Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Should We Talk To Nazis?" with Academy Award winner Emile Sherman & Dr. Lloyd Vogelman

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"Should We Talk To Nazis?" with Academy Award winner Emile Sherman & Dr. Lloyd Vogelman · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day, humans. Welcome to The Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas.
• 0:06
  Uncomfortable conversations with me. Josh Seps, what a great episode today.
• 0:11
  The first ever two-hander with two guests at the same time.
• 0:17
  The Academy Award winning and Emmy winning producer, Emil Sherman.
• 0:23
  Emil is the mind behind such hits as the classic Australian film,
• 0:29
  rabbit proof fence, lion with Nicole Kidman and Deb Patel,
• 0:34
  power of the dog, Jane Campions film top of the lake, her television show and the
• 0:39
  King's speech with Jeffrey Rush.
• 0:42
  He has a podcast of his own with his cousin.
• 0:47
  Now his cousin is a South African who has a doctorate in psychology
• 0:53
  and spent years as a leader in the fight against apartheid before building reconciliation in South Africa.
• 1:01
  And their podcast is called Principle of Charity.
• 1:05
  It's an attempt to bring together people who have different points of view
• 1:10
  with a view to finding some way to have conversations that are free of bullshit
• 1:16
  and that extend the maximum amount of generosity towards one opponent's ideas.
• 1:20
  Does that sound a bit familiar? Does that sound a little bit like what we're trying to do on this show?
• 1:25
  This is a fascinating insight into their lives, their experiences and the big debates
• 1:33
  that really underpin the philosophy of this show and what is needed.
• 1:39
  I think at this point in time, at this sort of cultural flashpoint,
• 1:44
  I hope you enjoy as much as I did, and I'm sure you will, this conversation
• 1:48
  with Emil Sherman and Lloyd Vogelman.
• 1:51
  Whenever I'm interviewing Academy award winners of your caliber, Emil, I'd like to start talking about that and that project.
• 2:13
  How many Oscar's do you have? One Oscar. Just one.
• 2:17
  No, what's he doing? I know, what am I here? I'll ask him how many nominations he's got.
• 2:22
  How many Academy Award nominations? Well, the win and two nominations for additional.
• 2:28
  Yeah, you don't get to count the nomination. You don't get to count the nomination that ended in the win.
• 2:32
  So three nominations. Three nominations are win and then for the projects,
• 2:38
  the power of the dog was an amazing success story for us and for Jan Campion
• 2:43
  of 12 nominations, 12 for the King's speech. And you want to count all those for live personally.
• 2:48
  So 24. Well, as the producer, you sort of potentially can legitimately count everything as being.
• 2:55
  Wow, it's all about me. That's what I said. Lloyd, the Golden Globes.
• 3:00
  What about all the other? I'm helping you here. Come on. I'll ask him about the Golden Globes.
• 3:05
  The Golden Globes are a joke. What about the BAFTAs?
• 3:08
  What about the Academy and the Emmys? Have you been nominated for Emmys?
• 3:14
  We have been nominated for Emmys. Yeah.
• 3:17
  And we won also Emmy for the power of the dog for Best Actress.
• 3:23
  How do you get an Emmy and an Oscar for the same project?
• 3:26
  And I won an Emmy for the State of the Union, which is a short form drama that Nicole B. wrote.
• 3:33
  Oh, right. Best short form drama. So I'm halfway to my Egot.
• 3:38
  But wait, how do you get an Emmy for the same project that God and Oscar?
• 3:41
  Isn't it either your movie or the other one?
• 3:44
  No, it's a different one. I'm State of the Union.
• 3:46
  No, but you just said for power of the dog.
• 3:48
  Sorry. Top of the lake. Top of the lake.
• 3:50
  Different Jan Campion project.
• 3:51
  Both Jan Campion. They're the changeable.
• 3:54
  Yeah. Because I just have an image of Jane in my hair.
• 3:57
  So the King's speech is the Oscar win.
• 3:59
  Correct.
• 4:00
  And how did that project come about?
• 4:02
  It was really the start of my company, C-Saw.
• 4:05
  And it was one of the first projects that came across our desk, me and my partner Ian Canning.
• 4:09
  He's based in London. I'm here. We'd worked together on a project called Candy
• 4:13
  before an Australian project and started up this company.
• 4:16
  And someone, yeah, a producer who had come across the script.
• 4:23
  I'm Gareth Unwin, had approached me and Ian to see if we want to produce with him.
• 4:27
  We need to more experienced producers.
• 4:29
  And we joined forces.
• 4:31
  And that was the film that really changed our lives.
• 4:34
  And am I remembering something correctly or was it apocryphal
• 4:37
  that someone dropped the script physically at Jeffrey Rush's home to get him to read it?
• 4:43
  That was right.
• 4:44
  Who was that? Who did that?
• 4:46
  That was Gareth from memory.
• 4:50
  And he just sort of left it on his doorstep in Sydney.
• 4:53
  I should read this, because I'm having too much trouble going through your management.
• 4:56
  Or I don't even want to have to go through it.
• 4:58
  Well then, when we joined, I'd work with Jeffrey before on Candy.
• 5:01
  And so, you know, we had stronger connections there.
• 5:06
  But, you know, you do what you have to as a producer.
• 5:08
  You're a hustler. You're a rustler.
• 5:10
  You just got to get it together.
• 5:12
  You heard cats or the analogies.
• 5:14
  And it worked.
• 5:15
  You just got to try to make it happen.
• 5:16
  And was it surreal when...
• 5:18
  I mean, you say it was sort of your first big project.
• 5:20
  So then it becomes...
• 5:21
  Did you expect that it was going to be sort of a nice independent art house movie
• 5:25
  and then blow up beyond your wildest dreams?
• 5:27
  Or did you know that you were sitting on gold?
• 5:30
  Well, a lot of companies passed on it.
• 5:32
  At the same time, we knew it could have been good.
• 5:36
  It could have been big.
• 5:37
  But I don't think we had any idea of what big meant.
• 5:40
  Like I went from producing, you know,
• 5:43
  international theatrical art house movies like Candy,
• 5:46
  Disgrace.
• 5:48
  I was involved in Robert Proofence.
• 5:51
  To suddenly, this film that...
• 5:53
  Yeah, since then, I thought if my career was just a slow downhill from the King Street,
• 5:57
  I'll be very happy.
• 5:58
  And it hasn't been a slow downhill.
• 6:00
  Well, I haven't wanted to ask a slow uphill, should we say?
• 6:03
  So you mentioned Robert Proofence.
• 6:07
  When did Lion happen?
• 6:10
  Lion was probably about six years ago from memory?
• 6:13
  That was after the King's Speech.
• 6:15
  Yeah, that was after the King's Speech.
• 6:16
  And that was also nominated for a bunch of...
• 6:18
  Yeah, that was a, you know, that was something we were really proud to have done
• 6:22
  a film that was at the time the biggest English independent film of all time
• 6:26
  and then the biggest Australian independent film of all time.
• 6:29
  Are you counting it as both?
• 6:31
  No, Lion, King's Speech and then Lion.
• 6:33
  And we were an English Australian company.
• 6:35
  Right.
• 6:36
  So, you know, you don't get many opportunities to make a film that is based in the country that you're in
• 6:41
  if you're in Australia or even England, that really can travel and be so international
• 6:46
  about many stories that come around.
• 6:48
  There aren't that many British films and Australian films that when Oscars have that.
• 6:52
  They go all the way.
• 6:53
  They're more English stories because of England's great colonial history.
• 6:56
  So they brought their stories forcibly to the world outside,
• 7:00
  whereas Australia, you know, trying to spot the story that has the oomph
• 7:04
  to be able to carry internationally and then has the talented director and writer
• 7:09
  and cast who are going to be able to, I guess, stand on the world stage
• 7:13
  metaphorically is really hard.
• 7:16
  It's what we try to find all the time and occasionally it works.
• 7:19
  Most of the time it doesn't.
• 7:20
  Well, most of the time it doesn't for everybody.
• 7:22
  The differences with you is that sometimes it does work.
• 7:25
  Sometimes it doesn't have to work all the time.
• 7:27
  No, you know, the first line of your obituary is still going to be Academy Award winning.
• 7:32
  And the one good thing with our industry, there are a lot of structural difficult things
• 7:35
  because if something works, you then wake up the next day and find something else
• 7:39
  that you hope works.
• 7:40
  You're not like you've built an ice cream business that people just keep coming back
• 7:43
  for the same ice cream.
• 7:44
  But the ones that let's just say don't meet everyone's expectations are more quickly forgotten
• 7:51
  than the ones that exceed people's expectations.
• 7:53
  Yes, that's right.
• 7:54
  That is the forgiving thing about success, isn't it?
• 7:56
  People do notice success more than failure.
• 7:58
  It's more visible.
• 8:00
  It's more visible until you blow up, you know.
• 8:02
  In crash and burn or cancel or whatever, that's right.
• 8:06
  But largely in our industry, you slog it out, each project is a new start up.
• 8:12
  And genuinely it's a new start up business.
• 8:14
  You've got a new company, special purpose company, you've got research and development costs
• 8:18
  with the script and trying to put it all together.
• 8:21
  So you can't rest on your laurels.
• 8:23
  They say as a producer you're only as good as your next project.
• 8:27
  The door opens for a lot of financiers to our calls and our offerings.
• 8:33
  But if they don't like it, they don't do it.
• 8:36
  But at least they remember our success as more than the failures.
• 8:40
  What do you remember of Oscars of Oscar night for the Kingswitch?
• 8:45
  Well, I've been at three quite for me, quite extraordinary Oscars.
• 8:49
  The Kingswitch was notable because it was the moment that we won.
• 8:53
  It was just so surreal because it was all just so far beyond anything I'd imagined or my pun in my company
• 9:00
  and canning it imagined.
• 9:01
  And do you remember you were up against that year?
• 9:03
  What were the big films?
• 9:04
  The social network.
• 9:05
  Wow.
• 9:06
  Which was a really incredible ride because it was winning everything.
• 9:09
  It won the Golden Globes.
• 9:10
  We sort of bombed out a bit of the Globes.
