Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Ignore the News!" with Oliver Burkeman

Transcript

"Ignore the News!" with Oliver Burkeman · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Good day humans! Welcome to the safe space for dangerous conversations. This is your refuge from
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  groupthink and phony argumentation. I'm Josh Zeps. I'm a humorist and journalist, which are
• 0:14
  rapidly becoming the same thing if the antics of many self-proclaimed journals are anything to go by.
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  Each week on this show, I bring to you one of the world's most fascinating persons
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  to join us on a ramble through the brambles of one big question in the news. This is the show
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  that considers ideas that might not be polite, that might be taboo, but that are always inspiring
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  and maybe frequent, just a little uncomfortable.
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  This week on the show, we challenge the very value of news itself, at least the value of news the
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  way that we currently consume it, both on screens and also through portals, through social media
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  filters, which are tailor-made by algorithms designed by terribly wealthy 22-year-olds with skateboards
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  in Silicon Valley, and designed precisely to addict us. This is not a finger-wagging,
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  scolding conversation about how you should delete your apps off your phone. It's not that at all.
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  It's a conversation with a fascinating gentleman by the name of Oliver Birkman. He's a guardian
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  writer, he's a Brit, he's from the UK. Obviously, that's what Brit is called. It'd be fun if you were
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  Brit from Australia. I don't know how that would work. He's based in New York these days and he's
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  a regular online column on the intersection of social psychology and the news. I thought,
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  well, how perfect is that? Precisely the kind of thing I'd like to talk about on this episode of
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  the show. He has a column called This Column will change your life, which is sort of about
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  kind of pop psychology ways of making you happier and helping you to think about your interaction,
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  I suppose your mind's interaction with the world around it. That sounds a lot more wonky than
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  it actually is. It's actually quite fascinating. But I first came across his stuff in his book,
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  one of his books. It's called The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking.
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  And it's a sort of whimsical wonder through the different ways that the ancients have told us we
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  could be happy, and a way of contrasting how different their recommendations are from the way that
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  we actually live. And it shines a beautiful spotlight on just how silly we are for getting caught
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  up in our mental adventures inside our heads instead of interfacing with the world in a way that
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  is more raw, more authentic and ultimately more fulfilling. I wanted to talk to Oliver when the
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  pandemic began because I recalled an article that he had written back in May of 2019.
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  I was about to say May of last year and then I looked at my notes and I said, hang on, that's 2019,
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  that can't be last year, 2019, I have to be about three years ago. What's the year now? Is it 2022 yet?
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  Is it 2025? How old am I? I feel like someone who's just shaken me awake in bed at two in the
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  morning and said, how old are you? And I go, I'm 19! And then I go, oh no, hang on, I'm not.
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  Do I have a catch? I don't know. It's all very disorienting at the moment so I didn't even know
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  what year it was. It's 2020. I do wholeheartedly apologise July of 2020. Nonetheless, I'll
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  have erote this article a year ago now and it reads like he could have written it yesterday.
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  It's so prescient. It was actually shortlisted for an award. Oh, he's one all kinds of awards.
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  Well, I'm not going to do that whole nonsense where he goes, all of a Berkman won the Foreign Press
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  Association's Young Journalist of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize,
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  both of which are true, but which probably don't make you more likely or less likely to listen to
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  this, although maybe now that I've done that silly voice, you're marginally less likely to continue
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  listening. So how about I shut up and do we just start talking to Oliver, shall we? Does that
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  suit you? Hmm? So it's me. This is not, I got some feedback from the first episode about,
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  well, that wasn't a terribly uncomfortable conversation. You, the two of you seem to get along
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  quite well. Let me put in context what the word uncomfortable means in the title of this show.
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  It doesn't mean that I'm going to constantly have arguments with people and make them feel
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  uncomfortable for no reason. I don't like that. That's part of what this show is designed to not be.
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  The kind of cable news habit of, well, if we're going to cover this story, then let's get one
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  person who agrees with it and one person who disagrees with it and will have them shout at each other
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  on a panel. I mean, I might occasionally do that because it's sexy, but that's not going to be
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  the mo of this show. The uncomfortableness will sometimes come from me disagreeing with my guest,
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  but more often than not, it'll come from the two of us together trying to tease out something that
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  is uncomfortable for us to, to truly grasp. It about ourselves, about the world, that's uncomfortable
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  for society to face up to, and that may be uncomfortable for you to consider, given where you
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  sit politically, because it might conflict with what you think a good person ought to believe,
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  or it might conflict with what your tribe represents. That's where the discomfort comes from.
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  This particular episode is actually totally convivial, largely, because all of us so brilliantly,
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  I can't bring myself to criticize him. This is moderately focused on America this episode,
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  because that's where Oliver lives and we start out by talking about how he's doing,
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  living in Brooklyn at the moment during the pandemic. He lives in the same suburb of Brooklyn
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  of New York as I did. We talk about free speech and religion and why we sometimes hate our
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  own side more than we even hate ISIS, and how we should think about progress, whether or not we
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  should be grateful for the progress that we've made as a society, rather than scandalized by how
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  much further we have yet to go, but don't you need a certain level of being scandalized in order to
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  give you the motivation and the gumption and they get up and go to actually change things? We are
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  at a moment of such roiling turmoil as a culture, as a planet, that Oliver's insight is more
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  necessary than ever, and the big insight that he has is we might actually be consuming too much
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  news and we might actually be too aware of what's going on in the world. So the question I'm asking,
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  also I should mention this conversation was recorded. It was the first one I recorded for this
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  show and it was recorded at the end of May. So we're talking about the pandemic at a time when
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  New York was in a harsher lockdown and recent events in Australia hadn't taken place. So you'll
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  hear me talk about Australia's quarantine hotels without a hint of irony about the fact that
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  subsequently in Melbourne at least the quarantine hotel system turned out to be rather more
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  porous than one may have hoped and Australia is now scrambling to figure out what to do about the
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  daily case loads in sort of the hundreds now in Victoria. So there's a reason why I'm not mentioning
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  that is because it hadn't happened yet and there's a reason why perhaps Oliver is somewhat more
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  macabre and full on about his predicament in New York than hopefully he may be now since we're
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  sort of five or six weeks hence. The question I am asking today is should I ignore the news?
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  Follow Oliver at Oliver Berkman follow me at Josh Zepp's JOSHZ EPPPS although that's not
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  his spell my last name it's actually SZEPPS long story long long story you don't have to
• 7:38
  bother yourself with it follow the show at Uncomfy Convose which is Uncomfy with a Y Convose
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  and do go to your pod app and leave us a review and rate us I know it's terribly boring but the
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  reason we ask you to do that is because we're only two episodes in nobody knows about us yet
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  for iTunes the for the algorithm to understand that we are worth showing to people they just need
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  to be able to have activity on it doesn't even mean if it's a matter of it's a bad or nonsensical
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  review or if it's a crappy rating at least the algorithm will know that there's some activity there
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  so do that do it right now just open it on your phone while you're listening to this blah blah blah
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  please enjoy the one the only Mr Oliver Berkman
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  it's um you know I know I know it's New York City and I know it's still to some extent you know
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  the the center of everything COVID related but you would probably not be able to tell from
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  from this neighborhood apart from the fact of course that you know the stores are closed and
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  very few people on the streets but it's um that would you want a little bit yeah yes yes it doesn't
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  feel the whole zombie apocalypse vibe on the street might be a hint that there's a pandemic going on
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  yes but it does not feel like the center of an emergency it's very odd I you know time is
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  at a premium two jobs in a small child and no child care in nursery school is a challenge but
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  um a lot of the time it feels rather lovely while you know reading the news and
