Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Josh on... Can You Change People's Minds?

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Josh on... Can You Change People's Minds? · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  G'day, humans! Welcome to The Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas. And it may be one of the
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  most dangerous ideas to consider. That is, the idea that the other ideas which you hold
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  in your noggin are not really pervious to change. They're not really open to reconsideration.
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  You like to tell yourself that they are. We all like to walk around thinking that we're
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  rational human beings who are adjudicating the available evidence and judiciously arriving
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  at all the conclusions which we hold in our head. But in reality, we're just fallible
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  mammals who arrive at conclusions through some accident of history, a consequence of the
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  communities that we're in and perhaps the cognitive errors that we have inherited.
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  And then we retroactively find fancy sounding reasons to justify why we believe the things
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  that deep down we would believe anyway. It's a popular idea in psychology. It's a very
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  confronting idea. It's something that we think that we can see in others. So why wouldn't it
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  apply to ourselves? But it's something that I suspect gets overplayed. Certainly to people who,
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  like me, regard themselves to be in the radical center of things, open and amenable to changing
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  our minds and trying to make a practice of changing our minds on big issues when the evidence draws
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  towards doing so. That is what this conversation is about. I was kindly invited on a new podcast
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  which is called Changed My Mind. It's hosted by two very smart gentlemen named Aiden Alexander
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  and Tom Norman. And they wanted to ask me about my thoughts about whether people can change their
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  mind. They basically go around to intellectuals and they have conversations with people who've
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  changed their mind about one big issue. And in my case, they wanted to ask not so much what have I
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  changed my mind about? But what am I up to in this project of mine in uncomfortable conversations?
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  If I don't believe that minds are changeable, this conversation goes all over the place into some
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  of the areas where I'm most ambivalent, like factory farming and freedom of speech on social media
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  and abortion. I hope you find it stimulating. It's an opportunity to for you to parachute inside
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  my head and hear the way that I'm sort of trying to think about the way that we think and arrive
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  at our beliefs enjoy the one and only co-opted episode of Changed My Mind.
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  It's intuitively obvious to everybody who has lived through the cultural wars of the past five
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  or ten years that something is not functioning optimally about the way that we converse about
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  the most provocative things, that the number of tripwires that you can trigger or egg shells that
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  you can tread on that can derail a conversation or can have you pegged by someone who disagrees with
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  you as a member of the opposing tribe are too numerous and too intense and too hazardous for us to
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  have a kind of a free-wheeling public square where people can say whatever they want. And sometimes
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  when I say that people misunderstand me and think, but hang on a second, we've got neo-Nazi's on
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  X who are saying that Hitler was a good guy. Surely there's no dearth of free speech. I'm not
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  talking about the ability to shit post or produce like funny memes of Donald Trump looking like
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  the Pope or something like that or like you know saying that Hitler was a good guy. I'm talking
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  about learning to flex our muscles of disagreement in a way that actually lands with people who don't
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  already disagree with you. It's of course there's free speech within the echo chambers and the
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  thought bubbles that people inhabit. There's always been that in a way, I mean unless you live in an
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  authoritarian hellscape. But what there isn't and what we've lost the ability to do, I think,
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  is have a common grounding of discourse where I can talk about things and I'm not sure I may be
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  overly nostalgic about imagining that there was some Halcyon day in which this ever was the case,
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  but I think it was probably easier when everybody was watching an old white straight guy talk at
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  them delivering the news for 30 minutes in the evening rather than that the heedless cacophony that
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  we've got on social media today where so many of us are getting our news from different sources.
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  It was probably easier back then to talk to your neighbors and people at the checkout or people
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  on the subway about things that were going on without fearing that you're going to run into somebody
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  who's from an opposing tribe and you're going to alienate them or say the wrong thing or say
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  something that gets coded as a racial microaggression or that codes you as a marga supporter or whatever
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  it might be. So I started uncomfortable conversations in 2020 during the pandemic and I was already on
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  track to be a sort of a face of the public broadcaster here in Australia and so it wasn't a direct
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  response to my experiences there yet because my style was on the rise at the Australian Broadcasting
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  Corporation at the ABC which is sort of like Australia's version of the BBC and which for any
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  American listeners is a significantly more important part of the national conversation and culture
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  than something like NPR or PBS is and I think it was probably it was probably a twofold move.
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  I mean on the one hand I wanted to have conversations that I knew would be to boo at the public broadcaster
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  because they would be a little bit too spicy and they would wander into territory that you're not
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  allowed to wander into if you have to carry the burden I suppose of and credibility of the national
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  public broadcaster but also I think subliminally I was probably uh sureing myself up in case
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  everything went south between me and the public broadcaster which it ultimately did and thank God I
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  had the foresight to create an insurance policy because now I get to make more money doing much
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  less work and not have a boss um so that's the I think the long answer which is it was not necessary
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  for me to be inside the beast to know that the way that the mainstream elite um information
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  institutions namely social media and legacy media had failings. Yeah I guess um for me the first
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  the first thing is um you say that you started on comfortable conversations because you knew that
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  these kinds of conversations were not appropriate for the broadcaster and I wonder like is that
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  is that a implicit critique of the broadcaster or do you would you say like look the stuff that
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  they do well and because of the kind of institution they are the role that they play in society
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  is right that they kind of don't there are sort of spaces that they don't touch all levels of
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  spice that they don't kind of um yeah good question it's both it's both um it is a critique um not
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  specifically of the ABC but of all media organizations over the past five or 10 years especially
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  public ones um which if you look at the trajectory of NPR the BBC and the ABC um 20 years ago
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  you know when I was growing up these would have been that you would have heard a whole variety
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  of weird intriguing unusual perspectives on those outlets and now when you tune in if you know
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  that there is going to be a conversation on one of those outlets say let's say a panel discussion
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  debating um I don't know let's say you see they're going to be immigration or it's going to be
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  women's equality or it's going to be in the case of Australia Indigenous rights or in the case
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  of America Black Lives Matter or in the case of the UK Brexit one of these sort of you know highly
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  provocative controversial divisive issues of the past decade um you can pretty much jot on the
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  back of an African in advance the skew that you're going to get from the BBC or NPR or the ABC
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  and I don't think that that used to be the case I think that they've been cowed by the social
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  justice reckoning uh of the 2010s into self selecting a group of people who think broadly the same
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  way about what it means to be on the right side of history and so you just wouldn't want to count
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  on some platform ideas that you regard as being depraved or wrong headed uh or racist or
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  bigoted or white supremacist or sexist or however you might code it or transphobic or homophobic
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  and the the circumference of of of your pool of ideas that gets dumped into this unacceptable
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  deplorable bucket is so large so capacious that there are whole swathes of the population maybe
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  things that 40% of the population believe like maybe we should do a better job of integrating
