Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Woke Capitalism" with Prof. Carl Rhodes

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"Woke Capitalism" with Prof. Carl Rhodes · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans. Well, I've learned a lot in the past couple of weeks about the limits of
• 0:08
  having uncomfortable conversations and the not everyone's crazy about having uncomfortable
• 0:14
  conversations. They're much more in favor of demonizing people who they don't like.
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  So the episode before last, before the Pride episode, which is the last one, was a taping of my
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  live event with Peter Singer at the end more theater in Sydney. And we promoted on social media
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  using the sort of sexiest, most click baity, most controversial part of that evening, which
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  was Peter Singer talking about his most controversial opinion. Now, Singer is pretty
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  indisputably the world's most influential moral philosopher has had a massive impact on the world
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  and been encouraging people to be more generous and more expansive in their conception,
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  in their empathic imagination, basically. He coined the term animal liberation when he wrote that book
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  in the 1970s. He's had an enormous impact on animal welfare and enormous impact on people's
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  generosity towards poor people in poor countries and an enormous impact on the effective altruism
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  movement, which takes us sort of a clinical and scientific approach to the amount of good that each
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  dollar of spending on charity can do. Tremendously influential individual. But one of his opinions
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  is very edgy. And he was telling me in the interview, which if you listen to the whole thing,
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  you would understand, but many of these critics don't. And if you read his literature,
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  then you would understand, but many of these critics don't. He was telling me that in the 70s
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  and 80s, this opinion of his, which has to do with euthanasia, was getting him death threats
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  and deplatformed and making him very controversial and the target of a lot of hate from the religious
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  right, who felt that he was breaching the sanctity of life ethic. And then things died down and
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  everyone sort of gave up that fight, feeling I suppose that he had made his point and they had
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  made their point and there was nowhere further to take it. But he said that in the past five or
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  10 years, it started up again, the death threats, the hate, the deplatforming, the,
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  yeah, the pillorying of him. And it's not coming from the religious right, but now from the left.
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  It's coming from people who regard his words as violence and who say that because he's making
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  philosophical arguments, he has the blood of innocent people on his hands. Have a listen to
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  what we tweeted out. It's just a very, very short 30 second excerpt of the conversation. Here's what
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  he said. I think that if the child is not on a respirator and is not suffering from some other
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  medical condition that needs medical intervention, but the child's prospects are so bad,
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  then as with voluntary assisted dying, there should be non-voluntary assisted dying. It's not
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  involuntary assisted dying because that suggests it would be against the will of the child
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  and the child is incapable of having a will. So I refer to it as non-voluntary
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  abuse in Asia or non-voluntary assisted dying. Now, I confess that sounds potentially pretty bad,
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  the idea of killing children. But if you're pro-choice, then you do believe on some level in
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  killing very, very small members of the species homo sapiens. And if you think that you should be
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  able to abort fetuses all the way up to fairly close to birth, if you regard birth as being the
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  morally salient point at which it has to become unacceptable to take a life, then you would have
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  to recognize that there's something a bit arbitrary about that, that you could have a baby out of
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  the womb at eight months that is going to survive, and it would be illegal to harm that baby.
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  But you're going to have a baby in the womb at eight and a half months, and you would think that
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  it's okay, even though that organism, that individual is more developed to terminate that individual's
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  life. So regardless of whether you're pro-choice or pro-life, I think everyone agrees that there is
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  some sort of messiness at the edges and moral complexity here. Singer's point is you can conceive of a
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  life that is not worth living. You can conceive of rare cases in which an infant is born
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  with a catastrophically debilitating condition that puts it in excruciating pain and is essentially
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  a terminal illness. So you know that this child is going to live nine months, or maybe three or
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  four years at best, and that entire time is going to be an agony, is going to be in and out of
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  hospital, and you can put yourself in the shoes of that sentient human, and you can ask yourself
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  whether that's a life worth living. There are also cases where you might have a child who has
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  only a brain stem and no brain. There's no consciousness. There's no sentience going on. All you
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  have is, I mean, the light's just downed on. You have a clump of flesh essentially that has no
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  experiences at all. In cases like that, do we believe that it is moral to do everything that we
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  can and pour all the resources that we can into sustaining the life of this thing? And singer's
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  point would be if so, then why are we so cavalier about the way that we treat other sentient creatures
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  like say pigs? Essentially torturing them however we can in order to reduce the price of a pound
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  of their flesh to the lowest possible price in the supermarket. That's a kind of a bigotry. That's
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  what singer would call speciesism. Anyway, these are all, I believe, legitimate things for a moral
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  philosopher to think about. I mean, how else do you come to conclusions about what's right and wrong
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  other than by playing around at the very edges of our intuition? And of course it's easy to say
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  it's a horrendous thing to take a human life. But you need moral philosophers asking the question,
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  well when is it okay and when is it not okay? If the human life was either completely
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  non-sentient and doomed from the start or in total agony, is it ever conceivable that there
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  would be a life not worth living from the perspective of the person who's doing the living of it?
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  And in such a case, could it be the most humane thing to do to take that life?
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  But now of course, people don't want to have that conversation. What they want to do is strawman
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  singer and by implication, by the transitive properties of conversation implicate me in some
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  vast morally reprehensible eugenics movement. So perhaps it was foolish to pick that clip to
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  promote the episode with, but the backlash was extraordinary. What the actual FARC one person
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  wrote, you need to retract this conversation and you should both both make a public apology shame
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  on you, more like the immoral philosopher, not moral philosopher, poor form a day later. So no apology
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  or even a response for your blatant advocating of eugenics, another person writes, this is absolutely
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  disgusting. Another person says, why would you use this clip advocating murder to promote a show
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  egregious? By the way, I ardently support voluntary assisted dying and I like some of singers' ideas,
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  but using as a clickbait to able-bodied people discussing murdering someone not able-bodied is,
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  well, there are no words. Yeah, this brings me to another thing about like who has standing to
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  have conversations. Like the fact that we're two able-bodied people means that we can't have any
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  conversations about the abstract moral philosophy of edge cases. I mean, so the only people who are
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  allowed to make morally philosophical arguments about brain-dead newborns are brain-dead newborns
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  themselves. They have to be having the conversation. It's not going to go well. They don't have brains.
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  So, you know, someone has to have standing who is not a member of the narrow community that we're
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  talking about here. I responded to that person who I respect, by the way, in my defense saying,
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  I posted it because he's electrifyingly original and hugely compassionate towards sentient people
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  of every different ability. Almost nobody agrees with him on euthanasia, but the world would be
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  duller without renegades pushing the boundaries of conversation. And the person responded and said,
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  fair enough, I'm not advocating the shutting down of conversations. The critique is about choosing
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  this clip as the promo. One doesn't have to have much imagination to see how painful even devastating
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  it can be to hear this. To which I simply said, I do confess that there is an expectation that if
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  people find themselves offended by a contentious clip, they actually listen to the whole thing in
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  context before reflexively declaring that a moral philosopher has no standing to discuss moral issues
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  that don't directly affect him. And it was just disheartening, especially because I tried to
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  invite the most strident critic on the show to be heard. I met all the other reactions on Twitter
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  and Instagram amid the reactions like someone asking, is there a transcript of the podcast?
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  And another person saying, probably not, why make a podcast accessible to people he wants dead,
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  implying that Peter Singer wants to kill deaf people. I met all of that. I met the
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  the posts on Instagram saying, this is disgusting, ableist eugenics and absolutely disgusting.
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  You said disgusting twice. I met the messages saying, so essentially,
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  Peter Singer is advocating in a slightly pro eugenic sounding way for the murder of disabled
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  children. Easily one of the most offensive, horrific things I've ever heard. Another person
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  saying, grotesque, amid all of that. One person who I also admire posted, I just hope you'll be
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  giving as much air time to disabled people who are living, and this is a disabled individual we're
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  talking about, as you're giving to Peter Singer who wants disabled people dead.
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  And I said, I'd love to discuss this with you on a future show, and I tagged her. Would you
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  send my producer your best contact info? And I left the email address, if you are willing.
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  Here's what she said. No, thank you. My first impression of you was because you've created
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  an unsafe space for disabled people, facilitating a conversation that says we should be dead.
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  Maybe there'll be someone else more willing to chat, but it's not me.
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  To which I said, nobody has said anything like what you're claiming. I wouldn't allow anyone
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  I was speaking with to do so. I'm disappointed that you're uninterested in conversation, which is
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  all we've got really to understand each other's concerns, all the best to you anyway.