• 9:12
  It won all the critics awards.
• 9:14
  And then where you won the producer guild of America award.
• 9:16
  And that was meant to be the sort of talisman of the beginning of the award.
• 9:22
  The beginning of the award ceremonies where the voters of the Oscars are the same,
• 9:29
  share some of the same voters.
• 9:31
  Right.
• 9:32
  Where you sort of, not just the peers.
• 9:34
  Yeah, not just reviewers.
• 9:35
  And winning that night was the beginning.
• 9:38
  But then we were at Lion where they read out the wrong winner.
• 9:46
  La La Land won.
• 9:47
  Oh, that was that one.
• 9:48
  That was that one until the results.
• 9:50
  I remember that.
• 9:51
  It was in L.A. at a friend's place watching that.
• 9:53
  And we would, our jaws were on the floor as it was happening.
• 9:56
  It was beyond.
• 9:57
  And then it would just remind people La La Land was the favorite.
• 10:03
  But Moonlight, which was this indie production about a gay sort of an unrequited gay relationship
• 10:12
  between two black Americans, was the surprise winner.
• 10:16
  But there was some mix up where the wrong envelopes were there.
• 10:19
  And someone read out La La Land.
• 10:23
  And the La La Land people sort of came up.
• 10:25
  And then Jim and I had to come out and say, sorry, there's actually been a mix up.
• 10:29
  It's actually Moonlight.
• 10:30
  What were you thinking?
• 10:32
  It was, you know, our draw dropped like everyone around the world.
• 10:36
  But, you know, we sort of, you just don't know what to think.
• 10:39
  And then the same or, you know, different but similar thing happened with the power of the dog with a slap.
• 10:46
  Right.
• 10:47
  And we were there.
• 10:48
  You were there.
• 10:49
  The game going is, that was particularly strange because I think there was a big difference between being there physically
• 10:54
  and what you saw broadcast around the world.
• 10:57
  It felt like, you know, thankfully I don't live in a world where, and most people don't hopefully in Australia,
• 11:04
  where you come across physical violence that often you don't see people whacked in the head.
• 11:10
  And we knew it just felt like there was violence in the room and something really terrible would happen.
• 11:16
  But we couldn't quite work out what exactly had happened and what it meant.
• 11:20
  But the whole room just turned very sour and very dark for the rest of the evening.
• 11:24
  And, you know, it wasn't a great night for us with the power of the dog.
• 11:28
  Jan Campion won Best Director, which was extraordinary.
• 11:31
  But we were the favourites until close to the evening.
• 11:35
  But for the poor Coda winners who won amidst this, you know, really horrible attack, it was disappointing.
• 11:43
  And did you know as it was happening that it wasn't a bit, a comedy bit?
• 11:47
  No, we didn't know.
• 11:48
  We didn't know.
• 11:49
  Except, you know, just there was a smell that something didn't feel right.
• 11:54
  You couldn't put it into a box.
• 11:56
  Because it looked like a punch.
• 11:58
  And just to clarify where you are at this point.
• 12:00
  So you must be sitting quite close to the front because the power of the dog is pretty much the favourite to win.
• 12:06
  And so you're presumably about to, you've got your speech written.
• 12:09
  You're ready to get up there and receive your second Academy Award.
• 12:13
  And when Will Smith gets up there, what's your perspective on it?
• 12:19
  What are you able to see?
• 12:21
  Well, it looked like he sort of bolted up to stage and it looked like he punched Chris Rock.
• 12:27
  But then Chris didn't really respond as you would to a punch.
• 12:30
  And so we thought it might be a bit, but then it clearly wasn't a bit.
• 12:34
  And then the sort of yelling that happened afterwards, the aggression.
• 12:39
  We couldn't work out what was going on.
• 12:41
  I think the same as everyone.
• 12:42
  But it felt like something disturbing had happened.
• 12:48
  Well, obviously, James the whole night because then you didn't win.
• 12:51
  Imagine that.
• 12:52
  Imagine if he had himself.
• 12:53
  If he behaved himself, you'd be sitting here as a two-time Academy Award winner instead of just once.
• 12:59
  And then so just take us back to before I leave the Oscars that first night when you're there.
• 13:04
  And it's your first time at the Oscars when the King's Speech is nominated.
• 13:08
  And you've flown over from Sydney for it, I guess.
• 13:11
  I lived in with my wife and my kids.
• 13:14
  We had three young kids at the time.
• 13:17
  We moved to New York.
• 13:18
  We were shooting a film called Shame in New York at the time.
• 13:22
  And there's this thing.
• 13:23
  There's the award season.
• 13:24
  It's not a night, the Oscars.
• 13:25
  It's the culmination of about four months of ongoing awards.
• 13:30
  And the publicists involved the studios involved.
• 13:33
  It's basically a presidential campaign.
• 13:35
  Or they treat it as though it's as important as a presidential campaign.
• 13:39
  And some of the publicists representing the studios used to work in politics, you know,
• 13:44
  running presidential campaigns.
• 13:45
  So it has this energy of a ward after a ward.
• 13:49
  And a sort of media strategic powered play that leads up to that one night.
• 13:57
  And the minute the Oscars are finished, everyone goes bump gone and they disappear.
• 14:01
  And it's like see you in eight months time.
• 14:03
  And the whole show starts again.
• 14:05
  Yeah, fantastic.
• 14:06
  And do you remember the sensation of them who was reading out the Spielberg?
• 14:12
  Spielberg.
• 14:13
  Spielberg is up there.
• 14:14
  Spielberg.
• 14:15
  You're up against the so it's basically the social network versus the King's Speech at that point.
• 14:20
  Is it?
• 14:21
  And do you feel when he's opening the envelope?
• 14:24
  And the Oscar goes too.
• 14:31
  The King's Speech.
• 14:33
  The Incarning and Meal Sherman and Garrett Unwin producer.
• 14:38
  Well, it's a real because they're just so much pressure has been on the movie so much discussion,
• 14:43
  so much analysis, so many betting sites and pundits and you can't believe it's happening.
• 14:50
  And you know, within all that you were absolutely or I was terrified of getting up in front of countless
• 14:58
  thousands of people watching and having to give a speech.
• 15:04
  It's definitely one of the peak moments.
• 15:06
  If your life is defined by the peak moments, that would be right up there.
• 15:12
  And when did you write the speech?
• 15:15
  Your speech.
• 15:16
  Probably over the day or two before.
• 15:19
  Man, you don't get much of a time.
• 15:21
  As producers, thankfully our job is to not show ourselves publicly.
• 15:24
  Yeah, and you're so busy that you're probably doing a whole bunch of other things as well.
• 15:27
  But do you remember when you were writing it, whether you were thinking this is going to be amazing
• 15:31
  if it happens or if you were thinking there's no way this is going to happen?
• 15:35
  I think this, we had a pretty strong idea that we were very likely to win
• 15:40
  because you just look at the betting sites and the pundits sites and
• 15:45
  and then as a night progressed, it was clear that we were winning the things that were less certain.
• 15:50
  Right. And so there was a snowball and it was in and I would look at each other and go, holy shit,
• 15:55
  I think this is going to happen.
• 15:57
  Incredible. And what did you do after the ceremony?
• 16:00
  We, you know, we party.
• 16:02
  We went to the various parties and just had a good time.
• 16:05
  Yeah, it was, it was amazing.
• 16:07
  You're just bouncing around from vanity fear to various other parties.
• 16:11
  Exactly.
• 16:12
  Holding up the Academy Award.
• 16:13
  Very good to see.
• 16:14
  Yep.
• 16:15
  It was on this last one we were in the Jay-Z Beyonce party, which was really...
• 16:20
  To say it was the party highlight of our lives is an understatement.
• 16:25
  Really? Where was that?
• 16:27
  It was at the shutter.
• 16:28
  Of course it was.
• 16:29
  Of course it was.
• 16:30
  Yeah.
• 16:31
  I don't know how we got in.
• 16:32
  We were the only white people there pretty much.
• 16:34
  And when I say I don't know how we got in, I genuinely don't know how we got in, but we did.
• 16:38
  This was for the power of the dog.
• 16:40
  Yeah.
• 16:41
  Yeah. Right.
• 16:42
  It was an amazing party.
• 16:43
  Incredible.
• 16:44
  Lloyd, you're sitting here patiently being wowed by your cousins.
• 16:47
  Listen, I've heard some of these stories before, but I love hearing them again.
• 16:52
  And I smile every time I listen to Emil about these stories, because it is a phenomenal success that he's had with both Seasaw and his individual achievements.
• 17:02
  What was your relationship when you guys were growing up, were you close?
• 17:05
  No, because I moved to...
• 17:07
  I owned him.
• 17:09
  Emil was brought up in South Africa.
• 17:11
  I mean in Australia, I was brought up in South Africa.
• 17:13
  So our connection really is when I moved here 25 years ago.
• 17:17
  And you were a clinical psychologist originally?
• 17:19
  Originally.
• 17:20
  Originally spent probably 15 years in, I'd say, divided up between political activism and human rights.
• 17:29
  Qualified as a clinical psychologist, spent 15 years in political activism human rights, and then moved into business probably in my 30s.
• 17:39
  So I got into business quite late.
• 17:41
  Now there's sometimes a perception in Australia that South Africans who came here 25 years ago were sort of comfortable with the previous regime, or were comfortable with a partite.
• 17:49
  And one of the reasons why they left was because all of a sudden things were going in a direction that didn't want to.
• 17:54
  That wasn't the case for you.
• 17:55
  No, because I spent...
• 17:58
  Well I got into politics relatively early in my 20s, was president of the student union, and then was on the executive of what was then the United Democratic Front,
• 18:09
  which was probably one of the primary organisations to oppose a partite, very much part of the ANC in the broader sense, which was Mandela's party.
• 18:19
  That got banned in 85, I was in hiding, I had my own issues, tough times during the states of emergency.
• 18:34
  And then later on I set up the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, which was prior to the abolition of a partite, and that carried on until I left that sort of a year after South Africa became a democratic country.
• 18:51
  And you said you had your own issues, what were those?