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  Muslim migrants into the United Kingdom in order to maintain social cohesion or you know maybe
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  we should reconsider uh you know whether or not tokenistic gestures from white HR representatives
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  in Australia do it cowtowing to indigenous uh pro forma acknowledgments of country and land
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  acknowledgments are necessarily the best way for to progress race relations uh you know whatever
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  it might be there are whole swathes of of ideas that are regarded as being taboo um so that's one
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  half of the of the answer which is they should be more uh rambunctious more boisterous more spicy
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  more you know entertaining more representative they're supposed to represent the views of the
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  nation uh public broadcasters are however that being said all of that needs to take place in what is
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  annoyingly termed by insiders the content strand so most of these organizations or well almost
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  all media organizations that are in the news game will have a news division and then they'll have a
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  non news division which here in Australia is called content and I don't know what they call it
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  elsewhere um and that won't just be entertainment won't just be the sitcoms and the dramas and so on
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  that'll also include like panel discussion shows and things like that and like question time
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  in the UK or Q&A here in Australia um actually I think Q&A is handled by the news division but
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  there are all kinds of shows that are similar to that like my talkback radio show which sort of dabble
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  in the news but are not technically supposed to be beholden to the high standards of journalism
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  that the news division itself is um you've had a second and slightly different problem happened
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  in the news divisions then the one that I'm articulating in the content division which is a kind
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  of a closed-mindedness and a sort of a social justice mindset the problem in the news division
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  is that the push for diversity for the diversification of newsrooms for taking them transitioning
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  them from being bastions of white straight middle aged males to being more female more diverse more
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  queer more inhabited by more journalists of color all of which I think is a good thing
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  has been done in a ham-fisted way in in the sense that it is now taken for granted in a newsroom
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  that if you're going to do a story about queer issues it's it's going to be assigned to the LGBTQIA
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  plus reporter who is likely a an early 20s purple head nose ringged they them and that means that
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  all of the coverage of that whole field gets filtered through a prism that is quite alien to a
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  large proportion of the population and does not represent the views of conservatives certainly
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  doesn't represent the views of like recent Chinese migrants or migrants from like Lebanon or
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  something like that who have no understanding of this whole universe of trans pronouns and so on
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  it means that any story that's about race is going to get assigned to a journalist of color
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  and I understand the instinct here but to some extent it's no more justifiable when saying that any
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  story that you're going to do which is about the mining industry should be written by a mining
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  industry lobbyist or any industry that you're sure you're going to do about the drug industry is
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  going to be you know written by somebody who has experienced working for a drug company
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  you could see the obvious conflict of interest there they have a vested interest there's
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  come at your pulling from that pool and similarly when you only see Trump's executive order on gender
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  being reported on by people who think that he is the devil for you know instantiating a
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  US law that sex is biological instead of cultural you're missing you've got huge blind spots so
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  there are two problems that I think the news division has to become
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  much less opinionated and has to ditch this idea that it's had recently which is that there's
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  a sort of a lived experience that needs to bleed into news and the journalists should bring
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  their whole selves to work until their own truths there are no own truths like there's reporting
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  and there's not reporting there's good journalism and there's bad journalism there's what happened
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  and what didn't happen you've seen this a lot on Gaza as well where you know the the felt
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  experience of you know people who feel like they're marginalized whether that's on the Jewish side
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  who was screaming anti-Semitism anytime anyone criticizes Israel or whether it's on the Palestinian
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  side where you've got Arab journalists yelling about how if a news organization doesn't use the
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  word genocide then it's you know it's not telling the real unvanished truth it it leaves us with
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  this kind of cacophony of unrepresented voices who are all shilling their own thing and singing
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  their own song in the news division and then at the same time you've got a curiously inert and
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  bland content division where that is the place where all of these people should be shouting at
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  each other and having these arguments the way that we do the way that we would in a really good
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  at a really good dinner party right and that is left kind of castrated and bland and like you're
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  reading from a social justice hymn sheet so my criticism is both sort of institutional and
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  non-specific in the sense that the news division news divisions should be cautious and they should
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  be fact driven and they should not be spicy like me but I wasn't in the news division I had a
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  talkback radio show which was in the content division and nonetheless I had a falling out with
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  the broadcaster because I was constantly trying to talk about things and about the existence of
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  I suppose cancel culture within the organization and within the media more broadly in ways that
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  ruffled feathers and when not the the dumb thing so at a better an industry level news needs to be
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  completely free from the sorts of spiciness that I'm talking about and then at a specific level
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  institutions need to be more brave about the things that they allow said in the content on the
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  content side so we want to get onto your your spicy conversations a bit because there's some really
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  interesting stuff to to say there um but I wonder I wonder if this is a lit if you're a little there's
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  a little bit of exaggeration here like I don't know about Australia but you you did mention for
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  example the BBC and it strikes me that there was this period in early covid where I think there was
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  like a very large shift in the media towards kind of you know around the sort of black lives matter
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  process and things and trans issues were in the media in the UK as well at the time because of
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  some things jk rolling had been saying and stuff like this but then this it felt to me like there
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  was actually a real shift back against that and a sort of a feeling like maybe things had gone a bit
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  too far in one particular direction and I mean so in the UK for example just just today there's a lot
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  of coverage of a recent Supreme Court um really on trans issues one of the most
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  interviewed and hosted but a people on sort of the comments sections of our news in the BBC
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  is um Nigel Farosh who's obviously one of the sort of key Brexit people and the issue of immigration
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  is constantly being debated in the UK generally with the premise that like immigration is somehow bad
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  and we need to limit it and stuff like this so I just wonder is it I think you're you're getting
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  at something that's real but I think maybe there's a bit of a exaggeration here um um
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  someone like Farosh is at take your point there is a swingback right there is definitely a pushback
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  I am one I wonder whether the pushback is in the direction of healthy discourse that I'm advocating
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  for or whether it's a pushback in the direction of the same kind of phony binaries that I am resisting
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  in the first place in other words you may be right that there's a swing away from the extremely
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  dominant sensoriasness of the social justice left that we saw between I don't know maybe 2016 and
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  2022 but it may be being replaced by an equally unthinking and simplistic right wing narrative
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  from the likes of Farosh and Musk and Donald Trump um which I don't think is this that's not what
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  I'm calling for I mean I'm not calling for you know let's try to blow up blow things up by being
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  edge lords and saying naughty things I'm trying to find ways to nudge people 10% out of their echo
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  chamber and towards the other side by articulating a vision of one's opponents that is as generous as
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  possible so that what you say lands and is winnable and I see Farosh as an enormously negative and
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  cynical force in British politics so I don't think would have come about and I don't think Brexit