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  getting huge spikes of anxiety we'll talk about that I think well yeah let's talk about that
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  let's get let's dive straight into those spikes of anxiety and I think one of the more interesting
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  pieces that I've revisited through the pandemic was a piece that you wrote last year about our
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  consumption of the news and how we spend way too much time actually focusing on events that are
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  irrelevant essentially to our everyday lives and trying to be virtuous by remaining informed about
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  things that are going all over the world and that that may actually not be the healthiest way to live
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  right I mean that that was the idea I was trying to get at in this in this piece it's not like um
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  well two levels I suppose yeah it's not necessarily the healthiest way to live to spend that
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  amount of time embroiled in the sufferings of the world but it also might not be best for the
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  sufferings of the world right I think I think there's a there's a connection between what's gone
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  wrong with our politics and the degree to which people are are engaged with the news around the
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  clock I do feel as a caveat is in order when I'm when I'm talking about this piece which ran in the
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  newspaper that I work for and I'm very happy to do work for and you know it's I just the outset
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  I don't think I am saying that we should screen ourselves away from knowing about what's going on
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  in the world I think there are specific ways that we relate to the news these days especially
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  via social media they're not only that are particularly kind of problematic both for our personal
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  psychology and for what it does to civic life what are those ways so really a couple of years ago
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  I started to notice something among people I knew and various sort of high profile people and to
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  some extent myself as well it really felt like people kind of lived inside the news stream it's
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  very hard to express this thought right it was as if the news was their primary reality and the
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  world of their neighborhood or their family or their friends was somehow secondary and that where
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  they were sort of they seemed to be more and more identifying with with the news stream this was
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  you know in the UK this was a lot around Brexit and in the US it was a lot around the 2016 election
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  of Donald Trump obviously and it just seemed to drive them crazy in a kind of a in a fairly
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  serious fashion because obviously you know then at that point you are completely living in a drama
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  that actually you don't have very much control over and that is sort of unending and yeah so it
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  was that sense that that people were sort of somehow had taken up residence inside the news and
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  I think a part of what's going on there is the fact that that social media especially it makes you
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  feel that you're that you're doing something when you when you are consuming the news
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  more active than than if you were just watching it on on on TV say for example you
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  may have been given a comment on it or like it or share it right right exactly or even just
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  the infinite scroll and clicking around right I mean even that is certain kind of of engagement
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  that you don't get in other in other context it's funny it's funny you mentioned the infinite
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  scroll because I hadn't realized until I actually did a show at the moment comedy festival about
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  this subject last year that the infinite scroll was not part of the original architecture of social
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  media that when Facebook was launched you could finish Facebook you could get it it sounds so
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  ridiculous now but you could get to the end of Facebook it was a you know it was an intentional
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  sort of strategy for them to introduce something called the infinite scroll so that you would
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  just get trapped in this thing and you'd spend more more time on site TOS which is the metric that
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  you know the the gold standard by which they against which they measure everything yeah no absolutely
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  I do actually think I remember a little bit certainly some things that went went in some services
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  and sites that went infinite and previously weren't um yeah right and it gives us this impression
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  that this was all waiting for you rather than of course being constantly loaded in according to
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  your according to what you've already liked and lingered on so that so that it's sort of guaranteed
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  as far as possible to get you to stay even longer on the site and you know obviously
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  there's been like round the clock news is not a new thing that was CNN in the US in the 80s was
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  the pioneer of the idea that you could that you could consume the news all the time but you kind
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  of probably wouldn't want to because it's sort of insufficiently engaging to sort of watch those
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  reports for you know hours and hours and hours and hours and so I think it is this I think it is
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  this idea that you're that you're doing something that you have some kind of involvement in the
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  story and and also depending on your personality almost some sense of obligation to to keep up with
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  and to sort of feel bad about every bad thing that's happening that it is a sort of
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  in excuse we can get on to this but the idea that it's a sort of inexcusable expression of
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  unexamined privilege to like decide not to care about some thing that is happening somewhere
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  in the world that is that is terrible and that the people directly involved in do not have the
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  option of of not caring about I mean there's just so much there that kind of overloads us in the
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  sense that like we were never designed we did not evolve to to deal with that amount of sort of
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  of horror and and of course the attention economy functions so as to present us only with the
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  the worst stuff this is a bit more familiar material I think but you know and thereby we get
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  this kind of completely distorted picture of how things are because the stuff that is mundane
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  and boring has no has no value in that scroll so I mean it's interesting okay you're mentioned
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  of the kind of moral moral approbation that comes along with not paying constant attention to the
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  news because that's sort of half of it but it's only half of it isn't it because the when you're
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  talking about CNN in the 1980s and nobody would just sit down and watch hour after hour after
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  hour of rolling news coverage which I think is also true of for example rolling news coverage that
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  the public broadcasters in the UK or Australia might produce that has been replaced in the US at
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  least by rolling aggravated opinion and outrage on news networks so even CNN now is no longer a
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  place where you go to find out about stories around the world it's mostly a place where you go to
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  see talking heads on a panel arguing and getting angry about something that Donald Trump is doing
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  and I wonder whether that so there's no I don't think that there is a that people have a sense that
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  consuming that is a moral good but they do still have a sense that not knowing about what's going
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  on in Sudan or Yemen is a moral is a sin right I mean I think what I'd probably want to say about
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  things a really good point I think the the the thing that is so extraordinary about the social
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  platforms is just that they will tailor themselves to whatever kind of person you are and if
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  the thing that pushes your buttons is getting enraged at people with with the wrong opinions then
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  then that is what you will see and I think that is what in many ways the cable networks are now
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  sort of trying to keep up with is the Twitter outrage cycle but equally you know if you're the kind
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  of person who who consume stuff that you sort of that because you're a kind of someone who wants
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  to feel that you're being a good person it will that will find you and you can and you can feel guilty
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  about not doing anything about that I mean I think the the moral the moral side of this is it's
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  difficult right because I mean I think that any one of the kinds of stories that people think
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  we should be caring about we should be caring about if they were on their own but there is this
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  kind of overload situation you know I get as you do I'm sure you know countless emails every day
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  from a million different nonprofits campaigns whatever trying to you know wanting donations
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  wanting petitions to be signed it no longer were you know it's unimaginable with any one of
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  those organizations would ever say you know that I'm trying to think of an issue that police
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  brutality civil rights infringements or say or or air pollution they would never say like
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  this is the sixth biggest problem in America we really need you to we really need you to pay attention
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  it has to only be the biggest problem and and the problem with that is you know and so everybody
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  is motivated even very good people working for great organizations everybody is motivated in this race
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  to the extreme and to sort of making sure that if you pay attention to them you will you will just
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  get even more deluge with stuff that you feel you ought to do something about it one of the end
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  results is is that you don't do anything about anything when actually you know I mean yeah that's
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  interesting that you say that because I think the indignance is an important component of this like
