it strikes me
• 53:18
  that it also comes back to what we were talking about about policing the boundaries of a community
• 53:23
  in the sense that social media suddenly facilitated mob justice in a way that we had never experienced
• 53:31
  before so it's not just that I'm expected to show up as a gay Jewish white Australian male cis
• 53:39
  gender male it's also even if I choose elect not to identify as any of those things
• 53:47
  saying something that transgresses a norm will not just cause a raised eyebrow at the pub
• 53:54
  it will now call it will now has the potential to go viral and yield thousands upon thousands of
• 54:00
  people telling me that I'm a fucking monster and that I think changed something about our ability to
• 54:08
  um playfully dissent and disagree um and you know transcend uh identities.
• 54:16
  I think you're absolutely right and I wrote this book mostly in 2022 and 2023 actually
• 54:27
  and it was really funny because I wasn't a lot out there in terms of social science research
• 54:31
  on the kind of network effect that you're talking about but I would say like 2024 onward like I
• 54:39
  think a lot of people um started maybe looking at this kind of around 2020 and then the
• 54:48
  research started getting published by like 2024 because then suddenly I started seeing more research
• 54:54
  and then you know the book was done um but I think that that's a huge area that needs to be explored
• 55:02
  is you know I was looking at individual psychology and um sort of what's happening to our minds as a
• 55:08
  result of all this but I think that we're going to be seeing a lot more research that looks very
• 55:14
  specifically at these sort of larger implications and um larger psychological shifts for for mass
• 55:23
  numbers of people because of what you're talking about um a lot of what I was writing about was guided
• 55:28
  by my own sense of things my own experience a few studies that looked at you know group psychology
• 55:37
  group think how group identity is formed sort of um psychological principles that could withstand
• 55:44
  any historical era if that makes sense yeah that could be applied at any point in history
• 55:49
  but I think starting in 2024 and going onward we're going to see more specific uh research that speaks
• 55:56
  to like this moment yeah yeah it's fascinating I want to quote another thing from the book uh to
• 56:02
  wrap us up here which is that you say no one knows how to talk and disagree respectfully and people
• 56:09
  have no patience for differing viewpoints and opinions you're right we're all dealing with the
• 56:14
  consequences of a world where conversation is constrained by inauthentic parameters of acceptability
• 56:19
  and we think according to the group we belong to rather than the conclusions we've drawn through
• 56:23
  our own reasoning so this is something that I think everybody notices and recognizes but it
• 56:31
  bumps up against um the problems that exist when we try to do our own research and be independent
• 56:40
  minded people like if you think about what happened to podcaster stan during covert it was not a
• 56:51
  it was not a great phenomenon to see people trying to figure out what think what independent thinking
• 56:59
  was and independent research was because they had such a sense of being talked down to by elites
• 57:06
  and public health bureaucrats that they sought out a lot of information and they became this kind of
• 57:12
  mantra of like do your own research and you know when you hear this from like QAnon as well like
• 57:17
  look into it yourself you know don't just take don't be a sheeple don't take the man's word for it
• 57:21
  right and I wonder how you think about this conflict because I'm not quite sure what I make of it
• 57:26
  myself the on the one hand the desire not to be stuck in an echo chamber of group think
• 57:33
  taking things on faith just because your tribe or your or an institution that has authority tells
• 57:41
  you that it's so having an independent sort of journalist's mind versus the fact that we really
• 57:47
  do have to take a lot of things on faith and when when the government tells me that ivermectin
• 57:52
  doesn't work i just have to basically believe that um and it's right that i should believe that
• 57:58
  because they know a lot more than i do about about it like how do i balance those two instincts
• 58:08
  this is where i think there's no script and there's no formula and i talk about that in the book
• 58:14
  as well that this is just kind of part of the human experience it's just a constant dance and i
• 58:19
  think that some of this is just trial and error right i think as we go through life from childhood
• 58:26
  onward we were in situations where we learn to trust people we kind of develop a spider sense of
• 58:34
  who not to trust um and i think that same kind of dance is present throughout life until we die
• 58:43
  you know i think that yeah it's hard to give a a script or formula i mean i think this is one
• 58:49
  of the blessings of the internet is you can do your own research right and you know you can
• 58:54
  find other people who are um members of a community who have done maybe a little bit more
• 59:00
  research than you you can have conversations um i don't yeah i don't think there's an easy answer
• 59:08
  and lastly how do you feel about civility versus hostility in human interactions and what
• 59:15
  online is doing to them because on the one hand i hear a lot of people say that the world has
• 59:21
  never been coarser and full of gotcha questions and that people are just yearning for more
• 59:27