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  would have come about had we addressed the kinds of problems in terms of with the conversation
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  that I'm talking about earlier like had it been possible to talk in Britain in the early 2010s
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  and late 2000s about what European Union integration actually means about you know whether or not
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  it means that Britain should take in unlimited numbers of you know low skilled Polish workers
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  and whether the demographic face of Britain should change completely what the appropriate response
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  to the Syrian refugee crisis ought to be and if there was a more freewheeling um landscape in which
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  people could air their demographic grievances about the fact that the little English town that
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  they grew up in that had been basically the same for a thousand years had all of a sudden gone
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  from being 98% white to 40% white in the space of the past 20 years if they'd been able to talk
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  about those grievances without being held down as a racist and just told to get with the program
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  because both parties are on board with this bold new future where everything's going to be great
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  you know a significant minority of your town is now going to be Pakistani born
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  um then I think you would have you could have dodged Brexit and you could have dodged Farage
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  at all so I'm not sure about I mean you may be right about that opening up I'm still skeptical
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  that it is a genuine opening up on all issues I mean you might have that on trends and you might
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  have that on immigration but you know take something like free speech and the question of whether
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  or not it's acceptable you know I was on a panel show in Australia within the past 12 months
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  where every single it was our equivalent of question time which is a British show a show called Q&A
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  here and every single panelist including the host regarded it as primafacy obvious that when Elon
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  Musk tweeted of the British race riots that civil war is inevitable I don't know if you remember
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  that tweet that I remember that the the answer right that that that was racial incitement that he
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  should be prosecuted for or that when you know the likes of conservative columnists like Douglas
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  Murray would say we've been banging on about this for years and saying that if we don't get on top
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  of race relations and racial integration then there's going to be strife in the streets that
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  to simply identify the fact that they've been warning about it was itself evidence of
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  of incitement and I was the only person on the panel who was saying hang on it's not incitement to say
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  to to it might be hysterical you might be being a hysterical nitty you might be being a buffoon you
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  might be being an idiot you might be being a little bit racist but you're not it's not we should
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  not be criminalizing the opinions of people who are who are throwing up flares to warn us of
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  something that they think is an impending problem because it rhymes a little bit with what a racist
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  would say like so I so in something like that in something like the limits of acceptable discourse
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  I think I don't think anything has changed I think we're still as as blinded as blinkered I want
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  to get to the broader media landscape I want to talk about free speech all these things but I
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  think it's important to start with this this project of yours about uncomfortable conversations
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  and what it's trying to do and whether that project like whether it has legs basically because
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  you know as I understand it the premise of uncomfortable conversations is that these conversations
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  can allow us to bridge polarized groups and maybe a lot of people to change their minds even just
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  a little bit and I find that idea really appealing I would love to be true but everything I know
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  about human psychology says this is going to be incredibly hard you know we when we're challenged
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  on a views tensor become more entrenched in them and our views are often driven by emotions and
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  identity and tribal allegiances as you say rather than just by the facts so in your experience
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  posting uncomfortable conversations have you actually observed that people can change their minds
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  well it's I think you're slightly mischaracterizing the object of the show it's called a safe space
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  for dangerous ideas and it should be a place where I can freely I can interrogate in a free
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  wheeling way a person about an issue where so just a clear hope the the the title uncomfortable
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  conversations some people sometimes think think implies that the conversation is going to be
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  uncomfortable and that I'm going to make someone uncomfortable or that you know I'm going to get
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  on survivors of sexual abuse or something and like to talk it's not that's not the point the point
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  is not that I'm going to have an uncomfortable conversation necessarily in the room because
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  sometimes I'll agree with the person and sometimes we're just sort of spitballing and fleshing out
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  a big idea the point is that we take some kind of a dangerous question and a question which
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  if someone was to raise a strident opinion about it at a pub or at a work at an office party
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  or a Christmas party or at a dinner party at someone's house everyone's assholes would just
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  clench up a little bit if someone was started talking about it you know so that might be immigration
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  that might be trans that might be gender equality that might be you know indigenous rights that might
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  be climate change it might be whatever it might be an issue where the moment it comes up especially
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  among strangers or colleagues everyone feel everyone can just sense the tension in the room and
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  the fact that everyone sort of tiptoeing and trying to gauge what other people think in order to
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  say the right thing and not offend people and the point of uncomfortable conversations is to create
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  a playground a landscape in which we can be completely heedless of any of those concerns and
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  explore wherever our intellects take us without worrying about offending people or triggering any
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  of those trip wires the object there is not necessarily to change people's minds but to allow
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  people to feel heard if there's a little voice on their shoulder that calls bullshit on some of
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  the mainstream orthodoxies or dogmas from either side and in doing that I think you open up a space
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  a clearing in which people can consider other views with more compassion so it's less about it
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  also depends I think this whole question about changing people's minds is really interesting
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  and we fall into a trap with it frequently which is that we regard people's beliefs as being
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  monolithically intense or committed like people have different levels of commitment to different kinds
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  of beliefs and many of our beliefs are just inherited from the soup of general precepts that are
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  swirling around in the tribe that we're affiliated with yeah we haven't thought them through
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  terribly carefully we're not that committed to them if you tell me what you think about
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  climate change I can predict with a high level of accuracy what you probably think about corporate
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  tax rates yeah the two have nothing to do with each other right you I mean there's no necessary
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  reason why you should why a person who is on one side of politics should tick off all of the
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  checkboxes on their particular side of politics just because that is what their tribe says that
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  they should believe about trans or climate or taxation or whatever it might be or animal rights
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  or whatever yet people do do that people do co here because we're tribal beings and so we necessarily
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  we sort of outsource the hard thinking to our group and to authority figures who we agree with
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  the kinds of media that we read the kinds of things that our parents and grandparents say the kinds
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  of things that we learn in the kinds of schools that we go to the kinds of television shows that
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  we watch the kind of movies that we see and so what I'm trying to do you're right that there's
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  that there's no way I'm not engaged in the process of let's grab a bunch of people who are
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  climate deniers and let's get them to come on come over to our side I'm not interested in that
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  like let them go off and be climate deniers if you're a Nazi go and be a Nazi I'm not interested
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  I'm interested in people who are swimming in a soup where they might be seeing bits of
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  oh well Hitler wasn't such a bad guy or you know well you know maybe we need to round up trans people
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  or oh well you know maybe you know J.K. Rowling is is a criminal who should be prosecuted for
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  her hate speech or you know the the the flotsam and jetsam of the information ecosystems that we're
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  swimming in I'm just trying to tug people into what I would call a radical centrism or a kind