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  it's it's not it's not just that the charity doesn't want to admit that they're the sixth most
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  important issue it's that they they want you to believe that if you're not angry then you're not
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  being a responsible citizen you're not paying attention like it's it was like after Trump you
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  know if you're not furious then you're not paying attention yeah well can I pay attention and think
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  that it's wrong and also love my cat yeah focus on the on the micro instead of the macro all the
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  time and so I mean I think we should bring the conversation to the pandemic here because one
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  interesting thing about your argument pre pandemic was that we're spending a lot of time
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  sort of signaling our own virtue by being all wrapped up in anger and and fury about these things
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  that are going on but they're actually quite abstract and in in in a practical real life way
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  the election of Donald Trump shouldn't be the most important thing in your personal life your
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  personal life is about family and community and going to work and what I'm doing and I'm you
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  do I have enough to eat and do I might do it surrounded by people who love me so Brexit should not
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  be the number one thing that I'm thinking about all the time and nor should the reelection of
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  Scott Morrison in Australia last year but the pandemic actually does that is there here is a new
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  story that is both the number one new story in the world and also has the potential to actually kill
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  me does that change the equation it's interesting isn't it I mean I I it clearly does in certain ways
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  because the idea that you know people were voluntarily immersing themselves in the new cycle
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  is sort of flipped the new cycle is coming to every every home whether you whether you like it or not
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  I think that you do still see this this phenomenon right of everybody competing in the attention
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  environment to say that that a particular aspect of this story is the one that that really really
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  really demands your your attention and your your anger and I you know plenty of the things that
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  have happened to quite a quite anger inducing I don't I don't think that none of this is about
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  saying that like you should be able to look at any of these issues and think well that's just fine
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  what happened to you know nursing home residents in the UK or the US for example I mean not at all
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  but I do think that there is this well first of all the same dynamic plays out I mean
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  all the everyone use everyone publishing onto every social network has the same incentives
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  as they did you also get this very strange phenomenon I hope this is an answer to your question
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  but and I don't think people quite realize that this happens you get a situation where
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  I honestly feel that a lot of us are receiving an exaggerated sense of this story even though
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  I will 100% endorse the position that it's an absolutely massive and incredibly scary and
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  serious and historically unprecedented story right because there is this pressure on every
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  news organization I think to to select the strongest line from from all the stories that they have
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  to present what they have in the most sort of them in the most eye opening terms and so you get
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  this very strange situation where like it kind of is a total catastrophe and yet it is still possible
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  I think to come away with kind of overloaded and disproportionate sense of of what it actually is
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  does that make sense I'm very wary of making it something well one of the people who thinks it's
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  nothing to worry about or just like the flu I mean certainly not it's tricky I mean it's tricky
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  because I think it also depends on when in the pandemic we're talking about because as you're talking
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  I'm just casting my mind back to February March and northern Italy imploding and the sense that I
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  had then I had two conflicting senses one was that is horrendous and we have to do everything we
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  can to ensure that that doesn't happen on the global scale where you've got hospitals that are
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  too overwhelmed to you know and are making triage decisions and leaving dying people in hallways
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  but the second thought was that is happening there and it's a very long way from here
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  and here is different so I don't have to spend or I don't have to expend all of my consciousness
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  and attention on what's happening to people in Lombadi I'm in Sydney so it's a it's a it's a
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  funny contradiction you want to heed the warning that the news is giving you but you also want to be
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  able to be detached enough from it that you can go well all right I just have to make sure that
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  I take care of myself here and I don't have to spend all my time thinking about that right right
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  and there's also this yes absolutely and there's this other paradoxical problem that you know I think
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  that there has been an element of the way the attention economy works could be characterized as
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  as fear mongering about COVID and yet as others have said I'm just repeating them like there's
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  something to be said for everyone being incredibly afraid I was one of the mongers based
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  of the right of the right behavior I was one of the I was one of the early mongers being a being
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  a bit of a data wank and an epidemiological nerd I I was early to this and I was I was one of the
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  people who was shouting from the I mean I took my kids out of daycare when people still thought
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  that was a ridiculous thing to do I was buying canned goods and people thought that was a silly
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  thing to do and strangely when we talk about those those weeks where you know Italy and Spain started
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  getting hit I started feeling tranquil and kind of placid and calm in a way that I hadn't for about
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  four or five weeks because I was no longer a crazy man who had to try to convince the world that
• 24:37
  I was insane now the whole world had come around self isolation was being introduced borders were
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  being closed we were all re-evaluating everything and so while everybody else was on this
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  ascent of feeling increasingly anxious I was on the way down because I felt like okay the trains
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  leaving the station everyone's on board the train we're going somewhere I don't know where it is
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  but at least we're going and I don't have to be standing on the platform screaming to people to
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  get on the train anymore I think that's a great point and I think that the other thing that I have
• 25:06
  sort of haven't emphasized in just looping back to the peace of mind that you mentioned is that
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  there has been throughout this several things that anyone can do like real things that you can do
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  on a daily basis to protect yourself protect your family and protect the community at large
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  even if you're not you know actually on the front lines of this it's a slightly odd thing in
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  the sense that it's a negative thing you know it's staying at home and not doing your usual
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  activities but but wearing masks and washing your hands and disinfecting the you know door handles
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  of your apartment building you know this is in contrast to that kind of strange fake agency of
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  you know clicking and scrolling to to to imagine that you're somehow impacting the world by
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  expressing your thoughts about on Twitter obviously people are doing that too it's a very
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  a very high volume but you know I think there is there is no better cure for anxiety than
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  action right I mean if there are things that you can do it is it's just it's just transformative
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  because like I don't know you know that's just it's the you take control of what you can control the
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  old sort of you know Stoic approach and and that makes the stuff that you can't control
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  less tormenting I wonder if that's part of the perniciousness of social media that it makes you
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  feel like you can control more than you actually can because you can always tweet a snarky response
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  back to someone or you can always comment on something someone is posted and you feel like you're
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  you feel like that is actually achieving something I mean I get caught in this trap all the time
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  you know I'll waste 45 minutes on Twitter arguing with people and in front of an audience
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  of just a few thousand people when if I spent that time thinking about I don't know
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  writing an op-ed column for a newspaper or something then those 45 minute periods each day
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  over a week that's enough time to write a column and I'd be able to reach out a thousand people
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  instead so just a few people on my Twitter feed it's crazy but it feels like I'm doing something
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  yeah and I mean you know it is a little bit different for for journalists and for people who
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  like have some shot at having some influence over somebody's opinion but but yes still point
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  totally taken I'm absolutely susceptible to it too this feeling that the feeling that by sort
• 27:39
  of or you know delivering a sick burn against someone who said something outrageous and bad this
• 27:46
  is another very great it is fun that isn't it Twitter activity but no you know the sense that you
• 27:52
  have somehow that you have somehow acted that day and you can okay now it now you can go and relax
• 27:57
  because no one can say you haven't justified your existence there's also another just on a side
• 28:03
  point really but I've noticed this in myself that this is this was the kind of the lowest point of my
• 28:09
  Twitter addiction which I think I have somewhat under control now but where if some news event happens
• 28:19
  for example if somebody famous dies but not somebody who was known to you personally or who's
• 28:25