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  And someone else parachuted and said, I think she's made her concerns clear, no, what is it that
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  you don't understand? Well, where do we even begin? What I don't understand is why you wouldn't
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  want to talk about it. What I don't understand is why you would assume the worst, why you
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  would assume for a start that someone who is arguably the most respected philosopher in the entire world
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  would be saying that he thinks you should be assassinated or executed. Why you wouldn't see
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  that that's probably a straw man, why you wouldn't want to flesh out what's actually going on.
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  I don't understand the intellectual incuriosity of people, I suppose. I totally, totally,
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  totally get how shitty it must be to have to endure all of the ableist bullshit that people
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  throw at you, that assholes throw at you. And I completely appreciate that I speak from a place
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  of privilege that I don't have to live with that. But after all that throat clearing is done with,
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  can't we also address the separate question of whether or not the world's greatest moral
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  philosopher is a member of the gang of ableist vomit spurs and tweet haters or whether he might have
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  some kind of a point and if he doesn't have a point the only way that you're going to convince
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  people of it is surely by making the argument, not by saying that he wants all deaf people to be
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  executed. I mean, you can't be serious. Anyway, this is not my fight. What was alarming to me was
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  the refusal to converse. I mean, here is a group of very highly respected supposedly intellectual
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  people who hear 30 seconds and jump to the conclusion that they know so much from that 30 seconds
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  that there is nothing more they need to know. There is there is nothing that could be redeemable
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  about a person's entire life body of work. Or maybe they're just afraid. I don't know, maybe they
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  think I'm going to go in and attack them, which are absolutely wooden to if you know this podcast
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  and you know me, I would try to understand their point of view. So we considered talking to,
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  you know, Australia's disability commission or something, but the problem is that the vast majority
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  of people, the vast majority of people living with different abilities would regard it as being
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  acceptable for people for a moral philosopher to think through the moral edge cases of humankind.
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  So, you know, I'm not going to get very far if the first, if I say, you know, was this completely
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  unacceptable and they say, well, it could be misconstrued, it could be misunderstood, it could be
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  considered offensive, but no, it's fine for him to say and it's fine for you to hold the interview.
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  I really want to talk to people who think I should lose my job. I really want to talk to
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  those people because until we can converse with those people, I don't think we're going to get out
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  of the whole worry. So yes, this is just an eye-opening experience, a reminder once again for the
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  importance of if not having at least inviting people to have conversations that are difficult and
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  stimulating and uncomfortable.
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  Today on the show, woke capitalism. The role that companies play in stoking our
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  wokeness in fighting for social justice and corroding and eroding the public square in the
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  process. That at least is according to our guest. Karl Rhodes is the dean of the business school
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  at the University of Technology, Sydney, full disclosure. I'm a visiting fellow there, but in a
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  different department, social sciences and humanities. Karl writes a lot about the ethical and democratic
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  dimensions of business and work. His book is woke capitalism, how corporate morality is sabotaging
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  democracy and he's not a conventional right-wing rack bag who just thinks that wokeness is an
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  unmitigated evil. As you will hear, he's broadly on the left, but he believes in traditional left
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  wing ideas and indeed pushes back on my concerns about wokeness with the mindset of a smaller liberal
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  and a capitalist and someone who believes in social and economic justice. He's a really interesting
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  guy. He's appeared in a bazillion places like the Sydney writers festival and he tours and gives
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  professional conferences. He previously had very senior management positions in big companies
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  like Landleese and AGL and Citibank and Boston Consulting and so on. So he has his chops, he has
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  his cred in the business world and now he's really inviting us to lift our eyes and think differently
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  about how business could operate and certainly thinks that it's a dead end for businesses to
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  cynically manipulate wokeness in an effort to chase profits. I hope you enjoyed this conversation
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  as much as I did with the one and only Professor Karl Rhodes.
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  How was the pandemic for you? Well, I mean, I guess different in different ways. I mean,
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  everything, you know, it was, it wasn't too bad, you know, we're a family of three in my house
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  and we found out that we get on reasonably well together. I think they're in the alternative.
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  I have here exactly. I mean, I know there are, you know, there are COVID divorces and various
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  things around. Yeah, one of my best friends actually got a COVID divorce and it's one of those
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  tricky things where you can't really say to the person, but you're undergoing so many stresses
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  at the moment, they just had a baby and they were living in Los Angeles and so the, it was much more
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  chaotic and in some ways more scary over there and all the pressure just did them in and you're
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  making a permanent decision on the basis of what is in fact a temporary set of circumstances but
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  doesn't feel that way at the time. I mean, I think the first time around, it didn't really feel
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  temporary because we had no idea there was no word of vaccines or we really didn't know what's
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  going to happen. It was for me, it felt kind of like time became different. You know what I mean,
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  the time horizon of your life became different and you couldn't kind of think of the future in the
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  same way. I think by the, by the last year, you know, the vaccine was coming and we had this kind of
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  target and every day you'd see Gladys on TV and he says, well, that's the premiere of our stage.
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  Yeah, telling you what percentage we were at and once we got to 80, certain things. So it was
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  almost like there was a goal we were getting to. So I think the second one had that sense of the
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  future where the person like, we just didn't know what the hell was going to. Do you remember what you
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  thought was going to happen at the beginning of the beginning? The beginning of the beginning.
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  I thought that it would the very beginning. I don't think we actually knew how bad it was. I
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  think we all kind of thought it was a bit of a bad flu that was super infectious and it would just
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  get over with it. I thought about that. But obviously I was wrong. And after that, no, I think it was
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  just kind of living day to day. It's funny. I was going back to back through some of my WhatsApp
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  messages with a friend in Europe about it as I was just scrolling back and looking at our
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  communications in March of 2020. And I somehow thought that it was, I thought it was going to be
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  very bad from early on because I knew enough data wants to be sounding the alarm in February. So
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  I felt like I was chicken little screening from the rooftop. So while everybody else was still
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  going about their lives. But once everyone got on the train, you know, end of March where everyone
• 18:53
  was sort of on board and there was panic buying and all that sort of stuff. I noticed in my text
• 18:58
  message threads to him, I seemed to be under the impression that it was going to get very bad for
• 19:02
  a few months and then go away completely somehow. Yeah. Right. I thought that pandemics would rip
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  through the population might kill, you know, five or 10% of the most vulnerable people. Yeah.
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  And then we'd all just go back to normal life in June of 2020. Yeah.
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  And it's so bizarre to me now why I would have thought that. But of course, you know,
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  not everyone gets it. And so you have to continue to try to prevent people from getting it forever.
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  Yeah. I haven't had it, unfortunately. You're the guy. You're the one guy.
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  But especially recently, you know, it's my job. I mix with a lot of people. I go to dinners,
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  I go to graduations at university where there's people from everywhere in completely non-society
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  distance ways. So I really should have. So I don't know why. Could we tomorrow? I'll try to carry it
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  on to you somehow. I'll try to cough as much as possible. Or maybe you're just one of those people.
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  I mean, I'm sure there are some people who are who are just naturally, you know, semi-immune who just
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  don't seem to get it. Or at least maybe I've just been lucky. Yeah. I know I've had all of that.
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  I had all of vaccinations as soon as I as I could. So I took all the precautions in that sense.
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  But yeah, I've just I had all the vaccinations. And then I and I went to the most dangerous parts
• 20:25
  of the world to Europe when Omicron was exploding in December of 2021. And to the states. And you know,
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  waiting in line at security at Austin Airport and LaGuardia and places like that, which would be
• 20:36
  absolute cesspools. And I didn't get it. And then I came back here and after I'd been back in
• 20:40
  Sydney for three or four weeks when Omicron was exploding, I got it. Anyway, why did you want to
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  write about woke capitalism? What's woke capitalism? Well, woke capitalism is a phenomenon that's
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  kind of started around the Trump era really late 2010s. I mean, it has a history before that,
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  but the term emerged then where we see big corporations, their CEOs and in sometimes wealthy people,
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  billionaires usually attached to business, supporting political causes that you would have
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  previously or normally associated with the progressive left anti-racism and the Black Lives Matter
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  movement, you know, the Me Too movement, climate changes is in their support for
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  sexual diversity, you know, LGBTQI. They'll come after you, Carl.
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  Yeah, the LGBTQI plus. Do you have a pronoun in your bio at university?
• 21:41
  No, I don't use a pronoun in my bio. That's not mandatory. The university doesn't impose it.
• 21:47
  No, the university doesn't impose any of that kind of stuff. I'm waiting for the ABC to tap
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  me on the shoulder and say, excuse me, you don't have a pronoun in your bio. Well, it's interesting.
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  A lot of the people who are critics of woke capitalism blame universities and say that universities
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  are somehow these kind of hot beds of, you know, crazy, lefty, loony left kinds of thinking,
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  bringing all of this in. I think that these people don't spend a lot of time in university.