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  of a radical empathy towards an understanding of where other people are coming from so that we can
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  yeah sort of construct our own so that we can make sense to each other essentially so I'm
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  on a mission of rationality reason and sense making rather than I have an idea and it's the
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  opposite of your idea and I'm going to bring you over to my side if you're really firmly
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  entrenched in your idea that I agree with you that there's probably no point in trying to change
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  your mind yeah I mean absolutely you're not trying to pull people to one side or another but you're
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  trying to create a space where it's possible for people to move move yeah that's right at all
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  yes have you observed that to actually yes absolutely absolutely that definitely happens that
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  definitely happens all the time I mean you know the list can just interrogate in their own life
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  whether or not there are things that they had had sort of held as just sort of generalized assumptions
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  about the world that have been poked or prodded or punctured by exposure to I mean this happens to
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  you know religious people all the time which is a good example of of mind-changing because it's a
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  good example where the majority of the population is raised with a set of beliefs that they never
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  interrogate but they just inherit a very specific so it's a good test case a very specific set of
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  beliefs and you know you just have to look at the male that comes to you know the letters that
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  are received by the likes of Richard Dawkins or I and her CLE or Sam Harris to know that there is
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  a the capacity to punch through on those issues and a lot of people do a lot of people
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  inherited a faith that they then came to question and on your show have you seen any particular
• 27:17
  examples of people moving or yourself moving yes I mean I am constantly in a state of moving
• 27:24
  because it's my job to sort of think these things through I mean I'm currently in a in a state
• 27:32
  in a kind of crisis of not a crisis a positive a constructive crisis of confidence about the
• 27:36
  whole issue of free speech which I just raised about like this is something that I sort of go
• 27:42
  back and forth on maybe every three years I lived in New York City for the majority of my
• 27:48
  dot life and inherited a fairly American attitude towards free speech which basically says you
• 27:54
  can say anything that you want except for you know let's all gather together at 3 p.m. tomorrow
• 28:00
  and bash up some you know Arabs or something you can't say that if you especially if you go on
• 28:04
  and do it but countries like Australia and Western European countries have an attitude which is
• 28:14
  closer to the idea that we can also settle on a bunch of things that we're glad to put behind us
• 28:20
  as notions and let's rule them out of the public square we don't need to be having conversations
• 28:26
  anymore about whether or not you know Jews are the cause of all the evil in the world or whether
• 28:33
  black people are inferior to white people and so those things should be considered a form of
• 28:40
  hate speech especially if they're punching down and yeah I that I my mind gets changed on that
• 28:46
  pretty much depending on who the last last convincing person I spoke to was about it I can really
• 28:52
  see it argument for just saying you know what there is stop hiding behind your John Locke and your
• 28:56
  John Stuart Mel on the question of like whether or not we need to be platforming Nazis like let it
• 29:01
  I'd rather whatever downside arises from having a slightly less spicy and rambunctious public
• 29:09
  square because there are fewer Nazis in it is outweighed by the upside of living in a pleasant
• 29:16
  multicultural society where people aren't you know afraid of you know I don't know having their
• 29:21
  houses spray painted with you know fuck Jews or whatever it might be or fuck Muslims um so that's
• 29:28
  an issue on which my mind gets changed regularly I know that on I mean there are a bunch of issues
• 29:33
  that I could rattle off animal animal rights the way that we the that we treat animals on this is
• 29:38
  another good example I think where people where you can see the ability to puncture people's
• 29:42
  received wisdom I think most people are raised in an environment in which they think fluffy cute
• 29:48
  pets are adorable and at the same time that there's a hierarchy of uh of creatures on this planet
• 29:55
  and we sort of have a kind of admit natural dominion then it's a natural part of the um of the
• 30:00
  life cycle and ecosystem of humankind for us to use animals however we want to and then when
• 30:06
  you confront them with the reality of what industrial farming looks like and get them to think
• 30:11
  with just a little bit of empathy about what it must feel like to be a ascendant creature in a
• 30:17
  pig stall people quickly come around to that abortion is another another issue I mean I was raised
• 30:23
  in the left wing um progressive house where it was not a big issue it's never been a big issue
• 30:27
  in Australia when I moved to the United States it was obvious to me that this was just a woman an
• 30:30
  issue of women's reproductive rights after having kids myself I'm much more sympathetic to the
• 30:36
  conservative point of view not that abortion should be outlawed but that there's a that there's a
• 30:40
  genuine moral um question here that you're dealing with something that is that you know just yesterday
• 30:46
  I read a piece in the New York Times about uh Donald Trump recently uh uh reverted back to the
• 30:53
  Biden era policy on methapestone which is this abortion pill so he's basically backtracked from
• 30:59
  the hard right um uh on abortion and taken a more moderate position and the New York Times reporter
• 31:06
  was saying said a road align that said the Trump administration has traditionally been hostile to
• 31:13
  policies that are supportive of women's reproductive health that's how the impartial objective
• 31:23
  great lady of journalism the ultimate authority on clear unbiased writing articulates
• 31:32
  positions that have an issue with unlimited access to the death of unborn babies
• 31:44
  right like I'm not I'm trying to find a way to say it that it doesn't seem like it's spinning
• 31:48
  you know to conserve that the religious conservative would say that it's murder I'm not saying it's
• 31:51
  murder necessarily but you've got you've got babies there's a baby there uh um and then it stops living
• 32:02
  and it would have been a person and now it's not a person anymore it has its own DNA it has its own
• 32:06
  heartbeat it has its own little developing mind all of us used to be that thing um to frame that
• 32:14
  in the New York Times not an opinion piece in the news pages as being Donald Trump is hostile to
• 32:20
  policies that support women's reproductive health yeah from which the infant is completely absent from
• 32:27
  that picture is just one evidence is just evidence of the kind of echo chamber that I'm talking about
• 32:32
  and the so that's an issue on which I have started seeing it's like once you start I wouldn't
• 32:36
  have noticed that 10 years ago and now I noticed that that as being a partisan way of framing things
• 32:44
  that's really interesting I'm I wonder when I talking about issues that get people's uh bots to
• 32:50
  clench up that is definitely one of those ones right and I wonder when you started kind of uh
• 32:55
  talking to people about us when you think when you're thinking about it did you have some initial
• 33:00
  kind of resistance a bit of defensiveness I mean animal agriculture is another example where like
• 33:05
  when you start talking about it people often get a little defensive a little annoyed maybe
• 33:10
  and I wonder how you when that comes up in your your conversations how you
• 33:16
  avoid yourself kind of falling to those defensive straps how you manage to stay kind of open
• 33:20
  and receptive to what other people have to say I think that's just a character or a logical
• 33:24
  flaw that I have that I don't I'm too unemotional to feel that I don't have that gene I just I
• 33:29
  I'm a brain and a vet and I like playing with ideas and so um uh I'm trying to think if there
• 33:35
  if there would be an issue on which I feel such commitment emotionally that it would be hard
• 33:42
  to contemplate I mean I'm also quite comfortable being a hypocrite Tom so I don't you know like
• 33:49
  I on the issue of I'm not a vegetarian for example so I can at once sort of play on the intellectual
• 33:56
  space of understanding the monstrosity and then go out and eat a steak like I so I yeah I
• 34:05
  have this ability to just sort of detach my emotions from my brain and at the same time
• 34:11
  I think I get a real joy from trying to find figure out what's true it's like doing a Rubik's
• 34:16
  cube to me or doing a Sadoku puzzle or something it's like you know how how can I talk to people
• 34:21
  who have thought about this particular issue a lot more than I have especially if they're
• 34:27
  strident about it and how can I poke holes in what you know how what how can I do my best job
• 34:31
  to play devil's advocate with them in such a way that we hopefully ratchet up to arrive at a more
• 34:36
  reasonable uh version of the truth that's more comprehensible to uh the largest that's as that's
• 34:43
  maximally comprehensible to the maximally largest number of people that that's kind of my
• 34:47
  objective anytime I'm talking about an issue on the show I want to leave the conversation feeling
• 34:53
  like people on both sides or any side of that issue would hear that and go you know what that was
• 34:58
  a that was a pretty good faith way of taking into consideration all of the objections that a
• 35:04
  person might have and you mentioned how your mind has been changed a lot uh through through these
• 35:09
  conversations um what about the guests and and the audience have you have you seen changes there
• 35:15
  and um who have you found more likely to change their mind uh through your conversations the
• 35:20
  the people listening or the the person you're having the conversation oh usually the people
• 35:23
  listening because the people listening by definition are on some kind of a quest and have not
• 35:27
  reached a point of uh of expertise at which they would be able to be invited on a on a show like
• 35:33
  mine so the guests generally I'm not trying to change their mind about anything I'm sometimes trying
• 35:38
  to help them to see a perspective that they might be too strident to see almost never happens I
• 35:46
  can't think of any example of it actually happening but the the guests who are the most open
• 35:51
  are guests are philosophers really and people who spend their days thinking about different things
• 35:56
  and who will actually receive what I'm saying um and occasionally journalists as well um you know
• 36:03
  a guest who was an activist is obviously not going to have their mind changed because they have
• 36:06
  an enormous sunk cost in believing what they believe and fighting for it um in terms of listeners
• 36:15
  the majority of uh you know of communications that we get from listeners is is I would say there
• 36:22
  is 20 to 30% of it which is thank you for you know framing things in this way I hadn't really
• 36:27
  thought about it that way before so now my mind is open to thinking about it in a way that I hadn't
• 36:31
  that I hadn't previously but then the majority of it is just thank you for like having a conversation
• 36:38
  that we never hear anywhere else where you're actually talking about things that I sometimes think
• 36:43
  about but I can't quite articulate to myself or that you know I've kind of felt like there's
• 36:47
  something quite there's something a bit off about about the way that we're talking about you know
• 36:52
  this or that issue and that it seems sort of simplistic when I read the mainstream press but I
• 36:58
  hadn't quite figured out exactly why or how um and you know so it's refreshing so um so I I
• 37:08
  I believe that there's a bit of mind changing going on but I think more than the mind changing is