  work you meant something very specific to you personally nonetheless I've noticed and I've
• 28:30
  just other people with a few thousand Twitter followers equally have reported this too right
• 28:36
  you you find yourself thinking that you've you've got to say something about it on Twitter like you've
• 28:41
  got to have an a you know like you've got a it's astonishingly pompous really the notion that like
• 28:48
  as if I were the embassy of some small nation state or something you know I've got to admit
• 28:55
  it's any a press release yeah a decree about just to talk about my condolences nobody cares about
• 29:02
  my condolences and it's you know maybe that's partly me being sort of deeply narcissistic but I
• 29:10
  think that that is you see that kind of behavior a lot it's just this idea that and it's the same
• 29:16
  thing right I mean it's a different version of the idea that like you have to do something in this realm
• 29:24
  that's so true speak speaking of being a small embassy do you remember that during the 2016 election
• 29:30
  uh Donald Trump when he would make policy announcements at his rallies he would hold up a piece of
• 29:34
  paper and he would say Donald J Trump hereby declares a total and complete shutdown of Muslim
• 29:41
  immigration to the United States and he'd read it in the third person off a piece of paper instead of
• 29:47
  just saying it as if he was saying it it's like it was you know it was like Moses had handed him a
• 29:52
  tablet and he was reading this decree is kind of emperor's decree and I remember noticing it at the
• 29:57
  time and I thought that's actually a very effective tactic it gives this kind of formality and pomp
• 30:03
  to what is really just a brain fart you know it's like that it's like those certificates you can
• 30:08
  buy for like $10 saying that you own a piece of the moon yeah or a star and a distinct galaxy is
• 30:14
  like okay whatever yeah that's right and having to a yeah that's true so right about it you know
• 30:20
  recently uh Australia's most controversial and popular broadcaster Alan Jones retired and
• 30:26
  it was the same phenomenon where all of the Twitterati had felt the need to either snark on him
• 30:33
  or kiss his ass and I was like you could just sit this out yeah I don't really care what you think
• 30:40
  about him his career it's like he's just sit it out the other thing is that those Twitter
• 30:47
  burns that are so fun they make me a bad person they make me someone who I don't like very much
• 30:53
  I was recently responding someone had said someone had had poo pooed people who call themselves
• 30:59
  doctor but they're actually PhDs in you know English literature and insist that everyone
• 31:04
  call them doctor and I responded by saying that sometimes when I'm on the air I will just have
• 31:10
  to pass over a producer if a producer has written an intro and it says doctor I don't necessarily want
• 31:15
  to mislead the listener into thinking that we're talking to a physician if we're talking about
• 31:18
  something that for example is adjacent to the health to health care work so if we're talking
• 31:24
  about the pandemic with a doctor of botany or something like that I don't want to say doctor because
• 31:28
  that could be misleading and of course then all of the PhDs come in and pile on me as if I'm
• 31:34
  you know any responsible journalist for for not respecting the credentials and one person said if
• 31:40
  if you didn't introduce me as doctor I would correct you then and there on the spot and hang up
• 31:46
  and I responded to him it usually takes more than just the first few seconds to tell whether
• 31:53
  a guest has a tiny penis now it's a pretty good burn but is that who I want to be I look back on
• 31:59
  it I'm like hang on that's not me it's like we're all in the final scene in eight mile and Eminem
• 32:06
  is trying to dunk on on the other rapper yeah yeah you know it yeah no I totally I totally
• 32:14
  empathize with that with that feeling vice if anyone ever tweets that you know they regretted
• 32:19
  what they said they just sort of like got caught up at the moment I'm just so sympathetic to that
• 32:24
  oh yes yes yes but of course people don't want to do that I didn't do that
• 32:31
  is it a problem that our conversations are taking place in public so this to hold dunking
• 32:35
  thing for example it only works because you know that there's an audience if I was having this
• 32:39
  conversation with this person one-on-one there'd be no point in being so mean I think that's
• 32:44
  absolutely right I mean I think it's worth saying that there's a there's a sort of structural
• 32:47
  disingenuousness right that that and this actually affects a lot of more traditional op-ed writing
• 32:53
  too it looks like what you're trying to do is persuade somebody who disagrees with you of the merits
• 32:59
  of your view but what you're actually doing is demonstrating to people who already agree with you
• 33:07
  that you are a bona fide member of that tribe and you are if you're a little bit more irresponsible
• 33:15
  bad on social media you may be sort of trying to marshal your troops to go and to go and attack
• 33:22
  the the other side and that actually bring I mean we I can skip ahead if you want but the other
• 33:27
  thing I was trying to get at in that in that piece we were talking about is that this is actually
• 33:31
  an interesting case where the degree to which we are in meshed in politics and politicising
• 33:37
  everything else all the time online is actually some people have argued and I tend to agree with
• 33:42
  them really bad for democracy you know it's a kind of a strange paradox that we are probably doing
• 33:48
  politics in some sense of the word more than than ever before everything is sucked into
• 33:54
  political debate into political polarization and so you know actually a lot of this kind of
• 34:02
  engagement with the issues that is so morally celebrated may actually be making it harder and
• 34:09
  harder and harder to get anything done at the level of at a political level as well there's
• 34:14
  also a huge opportunity cost in what we're not talking about when we're talking about these big
• 34:18
  things you know like that was the tragedy of Brexit I felt like and I mean it's there's certainly a
• 34:24
  parallel with Trump that my brother lives in the UK and I was in London when the Brexit vote happened
• 34:31
  and over the subsequent years I just thought like the amount of attention that is being
• 34:38
  heaped onto this one moderately arcane technocratic story when you know think of think of the number
• 34:48
  of human mind hours that could have been put into fixing climate change in the four years that
• 34:55
  have absorbed tens of millions of Britain's attention about the backstop it's just a huge waste
• 35:03
  it's a huge fucking waste it is I mean I'm torn because I think I totally agree with you and yet I
• 35:09
  think there are aspects of it that are kind of that that strike me as deeply legitimately tragic what's
• 35:16
  I think but now you're caught in this in the pickle of your own sort of contradiction aren't you
• 35:21
  well yeah no I mean I don't I mean I it's yeah I mean possibly there none of this is going to seem
• 35:30
  very significant a few years from now and I'm going to think that even the things I felt that I
• 35:34
  legitimately cared about in the mixture of Brexit were not we're not worth caring about but
• 35:41
  I mean I think you can sort of I'm I'm certainly not a perfect you know them exemplar of the
• 35:50
  of the ideal way of behaving that I'm talking about here I do think that yeah I think the
• 35:57
  the really important part that's right in what you're saying is you know firstly all the time
• 36:01
  that it took up but also the time that it takes up I mean I'm just extending the point
• 36:06
  when you're not on Twitter right because that because the problem one of the problems with
• 36:11
  social media and the attention economy more generally it seems to me is that it it determines
• 36:18
  your map of reality in ways that affect you once you're no longer looking at the app on your phone
• 36:27
  or your computer right so it will tell you you know it will create a sense in you of what your
• 36:33
  political opponents are like or how dangerous your neighborhood is or how divided your country is
• 36:40
  and that then becomes part of the real way in which you you know exist in the rest of the world
• 36:48
  psychologically and and that that is kind of so there's kind of a corrosive effect
• 36:53
  even if you're already spending an hour on Twitter in the day you know you find yourself kind of
• 36:58
  your view of the world is conditioned by one of the saddest things that lots of people have said about
• 37:04
  Brexit is that in parts of the world like the north of England where I come from
• 37:09
  my parents live where there's a lot of you know it's not 100% one way or the other there's a lot
• 37:15
  of people on both sides of that dispute you find yourself kind of it's harder to just chat to random
• 37:24
  people because you find yourself wondering if they might be on the other side and and so and you
• 37:31
  probably don't even talk about it because you're British all the same at the end of the day and
• 37:35
  you're not going to like cause a huge row in the high street but but you know it changes the way
• 37:42
  we relate to not only to our political rivals and our political opponents but to people who might
• 37:47
  or might not be our political opponents and in any case the whole point of our relationship with
• 37:52
  them is not political you know they're the nice old lady at the top of the street and the fact that
• 37:56
  she might have some there was a time when you just wouldn't have had a thought about what
• 38:01
  views she might have had about certain things that she might have had some pretty nasty views about
• 38:04
  certain things but actually maybe there's some benefit in not 100% of the time deciding whether to
• 38:15
  have a social relationship with her or not on the basis of those issues. I mean that way lies the
• 38:20
  destruction of civil society altogether that's and ultimately you know if you took it to its
• 38:25
  most extreme conclusion to civil war or or or some such I mean I think that's it's so true that
• 38:32
  the insistence on judging everybody's every opinion about everything through the prism of your
• 38:37
  own sense of moral righteousness and political allegiances and tribalism is is a is a sure fire way
• 38:45
  to bolcanize a society and turn you into a bunch of clusters of warring groups yeah the old lady I
• 38:52
  mean like I'm married to a man what do I think most old ladies in the north of England feel about
• 38:58
  that and do I want that to be a litmus test as to whether or not I can have a pleasant interaction
• 39:04
  with them and there would be a cohort of the left who would say it's in it's morally important
• 39:09
  for me to care about that that it's that you know this comes back to if you're not angry you're not
• 39:14
  paying attention. Well there might I think you know it's context dependent there are contexts in which
• 39:19
  it would be important and the most obvious one is you know if there's something up for a vote
• 39:26
  that or or a choice of leaders that is going to affect people's you know equal rights and at
• 39:32
  that point you do have to you do have to relate to those people as your political opponents and
• 39:37
  make sure that like you get enough people on your side to the polling station but it is that kind
• 39:42
  of absolute absorption of social life by politics one of the people I quoted in that piece Robert
• 39:47
  Talith a political scientist at Van der Bilt University in Nashville Tennessee who's written a
• 39:54
  book called overdoing democracy making this argument that too much politics is actually really bad
• 40:00
  for the goals of democratic politics and one of the places that book began as I understand it is
• 40:07
  that after Trump was elected there were a lot of newspaper articles about how you were going to
• 40:11
  deal with Thanksgiving in America when you went when all the family reunited for a meal and that
• 40:18
  your sort of Trump's supporting uncle of course and for people who aren't in the set Thanksgiving
• 40:24
  happens two or three weeks after the election so it's right it's right it's right right right right
• 40:29
  yes no completely and and a lot of these pieces would say well you can take this approach you could
• 40:36
  take this approach but they often concluded with you know and if it's just impossible maybe you
• 40:41
  shouldn't go to Thanksgiving this year you know maybe you have to skip out on it and his point is
• 40:47
  just like well maybe you can relate to your uncle in one of his one aspect of his being and not
• 40:55
  the aspect of his being that is Trump's supporter it even I find it a little difficult to I think
• 41:04
  it's increasingly difficult for people to get their heads around the idea that it is not to endorse
• 41:11
  that person's political opinions to relate to them in a non-political
• 41:20
  fashion because you can always push the thing to an extreme right and you know once you're talking
• 41:24
  about like members of the Ku Klux Klan that's right if it was if your uncle was it's going to be
• 41:31
  appropriate not to go to Thanksgiving yeah I mean it is tricky I think I so I guess as we
• 41:37
  grow towards like some consensus here is is it that is it that we're all a little bit precious and
• 41:43
  hysterical about how important the values that we hold are then because if your uncle was Hitler
• 41:49
  then you shouldn't go to Thanksgiving and the reason you shouldn't is because he poses a direct
• 41:57
  threat to the existence of civilization of human flourishing of I mean he's a murderer
• 42:06