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  Well, maybe not in the business schools, but in the social studies to be in some cases in
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  social sciences and humanities, but that's usually a fairly small part of a university. It's certainly
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  not incubating in the engineering faculty or business schools also get accused, however,
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  because especially with woke capitalism, businesses are increasingly putting their resources
• 22:37
  behind this, these kind of things. So, coming back to your question, so I saw this phenomena
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  kind of happening. And I saw most of the people who criticize woke capitalism, it's a conservative
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  critique. It's a critique that says, businesses should just be making profit and shouldn't be
• 22:52
  messing around with all this woke stuff. And in a sense, they don't like it because they disagree
• 22:57
  with the type of social causes that are associated with it. In a sense, they're more critical of the
• 23:03
  woke than they are of the capitalism. I come at it from a different perspective and my personal
• 23:10
  politics are progressive. And so, the type of causes that I was mentioning, I think that I would
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  generally support, I mean, as a kind of blanket statement. But I still not happy with woke capitalism,
• 23:21
  still not happy with private interests having such a big influence on what a really public matters.
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  And so, there's a kind of break within, we live in a society that's a kind of, you know,
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  a tense relationship, in a sense, between liberal democracy and market capitalism. But the history
• 23:39
  is to try and keep those things separate, to try and keep the private interests and the public
• 23:44
  interests separate. And woke capitalism is kind of breaking that system where private interests,
• 23:51
  the interests of wealthy people and people and corporations are coming to have an undue influence
• 23:56
  on the public. But that's a problem for democracy. But haven't market pressures always
• 24:01
  bled into the liberal democratic square in the sense that an oil company will try, you know,
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  motivated by its own financial interests to poo poo climate science and to advocate for more
• 24:15
  drilling. And that then ends up leading to a contamination of the public discourse about
• 24:20
  climate science, even if it's not motivated to do so. What difference does it make, whether or not
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  the corporation is motivated for ideological reasons or for market reasons if the end effect is
• 24:30
  the same? Well, I think in both cases, the primary motivation is market reasons, but they're being
• 24:37
  masked as ideological reasons in some cases. So you don't see corporations back in courses where
• 24:44
  they end up losing loads of money. And often, you know, look at Gillette, if you remember they had
• 24:48
  that, the best a man can be ad, you know, in support of me too. There was a whole lot of market
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  research and stuff they did before going out with that. They created a little bit of a controversy,
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  but there was no real financial risk if anything, there would have been an expecting a financial gain.
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  So I don't think, I mean, so I think it's a, it is similar to other things or even similar to,
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  you know, direct lobbying of corporations to reduce, you know, regulations or to see things go
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  in their own way. But it's different in this sense in that it's really, it's really, it's a kind of
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  mutation of those, those other things, because it's more directly trying to appeal to people's
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  social conscious and social views. So it's not so much that it's different. It's just
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  different in principle. I mean, it's just a different manifestation of doing that kind of
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  things. I mean, just to just to corroborate your note about the insincereity of companies that
• 25:43
  try to do this, I saw a side by side screenshot of the, the social media profiles of companies
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  during Pride Month on, on LGBTQI plus matters. And, you know, everyone's got the rainbow flag
• 25:56
  on the North American and Western European and Australian versions of their, their sites.
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  And you go to the Saudi version of the website or the Iranian version of their website if they're
• 26:08
  lucky enough to exist in Iran. And of course, not a, not a peep. I mean, what would actually be
• 26:13
  courageous and, and woke would be to stand up for queer rights in Saudi Arabia, not in North America,
• 26:19
  where it's already a done deal. Yeah, I'd even hear when, you know, Alan Joyce and
• 26:23
  Contas were supporting the marriage equality debate a few years back. He's the head of Contas.
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  Yeah, he's the head of Contas and also a gay man. In a sense, he amplified the course, but
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  it had pretty much been decided in the public opinion. You know, they just came in and kind of,
• 26:42
  you know, rode the winning horse. Well, then what does it matter if it's just bandwagon hopping
• 26:47
  that's not really going to change much? Um, I guess it's kind of not going to change much if
• 26:54
  in that's the case. And to some extent, in many cases, corporations are adopting these things
• 26:59
  because their customers think they will. But I think the, the problem that I see with it is,
• 27:05
  is not so much that these people may be doing some slight amplification of these issues, but
• 27:10
  the kind of issues that these corporations support are generally social or environmental.
• 27:16
  Climate change, as I said, you know, same-sex marriage, gay rights, LGBTQI plus rights.
• 27:25
  Hey, Gary, now that ladies and gentlemen, he was holding up a sign. Oh, I can't say no.
• 27:29
  Yeah, I've got a little yellow card. I can't say ladies and gentlemen either because
• 27:34
  they're defensive to it as trans people. So, um, people and people, people, people, people,
• 27:40
  so these kind of things, but what it tends to do is it also distracts away from addressing more
• 27:47
  core economic issues. So you don't see any woke corporations saying we've got a scourge of excessive
• 27:55
  CEO pay with CEOs earning, you know, increasing multiples of the average wage and that's driving
• 28:01
  inequality. You don't, you know, when you have the debate about should minimum wages increases,
• 28:07
  there's no kind of soapbox standing CEOs agreeing with that or universal basic income or economic
• 28:14
  equality inequality more generally and how that tends to be stratified across racial and gendered
• 28:21
  lines. So I think one of the problems with woke capitalism, it pushes all this debate onto
• 28:28
  these kind of social issues, but leaves the more traditional left or progressive issues related
• 28:36
  to inequality and exploitation don't, you know, get less public airing. So it's a kind of controlling
• 28:43
  the political agenda in a way that I think is a problem for democratic debate. Right. And I guess
• 28:51
  then it ends up putting it to thumb on the scale of the internal, factional debate on the left
• 28:56
  between should we be concerned with identity rights or should we be concerned with economic
• 29:01
  justice issues? Yeah. And of late, the former has definitely been winning over the latter and
• 29:06
  many argue that that's one reason why the left keeps losing elections to the extent that it does.
• 29:10
  Yeah. That was dening a recent Australian national election, but certainly in the United States,
• 29:14
  there's one analysis that says, you know, if you're not talking to working class people about how
• 29:18
  you can make their lives better, but you're constantly talking to educated university elites about
• 29:22
  what pronouns to use, you're not going to win enough votes to win elections. Yeah, but I would also
• 29:28
  to the extent that the issues of sexual identity in this case are also related to inequalities
• 29:33
  because people from minority groups tend to be discriminated against more. So it's also about
• 29:39
  the idea of divorcing the economic from the social is a problem as well. But then you get, I don't
• 29:43
  know if you saw, you know, not long after the end of the election here, and so kind of, you know,
• 29:49
  conservative hand wringing started, and then Peter Dutton was was named as the head of the liberals.
• 29:55
  He declared that the liberal party is the party of the working class, and the party of the,
• 30:02
  you know, just similar to forgotten Australians that the Morrison used to talk about.
• 30:07
  And just to clarify for foreign for non-Australian listeners, after the election,
• 30:13
  one of someone from the right wing of the right wing party has, Peter Dutton has now
• 30:17
  ascended to the leadership. And when we say liberal, we're talking about conservatives,
• 30:21
  the capital L liberal party here saying that the conservatives are the party of the working class.
• 30:27
  It's a, yeah, it's a fascinating shift. After spending a whole lot of time bringing in a
• 30:32
  regressive tax policy that gave massive tax cuts to wealthy people with not much going on for
• 30:39
  everyone else. I mean, I think this is all well, you know. Right. And running an election campaign
• 30:45
  in which trans athletes featured prominently sort of a rather imported North American issue
• 30:52
  that Australians don't really give a toss about one way or another generally, but in the hopes of
• 30:57
  swaying some working class voters who might want to fight the culture war rather than focus on
• 31:04
  the way that they're being screwed by the economy. Yeah. So in a sense, it smells a lot like what some
• 31:10
  people call dead cat politics, where you get the dead cat and throw it on the table. And no one
• 31:16
  can talk about anything else distracts from the real issues that need to be addressed, which I
• 31:21
  think are issues of, I mean, economic inequality. There's good signs from the new progressive
• 31:29
  Albanese government in the sense that at least issues of wage equality and housing affordability
• 31:36
  have been kind of brought to the fore in that sense. But there's still a lot to go. And I think
• 31:40
  we've had so many years of this politics, which has not addressed these issues. They're not so much
• 31:48
  in people's consciousness anymore. And to my view, they should be. So a conservative is pulling off
• 31:54
  a kind of a bait and switch. This is, this is Thomas, this was first alluded to this by Thomas
• 31:58
  Frank's book, What's the Matter with Kansas? I don't know if you remember that from what the late 90s
• 32:02
  or early 2000s, he wrote a great book saying that basically what conservatives do is deliver a
• 32:08
  windfall for the rich and screw over the poor and then get the poor to vote for them by
• 32:12
  ginning up cultural issues that they actually never deliver on, but they keep using as a
• 32:16
  buggy man to win the next election, whether that's, you know, gays or trans or migrants or race
• 32:22
  or whatever it might be, people coming to steal your jobs or to pervert your children in the schools.