• 37:14
  is an opening up of considering of different points of view rather than a binary flip
• 37:20
  and in your conversations a lot of the a lot of the time you're navigating political disagreements
• 37:25
  and I think it's important to poke under the hood of what's going on that drives the political
• 37:30
  disagreements because of where to try and construct conversations where it's possible for people to
• 37:35
  be open to new perspectives and maybe changing their mind and resolving those disagreements
• 37:40
  we need a theory for what's actually happening here and I've come across a couple competing theories
• 37:45
  one is this idea of mistake theory which is that political disagreement is just about different
• 37:50
  understandings of the facts if only everybody understood economics 101 we would never disagree
• 37:53
  about economics again and this is so silly oh yeah well there's I mean there's some level of appeal
• 37:58
  because we we appeal to people on the level of facts if we didn't think that mattered at all we
• 38:02
  wouldn't we wouldn't bother but the other perspective is that is conflict theory which is that
• 38:07
  disagreements political disagreements are fundamentally just about conflicting material interests
• 38:12
  and so when people disagreeing about economics it's because they're disagreeing about what's good
• 38:16
  for their faction and so obviously talking about the facts is not going to sway anyone and I think
• 38:21
  these perspectives both have some appeal to them and somewhat explanatory but also a bit silly
• 38:28
  and I think a really good example of how they both fail is the question of vaccines where
• 38:33
  we can't make sense of this debate in terms of competing interests because if vaccines are
• 38:39
  beneficial then anti-vaxxers are hurting themselves and their their children by
• 38:44
  depriving their children of them and if vaccines are actually really harmful then it's the
• 38:47
  pro-vaxxers that are endangering their children someone's making a horrible mistake and is not
• 38:52
  arguing in terms of their self-interest but as I think you've observed on this very topic mistake
• 38:57
  theories is not right either because even when the evidence is pretty clear presenting it to
• 39:02
  people doesn't really change their mind so something else is going on and a compelling explanation
• 39:08
  that I've come across is that political disagreements are largely about these deep psychological needs
• 39:15
  that we have to see ourselves as rational good high status people who belong to the rational good
• 39:21
  high status group and so we adopt positions that allow us we adopt political views that allow
• 39:27
  us to preserve to meet those psychological needs and so in the case of vaccines both the pro-vaxxers
• 39:32
  and the anti-vaxxers can see themselves as having intellectual superiority of slightly different
• 39:36
  kinds so I want to know do you agree that there are these psychological needs that are important
• 39:42
  drivers of our political views and if so how do we construct conversations that allow both
• 39:47
  sides as political needs to be met so that it's possible for them to be open to yeah that's good
• 39:52
  I mean I like that way of framing it I would go a bit further I think it's quite exactly I don't
• 39:57
  quite agree it's definitely not the political battles are definitely not about facts so I don't
• 40:04
  think they're about mistaken facts I don't think I don't think either of the first two explanations
• 40:08
  are particularly good your last explanation is close but I would inject John Heights work on values
• 40:15
  here where I really think that what's happening when we get into political disagreements is that we
• 40:19
  have some some basic values differences which are closely correlated to those personality metrics
• 40:29
  which I yeah the big time yeah openness consciousness extroversion
• 40:35
  and neuroticism yes agreeableness yeah good job so along all of these metrics you can place
• 40:48
  people and there's a reliable correlation between where you lie on along those those metrics I mean
• 40:53
  openness is a good easy one to take right you know your instinctive openness to new experiences and
• 40:59
  to other kinds of things I mean I rate very high on openness I always love traveling I love
• 41:04
  multiculturalism I love different foods I love you know I'll I'll if you give me a fried a deep
• 41:08
  fried tarantula I will eat the deep fried tarantula to see what deep fried tarantulas taste like
• 41:12
  there are a lot of people who aren't like that and those people are likely to be political
• 41:15
  conservatives and they are likely to be less comfortable with immigration than I am and they are
• 41:20
  likely to have a whole you know to be more traditional and they're likely to they're likely to
• 41:24
  favor community over diversity more and so anytime we're talking about political issues I I think
• 41:32
  you know to to follow up on your example of vaccines there is a meaning that is derived from feeling
• 41:38
  like you are you are bucking what you know elite hoity-toity fancy pants people are coercing you
• 41:47
  into doing and you're taking responsibility for your own children's lives and they're on your
• 41:51
  own safety and you are doing your own research and you are finding community and meaning in a group
• 41:56
  of people who are defying the sheeple out there who are just obedient netwets and boobs who
• 42:02
  are all complicit in this big money big drug company big farmer big government public bureaucracy
• 42:08
  scam to try to you know puncture your children's skin with needles and and and ignore and
• 42:16
  sideline any concerns that you might have by dismissing you as if you're a tin hat tin foil hat
• 42:21
  wearing nutter just because you're trying to find a more communitarian and holistic way of
• 42:28
  understanding your health and your children's health and big farmer wants you to consider that is
• 42:33
  a worldview that when you articulate it like that even people who are a pro vaccine like myself
• 42:39
  can understand a bit more than just saying are they idiots who don't understand the data the
• 42:44
  data isn't going to help if that is your worldview so you have to talk to people on the basis of
• 42:50
  the worldview and their values rather than are you an idiot because the data says xyz about
• 42:56
  it either mecton like you're not going to get them that way so I think a lot of and especially when
• 43:00
  it comes to things like you know diversity equity and inclusion or immigration or the integration
• 43:05
  of migrant communities or anything like that when we're talking about data we're just talking
• 43:09
  a straight past each other it's not about mistakes and it's not about facts and it's not about
• 43:12
  misunderstanding since it's not about the actual rate of you know migrant crime and it's not about
• 43:17
  whether or not there should be quotas for particular people in particular professions
• 43:21
  it's about a clash of values and the clash of instincts between people who lie at different places
• 43:26
  on those personality spectrums so to to make progress I wouldn't say to necessarily change
• 43:33
  people's minds but to find a collaborative way of working together on a in a common mind space
• 43:38
  we have to be talking to each other in the language that the listener is going to understand right if
• 43:44
  you're a which often means just to get to the sort of strategy and nuts and bolts of how you have
• 43:51
  conversations that are most likely to either change people's minds or to make them more more receptive
• 43:55
  to other points of view you start by granting what the person has that's right on the fact in the
• 44:01
  fact universe so that you can see they can immediately see that you're not an other and you're not
• 44:05
  a them and you're not antagonistic towards their world view and their values so you know if it's
• 44:10
  something like vaccines you don't start by saying you're an idiot and the science says eggs you
• 44:16
  start by saying you know it's completely understandable that we would have skepticism towards what
• 44:21
  big drug companies say because they have time and again betrayed our trust and you know and put
• 44:25
  profit before people and governments make mistakes and public health bureaucracy's make mistakes
• 44:30
  all the time and it's also the case that and then you can start talking about Andrew Wakefield
• 44:35
  and the hoax about autism and the misinformation in there and so and then you can frame it in a way
• 44:40
  of like to really be responsible for our children's well-being it is important for us to you know
• 44:46
  follow the science wherever it leads and that you know so that is just much like it met there are
• 44:53
  many many many anti-vaxxers who will never be swayed but for the people on the fringes like I was
• 44:57
  talking about before the people who are just kind of in the swirl of like oh well I read this thing
• 45:01
  on I saw a thing on Facebook that like there's mercury and blah blah blah you're much more likely
• 45:06
  to win them over and to have them believe you when you say that there hasn't been mercury and
• 45:10
  vaccines since whatever it was 1990 something rather if you start on a common footing and that
• 45:16
  common footing always has to start from a place of values and personal values and personal you know
• 45:21
  instinct rather than facts yeah yeah I think that's interesting and you mentioned Jonathan Hight
• 45:28
  just reminds me when he's work on morality he kind of has these different moral pillars and as you
• 45:34
  say he points out that liberals and conservatives actually quite differ on these that everyone shares
• 45:39
  this kind of really key pillar of fairness and it seems like whether you're a liberal or a conservative
• 45:44
  fairness is like a really key value for like almost all people in almost all societies with almost
• 45:50
  all income levels which is really interesting and I wonder if that's kind of the place that we can
• 45:55
  sort of bring ourselves together and we can have these conversations and focus them around these
• 46:00
  actually shared values that almost all of us read you have yeah I like that I think I do think
• 46:05
  fairness is the kind of you know the uber value the value to trump all other values because it is so
• 46:12
  universally held it's a tricky one because we have wandered the left I mean part of the problem
• 46:23
  of the culture wars at the moment is that up until the the sort of late 2000s and early 2010s
• 46:30
  and you know this accelerated into the late 2010s and with the George Floyd protest in the states
• 46:36
  and the the summer of riots in 2020 and the social justice reckoning thereof there was a the left
• 46:44
  had a kind of monopoly on fairness it was obvious it would have been obvious to someone who you
• 46:48
  spoke to in 2010 for example or 2008 you know which side of politics is more concerned about fairness
• 46:55
  than the other I mean it would be a no brain it would take you less than a second to respond
• 46:59
  the left stretching all the way back you know that was that was the left's whole bag was egalitarianism
• 47:04
  and fairness that's the whole concept of socialism that's the whole concept of communism even
• 47:08
  when it's deeply unfair which it shrouds itself in the rhetoric of fairness and conservatives would
• 47:14
  have been more comfortable with a certain amount of inequality and unfairness in the interests of
• 47:18
  productivity and human vitalism and you know heroism and whatever some kind of niche in conception
• 47:24
  of people you know he wasn't big on on fairness and then the the left kind of abandoned that because
• 47:32
  there was a feeling that traditionally marginalized communities and people who'd been historically
• 47:37
  shatter upon were not progressing fast enough on the basis of a merely egalitarian conception of
• 47:44
  humanity and so the Barack Obama was really the last major public figure in America who still
• 47:51
  articulated a vision of the world if you go back and listen to the speech that first put him on
• 47:55
  the political map which was his speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention when he was a
• 48:01
  senator from Illinois he gives this incredible barnstorming speech which became the template for
• 48:06
  the speech that he gave a bazillion times and they've been the run up to his his winning the
• 48:11
  Democratic primary in 2008 which ends with this great soaring rhetoric about you know there is no
• 48:17
  red America or blue America there is no black America or white America there is just the united
• 48:22
  states of America and the crowd roars and the confetti comes down and you know God save America goes
• 48:27
  blasting up the speakers and everything it gives you a chill it's a really egalitarian and unifying
• 48:34
  and universalist vision of what is possible in conceiving of ourselves as a unified demos
• 48:43
  that gives way in the 2010s to a much more antagonistic and fiery vision of