  the I guess the Trump supporting uncle the case on the left would be that the Trump supporting
• 42:11
  uncle is a little bit like a Nazi in the sense that he is supporting a regime that is actively
• 42:19
  that actively seeks to be us to introduce a soft kind of authoritarianism in America and that is
• 42:25
  deeply bigoted and incompetent and has already cost many many lives from the pandemic and so on
• 42:31
  so a case could be made and what's the response to that is the response to that just well he
• 42:35
  probably has his reasons and I have to have a bit of epistemic humility in being so certain that
• 42:41
  I'm right or is it that I'm carving out politics from the domain of family but in that case then
• 42:48
  why don't you go and have Thanksgiving with Hitler too?
• 42:53
  This is such a great thought, terrible thought experiment I mean I think I have two responses one
• 42:57
  of them is that I think there is an important distinction between followers and leaders I don't think
• 43:02
  it's the only point to make here but I do think that you know I feel quite strongly that I want
• 43:10
  to be able to say that right at the bottom of people's emotional motivations for
• 43:15
  supporting a leader who I find you know I'm extremely extremely opposed to is going to be
• 43:23
  something that I can empathize with right at the bottom of the chain of motives and that you know
• 43:30
  racism is an absolutely terrible thing racism often comes from fear if you trace it all the way
• 43:35
  back down to what caused the fear originally there might be something about that fear that is just
• 43:40
  that is just a very human emotion that has taken a path in its expression and its rationalizations
• 43:48
  that it shouldn't have done this is the argument that the worst person in the world was a
• 43:53
  sort of four-year-old child just trying to figure things out and feel safe and secure once and
• 44:00
  that I think that right at the bottom of the chain of emotional reasoning of virtually any
• 44:05
  viewpoint is going to be something that is just a kind of rather pitiful kind of fear or
• 44:14
  anxiety or something else also I think that the thought experiment is kind of flawed anyway because
• 44:20
  like once we're just talking about whether we're going to hang out with someone I mean possibly
• 44:27
  there's nobody who I wouldn't want to have a conversation with if that was the only question
• 44:33
  that I was being able to ask if you're actually going to bring Hitler into it he should be like
• 44:37
  you know he should probably be killed or taken into custody or something right I mean I'm not
• 44:43
  is there anybody is there anybody in the world who if my only option was to talk with them
• 44:53
  I would prefer not to even talk with them because their views were so abhorrent I mean
• 45:01
  that seems to be based on a strange sense that I might fear I would suddenly like come to think
• 45:08
  they had a good point or something and I've got enough to figure out your sort of you're sort of
• 45:12
  you're somehow platforming them just by engaging with them Sam Harris makes an interesting point
• 45:18
  about this which is that there's a kind of an uncanny valley of of badness among people among
• 45:25
  interlocutors so like if if you were to have a conversation with Hitler or some have been laden
• 45:31
  I think people would actually give you more of a pass than if you were to have a conversation
• 45:35
  with a neo-Nazi or not even a neo-Nazi someone who basically like Donald Trump Jr
• 45:42
  right you know who I'm not implying at all is a neo-Nazi but is in some ways more toxic because
• 45:48
  he's not quite toxic enough like you could have a certain level of curiosity talking to a jihadist
• 45:54
  and there would be no assumption that you're condoning their ideas by doing so but the moment you
• 45:59
  talk to like Dave Rubin the right-wing internet interviewer all of a sudden you're you know
• 46:05
  you've been somehow golem has has touched you and you've been implicated in
• 46:10
  uh something dark yeah and I don't think that's totally irrational right because I mean because
• 46:15
  there is this sense that if somebody is right at the extreme they are a bit more of a kind of a
• 46:20
  specimen of interest rather than a uh conversation partner I mean I'm thinking about it now you know
• 46:27
  I I would not want to be I wouldn't want to go to an event that a white supremacist was speaking
• 46:33
  out because I wouldn't want to add to the numbers of the crowd I wouldn't want to spend to to
• 46:40
  provide money through tickets I wouldn't want to be uh any any part of massaging that person's ego
• 46:47
  but but like if they'd written something somewhere and they'd already written it I probably
• 46:53
  would take a look because I'm kind of curious to know how anyone could ever end up with that kind
• 47:00
  of um that kind of viewpoint and I think you could go even further at the risk of sounding sort
• 47:05
  of moralistic and pregish but like maybe we need to uh you know um know what the hell is going
• 47:14
  on inside the heads of certain people if we're ever going to stop those movements becoming
• 47:19
  bigger and more dangerous and then very quickly we're at that kind of time honoured dispute about
• 47:25
  whether seeking to explain why people are as they are is is somehow justifying uh that's really
• 47:32
  interesting I mean I do think that one of the problems that is that we're creating it through
• 47:39
  social media and through essentially social justice uh movements and uh by which I don't mean
• 47:45
  actual civil rights but the sort of thought policing and word policing that comes uh from both sides
• 47:51
  of politics but specifically from the left when it comes to social justice issues that that is
• 47:56
  impeding our ability to understand the enemy and it's it's actually doing a disservice to progressive
• 48:02
  young people for example to shelter them from uh racist or homophobic ideas because they actually
• 48:09
  don't know what they're fighting against it's quite amazing like I in a strange way when I when I talk
• 48:14
  to conservatives they seem to have a better understanding of the liberal worldview the small
• 48:19
  or liberal uh left wing worldview than the lefties do about conservatives when I I find that
• 48:26
  the left will assume that conservatives in Australia are mean and money hungry and uncaring
• 48:33
  towards the poor which may all be true but that's not how the conservatives see it
• 48:38
  they regard it as being economically responsible in favour of economic growth and prosperity which
• 48:43
  will lift everybody up you know prudent and disciplined and rewarding of the right things uh you
• 48:50
  know there's a whole world view that seems that we seem to be sheltering ourselves from this
• 48:55
  well yeah and I mean I think that's I think that's right and I think that I'm not necessarily
• 48:59
  saying anything startlingly original here but I think that there is this very evident problem that
• 49:04
  the left side of the political spectrum is involved in in in constantly radically reducing the number
• 49:12
  of the the the population of people who are um who have acceptable opinions for for the left while
• 49:21
  the right is engaged in massively widening it all the time so it's very sort of self this very
• 49:26
  self-defeating situation where I mean it's not only that people are not exposed to
• 49:33
  bigoted opinions it's that more and more and more opinions are defined as bigoted or
• 49:40
  opinions that are bigoted but not in a very very terrible way are lumped with opinions that are
• 49:47
  very very terrible and the obvious piece of this that many people have talked about is this strange
• 49:52
  drift that has happened and come out of certain Mr. McAdemia over the last few years of the
• 49:58
  concept of white supremacy to to mean not only neo-naughtsies and members of the Ku Klux Klan but also
• 50:07
  people who um you know are genuinely racist but racist in a way that maybe they'd be reachable
• 50:15
  by a political movement that was interested in coalition building maybe they could eventually
• 50:19
  have their minds changed not extremists but kind of like you know the kind of uncle thanksgiving
• 50:25
  people and then now you see it used to refer to anybody who doesn't invest all their time in
• 50:31
  challenging um um racism and even if the attitudinally they might be completely not racist at all
• 50:38
  so you get this you get this you get this situation where more and more people are grouped
• 50:43
  as the out group uh at least from the perspective of certain parts of the left and
• 50:52
  people who you might have been able to reach and change the views of uh here you calling them
• 51:00
  no better than the Ku Klux Klan and then say well screw you and there's certainly not going to
• 51:04
  vote for you at the next election so there's a kind of a a strange spiraling dynamic where
• 51:13
  where you just you just alienate more and more and more people and some of those people have like
• 51:18
  views that I consider to be obnoxious but but there's no hope for any kind of democratic politics if
• 51:25
  if some people well if certain views maybe I have to just sort of get along with people even
• 51:30
  though they have them and other people I might be able to change their minds but not if I've
• 51:33
  ought not if I've ruled them out of membership yeah I mean it may not even be that they have views
• 51:40
  that you disagree with they might just talk about their views in a different way this is
• 51:43
  or part of my other problem with I guess social media and social justice that there's there's a for
• 51:50
  example like race let's take racism or gender studies or any of these kinds of issues if you talk
• 51:57
  about trans rights or gay rights or or racism there is a discourse that comes out of um prestigious
• 52:04
  universities that coaches you in a certain way to talk about them that talks about structural
• 52:10
  systems of oppression it talks about as you say white supremacy not as as something that just
• 52:17
  neo nazis do but something that we're all complicit in through the the systems that we inhabit
• 52:24
  and that kind of language it has become synonymous with being alert to racism and being anti-racist
• 52:33
  but there are there are blue collar working class non university educated people who are not racist
• 52:38
  in any meaningful sense they don't have a that they they really want to love everybody but they don't
• 52:44
  talk about race in that way they haven't learned that language of that discourse they haven't learned
• 52:49
  that structural way of thinking about things so they'll put their foot in their mouths and all of
• 52:54
  a sudden they're condemned as being racists but what that actually just means that they haven't
• 52:58
  learned a language that we're all inhabiting and I think if you're gonna as you say exclude
• 53:03
  those people from the party then your party's just never gonna be more than irrelevant I think
• 53:08
  that's absolutely right and I mean even that would be true even if we wanted to say that learning
• 53:13
  that language was the right thing to do I mean that's a separate discussion but even if we just
• 53:18
  say for the sake of argument that like yes that is the way you should be talking about everything I
• 53:23
  mean so give them a chance you know if all you're gonna do is say well because you don't
• 53:30
  talking that way you are expelled and you see this happening like this is there are so many
• 53:35
  different ways in which this is happening if you expel enough people from your group they just
• 53:39
  form a bigger group that can that can defeat you I mean it's yes and I think that I don't think
• 53:45
  it's all a question of social media but I do think that that that one of the things that social
• 53:50
  media contributes to that is that it really it really drives for very different reasons it drives
• 53:58
  this kind of policing of small differences it makes it much more energizing to expel from the
• 54:07
  community someone who you thought was in good standing and who wasn't good standing until a few
• 54:12
  weeks ago than it does to ranted people at the far opposite side of the political spectrum and I
• 54:21
  think we all to some extent can empathize with this reaction because I mean as I said and something
• 54:25
  else I wrote like if I'm really honest I spent much more time being enraged in a sort of emotional
• 54:33
  way with certain figures on the Brexit leave campaign than I have done with like the Islamic state
• 54:42
  and I don't really think that those Brexit people are are bad but it's just you know this is the
• 54:48
  way psychology works right and even more enraging than the Brexit people is the guy who parks
• 54:53
  on illegally outside my apartment you know it's like it's like we're everything's upside down in
• 54:58
  terms of how our emotions are sort of scaled to the to the seriousness of the thing and I think that
• 55:08
  at an extreme level that then becomes this kind of this kind of orthodoxy please yeah yeah
• 55:16
  there's a it comes it comes couched in the in the excuse of like opposing hate often as well so
• 55:23
  I'm thinking about there was a famous rugby player in Australia named Israel for now who is
• 55:30
  deeply Christian and he would use his Twitter platform to tweet out things about how fornicators
• 55:35
  and homosexuals are going to hell and will be judged and rugby Australia didn't like this so they
• 55:40
  gave him a few warnings and when he refused to heed the warnings they fired him it was a huge
• 55:43
  national scandal about freedom of speech corporate rules religious freedom and so on and I was one
• 55:51
  of the few people who felt like who felt who who continues to feel uncomfortable with corporations
• 56:00
  imposing speech rules unless the speech is really an insightment to violence and truly fostering