• 18:55
  Well it's funny, I experienced like many people who opposed to a partite, but actively so.
• 19:06
  I experienced the repression of South Africa, not in the extreme way that other people did, because many people lost their lives, many people were tortured, many people went to jail for 20, 30 years, like Mandela did and many others.
• 19:19
  But being sort of at the centre of and leading some organisations inevitably experienced the repression that came with a highly repressive police state.
• 19:30
  I mean the point about a partite I think that people forget is that it wasn't just a racist state, it was a very repressive state that put many people in jail, killed many people outside of all the other abuses that it had.
• 19:46
  And for probably four or five years, for at least three of those years it was a state of emergency, legally you weren't allowed to meet with more than two people, legally.
• 19:59
  It was illegal to have a party of three meetings.
• 20:03
  It was a tough time, I had my own experiences and that led me to setting up the centre for reconciliation after I left activism.
• 20:15
  I found that in my activism I started to find myself unfortunately and I didn't know it at the time, but sort of almost revealing part of the oppressor.
• 20:28
  I became hard-line, I was tough, dogmatic, very judgmental and I think that's what war does and I think South Africa was at war certainly for 10 or 15 years, it was a civil war in some form.
• 20:45
  And before that period, while you were still active under a partite, what was it that you saw or that you had that was different from the way that most white South Africans responded to that regime?
• 20:59
  I've thought about that a lot. I was brought up in a very small conservative of Recon's town.
• 21:09
  It was a mining town and the Assyron would go off at nine o'clock every single night and that was a curfew for black people to be inside.
• 21:20
  I would see, it was a mining town, I would see 18 or 19 year old miners beat up 35, 40 year old black men and the black men could not really resist.
• 21:33
  If they resisted, that was more of a greater consequence for them because they'd be arrested, they'd get a jail, they might be tortured.
• 21:40
  So when you see those images in very stark explicit forms as a six or seven year old, I think it removes all forms of subtlety.
• 21:53
  This either feels right or it feels wrong and my parents were liberal and so I was always anchored on it, it's probably wrong and it just felt more and more wrong.
• 22:04
  So as a young kid, I just knew that it wasn't right. I knew that I had to do something. I didn't know what to do until I probably got to university.
• 22:15
  But the funny thing about the way that humans respond to so many of those situations of overarching systemic injustice is that we can observe that they're wrong and nonetheless sort of think, well, I mean, it is the way things are.
• 22:28
  Yes.
• 22:29
  I mean, it is the way things go.
• 22:30
  I mean, there are all kinds of things that we do now that I wonder whether people in the future will judge them harshly from factory farming to the casual way.
• 22:39
  We treat the impending climate chaos or whatever it might be. And I am as guilty as anybody going, you know, I know what we're doing is probably wrong, but this is the system that we live in and what am I going to do as just one individual.
• 22:52
  And that's the way that the majority of Whites South Africans responded to that scenario. So there's some missing jigsaw piece.
• 22:58
  I think sometimes you get a bit of.
• 23:02
  When you fight injustice, there's also a little bit of moral luck involved. The moral luck came to me was.
• 23:10
  I was offered the opportunity to stand for the student representative council. I did very well. I became president of that.
• 23:18
  And that sort of just took me into anti-aparitate politics, but I think it also depends on, you know, there's so many influences that shape whether we act on things or not. One of those is familial, right? Our family culture. My father was a military hero.
• 23:31
  And so there was always the sense in my family and that story that you had to do something about injustice. You couldn't just talk about it.
• 23:38
  That was a military hero from from what from the second world war in the second world war. So he had won the military cross. He was part of a special battalion that parabat battalion that flew behind the lines.
• 23:49
  And so in the European theater or in the European theater. Yeah. So Italy, Greece, he was honored by the Greek government.
• 23:57
  So, you know, he was a real war hero. And so that was probably the script I had was that you had to fight. You couldn't accept.
• 24:07
  And I suppose with that dimension plus the theater that I was in, which was this moral injustice, there was probably an inevitability that I was going to act.
• 24:18
  I then did act and and part of my actions over a period of time I just grew uncomfortable with myself. I mean, I didn't it's it's hard to be fair when you fighting a regime that has spies security police because you become more dogmatic, you become less democratic because you contrast anybody.
• 24:38
  You become more fearful. And so I think over time there were pots of me by my late 20s that I didn't like about myself. I mean, I wouldn't have been able to say that then, but I think that's probably true now.
• 24:50
  And so you embark on this journey towards I guess embracing reconciliation rather than manning the barricades and fighting the bad guys. And in fact, when the famous truth and reconciliation commission is established, you become a commissioner on that. Is that right?
• 25:05
  No, I was nominated, but I declined. Why is that? I was by then I had seen I'd set up the Center for Reconciliation. We had a massive trauma clinic. We were dealing with victims and survivors of rape abuse death squads.
• 25:22
  I was working a lot of death row dealing with ANC Caders who had been sentenced to death. I I had extreme post dramatic stress probably I reckon five or six years into that work. And I was the director and still raising money and spending a lot of time internationally.
• 25:41
  So I think I was I was a mess. My wife would have say, listen, you need some help yourself. And I would say, I don't as as many post dramatic stress people do. I was sorted myself. I just became more bantery, more aggressive, more macho, more machismo in dealing with just the tragedy and the abuse.
• 26:01
  And I think by the time I was seven or eight years in I remember seeing a victim, a woman who came to see me and she had found her daughter raped and shot in the head during a sort of an uprising in a particular area.
• 26:21
  And I remember sitting there and thinking, I've got no compassion left. I'm just angry on your behalf, but I couldn't be compassionate to her. And it was at that point that I knew I had to get out. I had to leave human rights. I was done. I was just too angry all the time. Angry on her behalf, angry to do something, but I realized I had lost my compassion.
• 26:42
  Angers are very powerful force. It's very energizing. It does lots of good things in the world. But I think so is compassion. And I'd I'd really lost my compassion itself. How did you figure out what to do?
• 26:56
  I don't know how I figured out. I just somehow again, random luck, a colleague of mine who had also been in politics had gone into business. He said, why don't you come join us in our firm? I did. And that's that was really my entry.
• 27:14
  I've been in business really ever since. And so explain what you do now in your consultancy. We have a boutique consultancy. It's sort of as two parts. One is sort of consulting. We do a lot of work on helping companies grow their revenue line more strategically.
• 27:32
  So what they should do, how they find different customers, what they what their value proposition is to their customers, meaning why should their customers choose them. And then the other part of our business is is a lot of sort of quite executive training.
• 27:45
  So training of executives in different sets of skills. We are boutique. We global. We probably had more success than I would have anticipated, but it's been a successful ride.
• 27:58
  What did you know about this side of the family in South Africa when you were growing up? Were they ever talked about?
• 28:05
  Lloyd's related to my father, Brian, and a lot of my relatives were really through my mother's side. So it was something special that had Lloyd and his family knew my dad's family from these really tiny towns in South Africa.
• 28:20
  I mean, my father's from a town called Brackpan, which I always understood was, what was I mean, Brackish water? I mean, these are not like, you know, not great nights, not great advertising.
• 28:31
  I came from a town called Stolfentane. Stolfentane. Stolfentane. I mean, so we're not talking area, and it's not Cape Town.
• 28:37
  No, no, that's really typical Cape Town. We went back.
• 28:40
  But no, it's really only been, you know, in the last 10, 15 years that Lloyd and I have become close. And it's just a great, in a sense, he was my father who passed away recently and he's really a younger brother to my father and Lloyd's like an older brother to me and Lloyd's son.
• 28:58
  John, there's a bit like a younger brother to me. So we've got this really great into half-generational relationship, which I haven't really had with anyone else.
• 29:08
  So what was going on in culture that you guys were seeing that made you think about the possibility of teaming up for a podcast?
• 29:14
  Well, you know, we just enjoy each other's company. We talk endlessly and toss ideas around. I think we're both really curious people and about two and a half years ago now, maybe three years ago.
• 29:26
  We just thought, let's start a podcast together and just do something fun, find a way to, I guess, channel whatever we have to say and whatever voice had been left on the table in our respective jobs.
• 29:37
  And you both had so much spare time because you were making Academy Award winning productions and you were coaching global companies.
• 29:44
  But, you know, we both been hugely influenced by Jonathan Height, who's a psychologist, and had written a book called The Righteous Mind, which was so beautifully sets out the moral sensibilities that are almost like our taste buds, moral taste buds,
• 30:05
  that opened our worldview to the fact that so much of what we understand as being moral has really been controlled by a certain Western philosophical understanding and morality about, you know, the sort of human rights, the sort of deontology of Kant and utilitarianism, things that are based on equality and kindness.
• 30:29
  But there's a whole world of other moral sensibilities around loyalty and purity and hierarchy that essentially what Height says is that the right wing, which I've, Lloyd and I've always very much identified on the left side, they bring those moral sensibilities into their politics a lot more.
• 30:49
  And if you understand morality in a broader sense, you understand why people are so drawn to different sort of moral, you know, ideologies.
• 31:01
  And I opened up our mind and I think we talked about just the necessity to understand other points of view, to understand the best version of other points of view.
• 31:12
  And I thought, let's start a podcast, which actually Tim mentioned came up with a name, principle of charity, so he gets the credit for that.
• 31:20
  But very much the idea was something that Lloyd and I came to ourselves, which is let's get two people, two expert guests with different views on key social issues.
• 31:31
  And as part of the podcast, get them to articulate the most generous version of the other viewpoint.
• 31:36
  So to come into an understanding of social issues through two different viewpoints, which we know with our sort of biases and blinkers on that are just part of human nature, just so hard to unknow what you know and to know and to sort of step outside of oneself.
• 31:55
  To do it is just to have two different viewpoints actually present.
• 31:58
  And then to frame it in this way, which says generosity, curiosity, seeking the truth, not winning the fight, not having a debate around which views better.
• 32:09
  But actually trying to understand the best view of version of the other and then see where that takes us, because maybe new things come out, maybe you harden your own opinion.
• 32:19
  But unless you come to a discussion in good faith, there is no chance that the truth can emerge.