• 48:51
  identitarianism where movements like the trans rights movement and black lives matter say it's
• 49:00
  this is all foolishness we are never going to be unified the idea of fairness and egalitarianism
• 49:06
  has always just been a smokescreen for straight white males to entrench their own power by saying
• 49:12
  look we're all equal now right I mean don't worry about the 400 years of slavery and don't worry
• 49:16
  about the patriarchy this is a you know you you're fine tuts now that you're allowed to
• 49:21
  you know join the workforce just like everybody else and this this critique said well yeah but
• 49:26
  how do you still explain the lack of female CEOs and you explain the lack of people of color in
• 49:31
  you know corporate sea sweets we need a more aggressive understanding of justice and that needs to
• 49:38
  be essentially a conception of society as being a bunch of identity groups who are all fighting
• 49:42
  for a larger share of a finite pie and that conception of the left that I think derailing
• 49:50
  of leftism from an old kind of I don't know Christopher Hitchens or you know even Bernie Sanders
• 49:57
  idea of the the left which was egalitarian and universalist into one which is more
• 50:03
  identitarian and baffle hardened yeah it was and much more sensorious and judgmental yeah sorry
• 50:10
  yeah there's it seems to have been a shift which I find it disappointing from trying to get rid
• 50:16
  of hierarchies and inequalities between opportunities between different groups to just trying to
• 50:21
  invert them which seems to completely miss the point yes yes or at least the I mean look they
• 50:26
  started out with the rhetoric of fairness so to Tom's point the fairness was always the justification
• 50:32
  for things like quotas and diversity policies and you know equity and inclusion which is
• 50:40
  noble insofar as it goes but it has become quite dogmatic and quite orthodox and I think that
• 50:51
  the the reason I'm pausing is because the difficulty of getting everybody on the same page with
• 50:55
  fairness is that a large chunk of the progressive left has is advocating for a way of thinking
• 51:03
  about ourselves as black people or queer people or trans people or you know migrants or you know
• 51:10
  whatever it might be that is actually antithetical to fairness I mean how would you articulate the
• 51:15
  view of a of a far left gender queer person in it in terms of fairness they don't actually want
• 51:27
  fairness what they want is special consideration they want a minimum number of people of color to be
• 51:34
  on in every organization they want a minimum number of women to be on every board they want
• 51:40
  religious people to have to teach their kids that there are there are multiple genders and genders
• 51:46
  are just in your head they want like it is inherently divisive now which is not to only blame the left
• 51:54
  the right has had this all along I mean the right invented cancel culture you know the it was
• 51:58
  it was not traditionally the left that was you know hysterical and sensorious about trying to
• 52:04
  ban things and detail what people can say McCarthyism was a right wing phenomenon the
• 52:09
  Inquisitions was a right wing religious phenomenon the people who wanted to ban the life of Brian
• 52:14
  were on the right not the left you know the hysteria around violent video games or whatever in
• 52:19
  the 1980s it was all right wing people it's just that we expect that from the right we expect them
• 52:24
  to be hysterical sensorious nines and over the past 15 years or so it's unfortunate that the left
• 52:31
  become the ultimate sensorious nines on a lot of these issues but I basically agree with
• 52:36
  your time that if we can find a way of framing things in terms of fairness so that you say to the
• 52:42
  you know I don't know I'm trying to think of a way so I can I can more easily do it in the other
• 52:48
  direction where you can imagine saying to the JK Rowlings of the world I understand that it's
• 52:56
  important to you that women maintain their female only spaces so you know you don't want
• 53:02
  people with penises to be in women's prisons and women's rape shelters and at the same time
• 53:07
  we're talking about a community that has been historically disadvantaged and disenfranchised so
• 53:12
  it's important you know don't you think that the fair thing to do is for I mean the problem is
• 53:17
  it's gonna get me in trouble to say this but I think she is actually on the fair side of this
• 53:22
  I don't think she does want discrimination I mean she's never said that she wants discrimination
• 53:25
  against trans people she wants a definition of women women you know to be a biological one but
• 53:32
  she doesn't want she's got no trouble with people being up trans people on the streets so
• 53:37
  well I think that's that's sometimes the point isn't it that like to your point earlier about
• 53:41
  we're talking past each other often actually when you get down to it we agree on quite a lot
• 53:48
  and it's just because people frame these arguments in different ways and end up talking past
• 53:54
  each other that it looks like we're disagreeing more in fact than we are so I think this is a
• 53:59
  already good example right where people are just one side is emphasising the rights of the
• 54:04
  important rights of women the other side is emphasising the important rights of trans people
• 54:08
  but both sides fundamentally agree that both of these groups have rights both of those sets of
• 54:13
  rights are worthy of protecting and respecting and it's just a question of really at the edges
• 54:21
  how do those yeah I mean I think that's true and I thought that that's true among I mean obviously
• 54:27
  the elephant in the room here is the social media algorithm that drives us to only see things
• 54:32
  that we agree with or and that caricatures things that we don't agree with to demonise them and
• 54:36
  make them look as ridiculous as possible so that we'll engage with them and comment on them and
• 54:40
  get angry at them and share them and so on but the I my gut tells me that you're right Tom and
• 54:47
  that that basically 90% of normies who aren't super online are on the same page about trans people
• 54:54
  which is there's historically always been this tiny minority of people who feel like they feel
• 55:01
  feel from a very very early age like they're born into the wrong body and the only way that they
• 55:05
  can live a flourishing life is for that psychological gender dysfunction to be enacted physically and
• 55:12
  for them to have all of the medical support and we shouldn't discriminate against those people
• 55:16
  for being different I think almost everybody agrees with that and probably almost everybody
• 55:23
  agrees that a woman who has been raped or in an abusive relationship who goes to seek help
• 55:30
  in a women's only rape shelter which is only for women should be free from people with penises
• 55:38
  in that rape shelter even if those people identify as female so somewhere between those two
• 55:46
  extremes where we're just working around the edges what again to come back to my critique of the
• 55:53
  left is I actually think that you know over the past 15 years it's that it's been the people on
• 55:58
  it's been the JK rollings of the world who have been more willing you know although I have problems
• 56:04
  with how strident she's become of late her original goal was perfectly consistent with the first
• 56:12
  premise that I just articulated which is that there are some people who deserve our compassion
• 56:16
  and who deserve our support in transitioning it was the other side the extreme trans activist side
• 56:25
  many of whom are not trans by the way many of whom are university educated well meaning
• 56:29
  straight white males who are trying to prove that they're on the right side of history
• 56:32
  who was refusing to consider the no penises in rape shelters and no penises in prisons and
• 56:40
  no penises in women's elite sports position and I my instinct is that 90% of people are in this
• 56:49
  middle spectrum somewhere but when I speak to Americans American people on the heterodox left
• 56:58
  they say that's not true that's not true in the in the progressive circles in California and
• 57:03
  New York that specifically on trans at least and also in immigration there is a large
• 57:10
  minority of people on the left who think it is an easy open and shut case that trans people
• 57:17
  that trans women are women full stop we're not going to go any further than that to interrogate
• 57:22
  whether or not we should be discriminating against them from getting their balls waxed at a female
• 57:26
  only salon or something all of that is just right wing obfuscation and hysterical fear mongering
• 57:33
  so just shut the fuck up about it and get on the program because the future is trans and similarly
• 57:40
  that to think about any there being any difference really between an undocumented immigrant or a
• 57:44
  documented immigrant or like to call people illegal and so on is beyond the pale when in countries
• 57:51
  that manage their immigration effectively I would say like Australia I have huge problems with
• 57:56
  the barbarity of some of our policies but nonetheless we've maintained a multi decades long project
• 58:02
  to have one of the highest refugee resettlement rates of any country in the world and one of the
• 58:05
  highest immigration rates per capita in the world and the reason why people are comfortable with
• 58:09
  that in Australia and we haven't seen the racial backlash that you've seen in the in the UK and
• 58:13
  Europe and we haven't seen the you know the kind of Trump the immigration dysfunction that you've
• 58:19
  seen in the United States is because we have total control over the borders which is partly a
• 58:23
  result of being an island but hey the UK is also an island it's also a result of having a strong
• 58:29
  border policy where we know exactly who's coming in and we know why they're coming in and we feel
• 58:33
  like we're in control of it so this is all just to say that there are shibboloths on the left in
• 58:39
  America that we as Aussies and Brits may not be aware of where to me it would seem obvious that
• 58:45
  you can talk about a migrant being illegal or or or legal like either they're allowed to be here
• 58:51
  or they're just an interloper who has snuck in and isn't allowed here like that seems like an
• 58:55
  obvious amoral a political statement to me just a statement of fact but for much of the American
• 59:01
  left that would code as racist yeah I think there's a case to be made that has been made that maybe
• 59:06
  we agree on 90% of things you're also hearing from some people that maybe we don't either way
• 59:10
  it certainly doesn't feel like we for the most part agree with one another and I think that's in
• 59:16
  part as you mentioned because perhaps this is political disagreements for once fundamentally
• 59:21
  about values but we've sort of self-sorted into identities and now it feels like you can't
• 59:25
  concede an inch of ground to the other group without betraying your your own identity and so this
• 59:30
  makes me wonder what we can replace these identities with that could be more productive and one candidate
• 59:39
  which I'd like to put forward and get your take on is this idea of the identity as being a truth
• 59:45
  seeker because I think that figuring out what's true and changing your mind has very little to do
• 59:50
  with intelligence we've all seen intelligent people that can use their intelligence to defend their
• 59:54
  view from evidence kind of no matter what it's all about mindset and Julia Gailiff has a thing called
• 59:59
  the scout mindset which if you've heard of this but the ideas you know you should approach the
• 1:00:03
  information landscape like a scout seeking to you know build an accurate map rather than a soldier
• 1:00:09
  who is trying to defend and fight against an alternative group I think this is totally true
• 1:00:16
  and for me I have tried to build an identity as as a scout as a truth seeker and not only is this
• 1:00:23
  an identity that can maybe take the place of other less productive ones but I think it could be
• 1:00:29
  really valuable in and of itself for what what do you think about it yeah I like that I like that a lot
• 1:00:33
  I'm not sure it's a replacement for a values based on pessimistic about the ability to change
• 1:00:42
  people's basic fundamental commitments allegiances and motivations I think the scout is probably
• 1:00:49
  born not made really like I would find it it would be an interesting experiment to try to graft
• 1:00:56
  scout them onto a soldier yeah right I think that's probably temperamental and it probably arises
• 1:01:02
  out of your settings on the ocean yeah you know it definitely does a lot of the work I think it's a
• 1:01:07
  practice too though you can yeah that's true that's true I mean when I think about my when I
• 1:01:12
  think about people who like uncomfortable conversations I mean the show not having an uncomfortable