• 56:07
  hate but but I was a very rare voice I mean especially on the left I mean everybody regarded as
• 56:13
  being self evident that his life should his life and career should be ruined because he continued
• 56:18
  to espouse you know hate in quotation marks but from his from here in his worldview it's not hate
• 56:25
  in his worldview he's trying to encourage people who have gone got lost down a bad path
• 56:30
  to redefine their way and this is something that he's deeply committed to I think his commitments
• 56:35
  are totally insane and batshit crazy like all fundamentalist religious commitments are but
• 56:41
  that's of course I'd think that because I'm from I'm looking at it from my perspective and what
• 56:46
  struck me at the time is a bit like what you're saying about the Islamic State a lot of the people
• 56:49
  who were most outraged his homophobia are the same sorts of people who when for example a conservative
• 56:54
  Imam says similar things will be quiet because the conservative Imam is an oppressed minority you
• 57:02
  know these are not people who get agitated about ISIS throwing gay people off the tops of buildings
• 57:06
  the people who get agitated about the UK and US and Australian government's trying to do something
• 57:11
  about ISIS throwing gay people off of buildings because yeah there's there's I don't know the
• 57:18
  target of your do you have any thoughts here about why why is the why are we so I think that
• 57:24
  selective yeah well that's an I mean I think the I think that specific example brings in something
• 57:31
  else which I think is also true which is sort of the the issue of like clashing clashing commitments
• 57:38
  and not wanting to inadvertently fuel one form of bigotry by condemning another form and the
• 57:48
  question of which forms all end up winning out in a reliable way on the left is very is very sort
• 57:53
  of interesting we could talk about it for ages and I'm not even sure what I think about any of that
• 57:58
  I think you can sort of even in addition to that there is just this fact of like the scale of the
• 58:04
  offense right so it's like it's like well one way of defending that that position would be that
• 58:14
  one expects more of one zone community or one expects more of a democracy than a than a country
• 58:22
  that isn't a democracy and this is you know this is something that has comes up as an argument
• 58:31
  quite a lot in the context of the of Israel Palestine right yeah as a defense against the idea
• 58:37
  that people are holding Israel to an unfairly high standard is the argument that actually
• 58:42
  democracy should be held to a yes I always say so there's a still in different like levels of this
• 58:49
  yeah I always say to my little little kudnik right wing pro-Israel friends like you can't have it
• 58:55
  both ways if Israel wants to say that they're being held to an unfair standard then Israel should
• 58:59
  Israel's sort of national motto should be something like hey we're not Yemen but if you're
• 59:04
  going to present yourself as being just like the United States or European countries or Australia
• 59:10
  and stand up on the world stage wearing a suit and tie and expect us to treat you like a member of
• 59:15
  the club then you have to do better than you're currently doing with with the Palestinians right
• 59:19
  right yes absolutely and then it's context you I mean that also makes me immediately think that
• 59:23
  someone listen to this would say well things aren't so great in the United States either and again
• 59:27
  there's something that Stephen Pinker has has written about in when he was doing all that stuff
• 59:32
  about how violence has declined that our moral standards sort of seem to rise through time faster than
• 59:41
  the reality of what's happening on the ground so we are now in a situation where where the use
• 59:50
  of torture by a sort of the government that we consider to be a reputable and legitimate government
• 59:58
  is a hundred percent abhorrent that means that when instances come to light of their amusing torture
• 1:00:07
  it is deeply deeply outraging and and and sort of horrifies us but you know obviously go back a few
• 1:00:18
  hundred years and it was the fund it was the basic method of them of sort of criminal justice so
• 1:00:24
  what's happened is that our morals have have gone all the way from torture is great to torture is
• 1:00:35
  a monstrosity and the reality has gone almost all the way from torture happens all the time to
• 1:00:42
  torture is has not been completely stamped out and so it seems like the world is as bad as
• 1:00:49
  it's ever been or might even be getting worse when actually it's a lot better than it was
• 1:00:54
  it's just not as good as we very rightly I think in that case anyway feel that it should
• 1:00:59
  and I mean it will always be thus right I mean by definition the the behavior your behavior is
• 1:01:06
  going to lag your aspirations right you're always going to have you're always going to be
• 1:01:12
  one inch ahead of your actual capacity to implement the highest standard of values for yourself
• 1:01:18
  as a culture or a society so by definition you're always going to feel like you're falling short
• 1:01:24
  right no absolutely and I mean you know it's it's a it is a I do understand why some people think
• 1:01:28
  that this argument is a sort of is a sort of backdoor excusing of the bad things you know I understand
• 1:01:35
  why people get distressed by the argument that for example you know I think as I have made this
• 1:01:46
  argument you know that and had some pushback for me like there is something to be celebrated
• 1:01:54
  about the fact that the whole of this country the United States or very large proportions anyway
• 1:02:00
  of the liberal side of this country from the Canadian border to the Mexican border and from the
• 1:02:06
  East Coast to the West will be will be deeply deeply scandalized and outraged by an instance of
• 1:02:14
  you know unjustified police violence against an African-American person there's actually so I mean
• 1:02:20
  you know this is a terrible instance when it happens but but there was a time when it happened
• 1:02:25
  all the time and people in communities like the one I lived in living wouldn't have wouldn't have
• 1:02:30
  like cared and that was surely a vastly worse time yeah so it's very different I totally then see
• 1:02:36
  why when you make that argument it looks like you're saying that we should be grateful for the
• 1:02:41
  for the you know for the situation we have when obviously these things and I've made the argument
• 1:02:46
  in reverse right anyway why shouldn't we be I don't I'm not as as empathetic as you are towards
• 1:02:51
  that that point of view I really I'm really not I don't have time for it so you know people aren't
• 1:02:55
  familiar with Stephen Pinker let me just color that in so Pinker Pinker's sort of take is we're all
• 1:03:00
  we spend a lot of time saying that the world's going to hell in a hand basket but when you actually
• 1:03:05
  look at the metrics of the things that we care about like babies not dying in childbirth and
• 1:03:09
  people not dying from preventable diseases and how much money people have and people not starving
• 1:03:14
  and so on by almost every metric and you can bring in race and social justice and gay marriage
• 1:03:19
  and things like that here the things that we claim to care about are getting much much better and
• 1:03:22
  have been for decades and so what you're articulating there Oliver is the pushback against that which
• 1:03:27
  says yeah but but but but but but but I find the but but are pretty unconvincing well I will now
• 1:03:33
  turn on a dime and make the argument because I have also written these sort of trying to push back
• 1:03:39
  against the kind of that sort of optimistic take of Pinker and others world is getting better and
• 1:03:46
  better and better and it not because I think the data is wrong it really is true and you know
• 1:03:52
  take the police brutality thing at example I think the figures are very clear on that but this is
• 1:03:57
  a you know over a long term over the long term we have every reason to believe that things are
• 1:04:02
  getting better and better and better but like why why here's the argument here's the devil's
• 1:04:09
  advocate argument why why use that metric like why say it's so great that there are only occasional
• 1:04:14
  famines uh in the developing world these days that compared to how many there used to be because
• 1:04:21
  we've all agreed that you came out of bed right but why not say um why say that it's good that
• 1:04:27
  there are only a few and why why instead of saying it's scandalous that there are any right because
• 1:04:32
  that I'm picking the example to slightly um you know make my point for me because it's famously a
• 1:04:37
  thing that there is no sort of natural reason for there ever to be the I think it's I think it's
• 1:04:44
  seems to me to be generally accepted that that that sort of true famine is a political is a result of
• 1:04:49
  yeah there's enough there's enough food to go around we could we could figure out how to eradicate
• 1:04:53
  time and so if we wanted to so why is the comparison point the past instead of the instead of where
• 1:04:58
  we could be I mean that's that that would be the argument right the argument would be like why
• 1:05:02
  why why should we be happy and content and complacent about the fact that there are so many fewer
• 1:05:08
  deaths in war today well complacent is a complacent is a different question
• 1:05:17
  right but why not outraged at the fact that there are still so many I mean I think I think my
• 1:05:23
  response to that would be because the past is an actual existing metric that is real and your
• 1:05:29
  aspiration that you just pulled out of your ass about what you want the future to look like
• 1:05:33
  isn't right you could you mean you can just spend your entire life constructing utopias and then
• 1:05:38
  railing against the fact that you're not living in one but that strikes me as a less useful
• 1:05:45
  mindset than looking at the actual concrete things that have really happened and trying to figure
• 1:05:50
  out whether or not you're on a an improving trajectory or a worse one I think it depends because
• 1:05:58
  I think that you know to a certain extent maybe not hunger but certainly feeling that things are
• 1:06:03
  wrong in the world is a is a is a motivator of possibly in some sense the only motivator of change
• 1:06:14
  and I think that gratitude though it's a very positive thing can can be used as a way of sort of
• 1:06:23
  as a reason to for people who have invested interest in not taking action on certain things to
• 1:06:27
  not take action maybe I mean I think I think you're somewhat begging the question by assuming
• 1:06:35
  that the outrage is actually going to be fruitful I mean it may be the case that you know having
• 1:06:41
  a Bill Gatesian or Stephen Pinkerian idea about the world is actually more useful in fostering
• 1:06:47
  future change by analyzing what has worked and what hasn't in the past and trying to continue
• 1:06:52
  ratcheting up those improvements rather than hunting for microaggressions about why everything is
• 1:06:58
  why everything is terrible I mean it's interesting also since you were talking about race and the
• 1:07:02
  fact that the left is scandalized by police brutality and that that's a positive thing and I
• 1:07:07
  agree it is that actually when you when you look for example at the democratic primary race in
• 1:07:12
  the states black people and I think this is true in Australia and the UK as well that ethnic
• 1:07:18
  minorities are less on board with the narrative of everything is getting worse and everything is
• 1:07:24
  terrible than the largely white kind of politically correct university elite are like democratic primary
• 1:07:31
  voters in the states were voting for Joe Biden the moderate they weren't voting for the worker
• 1:07:38
  candidates this so this comes back a little bit to this to what I was talking about earlier about
• 1:07:42
  there being a kind of educated university discourse that has now become synonymous with what is
• 1:07:46
  good on the left but the actual down home common sense people who are going about their lives
• 1:07:52
  in black American suburbs are not as are not as swept up in that as as the people who claim to speak
• 1:07:59
  on their behalf think they are yes I mean I agree and the figures the polling that I've seen all
• 1:08:06
  backs that up to a to a very great degree there were there were polls released just a little while
• 1:08:13
  ago about the different demographic groups of democrat democrats whether they were concerned
• 1:08:19
  that the fact that that that Joe Biden was a that the nominee was a white man and that's something
• 1:08:30
  that many more white democrats are concerned about than black democrats yeah I think in some ways
• 1:08:37
  I think this is misleading because I think it's probably just a particular it's a particular
• 1:08:44
  extraction of the data along demographic lines that that maybe obscures a more fundamental fact
• 1:08:52
  which is that just like most people are not caught up in these in these kind of debates that
• 1:09:01
  carry so much value on on Twitter and in these kind of these kind of forms of language policing
• 1:09:07
  and the rest of it it's like regardless of your ethnicity the chances are if you're picked
• 1:09:12
  around from a telephone directory in the United States that you do not know what's going on on Twitter
• 1:09:17
  and what people are fighting obsessively about so in other words I'm not sure about that I think if
• 1:09:23
  I think if we took your postcode for example a park slope and you you went into the phone directory
• 1:09:29
  there that more people would both be across the latest transgression of some celebrity who put their