  comedy and uh understanding and on the other hand i'm sympathetic to the view that there's way too
• 59:33
  much mindless comedy and and faux understanding and lack of genuine intellectual disagreement and
• 59:43
  constructive pushback um so you know the my skin crawls when i hear calls for greater civility
• 59:51
  because i think it can sometimes just be a phony way of enforcing consensus on the other hand
• 59:57
  i'm also allergic to pointless gotcha questions where people are just trying to be antagonistic and
• 1:00:01
  to trip each other up and to take the least generous interpretation of an opponent's argument
• 1:00:08
  how do you model your way through that yeah i think about this a lot actually so i you know it's
• 1:00:14
  funny i have a similar reaction to this term civility it's like and i go back and forth even
• 1:00:20
  in thinking about how to talk about this book because i think i'm really hungry and eager for more
• 1:00:28
  you know like real talk and authentic conversation and i'm through writing this book actually
• 1:00:33
  became a lot more comfortable with um disagreement and uncertainty and i had to sort of
• 1:00:40
  educate myself how to uh get better at those things like i said having been raised
• 1:00:47
  you know pretty religious where there was like a very strong emphasis on on unity and people
• 1:00:54
  you know harmony and things like this and so even though i was always like this very outspoken kid
• 1:01:00
  and was curious and was always talking to adults i you know there was no debate club in my school
• 1:01:06
  i i didn't really have a ton of experience with like fierce opposition and things like that
• 1:01:12
  so i think one thing i can say is that people just need to get
• 1:01:20
  way more comfortable with with conflict and to not see opposition or even feeling like minor feelings
• 1:01:31
  of like defensiveness or uncertainty or you know maybe like a tiny tinge of fear even and this
• 1:01:40
  is not to say that you know we want to welcome danger or encourage danger or something like that
• 1:01:46
  but i think that just because something feels foreign or threatening or you're scared of like
• 1:01:54
  a fight right like like friends fight spouses fight like nobody likes to just like get into an argument
• 1:02:00
  for the sake well i guess some people do but i think that this is again this is why psychology
• 1:02:06
  is so important and why i kind of went that route for this book because this does have to do with your
• 1:02:11
  nervous system this does have to do with like training your nervous system getting comfortable
• 1:02:16
  having more exposure to fierce disagreements because as you probably know the more that the more
• 1:02:22
  practice you have the more comfortable you get and the more exciting it becomes and the more that
• 1:02:27
  you actually welcome it and look forward to it and so i it's hard to say um what to do about these
• 1:02:36
  terms like civility and um opposition because i think i really think what we need is a collective
• 1:02:46
  like turning like taking the fear a notch down turning down the volume on our fear
• 1:02:53
  that's how we'll get more real with one another and frankly i think that's how like the left
• 1:02:58
  could be revitalized and this is what this is what we were talking about earlier like getting more
• 1:03:01
  human because part of being more human with each other is welcoming fierce disagreement and
• 1:03:07
  and frankly sometimes it's not always civil like it's just not and that's okay as long as it's not
• 1:03:13
  excessive right and and and just kind of sticking it out can pay great dividends in terms of
• 1:03:21
  understanding someone even if it's really hard and you want to shy away from it and it's scary
• 1:03:26
  and you don't want to get into a fight and and all of that um some yeah i think we just have to
• 1:03:33
  learn to go there that's what i think yeah yeah that's interesting i mean you're making the
• 1:03:37
  realize that we're talking about this phenomenon as if it's one thing but it's actually two things one
• 1:03:43
  is the emotional sense of being in a fight and being under attack and the other is the cognitive
• 1:03:49
  game of challenging an idea and you know for many people those two things seem like the same thing
• 1:03:57
  and when their idea is challenged it lands as a threat and it has an emotional resonance because i
• 1:04:02
  don't like being in a fight i don't like being in an argument i don't like feeling like i'm under
• 1:04:07
  attack but i deeply love the detached brain in a jar sparring with someone whose mind i respect in
• 1:04:17
  ways that are constantly probing what their argument is and then they're probing mine and hopefully we
• 1:04:23
  arrive at some better union as a result of the exchange and i'm fortunate that i've done that
• 1:04:30
  enough and probably just have a constitution which is such that that doesn't contain any unpleasant
• 1:04:36
  emotional you know artifacts of conflict that's just that just is a game and for a lot of people
• 1:04:45
  i think it would carry emotional baggage and they wouldn't understand that that's different so maybe
• 1:04:50
  that's the maybe that's the goal and maybe the only solution to that as you say is for is real world
• 1:04:56
  in you know in the flesh communication because it's probably a lot harder to be generous and nuanced
• 1:05:01
  on Twitter than it is in a bar um well that's fascinating all right you've got give me a lot to
• 1:05:08
  think about thank you so much for explaining it to us it's um it's lovely to talk to you and
• 1:05:13
  lovely to meet you thanks for your time yeah thank you thank you so much great to be here and great
• 1:05:18
  to chat