• 1:01:17
  conversation then it's it's generally people who do value open-mindedness intellectual curiosity
• 1:01:25
  a little bit of sort of spiciness something it's a little bit different from the mainstream and I
• 1:01:30
  don't think that people necessarily need to work hard to foster that instinct like I don't think
• 1:01:35
  that these are people who would otherwise be devout like Greek Orthodox priests cloistered in an
• 1:01:42
  abbey somewhere who just you know find my show and go oh okay now I'm going to be open-minded
• 1:01:47
  about everything I think there's a tribe of the tribalists like there's a collection of people
• 1:01:54
  who are not easily fittable into a like a you know a preset box who sort of just have always
• 1:02:02
  kind of presented having to be told what to think and what check boxes they have to take in order
• 1:02:08
  to be a good sort of soldier in the marching army of the left or the right or you know whatever
• 1:02:16
  um and so maybe that's just a third what is interesting about what you're
• 1:02:23
  positing is like how expandable is that group right like I mean I see much of my job in the media
• 1:02:32
  as being as stealing 10% off the left and 10% off the right and 10% off the ideologues here and 10
• 1:02:38
  percent off the wokesters here and 10% off the you know the alt writers over here and just the
• 1:02:44
  the 10% that is winnable and it may be more than that it may be 50% it may be 60% there's certainly
• 1:02:50
  some portion that's not winnable but whatever portion is winnable let's try to get them back onto
• 1:02:54
  the playing field of actually kicking around ideas and being scouts instead of soldiers I don't
• 1:03:01
  think everyone can operate that way but I'd like that way of framing the center of the terrain
• 1:03:07
  hmm well I'd like to to push on beyond the craft of having uncomfortable conversations to
• 1:03:14
  to some kind of meta questions but I have one last question about the craft um that Tom and I
• 1:03:19
  be remiss of us if we didn't pick a brain about so one topic that we've mentioned that people find
• 1:03:23
  particularly uncomfortable is the question of where food comes from and how it affects animals
• 1:03:27
  um you've spoken about the uh conflict that a lot of people have here they love animals but we
• 1:03:31
  also know in the back of our mind there's a thing called factory farming it's producing most
• 1:03:34
  of our animal products um and when we raise this topic people get really defensive because
• 1:03:38
  it seems to imply even just the the mention of it that they have some quite indefensible
• 1:03:45
  moral inconsistencies which is irrational we don't want to be irrational and that's their
• 1:03:49
  complicit in some nasty shit and we don't want to be bad um and I think this defensiveness is only
• 1:03:56
  made worse by what vegan activists have done for the past 20 years which is say to people that if
• 1:04:01
  you don't change your diet right now you are evil um obviously nobody wants to hear that
• 1:04:06
  and so they're they're gonna tune it out and be particularly defensive and you know you have
• 1:04:12
  interviewed advocates on a range of topics and some better than others are able to talk about
• 1:04:17
  these sensitive issues in a way that uh it doesn't raise people's defenses um and doesn't make
• 1:04:24
  them feel judged by the mere mention of a topic so what is the secret uh have you nailed have you
• 1:04:31
  have you figured it out huh I mean
• 1:04:39
  I think you need to start with the common with some kind of common ground and build up as much
• 1:04:47
  of a base of agreement as you can before you start pulling you know pulling at the threads of
• 1:04:53
  their own uh habits right so it's gonna start with um I mean in my this look some people will
• 1:05:00
  just not be responsive to intellectual arguments right some people are just motivated by their
• 1:05:04
  gut and they're like you know you've seen t-shirts that say you know but I like bacon yeah
• 1:05:08
  like that you know we're like you know what about bacon okay if that's the if that's the level
• 1:05:13
  of of intellectual discourse that we're operating on you do you baby you go on you go and but at
• 1:05:18
  least be consistent and go and hunt a pig you know and be okay with like slitting its throat um
• 1:05:24
  but I think you can start with people by articulating that by asking them whether or not they
• 1:05:31
  agree that other animals are not machines but that they feel pain and uh capable of you know
• 1:05:36
  emotions and sensations uh and then you can get to asking them about what they know about the way
• 1:05:43
  that those animals are treated and frequently there you'll just hit it hit a cliff where they go
• 1:05:48
  I know that it's terrible and then they'll just stop and they don't know what else to where else to go
• 1:05:53
  so then I would suspect that in that particular case coming with a solutions focus is probably
• 1:05:59
  better than coming with a finger wagging focus like you know did you know that if you just cut out
• 1:06:05
  meat on Monday if you just do meatless Mondays then you know over the course of your lifetime
• 1:06:10
  you I don't know save the lives of how many thousands of you know animals or something like that
• 1:06:15
  you know you could so I think coming in with so coming in with a common ground of
• 1:06:20
  fairness to come back to what Tom was saying like fairness is probably even a way of articulating
• 1:06:25
  why we should give a shit about the way that animals treated and coming in with interesting
• 1:06:31
  solutions interesting alternatives interesting ways of thinking about these things because
• 1:06:37
  I mean to take my own experience with that particular issue I know that I'm so I don't
• 1:06:44
  factory famed flesh when I can avoid it and it is a lot easier in Australia than it would be in
• 1:06:50
  the United States to eat non factory famed meat the vast majority of our of our meat here beef
• 1:06:56
  and lamb are pasture raised that we don't really have concentrated animal feeding operations like
• 1:07:01
  they do in the United States so that being said that don't absolve me of the responsibility of
• 1:07:08
  the comic responsibility for that having the the blood on my hands of those animals but I kind of
• 1:07:13
  regard it a little bit the way that I regard my flying which is I know that it's not great and also
• 1:07:21
  it's such a massive problem that there's a collective action component here and so I'll do whatever
• 1:07:26
  I can to be part of the movement to get action on climate change and action on animal rights
• 1:07:31
  but I'm not going to derange my own existence on this planet and you know every day suffer the
• 1:07:39
  indignities of not being able to live my life the way that I want to because I'm the lone idiot
• 1:07:44
  who's not flying and who's not eating animal products in a world that's set up differently
• 1:07:50
  from that and maybe that's a moral cop out it it probably is but that's the way that I
• 1:07:55
  currently think about it yeah and I think that that makes sense and it's funny you mentioned flying
• 1:08:00
  because of course one of the ways that people a lot of people kind of deal with the fact that
• 1:08:05
  they have to fly is with an offset you know you like get someone to fly some trees or something to
• 1:08:10
  sort of offset the carbon that you do and Aden and I outside of this podcast it's obviously the
• 1:08:15
  most important thing we do but we we also run a charity where we do offsetting for people's meat
• 1:08:23
  and animal consumption basically so we say actually if you donate quite a small amount of money
• 1:08:30
  and it's about 23 US dollars a month you can do you can prevent as much animal suffering as
• 1:08:36
  were you to go essentially completely vegan and so we think this is kind of an interesting alternative
• 1:08:42
  way that people can like you say without deranging themselves and be able to effectively do you
• 1:08:48
  still be doing good still be part of that that movement for animal rights without you know without
• 1:08:54
  having to kind of not eat the birthday cake or whatever it might be yeah yeah some people
• 1:09:00
  a lot of people like find this like another idea it's basically providing a solution to a problem
• 1:09:06
  because as you say they got to this point in the conversation with the like yeah I agree it's bad
• 1:09:10
  I'm not willing like I'm not going to change my diet there and they don't have another option
• 1:09:14
  give them another option but then there's another group of people that find it kind of a bit
• 1:09:20
  itch in some way because like offsetting the experiences of something that lives doesn't feel
• 1:09:26
  quite the same as as as carbon but yeah yeah ultimately I mean I think it's it was an interesting
• 1:09:34
  moral it's a very it's a very sort of utilitarian way of thinking about about pain isn't it to be
• 1:09:40
  like I'm going to offset the pain of this creature yes and you know by enhancing the life of this
• 1:09:45
  other creature or preventing its death um yeah no I mean I like that it's still you know all credit
• 1:09:50
  to you for doing it and at the same time it doesn't resolve my basic problem about a collective
• 1:09:55
  action problem that I just fundamentally resent the fact that we live in a system in which
• 1:10:02
  there are collective problems that are required that we expected to invent individualist
• 1:10:09
  solutions too yeah we have collectively created the problem of the atmosphere being soaked with
• 1:10:15
  heat trapping gases it is our job to collectively figure out a way to decarbonize the atmosphere
• 1:10:21
  and to decarbonize our energy industry this is not a crazy challenge this is not an impossible
• 1:10:27
  thing to do we know basically how to do it we know that carbon taxes exist and all kinds of
• 1:10:32
  other incentives we know that trading systems exist we know that alternative renewable energies
• 1:10:36
  exist there's nuclear there's any whatever you want to talk about is humankind has is more
• 1:10:41
  than well equipped to have done this long ago we knew about the problem in the 1990s the Kyoto
• 1:10:45
  Protocol laid it out in 1992 by 2010 or 2005 we could have been well on well on our way but we
• 1:10:52
  have not figured out the systems the ways to get you know oil money and fossil fuel money out of
• 1:10:58
  politics the way to democratize the system well enough to pull off this landing don't put it back
• 1:11:06
  on me your fuckers I have to not fly because you we collectively have failed to do something and
• 1:11:13
  it's similar with animal rights like yeah absolutely I think I mean famously the idea of the carbon
• 1:11:19
  footprint was invented by I think it was BP the oil company in order to exactly to put this
• 1:11:24
  off of their shoulders and onto yours and I think the animal even needs to do exactly the same thing
• 1:11:31
  forget about making this a problem of you changing your diet and make it about the structures
• 1:11:38
  you know the the massive amounts of money that the animal lobby puts in every year into misinformation
• 1:11:44
  or securing lots of lovely subsidies for them so that their foods are cheaper than everybody else's
• 1:11:48
  for example and I think that this the part of the reason that we're quite excited about this idea of
• 1:11:55
  of offsetting of our donations is because those donations go to exactly the organizations working
• 1:12:01
  at that sort of systemic level of change and therefore you are able to kind of as an individual
• 1:12:06
  do something but that is that is actually starting to shift this question up level to the level of
• 1:12:12
  system change and away from the like it's your fault and you've got to fix it you know yeah so yeah
• 1:12:18
  we've we've covered how to have uncomfortable conversations but there seems to be a shift
• 1:12:22
  going on in society at large in terms of people's views on which conversations be ought to be
• 1:12:27
  allowed to have in the first place you know free speech has been a cornerstone value in the
• 1:12:34
  will democracies for as long as I can remember and for a long time the idea that the prevailing
• 1:12:39
  narrative has been that threats to free speech have come primarily from the political left with
• 1:12:45
  cancel culture and de-platforming and stuff like that but now we have this right wing US
• 1:12:49
  administration that as far as I can tell is willing to deport people based on political speech
• 1:12:54
  and you know has loyalty tests for their civil servants and will deny access to tourists that
• 1:13:02
  have ever said anything negative about the government so it seems like we're now in a position where
• 1:13:06
  both sides politically speaking are willing to sideline free speech when it conflicts with their
• 1:13:11
  own political ends this is concerning and it makes me like I want to get your take basically on
• 1:13:18
  whether what you think is going on here is that people are starting to value free speech less