• 32:26
  And they bang the drum on that and get people to vote for them, vote essentially against their
• 32:30
  economic interests using cultural war issues. And then they do a bait and switch and you never
• 32:35
  actually get the cultural stuff. Well, I suppose sometimes you do like like delivering Supreme Court
• 32:39
  justices in the United States who might overturn Roe versus Wade, but you rarely get the cultural
• 32:44
  stuff and what you reliably get is getting screwed over by the wealthy. I mean, I haven't read that
• 32:49
  book, but that makes sense. Although I think there's a slight difference here, the term work
• 32:53
  capitalist was capitalism was actually coined by a guy called Ross Doucet in an article in the
• 33:00
  New York Times. He's a conservative commentator. He made the very interesting observation. He said,
• 33:07
  look, when Trump was president of the United States and was, you know, giving these windfall
• 33:12
  tax cuts to corporations, the corporations, I'm going to say no, right? They thought that was
• 33:17
  great for them. And they wanted to accept that. But in accepting it, they didn't want to be associated
• 33:24
  with the populist, regressive, you know, somewhat brutish social views that Trump had. So,
• 33:32
  woke capitalism emerged as a way of kind of of cleaning up the image of the corporation so that
• 33:39
  they could be seen as being good on these social issues while at the same time reaping massive
• 33:44
  economic benefit from corporate tax cuts care of Donald. So, would you not object to woke capitalism
• 33:50
  if it was redefined, if workness was redefined in this context as economic justice?
• 33:57
  I think I would still oppose it to the extent that the idea that corporations and wealthy people
• 34:06
  have a say in controlling the political agenda, whether I agree with that agenda or not
• 34:12
  personally is kind of not really the issue. We've already established that they will do that
• 34:17
  for their economic reasons, right? So, take ideology out of it. They're always going to be lobbying.
• 34:23
  I mean, the drug industry is always going to be lobbying for, you know, against laws that could
• 34:29
  constrain drug prices and make healthcare more affordable for people. The military industrial
• 34:35
  complex is always going to be lobbying for more money for defense. Oil companies are always
• 34:40
  going to be lobbying for a failure to act on climate change. So, isn't it inevitable that you're
• 34:45
  going to get economic meddling in the national conversation about policy? It is always inevitable,
• 34:52
  but I think at the same time, I think what's happened here is that woke capitalism isn't just about
• 35:02
  corporations doing stuff. It's also about how we understand the rule of government. I mean,
• 35:06
  I'm one argument that woke capitalism's not just, it's not about the successes that corporations
• 35:12
  have had in manipulating things in their own interests. It actually results in a failure of
• 35:17
  government, particularly if you look over the period of the last 40 years, you know, what they
• 35:22
  call neoliberalism. I think of myself, by the way, as belonging to generation N. I was born in 1967.
• 35:30
  I went to university in 1984, which was the time where Ronald Reagan was president of the United
• 35:36
  States. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister in the United Kingdom, where I lived at the time.
• 35:41
  My whole adult life has been the neoliberal era. And I remember some stuff when I was a kid,
• 35:48
  which is kind of before this happens. But I think this whole period since then, there's been such
• 35:54
  an increased reliance on the market as the solution to everything, such an increased belief
• 36:00
  that the corporation is the business type of business that we need to work, the public listed
• 36:08
  corporations, all of the privatization of state corporations, the demutualization of mutuals,
• 36:17
  and moving towards this corporate sense. And this actually, which mixed with globalization,
• 36:23
  massive deregulation of markets, and the kind of belief in small government, which really
• 36:29
  means small, influence more than small size. So I think this withdrawal of government from the
• 36:35
  public sphere created a vacuum which corporations have been left to fill. So I think the, you know,
• 36:41
  while corporations may always always try and influence things in their own benefit,
• 36:46
  that doesn't mean society has to let them because corporations are exist in law. They exist
• 36:53
  because they're created as a kind of corporate person through the legal system of which is still
• 37:00
  controlled by sovereign states. So corporations are subservient to society, but society at least
• 37:08
  as represented by government in Western liberal democracies, as kind of let go. And this vacuum
• 37:14
  of power they've left has been filled. So I don't think it's inevitable that we're not able to
• 37:20
  reverse that with a new political imagination. Right. You just said that small government means
• 37:26
  small government influence, not small government size. What do you mean by that? Well, I mean, if you
• 37:32
  look, I mean, the idea of small government and that government should not be involved so much in
• 37:37
  interfering with the economy in particular, but also with society more generally, that doesn't
• 37:43
  necessarily mean that governments are actually smaller. It just means they're kind of doing less.
• 37:48
  And so government still exists and government spending still exists. But it tends to be, you know,
• 37:54
  and things you mentioned, the military industrial complex, but it's more the military government
• 37:59
  complex, unless directly involved in industry with the absence of public industry. But
• 38:05
  government still exists. We still build roads. There's still hospitals. There's still schools.
• 38:10
  And there are still these kind of public services. But the withdrawal is more of a withdrawal
• 38:15
  from the economy where at an extreme, the government only comes in to solve market failures when
• 38:21
  things get really bad, like the global financial crisis being a kind of significant example of that.
• 38:27
  So government is still there, but it's given so much up to the private sector. And even governments
• 38:33
  themselves and public institutions, even universities like where I work, you know, became increasingly
• 38:40
  could jolt to adopt corporate management style management there. I say media, public media companies
• 38:46
  have been succumbed to the same thing. So that's a different kind of shift, which is the encroachment
• 38:54
  of the private sector into the public, because the public sector created that hall to be filled.
• 38:59
  Right. I mean, so the criticism of the faturites and the Reaganites, I mean, the criticism that
• 39:04
  they made, not the criticism of them in the 80s, was that the public sector had become bloated and
• 39:09
  inefficient. It was full of cutting and wearing pale white middlemanagement people who were
• 39:15
  shuffling papers around on desks and couldn't find their ass with both hands. Now we've gone
• 39:20
  a long way in the other direction. I was just doing a segment recently about the New South Wales
• 39:25
  government, which is the state that we live in and that we're broadcasting from the most populated
• 39:29
  Australian state, has a thicket of motorways that are all owned and built by private companies,
• 39:37
  and we all pay exorbitant tolls to drive on these motorways. And recently the premier announced
• 39:43
  that you'll get up to $750 cash back on your tolls if you spend more than a certain amount on your
• 39:49
  tolls if you're driving in Sydney. So I did a radio segment saying, well, it's all very nice,
• 39:54
  but we pay taxes and registration so that roads can be built. And the government builds those roads
• 40:00
  and then outsources to the private sector, other roads that we then pay a toll for. And now the
• 40:05
  government gives us back a portion of the tolls that we paid in addition to the registration and
• 40:09
  the tax. Wouldn't it be simpler if the government just built all the roads? I mean, what's
• 40:14
  impeding? And I spoke to the road minister about this and she said, oh, well, you know,
• 40:19
  the private sector brings in large influxes of capital and cash that the government doesn't have.
• 40:24
  And I said, hang on, hang on. The government has a triple a credit rating. Everyone in the world
• 40:29
  trusts that the New South Wales government is good on its word. You would easily be able to raise
• 40:33
  as much money as you want to at extremely competitive interest rates and build whatever you want.
• 40:38
  Why don't you just do it? Well, the private sector is better at blah, blah, blah. And there's
• 40:41
  really this mantra that the private sector is the right place to be building the road infrastructure
• 40:47
  of a big global city like Sydney. Do you think that it's not and if not, how much would you have the
• 40:54
  private sector do? I mean, in these kind of things, you'd always have some kind of relationship in
• 41:00
  terms of who does the work. But yeah, the toll system does seem like double paying and the roads
• 41:06
  essentially a public good in the sense that, you know, everywhere in the sense, at least that
• 41:10
  everyone benefits from them. And traditionally, the idea in terms of the public good that no one
• 41:16
  would build them if they had to pay for it themselves, I mean, that compromises being broken in terms
• 41:21
  of toll roads. But the idea that it's more efficient, I think there was that issue in the 80s and
• 41:26
  that was certainly the case. And in the 70s, you had the kind of circulation economies and
• 41:32
  influx of competition from internationally, from Japan in particular, for example, in the auto
• 41:39
  industry. But then, I don't know if you've been to the UK recently and driven on a train. Yes,
• 41:45
  it costs a hell of a lot. The subway in London is extraordinary to you, but yeah. Or even the
• 41:51
  national trains, you know, go from London to Manchester because you're hundreds of pounds to go
• 41:56
  on a network that hasn't been invested in by its private owners. So I don't see, I mean, that's
• 42:02
  an example of something that's not an improvement. But even again, you know, we're here in the 2020s.