• 32:28
  Yeah, I mean it's Josh I think, you know, in part I was I'm a recovering extremist because you know I was in the hard edge of it.
• 32:38
  So polarization was something that I've really lived in the extreme sense of.
• 32:46
  But to a mill's point, understanding the other is hard work and I think we underestimate it.
• 32:54
  It's like when people say you have to be empathic. I mean it's that's really hard to say to really say to somebody else who you disagree with.
• 33:03
  Let me explain the strongest points of your argument and tell me if I've got it right is the starting point for the principle of charity.
• 33:11
  It goes against instinct, the principle of charity, it does rely on quite a lot of what I often refer to as intellectual and emotional horsepower.
• 33:22
  You really have to work at it and I think working at it is the opposite force to instinct.
• 33:30
  It's more rational, it's more cognitive, but you have to put a lot more effort into it.
• 33:37
  And that's the starting point for the principle of charity. We do often say you allow to disagree, you can in fact dislike somebody, but try and dislike them after you understand what they've got to say first.
• 33:49
  Yeah, by the way, while we're on Jonathan Hyte, people should check out the episode of his on this podcast as well, which I've just looked up, which is from the 21st of April 2022.
• 34:01
  He's one of the world's most influential living psychologists, he's a moral psychologist at NYU and he's an amazing person to listen to.
• 34:10
  And it's, I mean, when I first heard about this show and it was Tim mentioned who put us in touch with me and who said, you know, you should check out this podcast, it was amazing.
• 34:19
  It was amazing. I thought you had ripped off one of my ideas in the sense that, I mean, I'm joking because you wouldn't have known about it, but I had pitched a television show, which had the same concept really get people to get when I was in the States.
• 34:31
  I pitched this show where you get people and it was originally going to be just me with another person, but they had to play the role of, they had to flip and play the role of the opposite point of view that they had.
• 34:43
  And we would spar together in two different versions with each of us sort of role playing. And there's something, it's what's amazing to me is, as you say, Lloyd, how hard it is, but also how bad people are at it, even when they're trying.
• 35:00
  I remember, I think this came out of a conversation I was having with a progressive friend, and this was during the George W. Bush administration, that's how far back this is going.
• 35:11
  And she was talking about torture at Guantanamo Bay and the evil in her eyes of people like Dick Cheney who were ushering in this new era of American tyranny.
• 35:24
  And I said to her, well, what do you think Cheney thinks? And she was like, it's obvious what Cheney thinks. He thinks these people are animals and that they don't have any rights.
• 35:38
  And I was like, well, do you think Cheney would say it that way?
• 35:42
  Yeah, that's right.
• 35:43
  Cheney wouldn't say it that way. What would Cheney say? And she was like, I guess he'd say that, you know, they, we don't have to respect human rights because we're America, and we don't care about human rights. And I was like, again, that's not what Cheney would say.
• 36:00
  And I sort of went off on this big rant, which I won't bother re-articulating, but it was something along the lines of what Cheney would say is,
• 36:09
  there are times to play nice and there are times to not play nice. And 9-11 has shown us the perils of what happens when you play too nice and you push your foot around. And the world is a fucking serious place.
• 36:22
  So get with the program or don't. This is not a moment in which we're going to abide by the minutiae of little rules that were written by diplomats and bureaucrats in the United Nations.
• 36:33
  Human lives are on the line. If anyone in the world had the power to make their people safe using any means necessary, then they would.
• 36:42
  We are fortunate enough to live in the country that does have that power because we are the superpower. And I'm sorry if it offends your sensibilities that we're going to do everything we need to do in order to protect ourselves.
• 36:52
  But this is an uncompromising fight. And it's a fight you brought to us that we didn't start. So we're going to do everything we can to defend ourselves.
• 36:58
  That's what Cheney would say. And she sat there sort of looking at me like blankly a god and was like, I hadn't really thought of that.
• 37:07
  Obviously it's hard to think that way. But if you're ever going to take on Cheney on terms that he's going to understand, it's no point to come at him with a caricature or a cartoon, a cardboard cutout.
• 37:18
  Yeah, I mean, you can't, you know, I think the rules around persuasion are pretty clear.
• 37:24
  The first rule if you're going to even get a chance at persuading anybody is not to try and persuade them.
• 37:31
  The first rule is to try and make sure that they feel understood so that they're giving you some space to be persuaded.
• 37:38
  If they don't give you space, you pretty much are going to lose that battle if you see it as a battle.
• 37:47
  So I think in the principle of charity, our focus is very much on how to disagree. And our first basis, do you understand what the strongest arguments are of the other side?
• 38:01
  And can you replay those arguments to the point where the person says, thank you, Josh.
• 38:08
  I wouldn't have put it that way, but I would have put it that way and that is exactly how I would put it.
• 38:14
  Something to that effect where they're going, thank you, Josh. Once they go, thank you, Josh, you understand me.
• 38:19
  You, you in the game of persuasion. If they don't, you're just lecturing.
• 38:24
  Have you had conversations where it's been a brick wall?
• 38:28
  You know, when people get together, they tend to, I think it's a, it's about creating a space and an energy.
• 38:37
  I'm trying to say that in the least sort of airy, very, very possible.
• 38:41
  You're dangling crystals right now.
• 38:43
  When people talk, you're not really trading bits of information.
• 38:47
  You're coming to a conversation with an intent.
• 38:50
  And we try to create a space where generosity and curiosity and respect is the fabric of the conversation.
• 39:00
  It's sort of the air one breeze in that conversation.
• 39:02
  And so I think when people choose to come in to the podcast, they're coming with that intent.
• 39:08
  We've had a lot of guests who really strongly disagree with each other and who maybe come out,
• 39:13
  disagreeing as much as before, if not more.
• 39:17
  And I think as I've gone through this journey of doing really a lot of the topics come from subject matter that I've become obsessed with myself and think about a lot and try to work out what's the answer.
• 39:29
  You know, one of the first ones is pornography inherently demeaning to women.
• 39:33
  Is it moral tape meat? We looked at identity politics recently. Cultural appropriations are really big one in my industry.
• 39:39
  You know, is that problematic or not?
• 39:42
  And I've realized that obviously, you know, this is going to sound very, very obvious to listen.
• 39:48
  But there is no answer.
• 39:50
  The answer is to understand the issues from as many sides as possible.
• 39:55
  Well, I'm not sure that that will sound obvious to many listeners.
• 39:57
  I think a lot of listeners will think there is an answer.
• 40:00
  Cultural appropriation is wrong.
• 40:02
  You know, white people have been doing this for so long.
• 40:06
  Or another person will say, you know, there is an answer.
• 40:10
  People are getting hysteric, getting their tits in a tangle about something that they shouldn't.
• 40:14
  I think there are cases where people are motivated by really bad will.
• 40:19
  There are evil people out there.
• 40:21
  There are cases where people have misunderstood the data.
• 40:24
  But there are often cases where people just have different values and they bring different values to an issue.
• 40:30
  And so understanding the issue from multiple perspectives, for me is the greatest act of,
• 40:40
  that's the sort of moral core in a sense.
• 40:42
  That would be the moral instinct that I'd add to Jonathan Heights' five tastes,
• 40:46
  which is the instinct, the moral instinct to understand the other.
• 40:50
  And so, sure, that comes out in ways of we want to, you know, human rights and, you know,
• 40:58
  uplifting marginalized people.
• 41:00
  But at the core, it's reaching outside oneself and saying, what is it like to be you?
• 41:06
  And my world, the creative world of creating film and television and writers and directors,
• 41:11
  is about exploring what it's like to be outside oneself, to make that leap outside oneself.
• 41:18
  And to bring that sensibility and intention to a conversation to go,
• 41:24
  I have a viewpoint. We all know, I mean, it's really psychology 101,
• 41:28
  to know that our views are going to be so blinked by so many things.
• 41:32
  Even the most self-humble person epistemically,
• 41:37
  and that's something we promote on the podcast.
• 41:39
  Another question we ask is, what's the weakest version of your own argument?
• 41:42
  But there's a limit to how much we can understand and analyze ourselves.
• 41:47
  You need to be with another person, with a different viewpoint.
• 41:51
  You need to be in relief from oneself in order to start seeing the world from different viewpoints.
• 41:59
  At that point, your view may change. It may not change.
• 42:04
  But I think it's a lot less important where one lands than the ability to incorporate other viewpoints
• 42:12
  and to see the issue holistically.
• 42:15
  I think things will land where they land afterwards, but that's for me 90% of the work of a civil society
• 42:21
  is being able to be in conversation with each other and truly listening good faith
• 42:25
  and try to understand what everyone's saying.
• 42:28
  Sorry, Jean-Pierre Lloyd.
• 42:30
  Josh, for me, part of our project in the principle of charity,
• 42:35
  I come from a perspective of wanting to contribute to a democratic society.
• 42:42
  I don't feel complacent about democracy at all.
• 42:45
  I only voted for the first time in my life in my 30s,
• 42:50
  partly because I chose not to vote.
• 42:53
  Can I do that here in Australia?
• 42:56
  That's right.
• 42:58
  Grab your sausage and we'll find you if you don't vote.
• 43:01
  But democracy is pretty precious.
• 43:03
  And yet, when we in it, we go, the other side is just terrible.
• 43:08
  And yet, democracy is based on having other sides.
• 43:12
  That is what it is about.
• 43:14
  It is having more than one party.
• 43:16
  It is having different parties.
• 43:18
  And when we go, that other party is disgusting and they shouldn't exist.
• 43:21
  And I'm, you know, inverted commas.
• 43:24
  Then we are starting to really set the scene for potentially leaders to come along
• 43:32
  and galvanize us to break that apart.
• 43:35
  Well, it's also just not healthy not to have a good opposition as well.
• 43:38
  I copped a lot of flak after the last federal election in Australia
• 43:42
  for mentioning on this show that we shouldn't be gloating too much
• 43:46
  about the catastrophic loss that the Liberal Party faced here in Australia
• 43:51
  because they lost all of their moderates.
• 43:53
  And so now they were a rump of their former selves led by much more conservative people.