• 1:09:37
  foot in their mouth on Twitter and subsequently got fired by the New York Times and would also have
• 1:09:43
  probably an opinion that it was right that that person did suffer consequences from having been
• 1:09:48
  racially or sexually insensitive to some minority group then if you randomly took the phone book
• 1:09:55
  from an African American suburb of Detroit or Chicago or Atlanta I think that would be true but
• 1:10:01
  I think it would also be true if you did the comparison with park slope and a random suburb
• 1:10:07
  that was that was a majority white place somewhere in right I think yeah you're making
• 1:10:13
  you correct you're making a correct point about park slope I'm not going to
• 1:10:17
  right but it's not necessarily a racialized point yeah I take that point right I think I mean
• 1:10:20
  I mean I think it may be it may be partly I do just think that like this is maybe yet another
• 1:10:24
  example of you know the fact that none of us who spend a lot of our time on Twitter can fully
• 1:10:34
  appreciate how how unrepresented that place is yeah of everybody else everybody else yeah um let's
• 1:10:41
  just let's just loop back to the news and our and what we pay attention to and social media
• 1:10:47
  because I'd like you to to give us your advice about how we should sort of focus on things I
• 1:10:52
  remember hearing Marsha guess and the Russian American journalist talk about how one defining
• 1:10:58
  feature of a of a dictatorship or a totalitarian state is that whether you love or hate the leader
• 1:11:04
  they're always in your mind they're always occupying your attention and one thing that she found
• 1:11:09
  so corrosive about Trump's presidency and you could make the same case about Brexit and you could
• 1:11:14
  potentially make the same case about um the government in Australia is that they occupy more of our
• 1:11:21
  consciousness than they ought to and that's something that Trump loves it's something that Putin loves
• 1:11:28
  something that authoritarians the world over love is that they're occupying the real estate between
• 1:11:34
  your ears and I wonder if you have any thoughts about how to how to escape that
• 1:11:42
  well I mean I think it's absolutely right to that point I mean I think that um
• 1:11:46
  um ultimately it's just a bandwidth issue right isn't it I mean our attention is a finite
• 1:11:51
  resource and uh so it comes down to your preferred way of making sure that you are applying some of
• 1:11:58
  it to something else so that there is less leftover for uh Trump to colonize and and also I think
• 1:12:07
  you know so absolutely to some extent you know very low level tactical things like trying to spend
• 1:12:15
  a day a week uh where you don't go onto social media or taking the apps off your phone which I
• 1:12:23
  certainly have done yeah did you do that yeah I only access Twitter well 99 out of a hundred times
• 1:12:30
  that I access Twitter these days it's through uh laptop computer and that means you know I'm
• 1:12:36
  much less likely to do that when I'm again it does it does also mean that I'm more likely to do
• 1:12:41
  when I should be working yeah right is it really when it's almost like the infinite scroll
• 1:12:45
  feature seeming so antiquated like I can't remember the last time that I went to a desktop and typed
• 1:12:49
  in www.facebook.com and it it enter like to me it's just all it's just part of the soup that we're
• 1:12:57
  all swimming in it's just there on the front page of my phone which I know it shouldn't be I don't
• 1:13:01
  even like it it's just a habit if I'm taking a piss I just pull up my phone and see what people
• 1:13:06
  talking about on Twitter it's this banal kind of backdrop to existence that I both resent and also
• 1:13:11
  don't care enough about to actually bother taking off my phone so firstly do bother that's my first
• 1:13:17
  piece of advice you want it and then and then um I think the other thing that that you know it's
• 1:13:23
  become a little bit of a of an easy thing to say but I think it really does matter is this idea of
• 1:13:30
  local focus um local politics but not necessarily only local politics I think one of the great
• 1:13:37
  um huge problems of what's happening right now certainly still in in New York is that everything
• 1:13:43
  is virtual of necessity you can't easily get physically involved in um things that are going
• 1:13:51
  on in your community which I tend to assume means you know going and helping at the soup kitchen
• 1:13:55
  but I think it also means the five aside football match I don't think it has to be I don't think
• 1:13:59
  this is a point that is limited to sort of um volunteering and do good thing um another
• 1:14:06
  thing that authoritarian minded leaders uh famously love I mean this this observation goes back to
• 1:14:12
  Hannah R and I think is is keeping people you know isolated and separate from each other so that they
• 1:14:20
  um so that their only point of of community is that they are all all either back or um or
• 1:14:26
  oppose the the national uh leader and you're sounding like a covered truth here all of us
• 1:14:33
  like there are people there are people who claim that the whole thing is a big conspiracy to try to
• 1:14:38
  introduce authoritarian rule now I do not believe that you know one of the things I think is
• 1:14:41
  with Timothy Snyder the historian was has said a number of times is like what you need to do
• 1:14:47
  to the extent that there is you know in any um polity sort of a certain amount of
• 1:14:52
  creeping authoritarianism getting your getting our bodies out into space and occupying
• 1:14:57
  physical space and the things that we do and not just being uh you know behind screens is
• 1:15:03
  is tremendously important it's it's the way that you know it it it creates this kind of
• 1:15:10
  uh broads a territory of civic life on which democracy and politics is one of the things
• 1:15:16
  that we do rather than making every single little bit of our world um politicized and it's the
• 1:15:21
  same point right that actually if you're going to some like I don't know local board games club
• 1:15:31
  with somebody who you might in other context hate uh or or dislike the intensely the views of
• 1:15:38
  like that as again is something like you're you're weaving this fabric that is not all about politics
• 1:15:44
  all the time now it's hard because there's been so much geographical sorting that
• 1:15:51
  everyone on my block probably does basically agree with me at least in terms of which weight of vote
• 1:15:57
  general election but all the same and I'm getting these ideas from Robert to lease as well I think
• 1:16:01
  you know going and doing things in your life where politics just doesn't come up yeah this is
• 1:16:06
  different from going to seek out people on the other side of the aisle and trying to understand
• 1:16:10
  their political views that may have a role but it's just literally like going to events where
• 1:16:17
  you just don't know whether the person you're chatting to you know what as as you're talking I'm
• 1:16:23
  I'm just thinking of the virtue of of having a city that is that is conducive to that and what a great
• 1:16:29
  place New York is I think Sydney uh you can do it if you're uh if you try and the same in Melbourne
• 1:16:37
  because uh they're quite permeable cities but you know sprawling suburban cities that are
• 1:16:43
  dominated by cars are not very conducive to that I mean think of New York's think of Union
• 1:16:47
  Union Square Park or where are the big chess pieces that people can go and just play chess with
• 1:16:52
  each other you know that's Washington Washington Square Park that's right yeah Washington Square Park
• 1:16:57
  you know these are fantastic places I mean and during the during self-isolation
• 1:17:02
  I've been taking my toddlers to different parts of Sydney to get exercise you know one of the
• 1:17:06
  only justifications for going outside has been to exercise and with as you know toddlers they do
• 1:17:11
  need to get a bit of exercise but we've sort of benched the rules a little bit by going a little
• 1:17:16
  farther afield than we probably should but as a result you find yourself exercising outdoors in
• 1:17:21
  neighborhoods that are completely different completely demographically and politically
• 1:17:25
  different that might be part of the conservative heartland which is very different from the
• 1:17:28
  the latte sipping chardonnace willing you know left wing elite class clusters that I live in
• 1:17:35
  and it's been great it's been great having feeling like you're sharing an experience with people
• 1:17:40
  who you wouldn't normally normally come across and that yeah that that matters yeah no and I think
• 1:17:47
  that's true about New York obviously this is a blue city in a blue state and to get you know
• 1:17:53
  unless you're going to spend a lot of time traveling to Staten Island you're not going to be
• 1:17:58
  surrounded with people who vote differently but in the sort of wonderful sort of ethnic and cultural
• 1:18:08
  mix of this city even though basically all these populations will will end up voting democratic
• 1:18:15
  the polls you definitely have a very wide range of views on a wide variety of social issues
• 1:18:21
  yeah you know and um and then at the fringes you have just kind of like extremely eccentric
• 1:18:26
  New Yorkers who there are always a few who believe in like any random combination of beliefs
• 1:18:32
  that you wouldn't have thought went together with each other so you know it's just like yeah absolutely
• 1:18:37
  I think as you say this comes back to your point about not everything having to
• 1:18:41
  cleave along political lines long party political lines I mean the the first generation
• 1:18:46
  Chinese you know shopkeeper it may vote Democrat but they have a whole host of ideas about things
• 1:18:54
  that are completely alien to you you know or the old Greek guy in Washington Square Park might
• 1:18:59
  have incredibly retrograde ideas about about gender politics for example even if they end up
• 1:19:04
  voting Democrat we're complicated we're complicated creatures hopefully you know one hopes one
• 1:19:09
  hopes that we don't all silo ourselves into a predictable set of check boxes where you know exactly
• 1:19:13
  what other people believe simply on the basis of who they voted for
• 1:19:19
  right and you know I do maintain some faith that even all but the worst of the people that you see
• 1:19:24
  on Twitter being appalling uh you know when they're in the diner chatting to the aforementioned
• 1:19:32
  you know uh old Greek guy or whatever like I don't think they're going to be haranging him
• 1:19:40
  uh to double check his conformity to a whole lot of particular linguistic forms that three
• 1:19:46
  years ago nobody had heard of you know I don't think um I think that I think that real life
• 1:19:52
  you know this makes me sound like some kind of lullaby but um I think I think I think um
• 1:19:56
  I think real life uh uh makes people enter physical world makes people often into the better
• 1:20:05
  versions of themselves and I that I think is one one important reason that I hope that uh this
• 1:20:10
  isolation lifestyle does not persist in consciousness. I mean let's let's just talk about that
• 1:20:16
  because you know how exactly we unwind this is tricky uh Australia has the good fortune to have been
• 1:20:26
  basically well managed uh during during this uh we got the first case in the same week
• 1:20:31
  that the United States did now granted there had probably been a lot of community spread in this
• 1:20:35
  in the US before testing began um but uh Australia did move very quickly to close the borders
• 1:20:41
  imposed mandatory quarantine under police guard for everyone who was coming back I mean
• 1:20:45
  foreigners can't come but even returning Australians have to spend two weeks in um in a hotel room
• 1:20:50
  under police guard and in you contrast that to the UK for example we're only recently you know
• 1:20:57
  self uh self police self isolation has been in place and Australia very quickly ramped up
• 1:21:04
  you know put in a lot of orders to ramp up the production of ventilators luckily we didn't need
• 1:21:08
  them but just in case and a lot of testing and huge tracing the the data company that the government
• 1:21:14
  commissioned um hired former quantists workers who've been laid off or furloughed uh to to do follow
• 1:21:22
  tracing so that people could be isolated and as a result we're now emerging into a uh a world which
• 1:21:30
  touch wood is one which we don't have to be terribly afraid of anymore as long as we
• 1:21:35
  uh common sense and wash hands and socially distance but that's not the case in the UK and the US
• 1:21:39
  where populations are are to the extent that they can start emerging from self isolation are
• 1:21:44
  going to be emerging into a world where you do have to be wary of every stranger and you do have
• 1:21:50
  to be cautious and you don't have to cover your face and things are still a bit surreal do you
• 1:21:55
  how do you see that unfolding and are you optimistic or pessimistic that that that'll be a new normal
• 1:22:03
  I mean firstly nobody knows anything obviously right I mean and this this I think is um this I
• 1:22:10
  think is very important to bear in mind that like I have found myself um reacting as a sort of
• 1:22:18
  dyed in the wool pessimist I found myself becoming a strange kind of optimist as a result of
• 1:22:23
  all this I think because I'm realizing that I went around prior to this pandemic with a kind of
• 1:22:30
  all sorts of awful apocalyptic fears and fantasies in my head all the time anyway so now when
• 1:22:35
  anything happens in the real world regarding the pandemic however bad it is it's obviously not
• 1:22:39