• 42:08
  I mean, that, what Reagan and Tattoo were doing in the 1980s was responding to a set of problems
• 42:15
  in the 1970s, actually using an ideology, at least in the UK, that was developed in the 1940s by
• 42:23
  Friedrich Hayek in his book The Road to Serfdom. In what way is that relevant to 2022 Australia,
• 42:32
  not much, in my view. But the ideology hasn't predominantly changed, particularly in the conservative
• 42:39
  side of politics. So I think I don't have all the answers, but we just need a new political
• 42:45
  imagination to deal with the problems that we're facing now, not a 1940s ideology that was used to
• 42:51
  address 1970s problems. This indeed is another thing that Ross Douthet says, you mentioned
• 42:56
  Ross, the conservative New York Times columnist, which is that conservatives are always reaching
• 43:01
  for the same toolkit. And really, since the 80s haven't come up with any new ideas about it,
• 43:05
  and they're just reaching back to the same toolkit that is getting increasingly outdated and
• 43:10
  increasingly stale. But because the hero, Reagan or the hero, Tattoo loved it, they're going back
• 43:15
  to the same old story. And they still do. If you remember, was it last year sometime,
• 43:20
  uh, Josh Friedenberg came out and specifically, uh, referred to Margaret Thatcher as being a person
• 43:27
  who he looked to for inspiration with current policies. I mean, really, I mean, it's way out of date
• 43:35
  and it's time for a new generation of people. And I'm hopeful that there is, you know,
• 43:41
  there is a new generation of people with a different view. Many of them are the people who are
• 43:45
  kind of, you know, into work corporations. They're quite happy to buy from organizations of a
• 43:49
  particular type. I want to work for organizations for a particular type. But I think the maturation of
• 43:55
  that generation hopefully will lead to a new politics and a kind of research and, uh, democracy.
• 44:02
  I mean, the kind of, you know, like when I see the kids going to university now are the ones who
• 44:06
  are marching on the street, uh, because of Greta Thunberg. And there's really a different, uh, kind
• 44:12
  of view of young people that I see now, even than what I would have seen five years ago, certainly
• 44:18
  ten years ago. So I think there is also a generational shift going on. Work capitalism is kind of
• 44:23
  intertwined in that. Um, but I think there's also some hope in the, in the next generation,
• 44:28
  because frankly, my generation is either screwed things up or just spectated as they've gone downhill.
• 44:34
  Generation X, generation N, as you say. I want to get to workness in a second, but before we leave
• 44:40
  the capitalism component of work capitalism, when you say that you would like to see a sort of a
• 44:45
  new public imagination, what does that look like? Well, I think the problem, the issue is that we
• 44:50
  don't know what it looks like. But I think, I think, if you think of democracy, which is kind of
• 44:55
  the, kind of the basis on which we work. And if you think of, you know, the, the French Revolutionary
• 45:01
  slogan of freedom or liberty, equality, and it had fraternity, but we can replace that with
• 45:08
  solidarity because of the sexist language of the time. So much these days of democracy is all
• 45:14
  just about freedom and personal freedom. I should be able to do what I want, particularly if you
• 45:18
  look in the US, much less about what the responsibilities that, that brings much less about democracy
• 45:26
  as a system of equality and what that means in terms of, in terms of community and certainly
• 45:32
  much less in terms of solidarity. So we have this heightened individual, individualism that's come,
• 45:38
  you know, as part of the package with, with neoliberalism. So I think a turning back to kind of
• 45:43
  collective values and, and realizing that we're in this together. And in a country like Australia,
• 45:49
  you know, a wealthy, prosperous country, why isn't there more sharing of that prosperity?
• 45:56
  Why is it increasingly going in the hands of, well, not increasingly. Why is, for some time,
• 46:00
  as it being moving to the hands of the few? Meanwhile, if you're in a major capital city now and
• 46:06
  you're a young person leaving school or getting a trade or leaving university, the idea of home
• 46:12
  ownership is a pipe dream, unless you've got daddy's money. Yeah, I mean, that's a whole other,
• 46:17
  a whole other, you know, can of worms to open up. So if we are going to become woke to woke
• 46:23
  capitalism as you, as you call it, let's just trace back, uh, wokeness and I'd love to get your
• 46:29
  thoughts about whether the threat of wokeness is overblown or underblown. Um,
• 46:33
  is Colin Kaepernick a place to, to start? Well, I mean, that would be starting in the middle,
• 46:38
  but yeah, it's a good place to start. Well, let's start at the beginning then.
• 46:41
  Well, the, the origin of the term woke, um, came from African American vernacular. It's hard
• 46:49
  exactly to place when, but it was definitely around in the 1960s. And, and there was a really
• 46:54
  interesting speech by Martin Luther King, junior, um, where he was talking about civil rights and
• 47:01
  the civil rights revolution. And he actually, uh, talked about, do you remember the story of
• 47:06
  Rip Van Winkle? Hmm, but repeat it. I will. So Rip Van Winkle is hanging around in the 1700s
• 47:14
  in the, in the United States. And he decides to go for a long sleep. And before going, he goes
• 47:18
  to a tavern. And on the wall, he sees a, a, a picture of the king of England. Anyway,
• 47:24
  so he wanders up the hill and he falls asleep for 20 years. He comes back down, goes to the same
• 47:29
  tavern and now there is a picture of George Washington. He slept through the revolution
• 47:34
  and he's confused and he doesn't know what's going on. And he's all kind of, you know, in,
• 47:38
  in a, in a big kind of kerfuffle and doesn't understand the world. And what, um, uh,
• 47:44
  Martin Luther King, junior suggests is that don't sleep through the civil rights revolution,
• 47:50
  you know, or to put it another way, be awake to what's going on. And this notion of being awake,
• 47:57
  he didn't use the term woke, but others did at the time, is a, is a term about being conscious
• 48:04
  and aware of the political and social forces and changes going on around you. And that meaning
• 48:12
  kind of, you know, had a bit of an undercurrent, never really became mainstream. But what happened
• 48:17
  then with the Black Lives movement in the early, in the early 2010s, it came back. And this is the
• 48:25
  first, um, uh, social, one of the first social movements where social media was a big part of it
• 48:32
  and the hashtags stay woke, became part of the Black Lives Matter movement. And this was the
• 48:37
  original notion of woke, not as a criticism, not as a pejorative, like the, the, you know, people
• 48:44
  who get all crazy about woke capitalism, but actually something that's really good, something
• 48:49
  that, that's about being aware and being able to act on, on what you're doing. And in a sense,
• 48:54
  Colin Kaepernick, um, uh, was supporting, uh, the Black Lives Matter movement initially by
• 49:02
  sitting at the national anthem and then going down on one knee, as again, as a way of raising awareness
• 49:08
  of trying to get people to get awake to what was going on, particularly in terms of racial violence
• 49:14
  and inequality in the US. So that's where the, the, the, the term comes from. We can get onto it,
• 49:20
  but it became pretty mutated after that. Okay. Yes. Let's explore that mutation. So, uh, so you have
• 49:27
  people like, uh, Colin Kaepernick, um, uh, in this sense. And just by the way, what's interesting,
• 49:35
  you know, he got in a lot of trouble because he was kneeling and people thought this is terrible.
• 49:39
  And, you know, Donald Trump started doing his usual man thing off about it. Um, but the notion
• 49:45
  of kneeling, by the way, it was actually a custom that soldiers used to do. So if, if one of your,
• 49:52
  your comrades in arms died in the battlefield, you would kneel next to them and say a prayer in a
• 49:58
  kind of out of, out of respect and acknowledgement that they gave their life for the cause. So this
• 50:04
  is the, the actual symbolism that was, uh, that was being used here. So it was a symbolism of kneeling
• 50:10
  for, for African Americans who had been killed in police violence and, and, and, and, and through
• 50:18
  other things as well, but mainly in relation to the police. And so this whole thing then woke
• 50:22
  became a really important rallying cry for Black Lives Matter. But, but with the social media,
• 50:29
  it also then kind of seeped into more general culture. And you found that people then started
• 50:35
  using the terms woke more generally to mean political awareness, not just about racial injustice
• 50:41
  and violence, but about any kind of issues. Um, and, and so this, this was the case. But then
• 50:49
  language kind of works strangely, right? It kept moving along. So it then, as white people
• 50:56
  started to being called woke, um, and using the term woke, it started to take on a new meaning
• 51:01
  of meaning insincere kind of superficial political, uh, or, uh, positions or ideological positions
• 51:09
  that people were just adopting because they were kind of trendy or, or, or, or fashionable in some
• 51:15
  way. So it started coming to mean insincere, uh, belief in progressive political issues that
• 51:22
  didn't really have any depth. So that became more general. And then, you know, all these, you
• 51:28
  know, if you were, if you wanted to be disparaged for these kind of views, people would call you
• 51:34
  a member of the woke arati, woke tide is another one, uh, that was around, uh, for a while.