• 43:59
  And, you know, I was just saying, just be careful what you wish for if you're on the left.
• 44:04
  You actually probably do want a sane and, you know, strong opposition party
• 44:10
  to both keep yourself in check and so that when they do eventually get into power
• 44:14
  there'll be, you know, a reasonable people.
• 44:17
  You don't necessarily want to vanquish and demolish and raise the villages of your opponents.
• 44:23
  Where does that leave you? It brings out the worst in you and probably them.
• 44:27
  I think you're so right.
• 44:28
  I mean, desperate people do desperate things, right?
• 44:31
  I mean, we've even seen that in Russia and Ukraine at the moment.
• 44:34
  The desperation of Putin may lead to even worse things, right?
• 44:37
  I mean, that's...
• 44:38
  But I would say part of what we do need to protect
• 44:42
  and is the institutions that allow us to have good disagreement.
• 44:46
  I mean, is parliament working?
• 44:48
  Is the media working in a way that allows fair debate?
• 44:52
  Are we getting both sides? Do people feel represented?
• 44:55
  Without that, I think we lose the ability or mechanism
• 45:00
  to even have the principle of charity.
• 45:02
  We need the mechanisms to allow us to disagree
• 45:05
  because our instinct sometimes is to hate.
• 45:08
  So one rejoinder to this, to what you're saying,
• 45:11
  and a rejoinder to my podcast and to my outlook on life,
• 45:14
  follows a similar kind of theme to the Dick Cheney one that I was just articulating.
• 45:19
  But it can come just as much from the left as from the right,
• 45:22
  which is that this is all a very nice, a feat language game
• 45:26
  for centrists to pedal to make themselves feel good
• 45:29
  about not being an extremist.
• 45:32
  But sometimes, desperate times call for desperate measures
• 45:35
  and we have a world that if you're on the left,
• 45:38
  you might say, is being deranged by figures like Donald Trump
• 45:41
  and the far right in Europe and climate chaos.
• 45:45
  And if you're on the right, you might say,
• 45:47
  by political correctness and cancel culture and wokeness
• 45:51
  and transgender fads or whatever the target...
• 45:55
  De jour, might be.
• 45:57
  And that it's all very well for you guys to fiddle while Rome burns.
• 46:01
  But at the end of the day, what if the conciliatory conversation
• 46:04
  that you're trying to have is between a Nazi?
• 46:06
  And so, how much understanding do Nazis deserve?
• 46:10
  Yeah, it's easy to misunderstand the principle of charity
• 46:14
  and think it's about just trying to bring a state of consensus
• 46:19
  or pretend that we all agree with each other or not take action.
• 46:22
  It's really just about a first step of how do we engage
• 46:26
  with the other and understand multiple points of view
• 46:29
  before we decide what to do.
• 46:31
  But aren't there some points of view not worth understanding?
• 46:33
  I think every point of view is worth understanding.
• 46:36
  But a lot of points of view, you don't want to countenance,
• 46:39
  you don't want to accept, you don't want to permit the society
• 46:42
  to act on, you know, according to that point of view,
• 46:46
  you know, action and the moments to take action, activism.
• 46:51
  We have a lot of activists on the podcast.
• 46:53
  And we particularly, respectful of the advocates and activists
• 46:56
  who come on who have to, on the one hand, get up every day
• 47:01
  and rally their tribe and their troop and push through their agenda,
• 47:05
  their just agenda, at the same time,
• 47:08
  to know whether your agenda's just sort of as an a priori step,
• 47:13
  you need to know what all the arguments are around
• 47:16
  because you might be putting your energy in the wrong direction.
• 47:18
  You might be fighting against the group who you don't truly understand.
• 47:22
  And, you know, even if it's just to try to destroy the opposition,
• 47:26
  understanding it from their point of view is very helpful.
• 47:29
  But if you, but there are times where you might be wrong
• 47:32
  and if you don't understand someone else's point of view,
• 47:34
  you might miss out on ways to improve your position.
• 47:37
  And then there's just the basic fact of we are living in a society
• 47:42
  and we want to live in a society with diversity, diversity of backgrounds,
• 47:47
  points of view, upbringing, everything.
• 47:50
  And in order to do that, we need the structures and the norms
• 47:54
  around how to disagree productively.
• 47:56
  And so this sits as a baseline and it's,
• 47:59
  it goes even to a very baseline philosophical idea
• 48:03
  that when you say something, Josh,
• 48:06
  you could easily not be saying it in a way that's 100% clear.
• 48:11
  You know, I trained as a lawyer.
• 48:12
  Well, male, I'm always 100% clear as you know.
• 48:14
  You're not.
• 48:15
  Particularly male.
• 48:16
  But look, lawyers spend their entire day extending contracts
• 48:21
  to ensure that it's full proof that there's no way
• 48:24
  that a misinterpretation can happen.
• 48:26
  But conversations are not like that.
• 48:28
  Emails are not like that.
• 48:29
  Tweets are not like that.
• 48:30
  How do we interpret what the other person's saying
• 48:34
  without them having to create put caveats and dog points
• 48:39
  to every single line of their statement?
• 48:43
  And the only way to do it is to have another side
• 48:46
  who is doing their best to understand
• 48:50
  the most charitable version of what they say.
• 48:53
  Yeah, right.
• 48:54
  So you need that as sort of a basic theory of knowledge.
• 48:58
  Otherwise, we're just going to miscommunicate the dog.
• 49:01
  I call it throat clearing, you know,
• 49:03
  the amount of time that you need to spend at the moment.
• 49:06
  Clearing your throat before you say something.
• 49:08
  And if you were going to say something about, you know,
• 49:10
  let's just say high indigenous rates of crime in Australia.
• 49:13
  You'd have to spend the first 45 seconds saying,
• 49:16
  obviously, I'm a white person in Australia,
• 49:18
  so I don't have the lived experience of indigenous Australians.
• 49:21
  It's very inefficient.
• 49:22
  Like, can we just take it as a given that I don't...
• 49:24
  There's a lot of charities about efficiency and about it.
• 49:27
  But I think...
• 49:28
  But Emile, I think, you know,
• 49:30
  Josh has a point in Emile and I think we may disagree slightly,
• 49:36
  but that's good.
• 49:38
  We often do.
• 49:40
  But we had an episode podcast with Tim mentioned
• 49:43
  where we spoke about when does the principle of charity not apply?
• 49:48
  And I think it doesn't apply at times when you are in context or situations
• 49:53
  that are not democratic or not charitable
• 49:56
  or where disagreement will cost your life.
• 49:59
  And you need the principle of charity to be within a situation
• 50:05
  where disagreement is permissible.
• 50:08
  But there are times when seeking the truth is dangerous.
• 50:12
  It will cost your life.
• 50:13
  And there are times when you do have to act
• 50:16
  and sometimes you have to act instinctively without trying to understand
• 50:20
  because that is your only way of surviving.
• 50:22
  What about environments where the stakes are less than that
• 50:25
  but the interlocutor is acting in bad faith?
• 50:28
  Do you need both people to be acting in good faith?
• 50:31
  Because I encounter this all the time where people say,
• 50:33
  why don't you just have someone on the show for a different perspective
• 50:37
  on whether or not COVID vaccines are safe, for example?
• 50:40
  Well, I think it's...
• 50:41
  And I have to just do a different approach.
• 50:43
  I know that they are coming in with a preconceived barrel that they want to push
• 50:47
  and that there's...
• 50:48
  I know enough about them to know that there's...
• 50:50
  It's not going to be a good faith conversation.
• 50:52
  So I sort of don't want to get swamped by their bullshit
• 50:55
  and I'm not sure whether that's the right decision or not.
• 50:57
  Yeah.
• 50:58
  And I think for us, I would be sometimes asking that individual
• 51:02
  what their weakest arguments are, not their strongest arguments.
• 51:06
  I think if somebody is coming in from bad faith
• 51:08
  and somebody else is coming in from good faith,
• 51:11
  I still think the good faith person represents a role model.
• 51:15
  I still think that experience of seeing somebody trying to be charitable,
• 51:21
  trying to be understanding is still a contribution to society.
• 51:25
  Culture is made up of what we see.
• 51:29
  It's invisible, but we're observing it all the time.
• 51:34
  And so I think that good faith person is doing a good job,
• 51:37
  even in their smallest way.
• 51:39
  Yes, I will.
• 51:41
  Yeah, we do try to get guests who come in good faith.
• 51:44
  I think you're absolutely right.
• 51:46
  It can become an unproductive conversation if the two guests don't meet
• 51:50
  with that sort of energy.
• 51:52
  But I think as Lloyd's saying,
• 51:54
  you're talking to people in real life outside the podcast world, Josh.
• 51:59
  I'll never do such a thing.
• 52:01
  When one's not performing, it becomes, you know, you are what you do.
• 52:08
  And if you come to every conversation in good faith,
• 52:11
  I think there's a modeling factor and there's hopefully some sense
• 52:15
  that that energy gets, gets, gets spread around.
• 52:18
  And they're very few circumstances where it's the wrong decision
• 52:23
  to come to a conversation in bad faith to meet someone else's bad faith.
• 52:27
  At the very first instance, you just don't really,
• 52:31
  you won't give them the benefit of the doubt.
• 52:34
  I think, you know, there are times where one needs to put aside charitable thinking
• 52:39
  and just go to war and galvanize people against an enemy.
• 52:42
  But we, too many people are thinking that moment arrives too quickly.
• 52:47
  Right.
• 52:48
  You know, it's very easy to kid ourselves into thinking that this is the moment
• 52:52
  because I've thought about it all and actually the enemy's too great.
• 52:56
  And now we need to put aside charitable thinking and we need to fight.
• 53:01
  Everyone can create that condition for themselves,
• 53:04
  for their own, you know, justice movement at any moment.
• 53:08
  And so I think structurally it's about doubting oneself
• 53:12
  and using these sort of tools of thinking and of acting,
• 53:18
  which say really unless someone's got a gun to your head,
• 53:23
  go through the process of trying to understand the other person in good faith.
• 53:27
  Look at what your weakest arguments are.
• 53:29
  Bring humility to the conversation.