  infinitely bad and therefore I find myself thinking oh well okay well that's not that's not as bad as
• 1:22:44
  it could have been that's very much like my mindset and all of this so and I do kind of feel that
• 1:22:50
  so on that matter I mean I do think that you know obviously there are going to be certain
• 1:22:57
  sections of industry and hospitality restaurants and things as the obvious example that where
• 1:23:03
  you know reducing capacity significantly to keep people distance it could be and already has been
• 1:23:08
  obviously but but even going forward when they be open to be ruinous lots and lots of specific
• 1:23:14
  examples of it of it really being awful but but I also think that like I don't know I just think
• 1:23:19
  people are very adaptable I'm not sure that wearing a mask and being six feet two meters away from
• 1:23:26
  other people completely uh eliminates the possibility of lots of creative social I mean that's one
• 1:23:34
  of the things that sort of confused me all the way through this is that I've had the sense that if
• 1:23:39
  everyone wore a mask and everyone kept six feet of distance you know if you could magically make
• 1:23:46
  every single person in the United States wear a mask and keep six feet of distance from each other
• 1:23:49
  at all times and I think it would have been a very short lived uh phenomenon and neither wearing a
• 1:23:56
  mask nor keeping six feet of distance in most circumstances seems like a particularly big deal
• 1:24:03
  obviously there are contexts where six feet distance isn't going to work and it's and it's
• 1:24:07
  terrible it feels like a bit of a big deal to me it feels like I feel like there's a sort of
• 1:24:13
  social solidarity that comes from being in places with a lot of people in them like I like bars I like
• 1:24:20
  clubs I like you know restaurants that are too small where you're you're bumping up against the
• 1:24:24
  person next to you I like little noodle stands where you're sitting on a little plastic chair and
• 1:24:28
  someone's right next to you sloping their fur or their laxas like there's something convivial
• 1:24:32
  about all of that that I will I totally agree but I also think that like what I suppose what I mean
• 1:24:40
  is it's not that big a deal compared to everybody spends the whole of their lives inside their
• 1:24:46
  right inside their homes right yeah and and so suppose what I'm what I'm trying to say is there's
• 1:24:51
  something odd about the fact that we seem to have slipped into talking about how you know we'll
• 1:25:00
  never socialize again quite apart from I don't know how long it's going to be before whether it's
• 1:25:07
  really going to be a new normal indefinitely that this kind of distancing stuff happens there's
• 1:25:13
  a lot of potential still there there's a lot of you know you can I think I'm just trying to get
• 1:25:21
  at this I've been struck by how people go from will because we'll have to we may have to observe
• 1:25:26
  this or that for a long time that's basically the same as saying you know civic connection is over
• 1:25:36
  and I think you can already see some creative ways in which people are
• 1:25:40
  getting around that I don't know if you saw the photo I think the photos of the
• 1:25:48
  French kindergarteners having to keep their distance heartbreaking but the photos of the
• 1:25:52
  photos of the groups of people in Domino Park in New York sitting inside circles on the grass
• 1:26:00
  I mean you know it's just a very this very creative solution and it was when it looked like it was
• 1:26:05
  a wonderful atmosphere and even in my local part Prospect Park I mean it's not overcrowded it's not
• 1:26:10
  a problem but but like you know we're finding our ways of all getting back out onto the great
• 1:26:18
  lawns there and and watching other people fly kites and the one annoying guy who's always brought
• 1:26:24
  a quadcopter drone and all that stuff and and you know it isn't the same I'm not going to I'm not
• 1:26:30
  trying to say it's it's it doesn't feel like a loss that I hope we can uh that I hope we can
• 1:26:37
  you know not have to put up with any more at some point but it isn't it it isn't everybody
• 1:26:44
  stands staying at home with the door shut and the lights off yeah no that's true and obviously
• 1:26:48
  one of the things that we should be grateful for going back to the Stephen Pinker arguments and
• 1:26:52
  should we be grateful for anything or should we always be comparing it to a superior hypothetical
• 1:26:58
  utopian future one of one thing that I am grateful for is that the contagion doesn't seem to be
• 1:27:03
  terribly contagious when you are outdoors um there you know that there are several case studies
• 1:27:09
  such as Australia and New Zealand for example New Zealand went into full-scale lockdown closed all
• 1:27:13
  of the coffee shops and restaurants and everything at parks you know people were literally
• 1:27:16
  hunkered down and sheltering in place whereas Australia took a a looser approach and you were still
• 1:27:21
  able to go to the beach if you were actually exercising you couldn't lie around on the beach
• 1:27:24
  socialising but you could walk along the beach you could go you could still go surfing at most
• 1:27:29
  places there were beaches that closed were closed by local councils because of overcrowding but
• 1:27:33
  generally life could still sort of go on you could still get a takeaway coffee you could you know
• 1:27:36
  restaurants didn't close for takeaway and so on and the result was exactly the same the what seems
• 1:27:42
  to matter is testing and tracing and isolating and quarantine um so you're right right the ability
• 1:27:48
  to go to a park and to wander through prospect park and look at children playing together is
• 1:27:52
  um a lot better than the potential alternative of us all being imprisoned I mean we haven't
• 1:27:58
  talked we haven't talked about what the what's going to be happening economically and that of course
• 1:28:04
  is a very is a is a completely separate a completely separate thing again I think that you know
• 1:28:10
  people thrive in extraordinary situations but you know the impact of the what's going to happen
• 1:28:20
  to the economy on civic life is a whole you know a whole other topic so I'm once again I'm just
• 1:28:27
  arguing against my most recent that's what I like failure in life no no it's very good having
• 1:28:34
  complicated ideas you have to balance is good um yeah no and I I agree that coming back to the
• 1:28:42
  question of we are more than just who we vote for and I would hope that we all have complicated
• 1:28:47
  conflicting ideas about things I think there's uh there's been a bit of bit too much demonization
• 1:28:53
  of people who are really worried about the economic impact of the lockdown as if they're right
• 1:28:57
  wing nut jobs who are denying um the the seriousness of of coronavirus and we should be able to hold
• 1:29:05
  in our head to two concerns at the same time one that you know it's a contain it's a terrible
• 1:29:10
  contagion that you have to get on top of but two that it's not crazy to worry about the the
• 1:29:16
  lives that are being ruined by the lockdown as well economically speaking no absolutely I mean I
• 1:29:25
  think that the I think that certain members of that constituency uh have sort of
• 1:29:34
  crazily conflicting views like like we should reopen America but also it's an imposition on
• 1:29:39
  your liberty to wear a mask when obviously what you should be saying is let's reopen America and
• 1:29:42
  at all wear masks if that if that if that's your if that's your priority if the reopening is your
• 1:29:48
  priority but um yeah no I mean there are there are trade-offs here and as people have said you know
• 1:29:53
  if even if you're measuring it's even if you want to say that the human deaths are the only
• 1:29:59
  moral metric though people will die as a result of all sorts of factors relating to the impact
• 1:30:06
  on the economy people will die from isolation and lockdown you know and I mean
• 1:30:12
  even if you wanted to just do a very strict utilitarian how many people are going to die there are
• 1:30:17
  definitely there's definitely a debate to be had there um in your book you talk about essentially
• 1:30:24
  how to be happy and the how ineffable happiness is um do you think that the that focus the focus
• 1:30:32
  that the pandemic is giving us on having to some amount of specific uh trial is a good or a
• 1:30:41
  bad thing is there a silver lining here I mean it's dangerous territory I uh you know it's the
• 1:30:53
  kind of question that suddenly makes me very aware of my own privilege even though I get very
• 1:31:00
  annoyed by people making that kind of argument on Twitter um and also just my own luck so far
• 1:31:05
  right I mean you know the the I'll I reserve the right to have a radically different opinion about
• 1:31:11
  all of this uh depending on what happens to the people closest to me I do think there's a very
• 1:31:18
  important point here which is that this kind of crisis draws your attention to certain things
• 1:31:25
  that were sort of always true all along um from the sort of low sort of every day ones like you
• 1:31:35
  know I think we're seeing now that um a lot of uh people are learning that people haven't lost
• 1:31:42
  their jobs you know and who are working happily from home are learning that actually you know
• 1:31:46
  commuting an hour a day uh just to be able to show the or sitting at a desk is kind of a bit pointless
• 1:31:52
  and maybe uh maybe we don't need to completely go back to that in in all respects right up to the
• 1:31:57
  sort of rather grand philosophical point that you know we are everyone now feels or at least this
• 1:32:04
  may be changing but a few weeks ago everyone was like around me was very much very very anxious
• 1:32:11
  about the fact that they don't know what they didn't know what like the next day or the next week
• 1:32:16
  held and of course as you then want to say uh to them or to yourself that's what you're feeling
• 1:32:23
  like that's always true when did you when did you know what next week would hold yeah yeah exactly
• 1:32:30
  and there's a lovely old sermon by uh that CS Lewis gave in the during the Second World War which
• 1:32:35
  I had mentioned in something that I wrote where he sort of says that the war doesn't actually create
• 1:32:40
  an absolutely new situation it just reveals what was always the case that that that um we've always
• 1:32:45
  lived on a precipice and people are wrong to compare the war to normal life because life has
• 1:32:50
  never been normal and one of the things he's trying to say there is that we that you know crisis is
• 1:32:55
  not a time to say well how dare you carry on doing historical scholarship in a crisis how dare you
• 1:33:04
  carry on making art and music in a crisis because because actually every single bit of art and
• 1:33:09
  music and historical scholarship that's ever happened has been made uh you know in the teeth of
• 1:33:16
  death living in an uncertainty and having no idea what what's going to happen tomorrow and as I say
• 1:33:21
  I think for I think for sort of anxiously minded people of in that and I include myself in that
• 1:33:29
  there is also this kind of sense of um oh okay now something real this is actually happening
• 1:33:38
  this isn't the kind of thing I go through my days like vaguely imagining that terrible things are
• 1:33:44
  going to happen it is actually happening and for many many people it's absolutely terrible but at
• 1:33:49
  the same time it's kind of finite it has edges um and I wonder you know people often uh berate the
• 1:33:58
  younger generation today for being sort of emotionally fragile and I've seen some people argue that
• 1:34:03
  this is going to make that worse but maybe it will have the opposite effect you know this thing
• 1:34:08
  has happened to all of us and the vast majority of us are going to survive it and like you know
• 1:34:16
  we're gonna we're gonna prove something about our emotional resilience to ourselves and you know
• 1:34:23
  there's this idea of post traumatic growth that uh often doesn't get a look in uh when people
• 1:34:29
  undergo severe personal traumas and we talk a lot about post traumatic stress disorder but
• 1:34:34
  post traumatic growth is a very very common uh reaction to terrible things happening to people
• 1:34:40
  on an individual level and I wonder if there'll be some kind of parallel civic uh equivalent because
• 1:34:46
  you know like if we can if we can weather this maybe maybe we can weather more than we than we thought
• 1:34:52
  that kind of idea that's interesting yeah that's really interesting and I I have actually just
• 1:34:57
  been writing about how the bushfires in Australia this past summer may have had some unintended
• 1:35:04
  upsides in terms of preparing us for the pandemic because we we exited one national nightmare and
• 1:35:10
  and stumbled directly into another and maybe there was a certain resilience certainly a political
• 1:35:15
  uh responsiveness that happened to the pandemic that you might not have had had we not all just
• 1:35:20
  gotten uh knocked knocked about the head with another disaster and then I sort of think maybe
• 1:35:25
  the pandemic is going to be a useful lesson for the coming disruptions of climate chaos or
• 1:35:30
  something you know maybe they're maybe maybe all of this is just part of a great a great big learning
• 1:35:37
  yeah I mean one can hope I don't think that's I don't think that's a uh sort of unfeasibly optimistic
• 1:35:43
  view to take anyway who knows who knows uh wonderful to talk to you all of it thanks so much for
• 1:35:48
  your time take care yourself and um when park when park slope starts to open have a lovely little meal
• 1:35:55
  for me thank you I will and thanks for asking me out it's been a pleasure thank you