• 51:40
  So the meaning completely shifted from meaning being aware and sensitive to the real issues affecting
• 51:47
  you to being completely superficial in adopting kind of trendy progressive politics because,
• 51:55
  you know, you know, um, uh, they, they, you thought they were cool. And there was even the notion
• 52:00
  of woke fishing where men would adopt these woke positions through social media in order to
• 52:06
  try and make sexual conquests with, with women. Um, so it really kind of mutated. And then,
• 52:12
  when these corporations started doing this, you know, taking these kind of positions, which,
• 52:17
  as I said, was during the, the Trump years, it got attached to them as well. And it's pretty much
• 52:23
  stuck with that, um, uh, you know, over the last, whatever it is, four or five years.
• 52:27
  That's a good description. I'm, I'm interested that you use the word insincere as part of, uh,
• 52:32
  the definition of, of woke is, is, is insincereity, uh, a fundamental component of the way we use
• 52:39
  wokeness now because I, I'm not sure that's how I use it. I think I would, I think I would associate
• 52:47
  wokeness with sensoriousness, uh, hyperbole, uh, lack of perspective, uh, lack of generosity towards
• 52:54
  another person's position, uh, cherry picking, taking out of context, straw manning, um, but not
• 53:01
  necessarily insincereity. Uh, all of that couldn't come from a, in fact, I think some of the most
• 53:06
  dangerously woke people are deeply sincere about their stupid beliefs. Mm.
• 53:13
  But they're, yeah, so yeah, I mean, insincereity was part of the criticisms that came,
• 53:19
  whether that can be broader, yeah, I think you're right there. But I mean, I'm not just insincereity,
• 53:26
  I mean, maybe we could kind of broaden that out then to say kind of lack of depth.
• 53:30
  Yes. Superficiality, definitely. Yes. Might be more what I was trying to get in with that.
• 53:34
  Right. Yes. Yes. You can be sincere in, in thinking that you're fighting a good fight when,
• 53:40
  in fact, you're really just playing with words. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Um, uh, so, you know,
• 53:46
  there are a couple of components that are worth picking a brain about it that people think are
• 53:49
  bad about this trend. Um, uh, one might be what's broadly called council culture. Another might be,
• 53:57
  what I have, have what I call outrage archaeology, where people go digging. I'm trying to get it
• 54:04
  spread. I'm trying to get it into complex. Yeah. You know, the phenomenon, we're all of a
• 54:08
  sudden, you know, 11 years ago, someone tweeted, uh, some gay joke that at the time was sort of
• 54:14
  considered edgy and funny and is now considered, uh, out of bounds. And because they didn't
• 54:19
  haven't deleted it in the years since they get uninvited from the Academy Awards or host the Academy
• 54:25
  Awards or something as was, as was the case. Um, uh, I guess both stem from a lack of generosity
• 54:33
  towards each other and an almost religious fixation on finding heretics and, and burning witches
• 54:41
  and identifying, you know, transgressors. Um, are these concerns overblown? Are they interrelated?
• 54:47
  How do you think about them? I think there's some reasonable concerns. I mean, so Harvey Weinstein,
• 54:53
  let's look at him, someone who was clearly massively cancelled and was a reprehensible human
• 54:59
  being. Was he cancelled though? Well, I mean, it was a vicious and violent rapist who, who had his
• 55:04
  comeuppance. Yeah. So I don't think many people accuse his victims of being too woke or like
• 55:11
  that being a woke campaign today. Does he have many? I think the, the me two movement, which was
• 55:18
  spawned in response to, to Weinstein initially and then broadened out more generally. Um, uh,
• 55:26
  and how that then relates to debates around toxic masculinity is by some people considered woke.
• 55:34
  But my question is, does that mean you won't watch his films? Does that mean you, right? Well,
• 55:42
  that's another good question that's raised by all this, isn't it? Separating the artist from
• 55:46
  the art of the business person from the, from their products. I mean, I, I think he's, he's a
• 55:53
  problematic example because even the most, even the most anti-woke conservative does not think
• 56:00
  that men should go around violently raiding women, right? I think a, you know, a, a better example might
• 56:08
  be Louis CK, not guilty of a crime, but clearly guilty of being a creep. Yeah. Um, as these
• 56:15
  Ansari, I don't know if you remember that scenario where he was a comic who had a TV show, he basically
• 56:21
  had just a bad date who his, and she then wrote about it and said that she had felt uncomfortable
• 56:29
  in his awkwardness, but he hadn't, you know, expected to do anything and he was nominated for an
• 56:34
  Emmy award and nobody applauded. Yeah. These are not the worst things in the world. You know,
• 56:38
  he can still work, but it's deeply embarrassing and, and you're shamed and kind of not invited to
• 56:42
  fancy parties and maybe your career takes a hit because of, of things like that. Um, those would
• 56:49
  be the borderline cases where, uh, where people would wonder, you know, nobody wants to live in a,
• 56:55
  in a world in which women are, in which it's regarded as being okay for a woman's male boss to
• 57:01
  slap her on the ass and say, how are you doing to its nice dress? But similarly, few people want
• 57:06
  to live in a world in which it's impossible to, uh, be clumsy on a date without having your life
• 57:13
  ruined. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, I mean, I mean, these are border cases. I mean, the cancel,
• 57:19
  cancel culture is part of in, in these media personalities. It's about kind of popularity,
• 57:25
  which has always kind of been fickle in any case. But, you know, I remember when I was a kid,
• 57:30
  we used to watch the Benny Hill show and before that, uh, and thought it was hilarious. Like,
• 57:35
  it was no way that's going to add now. Yeah. I mean, you're going to cancel me because my 12-year-old
• 57:40
  self thought Benny Hill was funny. And with the outrage, I'll just hear this and I'll try. I mean,
• 57:45
  the funny thing is that, of course, you know, both sides do this and I was being interviewed by an
• 57:50
  Australian conservative Rowan Dean, uh, for a special that he's doing about cancel culture and
• 57:55
  free speech. And, you know, I made the point much to his chagrin that, you know, people say, oh,
• 58:00
  you can't, you couldn't do Benny Hill these days or you couldn't do Monty Python these days. You
• 58:04
  know, Monty Python, you know, the wokesters would all get out and they'd want to cancel it. I made
• 58:08
  the point to him when they released life of Brian, they almost were canceled. And the, and the film
• 58:13
  almost was banned. And it wasn't the left that was doing it. It was religious conservatives who
• 58:18
  were doing it. And this was right after McCarthyism when the, when the right wing had gone on an
• 58:24
  absolute witch-burning, witch-hunting, you know, witch-burning rampage against left-wing people in
• 58:31
  Hollywood. So, you know, there is a long history of cancel culture on the right.
• 58:34
  Mmm. And I think, I think the life of Brian Wadsband in some Catholic countries.
• 58:38
  Right. Yeah. Wouldn't surprise me. Yeah. Ireland, I think. They don't quote me on that, even though I
• 58:43
  just... Yeah. So, what's your relationship then to artist versus, versus the work? Do you still
• 58:50
  watch Woody Allen films? I haven't had an opportunity because no one's airing. But I still remember
• 58:58
  watching Woody Allen films. And, you know, he's a, he's a very funny guy. I mean, it's a hard one
• 59:04
  to draw the line. I mean, you know, would you listen to Gary Glitter's back catalog? You probably
• 59:09
  wouldn't, because it's so crap. But I'm not even sure I overheard Gary Glitter's back.
• 59:13
  Oh, okay. He was a kind of a glam rock star at the 17th. I wouldn't know as long.
• 59:18
  You then, you obviously don't remember, do you want to be in my gang? No, I don't.