• 53:32
  Just do that first because if you don't,
• 53:35
  there's no chance that you're going to catch your biases.
• 53:38
  Yeah, exactly.
• 53:39
  I think it was spiral.
• 53:40
  It's important to understand that, of course,
• 53:42
  your body wants to always think that you're the good guy who's fighting the important fight.
• 53:46
  Like this is hardwired in a room from millions of years of evolution.
• 53:50
  So it is counterintuitive to do what you're talking about.
• 53:53
  So you can't rely on your own instinct to guide you on whether or not
• 53:57
  you should be fighting or conciliating because conciliation is naturally anathema
• 54:02
  and fighting is fun, basically.
• 54:04
  I mean, this and the fact that our tendency to think that we're always
• 54:08
  at the barricades and that this is always the moment to drop our any attempt
• 54:13
  at comedy and to pick up arms is precisely why the Nazi analogy
• 54:18
  keeps getting trotted out by everyone anytime.
• 54:21
  You know, Trump voters are Nazis, you know, people who don't know anything about climate change
• 54:25
  and Nazis because that was the one instance in history
• 54:29
  where it was absolutely black and white for pretty much all of us.
• 54:34
  They're the one group of people for whom you can say,
• 54:37
  yeah, just shoot them in the head.
• 54:39
  Like I don't care.
• 54:40
  But you just want to understand the Nazis.
• 54:43
  I'm not in 2022.
• 54:45
  I mean, now we know enough.
• 54:46
  I know I saw what happened to me.
• 54:47
  You were going to influence them at the time.
• 54:49
  I wouldn't care about influencing them.
• 54:50
  I just want to be sure.
• 54:51
  But you were sure that they'd be a point to...
• 54:53
  No, there's a point that I'm saying.
• 54:54
  You can't influence anybody.
• 54:56
  Absolutely.
• 54:57
  The first point, whatever you want to do, is to understand them.
• 55:01
  And I loved your point.
• 55:03
  That sense is that it could help you.
• 55:05
  Josh, you know, I think your point about instinct is really powerful.
• 55:10
  If you listen to people, they'll often say,
• 55:12
  follow your instinct.
• 55:14
  Do what feels good.
• 55:15
  And in fact, that's just wrong.
• 55:18
  If we followed our instinct, we would be in a mess.
• 55:21
  I mean, civilization does not exist if we follow our instinct.
• 55:25
  Civilization in part exists because we're curbing our instincts.
• 55:29
  All we have to curb our instincts.
• 55:31
  We have to curb some of our private thoughts
• 55:34
  and not make them public because it would be not only dangerous for us,
• 55:39
  but it's dangerous for other people.
• 55:40
  It can be very hurtful.
• 55:42
  And the principle of charity is really emphasizing curbing your instinct.
• 55:47
  That he's saying, you know, just consider the other more carefully.
• 55:52
  I think fear is a real driver of hatred.
• 55:59
  It's a real driver of wanting to be right.
• 56:02
  And most of the time, if you reflect on your life and what you thought 10 years ago,
• 56:06
  you'd go, I was wrong.
• 56:08
  I was wrong about X.
• 56:10
  When I was a kid, I thought X now it's Y.
• 56:13
  When I was 20, I thought X now it's Y.
• 56:16
  And if that's your history, you have to know probably what you're saying now is probably going to be wrong.
• 56:21
  I do like the point that one of you alluded to earlier also,
• 56:25
  which is that you don't extend the principle of charity to the other person
• 56:29
  in order to be nice to them, although it may have that effect.
• 56:34
  But to make your own position more robust,
• 56:38
  I mean, it amazes me in the modern cultural climate that so many people think
• 56:43
  that they're going to have a better understanding of why they believe,
• 56:46
  what they believe by de-platforming other speakers or boycotting events
• 56:52
  where people they disagree with speaking.
• 56:55
  Because what's the old line about like if you don't understand your opponent's position,
• 57:00
  then you don't really understand your own.
• 57:02
  In order to truly understand why it is and to strengthen why you believe what you believe
• 57:07
  and to make it more compelling to other people,
• 57:10
  you've got to hear the best arguments of the other side.
• 57:13
  Otherwise, you're just whistling Dixie in your own chamber.
• 57:16
  Yeah, I think you can't really be said to have a solid opinion
• 57:22
  unless you understand all the arguments against it and the best versions of those arguments.
• 57:27
  I don't think you've got an instinct then to Lloyd's point.
• 57:30
  You have an ideology, but you don't actually,
• 57:33
  you're not able to lay claim to a proper thought through opinion.
• 57:37
  What do you make of arguments about bigotry?
• 57:40
  But the de-platforming though.
• 57:42
  I think there is, sorry, the second thing I'd say is,
• 57:46
  I still think it's too transactional to think of the principle of charity being useful
• 57:50
  to help you understand others so that you can be better at influencing them.
• 57:56
  I think one should, you need to come to the principle of charity,
• 58:00
  thinking you may be wrong yourself.
• 58:02
  You have to come with some epistemic humility,
• 58:05
  and so you may be wrong.
• 58:07
  Why do you have to?
• 58:08
  Because it strikes me that that's a harder sell to get people to engage in this process.
• 58:12
  Then if you say this is for your benefit, you say that little.
• 58:14
  No, sure, sure, it's probably a harder sell.
• 58:16
  But I'm saying that is the essence of it is to recognize that we may actually be wrong to Lloyd's point.
• 58:24
  I know that I've changed my mind through my life.
• 58:27
  You just look at the history of ideas.
• 58:29
  They change all the time.
• 58:30
  We all know we're influenced by the culture, by our tribes, by the groups we're in.
• 58:34
  By definition, we're going to be wrong.
• 58:36
  It's just obvious.
• 58:37
  We're going to be wrong to a degree.
• 58:39
  So you just have to come into a conversation like that.
• 58:42
  I would just say that even if there is an area in which I'm 99.99% confident that I'm correct,
• 58:48
  I think it's still worth actually arguing with a person who disagrees.
• 58:53
  Even if it's something like, you know, I don't think that Jews are a scourge on the world
• 58:59
  who are causing all of the world's problems.
• 59:01
  I still think it would be worthwhile to talk to somebody who does think that,
• 59:05
  because they'd be very easy to knock down.
• 59:08
  Well, they wouldn't be easy from their perspective.
• 59:11
  They won't get knocked down.
• 59:13
  No, but for the bystander, they will.
• 59:15
  For you in arguing with them, you'll think you've knocked them down.
• 59:18
  But they'll walk away from that argument thinking, wow, I really showed Josh up.
• 59:24
  Yeah, they might.
• 59:25
  Certainly if they're acting in bad faith and they don't have good reasons for believing what they believe,
• 59:29
  which I suppose in that example, they don't.
• 59:31
  But a lot of it is performative.
• 59:33
  Isn't that a minute we're doing this for the benefit of bystanders?
• 59:37
  Well, I think that's the, that's the, that's the effect on other people.
• 59:43
  But I think one does need to come into the conversation in good faith,
• 59:46
  because otherwise the whole thing becomes a performance.
• 59:48
  But do I need to come in suspecting that it might be true that Jews are the scourge of all the world's problems?
• 59:53
  I think, look, we need to be reasonable here and go, if there are good faith beliefs,
• 59:59
  and there are beliefs that are just clearly motivated by bad faith and by evil.
• 1:00:03
  And again, it's very easy to think, it's very easy to overestimate the value and the sort of moral underpinning of one's own belief and write other people off.
• 1:00:14
  So I think it's just creating that moment of doubt to go hold on a second before I decide that they're motivated by bad faith.
• 1:00:22
  I'm going to understand the best version of their belief, even if it's that Jews are, you know, the source of all evil in the world.
• 1:00:29
  But I just want to come back to your point on de-platforming, because I do think the progress of left have identified a weakness in the principle of charity and in public discourse,
• 1:00:42
  which is that power is involved.
• 1:00:44
  And there are power relationships which make certain ideas more prominent and make marginalized ideas, or ideas from marginalized groups, have less access to the microphone.
• 1:00:59
  And so part of the idea of de-platforming, as we know, is to ensure that the people with the microphone, the people with the power, don't just stay in power the whole time.
• 1:01:09
  And I think in my view, we need to take that seriously. I think if you're balancing the value of that belief with the incredible structural necessity of being able to have good conversations with multiple viewpoints in a democracy,
• 1:01:28
  I think it payles in comparison to the value of having conversations and not de-platforming, but I wouldn't dismiss the, I wouldn't dismiss de-platforming out of hand. I think they're onto something.
• 1:01:42
  It's just, I think the cure is worse than the poison.
• 1:01:47
  Just coming to your point about arguing with somebody who believes that Jews are the scourge of the world, I think when you go into that argument with that person, you need to be clear what your intention is.
• 1:02:00
  So is your intention to show that they're wrong? Is your intention to persuade? Is your intention potentially to feel that you morally righteous, morally superior in having that?
• 1:02:12
  I think knowing what you want to achieve out of that argument matters. And there are people, all of us change our views. I think getting somebody to believe that the Jews are not the scourge of the world when they believe that they are.
• 1:02:25
  That's going to be a hard task. It's like getting people out of the Glucleic's clan or de-radicalizing a militant of an extremist. That's hard work. You're not going to do that through one conversation.
• 1:02:36
  But I think knowing your intention matters because sometimes if your intention is to show them up, I would say, don't do it.
• 1:02:43
  They're just going to get more extreme in their views, probably, after that. I think really knowing your intention.
• 1:02:49
  For me, the principle of charity is all about, as we say in the show, seeking the truth, not winning the fight. For that, it's a scientific concept.
• 1:02:58
  In the sense that I remember my doctoral supervisor, if I had a hypothesis, she would always go, so Lloyd, what's the alternative hypothesis?
• 1:03:07
  Before you go prove your hypothesis, tell me what the opposite view is and then disprove that. Now that's hard work. And the genius of science, the genius of science, is that the great scientists are always trying to almost disprove themselves.
• 1:03:23
  They're interested in data. They're not scared about a 20-year project and putting 20 years of their career on the line and then the data demonstrates that their hypothesis is wrong.
• 1:03:33
  That is remarkably courageous. You have to almost have no ego. And I think in my experience of great scientists, that's what they illustrate.
• 1:03:42
  They illustrate not only a intellectual horsepower, but they demonstrate a lack of ego. That's what makes them the great scientists.
• 1:03:52
  If they only have intellectual horsepower, it gets to be a mess.
• 1:03:55
  And you were inspired by Philip Fettlock's research on super forecasters as well. Can you, it sounds like this is a good moment to articulate what that is?
• 1:04:05
  Well, well, his work is interesting because when he looked at people forecasting a range of things, whether it was the oil price in five years time or which political party would be in or what the price of copper would be.
• 1:04:19
  Most of the forecasters, the super forecasters, got it wrong. But the people who got it right the most, he certainly, as my understanding of his work, was he identified one portray and they were some of the least confident people about their perspectives.
• 1:04:39
  And because of that, because they were not that confident, they did more work. They were more curious about the other side. They were more curious about the alternative perspective.
• 1:04:50
  They just were less complacent to emails where they were more humble in their approach to the problem. And just doing that increased their percentage chance of getting the forecasters right.
• 1:05:00
  But the reality is most of our forecasters are wrong. I mean, nobody would have forecast Donald Trump winning. Nobody could have forecast covered.
• 1:05:09
  Deloitte, this is where the media system, the system of incentives, the economic system of incentives, the grant systems at university work against principle of charity.
• 1:05:19
  Because the people who generally are asked, as economists, what they think of the future, the people are going to be the most confident. Not the people who say, I don't know. And the people who actually the scientists who get grants, I like have to succeed. They have to prove their theory. Otherwise, they're probably not going to, I mean, I'm glad you make that point because I think this is a problem of conversation, not a prediction.
• 1:05:40
  Because people have this conception now that Donald Trump, that nobody predicted Donald Trump and that nobody predicted covered. No.
• 1:05:48
  The media conversation before the Donald Trump election and the media conversation in times of non-pandemic don't prepare us for these things.
• 1:05:56
  The actual pollsters, really like Nate Silver, who's probably America's best best pollster, he had it at a 70 to 80% chance that Hillary was going to win with a lot of caveats and variables if you read his final piece.
• 1:06:13
  And he was not surprised, like this was not a, you know, it sound 20 to 30% sounds like not a big chance, but, you know, you're right, if you've got a three, you know, it's a flip of the coin, it's a little less than the people don't understand probability do that.
• 1:06:27
  Right. So it's, it's, it's, it's, but as for as for a pandemic, I mean, people who understand pandemics have been screaming from the rooftops that this is just around the corner for, you know, the past 30 years.
• 1:06:37
  So there's something about the way that we communicate with each other and the way that we communicate risk.
• 1:06:42
  I think I just found probability and come to you, Lloyd, just that it is an incredibly complicated thing for humans to understand what probability means.
• 1:06:51
  How do you internalize Trump has a 30% chance of winning? Are you wrong if you say that and, and he wins?
• 1:07:00
  It means that if you replay this thousands of times, 30% of the time he would win.
• 1:07:07
  Right. Exactly. So you're just in one of those universes.
• 1:07:10
  So you're in one of those universes and, you know, when you look at the weather report and it says, you know, 10% chance of, of rain and it rains, you can be angry at them.
• 1:07:18
  But the only way to know if they're wrong is to look at it a thousands of times and see how they consistently saying it's 10% chance and that 10% hasn't ever happened.
• 1:07:27
  We in a world where we don't know what the future is going to bring. But having to Lloyd's point as sort of humility allows you to be able to get closer to, you know, the prediction power.
• 1:07:41
  Yeah. And this is one of the difficult things also about, you know, you go to a scientific conference.
• 1:07:48
  Every scientist who's really good is going to couch their research in so many caveats and say, well, we don't, you know, we're still not sure about this.
• 1:07:56
  And it's the surest sign of a quack or a charlatan when they come out of the gate with a level of certainty.
• 1:08:01
  Yeah. So it's interesting why we need to hear definitive views.
• 1:08:09
  And I think part of that is because the baseline, the foundation for anxiety, one of the foundations is the lack of control.
• 1:08:20
  So when we don't feel in control, we get more anxious. The other is often anxieties about a negative forecast.
• 1:08:27
  But we need certainty, which is why religion is so powerful, because it gives you a sense of certainty, astrology is so powerful, stockpickers are powerful, economists are powerful.
• 1:08:37
  And we had Ras Roberts on our show, an economist. And I asked him the question, I said, economists are getting forecasts wrong consistently.
• 1:08:50
  Why are they still respected? When does your discipline go back and go and say, and when does an economist go, you know, for the last 15 years, these were the forecasts I made and I've got 95% wrong.
• 1:09:03
  And why is this person still got credibility and rest, why are you still making forecasts? And he goes, nobody would phone me up if I didn't make a forecast and I wasn't definitive.
• 1:09:13
  I said, I'm not sure, the media just wouldn't carry my story. And, you know, we import, we import to blame. We love certainty. And I think to your point, Josh, the great scientists are always, and to Meals Point about probability, they always catching it is, this is my best view at the moment.
• 1:09:32
  I'm listening to a great audiobook by Helen Lewis, the British journalist who, for some people, might remember from her famous interview with Jordan Peterson. And she's at the Atlantic. And she's, it's funny you say that because just this morning I was sitting to her interview Paul Krugman,
• 1:09:47
  a Nobel Prize winning economist, and they're speaking in 2019, and she's asking for his forecasts of the global economy. And he's talking about a couple of big threats and he sort of says, and I, and you know, he's talking about, you know, interest rates being too low, too low, or you know, going even lower than the negative rates that they almost were. And he says, sort of says, oh, and I'm sure there's something else that, you know, I'm not even thinking about right now that could blindside us.
• 1:10:12
  And you know, six months later, you know, along comes COVID.
• 1:10:15
  And I think you highlighted in one of your podcasts, you know, I think you were talking about the economist. I mean, this is a great magazine.
• 1:10:22
  Right. With very, you know, thorough, well thought out pieces by, you know, top journalists who've been well trained. And you look at their predictions every year, which I think you pointed out in one of your podcasts. And they go, when they look, you know, what's our prediction for 2023?
• 1:10:41
  Or 2022 or 2021 when they reflect on it in the, you know, the year later, they've got it wrong. Yeah.
• 1:10:49
  And it's very hard for us to believe that we're wrong. And if we just had that belief and we could carry the belief that we are often wrong.
• 1:10:58
  Without feeling a lack of confidence, I think we would just be more curious.
• 1:11:03
  We would apply the discipline of science to our personal life. And I think that would make a difference.
• 1:11:10
  There are professions. I'm really interested in how different professions are structured for different outcomes.
• 1:11:16
  So if you are, as always, saying an economist with doing a lot of media appearances, you're going to have to make predictions.
• 1:11:24
  That's part of the and be confident and be confident about it. Yeah.
• 1:11:28
  But often people who are in business who are maybe even fund managers or hedge fund managers.
• 1:11:35
  Yeah. These are people who are successful only if they're accurate.
• 1:11:40
  Not, I mean, sure, you to sell and to raise money, you probably have to be confident.
• 1:11:45
  But if you are constantly doubting yourself and updating your beliefs based on new evidence that coming in,
• 1:11:52
  you are going to be more successful as an investor. And, you know, Nissem Taleb's talked quite a bit about this,
• 1:11:58
  being a trader philosopher, as he is, that when you've got skin in the game and when it just moves from a place of ideas
• 1:12:08
  and ideology into the sort of trading floor, that's when you can be rewarded for humility.
• 1:12:16
  And so I think trying to find and adjust our structures in society a little bit by rewarding people for humility.
• 1:12:23
  How do we make it sexy with something that Tim mentioned was discussing with us?
• 1:12:26
  How do we make the idea of being humble and not knowing something that is applauded and respected?
• 1:12:33
  Well, we're trying, are we?
• 1:12:35
  I think super successful people who are successful sustainably, meaning over long periods of time.
• 1:12:45
  The horizon is an important thing.
• 1:12:47
  They have two things that they carry very well.
• 1:12:50
  They carry a confidence in themselves about their ability to deal with pressure, challenges, get, you know, sort things out.
• 1:12:59
  But they also have a humility which stops the hubris.
• 1:13:02
  If they carry both, they sustainably for long periods of time.
• 1:13:06
  If they carry only confidence, that success tends to be short term.
• 1:13:11
  They'll blow up.
• 1:13:12
  They'll blow up.
• 1:13:13
  I can't let your comments about de-platforming a mail go without some pushback.
• 1:13:21
  What I think is underlying, so this comes in the context of a few weeks ago,
• 1:13:28
  the latest instance in Australia was that there was a University of Melbourne event that was discussing policies of diversity and inclusion,
• 1:13:37
  specifically with regards to trans students.
• 1:13:41
  It was a very pro-trans left wing type affair.
• 1:13:46
  One of the speakers was a feminist greens parliamentarian.
• 1:13:51
  Another was Alan Davison, who's a colleague of mine, a professional fellow at the University of Technology Sydney,
• 1:13:58
  and he's the dean of social sciences there.
• 1:14:01
  And it was moderated by John Fein, who's a celebrated Australian broadcaster, only after Paul Barclay,
• 1:14:09
  another broadcaster dropped out because of the blowback that was already emerging on Twitter as it being a place for platforming hate speech
• 1:14:16
  because it was going to consider the erasure of trans lives or however.
• 1:14:22
  And there were these really prominent people, I mean, even friends of mine, Patrick Lenton,
• 1:14:26
  who is a proper blue checkmark, Twitter legit journalist, who is an editor of a major publication,
• 1:14:33
  was saying that this event should not go ahead because it's hate speech and it's bigotry.
• 1:14:38
  And there is no quote-unquote debate over the right of trans people to exist.
• 1:14:44
  But the right of trans people, you can pack a lot into this box called the right of trans people to exist.
• 1:14:51
  And there was absolutely no one on that panel or anywhere near it who didn't believe in the right of trans people to not just exist,
• 1:14:57
  but have all of the same rights as everybody else.