• 59:23
  You're sharing your gen and age here. But he later got found out for child sex tourism
• 59:31
  in Southeast Asia, and it was a big kind of, big kind of thing. Although, if you lift the rock
• 59:36
  on rock stars and see the, the centerpiece crawling out and the slugs under there, that you wouldn't,
• 59:42
  there wouldn't be many people you could listen to in good conscience. No, no, not at all. Or even,
• 59:48
  you know, listen to the lyrics of the Rolling Stone singing brown sugar. I mean, why has that
• 59:53
  never been cancelled? It's about, it's about slave rape in early America. Or the Beatles,
• 59:59
  she was just 17. You know what I mean? Yeah, precisely. And so all of these things,
• 1:00:06
  I mean, it kind of depends on what gets beat up and what comes to popular attention
• 1:00:13
  that kind of does this cancelling. So, I mean, would I worry about it too much? I mean,
• 1:00:18
  to be honest, in my daily life, it doesn't really come up a whole lot. And you don't find that
• 1:00:23
  your students are in this ideology? A lot of the students I speak to these days are,
• 1:00:31
  but a lot of them are also a lot smarter than that and have a broad of view on what's going on
• 1:00:38
  in terms of politically as well. And I think that there's also a shift. I mean, you talked before
• 1:00:43
  about kind of, you know, different pronouns and sexual identity. I mean, in many ways,
• 1:00:49
  you've just got a group of younger people now who have a broader perspective on what sexuality
• 1:00:54
  is and what it can be that certainly wasn't around when I was, when I was young. And even
• 1:01:00
  until more recently, speak to someone 30 now and they'll still tell you that no one would come out
• 1:01:06
  as gay in high school because they were afraid of being bullied. But, you know, 10 years later,
• 1:01:11
  that's not the case at all. That seems to be a good thing people can express themselves. And
• 1:01:16
  if people, you know, some people don't like it, they might want to look at themselves and to say,
• 1:01:21
  why are you so worried about, you know, other peoples and genitals? Why are you so worried about what
• 1:01:26
  they do in bed? Why are you so worried about, about, you know, what they called themselves? It's
• 1:01:32
  kind of none of your business. Well, I mean, it sounds to me like you exist in a very desirable
• 1:01:38
  position, which is a position called the real world. And many of us don't. Many of us live in
• 1:01:44
  social media spheres where the debate is not between people who want sexual or gender liberation
• 1:01:53
  and those who are deeply concerned about what they do in the privacy of their own bedrooms.
• 1:01:58
  The debate is between people who would like to be able to have as capacious as possible a concept
• 1:02:04
  of the public conversation and raise devil's advocate positions about whether or not gender is
• 1:02:11
  related to biology, for example, without being hounded as bigots on social media. So I think it's
• 1:02:20
  less about why can't we all just get along with each other's groovy, genders and sexualities.
• 1:02:27
  And the way that the culture war, I think, is cleaving is it's more about, are we even loud to
• 1:02:34
  question this new orthodoxy that has somehow been handed down by the woke about these sort of hot
• 1:02:39
  button issues without being pilloried and regarded as being bigots. Sure, but, you know, if I'm
• 1:02:48
  some kind of, you know, white middle class guy living in Woronga, living my life and, you know,
• 1:02:56
  going to the RSL for a Schneidery every now and then, never ever meeting anybody who is not clearly
• 1:03:04
  identifying as being a man or a woman, why should I have an opinion about this?
• 1:03:09
  Well, maybe you, I don't know, maybe your children are being taught in public schools that there's
• 1:03:15
  no difference between men and women and that biological sex is a fiction. Yeah, okay, then it could
• 1:03:20
  be in terms of, in terms of children, but I don't think people are being taught that in schools.
• 1:03:27
  Not in New South Wales, yes. No, but, but, and I think when these kind of issues do come up in
• 1:03:34
  schools, it's presented in terms of, you know, different ways that different people see things and
• 1:03:41
  different ways that people can behave. And is it better to accept this difference in sexualities
• 1:03:50
  or do you want, you know, repressed teenagers committing suicide? Because they can't express
• 1:03:53
  themselves. So, I mean, this idea that schools are suddenly going to push, you know, educated
• 1:04:00
  school teachers are going to be pushing some singular ideology on, on, on students and they're
• 1:04:07
  just going to swallow it whole. I haven't find this with universities too. I mean, people will say,
• 1:04:12
  oh, we can't have this in universities because, you know, you'll just be indoctrinating the students.
• 1:04:16
  Man, we kind of get the students to hand their assignments in time indoctrinating them. That's
• 1:04:21
  impossible. But we can expose them to a greater variety of views so that they can form their own
• 1:04:29
  opinions. Well, that's the key. I think that's what people who are opposed to the alleged indoctrination
• 1:04:34
  are bothered by. The idea that there might not be a wide range of views, that there might be
• 1:04:39
  young people who are only being exposed to a worldview that has some basic tenets that are
• 1:04:45
  required to be unquestioned. Tenets such as the Western world is founded on a foundation of
• 1:04:51
  racism, that we are irredeemably racist, that there are sort of fundamental differences between
• 1:04:58
  the races that are insurmountable and therefore that white privilege has to be front and center
• 1:05:02
  of every conversation and every policy that we think about, that, you know, gender diversity is
• 1:05:10
  crucial as a way of overcoming the wrongs of the past and that, therefore, any assertion that
• 1:05:16
  males might be biologically more inclined to be this way and women might be more inclined to be
• 1:05:21
  that way is just a pernicious lie that's fostered upon people by the white privileged elite.
• 1:05:27
  So, you know, these could be certain tenets that you grow up believing as fundamentally,
• 1:05:32
  as, you know, that the earth is round and I think people just want young people to be exposed
• 1:05:40
  to a whole range of different ideas, some of which dispute those premises.
• 1:05:44
  Yeah, but I think the people who have the single view are more the people who've grown up with the
• 1:05:52
  view that, you know, men and men, women, who've grown up with the view that there's a particular way
• 1:05:58
  that, that class doesn't matter, we all live in a great meritocracy that Australia is a, a free
• 1:06:04
  country and had nothing to do with, you know, stolen land. And I think it's those people who are having
• 1:06:10
  their certainties questioned by a broader point of view who are the ones who've got the problem
• 1:06:16
  because I don't see the singular view around white supremacy or sex or gender or whatever being
• 1:06:23
  portrayed in this way. I think there's loads of different ways we hear about this.
• 1:06:28
  We're in the past, you would have had that singular indoctrination and it would have been an indoctrination
• 1:06:33
  towards the point of view that these critics are now becoming all anxious that their
• 1:06:40
  certainties have been thrown on a bonfire and that there are things can be questioned.
• 1:06:46
  So, I think there's a kind of projection that this, this, this woke position is being pursued
• 1:06:52
  as a singular ideology that no one can contest and it's not. It's the all singular ideology
• 1:06:58
  which finally is being questioned. To my mind, that's a good thing.
• 1:07:01
  Yeah, and hopefully we'll find an equilibrium. And I mean, to some extent, you're making me much
• 1:07:06
  happier about, because you actually work with students and you're actually on at the call phase
• 1:07:11
  of reality rather than tweeting at people. I tweet too. Yeah. Follow Carl on Twitter everybody.
• 1:07:19
  But I do think that on the whole Australia is a more sane and measured place than the United
• 1:07:25
  States. And so, rather than swinging wildly between my perception of the United States at the
• 1:07:31
  moment is that people are hunkered down into their warring trenches and each side wants its
• 1:07:39
  conception of the world to be holistic, to be all encompassing and feels like to yield anything
• 1:07:46
  to the other side would be, you know, to embolden the other side and to concede defeat to all
• 1:07:52
  things that are good, you know, to the conservatives. It's like, you know, common sense and family
• 1:07:57
  values and the structure of society and the hierarchies that have served as wealth hundreds of years
• 1:08:02
  and to the other side, it's justice and fairness and equity. It is. And I think there is more polarization
• 1:08:09
  in the US, certainly through the media. I mean, I go to the US from time to time as there a few
• 1:08:13
  months ago and you don't pick it up so much when you speak to everyday people as you do when you
• 1:08:18
  watch Fox News. Sure. Which I did watch when I was over there, by the way. It was kind of scary.
• 1:08:24
  But I'll tell you a story, you know, earlier this year and about January, I received an email
• 1:08:30
  from some think tank in Florida saying, we've read your book, Work Capitalism, Carl. Would you like
• 1:08:36
  to come for an all expenses paid trip to speak at our conference? Now, my book's called Work Capitalism
• 1:08:46
  and it's about how, how work capitalism is destroying democracy. Now, they clearly got the wrong
• 1:08:51
  view, right? They clearly got the wrong view and thought that I was some kind of right winged
• 1:08:56
  job type person or neoconservative more politely. Because the person headlining this conference
• 1:09:04
  was going to be Jordan Peterson, who you may have heard of. And so they just picked up on
• 1:09:09
  the title of my book and assumed that I was there and invited me. So I looked through the nature
• 1:09:13
  of this group and looked through the nature of this conference and realized that had I attended
• 1:09:19
  and spoken my mind, I may not leave alive. You may have changed the minds though. I don't think
• 1:09:25
  I would have changed anyone's mind. And I certainly wasn't prepared to take the risk to my personal
• 1:09:30
  safety of attempting to do so on that platform. So I mean, that's just an example of how you get
• 1:09:37
  this polarization and people will just pick up on things. And even the argue with woke, it's kind of
• 1:09:41
  like you've got to be four or against it. There's no, there's no other kind of possibilities that
• 1:09:47
  like my view, which is in a sense, I kind of both, I see myself as progressive, but I'm not in
• 1:09:54
  favor of work capitalism. You've got to, it's, you know, this foreign against, I mean, so it's
• 1:09:58
  well documented social media exacerbates this or having said that I'm not always sure how much it
• 1:10:03
  does because they tell me that social media Twitter, for example, is going to send me the the tweets
• 1:10:09
  that agree with my political ideology. So I ask you, why did they send me so much nonsense about
• 1:10:15
  the bloody platinum Jubilee? Completely against my personal view. You're following the wrong people.
• 1:10:20
  I was bombarded by tweets about that. It's not just that it's not just that it sends you things that
• 1:10:26
  reinforce what you agree with, but that it sends you things that that also caricature the ideas
• 1:10:33
  that you don't agree with. I mean, anything that will get you engaged, right? So anything that
• 1:10:36
  stirs the emotions, anything that wants you to like or reshare or comment. The daily male
• 1:10:42
  articles I received certainly stirred my emotions. Yes, did you repubble completely? If you retweet
• 1:10:48
  it saying this is a load of horse shit, then that's a win for Twitter. Okay, I didn't.
• 1:10:53
  Yeah. I mean, I do recall when I was at UTS and full disclosure, I'm a visiting fellow at
• 1:11:00
  your institution as well, thanks to Professor Alan Davison, who is trying to fight what he
• 1:11:08
  regard. I mean, you know, maybe different in the business department, but there is a general
• 1:11:11
  sense that John Hight in the States has sort of launched this campaign against of which Alan
• 1:11:17
  is a part that there's too much homogeneity and the thinking of social studies departments.
• 1:11:21
  And there's too much of a chilling effect on alternative points of view, especially conservative
• 1:11:28
  ones in those fields. And when I sort of just think back to my experience at the University of
• 1:11:33
  Technology, Sydney, when I was there, I mean, I do remember that the shibbolaths were different,
• 1:11:38
  but they did exist. I actually got out of UTS and did my most of my social studies subjects
• 1:11:47
  at Sydney University, which is the old sort of Ivy League sandstone university, which teaches
• 1:11:54
  the traditional, you know, philosophy and history and that sort of stuff, because after a semester
• 1:12:00
  of doing the kind of, you know, alternative deconstructionist post-structuralist social studies
• 1:12:07
  at UTS, I found that they were, you know, we did, there was a subject called making Australia,
• 1:12:14
  which was a reconstruction of Australian history through the eyes of marginalized groups,
• 1:12:18
  Indigenous people, women and so on and migrants. Now, I didn't know my university level
• 1:12:24
  conventional Australian history yet. So you're picking a part and deconstructing
• 1:12:29
  something that you haven't even set up the foundations of. And like we'd learned 20th century
• 1:12:33
  French philosophy that's all about deconstructing the ideas of the classical philosophers.
• 1:12:38
  And I didn't know the classical philosophers yet. And like cultural relativism sort of
• 1:12:44
  seeped through everything. I remember doing a, taking a class about Asian politics. I was very
• 1:12:49
  interested at the time. This was in the early 2000s about Australia's role in the region and whether
• 1:12:54
  we could straddle sort of Western civilization and Asian cultures. And my tutor, my lecturer,
• 1:13:01
  made the case that Tiananmen Square looked like a bad thing from our perspective because we are
• 1:13:05
  raised with certain biases towards human rights. But if you, if you understand things from a
• 1:13:11
  Chinese confusion perspective, the Tiananmen Square becomes a lot more understandable and just
• 1:13:16
  ifiable. And I remember saying in class, I'm sure that would come as a great consolation to
• 1:13:23
  the people as they were being stem rolled by tanks, you know, the recognition that actually their
• 1:13:27
  human rights are just a construct of Western colonialists. I didn't do very well in that class,
• 1:13:32
  as you might imagine. But it does lead me to believe that there are, you know, assumptions
• 1:13:37
  that are, that are imposed on, on young people. And not everyone had the intellectual
• 1:13:43
  fortitude and bigheadedness that I did. So probably quite a lot of people swallowed it and
• 1:13:47
  emerged with cultural relativism as a worldview. It's, yeah, it is possible in that case. And I
• 1:13:54
  presume this was the heady days of the post-modern 90s. Yeah, this was the early 2000s. So it was
• 1:14:00
  just it was still there. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that, that, but the interesting thing, I mean,
• 1:14:05
  these things do pass. And I, you know, I mean, in a sense, I think, I mean, as an educator, I say,
• 1:14:10
  that's kind of bad curriculum development that you, you suffered from as much as anything else.
• 1:14:16
  And maybe some over in enthusiastic lectures, I mean, it's hard to say. And so that will happen.
• 1:14:23
  But I imagine was this completely uniform? Was there no opportunity? Was there no alternatives in
• 1:14:29
  any part of the education? And does that, no, they were, they were, they were, they were,
• 1:14:34
  all there were, were, were some lecturers who admired my audacity for pushing back some who thought
• 1:14:40
  I was completely out of line and just missing the point. And really was just a relic of, of a
• 1:14:46
  biagon era who didn't understand, you know, the correct way of thinking. Anyway, that was just my
• 1:14:51
  experience. All of the, I mean, I was doing also radio and television and film production, all of
• 1:14:55
  which was fantastic. So I don't mean to besmirch the institution. It was terrific stuff going
• 1:14:59
  on there. That was just my personal experience in those classes. Let's just wrap things up about
• 1:15:04
  work. Capitalism, Karl, there's a piece, Will Hutton, who's a columnist in the observer in the UK,
• 1:15:10
  has had a piece recently entitled, what capitalism is the new villain of the right? But it's also the
• 1:15:16
  only way forward. So this is one pushback that I'm sure you hear quite a lot. It's, you know,
• 1:15:21
  it may be the worst system apart from all the others. It's, you know, it's the only way to get
• 1:15:27
  things done in a capitalist society is for corporations to take some responsibility for their social
• 1:15:31
  impact. In a sense, you know, I kind of, I kind of get that. But I think then, I mean,
• 1:15:37
  I corporations taking responsibility are, they just realizing they don't really have any alternatives
• 1:15:41
  after decades of climate change, denialism. You know, so, you know, that it becomes so hard that
• 1:15:49
  you'd really have to argue that black is white now to say that climate change isn't a real thing.
• 1:15:53
  So they've pretty much waited until the very end. But the dangerous thing is this kind of
• 1:16:00
  pragmatism, and I know the article you're talking about, this kind of pragmatism says,
• 1:16:04
  I'm going to support you so long as you agree with me, right? I will support what you say,
• 1:16:10
  as long as you agree with me, the same problem that you're saying your lecture is had when you
• 1:16:15
  are at uni. And that then becomes a problem because as soon as you disagree, I stop supporting you.
• 1:16:20
  So we get to the ideal position is if all I want to do is have my will imposed on other people,
• 1:16:29
  I'm just a wannabe dictator. Now, I'm never going to be a dictator because I don't have a whole lot
• 1:16:33
  of power. But you'll finally find someone who does have a whole lot of power, Donald Trump, for
• 1:16:37
  example, who is quite happy to try and impose their singular will on people irrespective of what's
• 1:16:44
  going on. And I think if we believe in democracy, not just as a political system, but as a way
• 1:16:50
  of life, it is about tolerance for difference, belief in community, accepting other people from who
• 1:16:56
  they are, not about me having fixed views about about you or anyone else or whether it be about
• 1:17:03
  how you should be behaving or how you should what pronouns you should use or how you should
• 1:17:07
  identify sexually. And that I want my will imposed on you. We dangerously move towards a society
• 1:17:15
  that admires dictators. And when Elon Musk becomes king of the world, we'll find out what that's
• 1:17:22
  really like. Yes, but we'll all be living on Mars. Sorry, great. The book is work capitalism,
• 1:17:28
  how corporate morality is sabotaging democracy. Karl Rhodes, thanks so much for being here.
• 1:17:34
  And Tyler, my pleasure.