• 1:15:00
  The conversation was going to be around some nuanced distinctions of policy areas where they may or may not be disagreement.
• 1:15:08
  And so underlying the de-platforming thing, I don't think you can...
• 1:15:14
  I think you're being so generous to say that the people who de-platform are only concerned about the fact that they're a power dynamics
• 1:15:22
  because of course that's true.
• 1:15:25
  Peter Singer on this show said, if someone has a problem with something I say,
• 1:15:30
  then the solution is not to uninvite me, but I will give them all of the time in the world
• 1:15:36
  to challenge me with ideas, not to try... but don't try to get me fired, try to launch an argument.
• 1:15:42
  And the de-platforming strikes me actually runs counter to your underlying desire to have more dialogue
• 1:15:48
  because it's an erasure of dialogue.
• 1:15:51
  And the other thing that I would just add to that in this very long and rambling,
• 1:15:56
  is underpinning the idea of de-platforming is a sort of inflation of what hate speech is.
• 1:16:05
  And this is why I could sort of come back to the Nazi thing.
• 1:16:08
  What are the boundaries that we're going to draw around the conversations we can have?
• 1:16:13
  What are the conversations that we're going to exclude upfront?
• 1:16:16
  Because at the moment there seem to be more and more conversations that we're going to exclude upfront.
• 1:16:22
  So the CEO of the Essendon Football Club, you know, leads a church that has homophobic and anti-abortion views.
• 1:16:32
  And so he's forced to resign the day after he takes on the CEO position at Essendon.
• 1:16:38
  And a large proportion of Australians think that that is primer-facing an appropriate thing for him to have to relinquish his job
• 1:16:46
  because there is no place in public society for, quote unquote, hate speech.
• 1:16:52
  Meaning there's no place to have conversations about something I don't agree with.
• 1:16:57
  About something I don't agree with because it's hate speech.
• 1:16:59
  There's no place to have a conversation about with anyone who doesn't agree with gay marriage.
• 1:17:04
  Now I'm married to a guy, I believe in gay marriage clearly, but do I want to live in a society in which we're not having those conversations
• 1:17:12
  or he's being deeply platformed because he has this retrograde belief?
• 1:17:17
  I mean, I absolutely agree with you.
• 1:17:19
  And when people are deeply platformed, I have a very visceral response to it.
• 1:17:24
  It feels like everything that I don't want society to be.
• 1:17:30
  I think sometimes good ideas get perverted and I'm just drawing attention to the good idea.
• 1:17:36
  That's still what I don't think is on balance helpful.
• 1:17:41
  But I think it is a good idea in itself that conversations are products of power.
• 1:17:47
  That there are powerless, a basic Marxist concept, isn't it?
• 1:17:50
  That the power relationships sit underneath the superstructure under what's happening.
• 1:17:58
  And when people are who's allowed, who gets the microphone, how are conversations held, what are the norms around them?
• 1:18:05
  Even the norms of the principle of charity could be said to come out of a sort of history of power relationships.
• 1:18:11
  But it does get perverted and then it can move very quickly into, as we say, that sort of instinctive thing that I'm now going to use this idea of power as a way to essentially cut out any form of conversation that I don't agree with.
• 1:18:27
  I do want to throw a challenge to both here because the controlling of discourse that the progressive left has done recently has been successful in many ways.
• 1:18:38
  You could say it has essentially controlled the conversation.
• 1:18:42
  Obviously, there's been the shadow side to that, which is that the trumps of the world have been elected.
• 1:18:47
  And you've had more conservative governments who represent the populist opinion have been elected and they use the controlling of conversations as a weapon to galvanize their tribe.
• 1:19:00
  But do you think it's not the right thing to do, but do you think it's been a successful strategy or you think it's actually a bad strategy for them?
• 1:19:09
  Well, what's your yardstick of success? I mean, it's successful in the sense that they've been able to achieve their goals from their perspective in their environments they have because in the environments that they control, like the panel talks and the social environments and the cocktail parties or the universities where they are ascendant.
• 1:19:33
  So things that you can't say that you used to be able to say you can't question whether or not it's wise to always be saying acknowledgments of country every time you go up to a panel you can't ask whether or not.
• 1:19:47
  Does that change how people think? Does it change how people act in votes?
• 1:19:51
  The next point would just be that's an own goal because all that clustering does, I think, is then give soccer to the Trump.
• 1:19:59
  Then you've got a pressure cooker, I think, in which that erupts that has perverse consequences and you end up with the people who don't want to be playing that game, becoming more and more extreme.
• 1:20:10
  And so I don't think you'd have Trump without that.
• 1:20:14
  I'm going to be, I have two different perspectives here. One is a slight disagreement with you, Emil and the other one.
• 1:20:21
  And we've got three minutes, so this will be your last.
• 1:20:24
  When we talk about power around de-platforming, there's always an economic power, social power that people have in the conversation.
• 1:20:34
  But the mob also has power. The mob has power over the individual and some of the de-platforming is a button mobby.
• 1:20:42
  It's scary when the mob gets going. I've seen it in crowd violence, I've seen it.
• 1:20:47
  We are all available to the mob, all of us. And some of the de-platforming feels a bit mob-like and the individual has no power against the mob.
• 1:20:59
  And that's dangerous for me.
• 1:21:01
  But Josh, my challenge to you, so this is the alternative view, is what happens if that...
• 1:21:07
  And this is the argument for de-platforming. What happens if that individual, that public...
• 1:21:12
  Let's call it a politician, who is potentially de-platform.
• 1:21:17
  But in another scenario where they are making anti-gay statements, and that is mobilizing people to generate violence against gay people.
• 1:21:27
  Should that person be de-platformed?
• 1:21:30
  There's a lot riding on the word mobilizing. They public officials, they inspire people like politicians do to act.
• 1:21:50
  I still don't think... No, I mean, I think there is incitement to violence.
• 1:21:55
  So if there is an instruction or a... Well...
• 1:22:00
  The Jews are the scourge of the earth, there'll be some people who will act on that.
• 1:22:04
  Right. I'm not telling them to be violent, but they'll act on it.
• 1:22:07
  Right. And I think you should be able to say that.
• 1:22:09
  And I think you should be able to say that gay people are disgusting perverts who have what's coming to them.
• 1:22:14
  I do want to live in a world that is big enough to tolerate that largely because I think that there's going to be a certain number of people who think that anyway.
• 1:22:23
  And so the best way to take down those people is to know who they are, have them saying it out front, and to argue with them.
• 1:22:29
  I mean, it's interesting. I love what you said before, I'll read about, identify what your objective is going into the conversation.
• 1:22:35
  The only reason I've lost sight of that is because I spend all of my life having conversations performatively where the real interlocutors are not...
• 1:22:42
  I mean, the relevant participants in this conversation are none of the people in this room, right?
• 1:22:46
  They're the people who are listening to us right now.
• 1:22:48
  The offended.
• 1:22:49
  Who vastly outnumber us.
• 1:22:51
  And so I'm always doing it with an eye to what the...
• 1:22:54
  If I were talking to the anti-Semite, then I would not be trying to change that person's mind.
• 1:22:59
  I would be trying to tease apart holes in their logic in ways that people who might be on the fence or who might sort of be tempted to believe in them, but they're still open-minded, you know, would find compelling.
• 1:23:12
  So if there's a writhing mob who are about to burn down like a gay store and someone is whipping them up, then yeah, a deep platform that person.
• 1:23:23
  But if there is no imminent danger and there's no direct incitement and that person is expressing a hateful position, I would encourage taking the most capacious view of what we tolerate.
• 1:23:37
  Okay.
• 1:23:38
  I mean, well, I'll have a slightly different view on that.
• 1:23:41
  Why don't you add...
• 1:23:42
  Well, in the final 90 seconds, why don't I articulate your view?
• 1:23:45
  That the cure can be worse than the poison, even if we would want to de-platform that person.
• 1:23:51
  Structurally, if you apply that and extrapolate out to society, how we want to all deal with each other, you end up with a worse society if you take what's right in the minutiae and apply it broadly.
• 1:24:03
  Because you have to know that that could be applied back at you with a belief that someone else this is...
• 1:24:09
  Which is exactly what happened to me. I felt that I was becoming in part the behaviour of my presses in and of itself.
• 1:24:16
  But a politician going, gay people are the scourge of the world, they perverts and semi-colon, I won't say any more.
• 1:24:26
  They keep on saying that saying at once is not going to, you know, inside people to violence.
• 1:24:31
  But if enough people say it and the conditions are right, over time people will get involved in gay bashing.
• 1:24:40
  Your view might be quite different as...
• 1:24:45
  Well, I just don't know what the alternative would be, Lloyd.
• 1:24:48
  For me, the problem is, so make sure the conditions aren't right and make sure those politicians don't get into positions of power.
• 1:24:54
  But if the conditions are right for the gay bashing and those politicians are getting into power, like democratically,
• 1:24:59
  well, I'm not talking about an authoritarian regime, then we have done something terribly wrong in our ability to persuade.
• 1:25:05
  And so I don't know, so now do we become the tyrants and just cause people...
• 1:25:09
  Well, I suppose my argument would be, you know, I was just giving the alternative to the D platforming.
• 1:25:14
  But for me, this conversation brings up the most important thing we can all do.
• 1:25:21
  And that is make sure that the institutions that we have in our society are so strong that they allow for difference and for constructive, civil, respectful debate.
• 1:25:35
  And when we see that not happening, I really do believe we're all at risk.
• 1:25:40
  We can't see it because it's so slow, it's so small, but we really do have to protect that.
• 1:25:47
  The podcast is Principle of Charity. It's hosted by Dr. Lloyd Vogelman and Emil Sherman. Thanks to both of you back.
• 1:25:56
  Thank you.
• 1:25:57
  Uncomfortable Conversations is produced by Stefan Postumer. Follow me, Josh Zeps on Twitter and Instagram for all the latest.
• 1:26:09
  May your day be fruitful, your mind humble, your enemies generous, and your conversations perfectly, sparklingly, delectably, uncomfortable.