• 1:13:24
  or perhaps people never really valued it all that much and now there's this less of a taboo to
• 1:13:28
  speak up about that or third option maybe people always have valued free speech and they still do
• 1:13:33
  but we have come to view our political opponents as so dangerous that we actually have to
• 1:13:38
  sideline it to make space for more I mean point two and point three at the same point I think the
• 1:13:44
  people have never valued free speech and that there are currently ideas that are so bad that they
• 1:13:48
  don't that just free speech shouldn't apply to them those two things are actually the same thing
• 1:13:52
  and I agree with the former that people have never really valued free speech I don't think most
• 1:13:59
  people I think 20% of the population since the enlightenment have been genuinely on board with
• 1:14:05
  like Voltaire's famous probably apocryphal you know adage that I hate what you say but I will defend
• 1:14:13
  to my death you're right to say it yeah and the majority of people pay intellectual given
• 1:14:20
  intellectual nod to the idea of free speech because they like the idea of them and their community
• 1:14:24
  being able to say the things that they like being said but the moment something arises that is
• 1:14:29
  too different from what they believe yeah of course it lands as being dysfunctional or perverted
• 1:14:33
  or anti against the common good you know that things that are extremely foreign just do land
• 1:14:38
  that way for human beings for all mammals you know and so I think the number of people who
• 1:14:44
  would actually storm the barricades to defend their opponents ideas to say something that they
• 1:14:50
  absolutely detest has always been a minority of of people and you're in that minority would you say
• 1:14:55
  no I wouldn't put my sorry I'm in the minority of pro free speech yes yes that's right and because
• 1:15:02
  I think that that is the underlying kind of super value that underpins you know civilization our
• 1:15:07
  ability to wrestle with with uncomfortable ideas in provocative ways what's happening at the
• 1:15:14
  moment is really interesting let's just separate legal consequences of speech from social consequences
• 1:15:21
  of speech because you know the first amendment in free speech as it's enshrined in by governments
• 1:15:27
  means that you can say anything and the government won't punish you for it won't throw you in jail
• 1:15:33
  that's different from you can say anything and no other private citizen or company is allowed to
• 1:15:39
  chastise you or punish you for it right which is which some people sometimes confuse like it's my
• 1:15:44
  free speech right to go on Twitter and say such and such no it's not it's your free speech right
• 1:15:49
  to say that thing wherever you can say it and not be penalized by the government for saying that
• 1:15:56
  but it's not your free speech right to force the owner of a social media company to allow you to
• 1:16:00
  say it without booting you off it's not your free speech right to go on television and say it
• 1:16:04
  without consequences it's not your free speech right to say it on social media and not get fired
• 1:16:08
  by your company for saying it yeah you try to speak but not to be amplified necessarily well that's
• 1:16:14
  one thing but I'm saying you have a right to speech speak but you don't have a right to not face
• 1:16:18
  consequences from people not liking that speech the amplified question is another good point to raise
• 1:16:23
  which is that we currently live in a social media ecosystem where algorithms are selecting for content
• 1:16:29
  purely based on whether or not it encourages engagement meaning whether or not encourages you to
• 1:16:34
  share it or like it or comment on it or watch it if it's a video that has one very reliable and
• 1:16:42
  predictable consequence which is that things that you see that you're likely to agree with will
• 1:16:47
  pander to your beliefs and will be good enticing versions of that and things that you see that
• 1:16:54
  you're likely to disagree with will be barbaric demonized versions of that thing they will not be
• 1:17:00
  highly persuasive nuanced you know bridge building things because bridge building isn't it
• 1:17:07
  doesn't around you it does not going to get you engaged you're not going to write an angry comment
• 1:17:10
  in the comment thread of something that's deeply reasoned at least not as much so it's an
• 1:17:17
  inflammation machine social media it's an extremeification machine the recommendations in places
• 1:17:24
  like YouTube and the for you thread on things like social media where it's no longer people you're
• 1:17:30
  following but people who things that it's suggesting for you which is the entirety of tiktok
• 1:17:35
  ecosystem for example all of that is a rabbit hole producing system of echo chambers and overlapping
• 1:17:43
  groupthink you know thought bubbles and silos so yes there you've got people's voices being amplified
• 1:17:52
  with no consideration for whether or not they're constructive or even true or whether they're
• 1:17:57
  deeply deleterious to the national conversation and those those can be amplified and disseminated
• 1:18:03
  even on the even if they're especially perhaps if they're total bullshit or inflammatory
• 1:18:08
  um so that's a major problem we have to grapple with that that is not that is not a sane way to
• 1:18:13
  manage the ecosystem the information ecosystem of a civilization and it'll derail human civilization
• 1:18:19
  completely if we don't get on top of that before artificial intelligence starts making it even
• 1:18:24
  worse so there's that you know don't amplify divisive nonsense but then there's what I'm
• 1:18:30
  talking about also which is just think clearly about the difference between um preventing the government
• 1:18:37
  from punishing people for saying certain things or believing certain things and uh what kinds of
• 1:18:44
  how tolerant we want to be in our civil society of dissenting views so what you've and traditionally
• 1:18:51
  think about the you know as I was saying about the sort of weird trajectory of the left over the
• 1:18:56
  past few decades or past 15 years as it's become highly sensorious and it's fidelity to social justice
• 1:19:01
  dogmas rather than to a freewheeling kind of libertarian social civil libertarianism that had
• 1:19:06
  evolved if you were if it was the 1960s and you were a young person who wanted to throw shit at
• 1:19:13
  the wall and produce crazy art and make your parents upset and you know screw the system and
• 1:19:20
  fuck the man and like show you know throw the overturn the chest table uh you're on the left
• 1:19:28
  I mean that there was no doubt about it you know throughout most of history the left has been the
• 1:19:32
  place where young dissenting radicals can go to be edgy the fact that the left
• 1:19:39
  seated that territory and turned into a bunch of finger wagging skulls who wanted to police
• 1:19:46
  exactly what you said about BIPOC people of color and you know members of the LBGD QIA plus
• 1:19:52
  community and you know make you know shame you if you didn't put gender pronouns in your email
• 1:19:57
  signature as a corporation or the rainbow flag on your social media profile or whatever it might be
• 1:20:02
  um that is a problem because it means that all of the energy of youthful exuberance and
• 1:20:09
  dissent is now on the right where you've got young people you know people under 25 are Republicans
• 1:20:16
  in the United States at larger numbers than they've been in generations because they think Donald
• 1:20:20
  Trump is a cool shit poster um that's a worry so it's worth noting that just in terms of the
• 1:20:27
  cultural space of free speech uh it is unfortunate to me as a person of the left that the energy of
• 1:20:34
  kind of free speech and shit posting and fun playful rambunctiousness now resides more on the right
• 1:20:40
  than on the left um and it's also equally unfortunate that on the question of government interference
• 1:20:48
  in our speech and government punishment for what for things we can say we're seeing a
• 1:20:52
  resurgence of a traditionally right wing phenomenon which again now is on the the right again
• 1:20:57
  for all of the sensory isn't of the left over the past 15 years they have not been using the
• 1:21:01
  government to send dissenters to El Salvadorian prisons or boot them out of the country or you
• 1:21:07
  know seek the uh the tax office on them or whatever and now in Donald Trump i think we just see
• 1:21:13
  a resurgence of a traditional populist authoritarianism that we've seen in you know at best the
• 1:21:21
  burlusconies of the world and at worst the odor ones and orbans of or punishes at the worst of the
• 1:21:26
  world um and whether or not america can get a handle on that before it uh degrades american
• 1:21:33
  democracy and uh you know liberal civil life so thoroughly that it becomes a semi-authoritarian state
• 1:21:40
  is a question that is that is open um so but final point on this i do think that that is in part
• 1:21:48
  a consequence of the uh lack of respect for free speech that the left has exhibited over the past
• 1:21:55
  10 or 15 years you know this is not to blame the victim here but i have been banging on for
• 1:22:00
  since at least 2012 when i started working at half post-life in new york city uh about the risk of
• 1:22:09
  framing everything as identities the risk of being too intolerant towards conservatives the risk
• 1:22:16
  of shaming people for not being uh sufficiently signed up to our ideological points of view
• 1:22:24
  and i've been warning that you can only push things so far before there's going to be a backlash
• 1:22:28
  and trust me it might sound great in your like trans women of color collective to paint your flags
• 1:22:37
  and go ra ra ra like white men of pigs and like you know male men should all die and there'll be
• 1:22:43
  a pit certain period of time in which people will cop that but it's a dangerous game to open the
• 1:22:48
  Pandora's box of turning the volume up on people's identities and there's only so long
• 1:22:55
  that white males are going to accept being told that they're the only identity group in the world
• 1:23:01
  that isn't allowed to feel proud of their sex or gender or race so like play this game with caution
• 1:23:09
  and we have not been playing this game with any modicum of caution whatsoever the identity walls
• 1:23:15
  was that the left unleashed are coming back to bite us all in the ass and i don't think you would
• 1:23:20
  get the free speech the anti free speech authoritarianism of Trump right now had you not had
• 1:23:26
  the hyper um sensorious kind of self appointed guardians of what is acceptable speech introducing
• 1:23:35
  this new kind of identity and social justice orthodoxy over the prior decade or two and uh yeah
• 1:23:43
  I think the the solution isn't to encourage everyone to be proud of their identities because these
• 1:23:47
  are just arbitrary things at the end of the day I think we should be encouraging people to be
• 1:23:51
  proud of things that are less arbitrary like being true thinkers for example yeah absolutely yeah
• 1:23:57
  so conscious of time uh we could let you go Tom it's got to go to bed so um one um kind of like
• 1:24:04
  last area I want to quickly cover with you is the media landscape that uncomfortable conversations
• 1:24:09
  sit within um and just to frame the crisis that traditional media is in with uh sobering stat um in
• 1:24:17
  the UK in 2022 just 29% of people said that they trusted journalists and this had them
• 1:24:23
  beating real estate agents who were at 28% by just one percent so when you're in that close to
• 1:24:27
  real estate agents you know you're in a bad way and uh even more depressing is that this 29%
• 1:24:32
  was the peak the the 40 year high of trust in journalists in the in the UK and this isn't a UK thing
• 1:24:38
  either um and so a lot of people have pointed to new media podcasts youtube sub stacks and stuff
• 1:24:45
  as the kind of alternative and these can be great alternatives to a dry bit tired newspaper
• 1:24:52
  opinion piece everyone saying the same thing um but it can't really fill the shoes in terms of
• 1:24:56
  covering breaking news uh and uh investigative journalism so my question is what do you think a healthy
• 1:25:04
  media landscape looks like and what relative roles should these two types of media play
• 1:25:09
  given that comparative advantages well the new media will never be able to do investigative
• 1:25:13
  journalism properly it doesn't have the resources to hold politicians to account by actually
• 1:25:19
  investigating you know pouring over their tax returns you know it doesn't have the resources
• 1:25:24
  to station people in foreign bureaus and see what's actually going on on the ground in Sudan or
• 1:25:28
  something so conventional legacy media outlets are indispensable for investigative journalism and
• 1:25:34
  for on the ground fact based reporting um and i hope that they manage to i think they will find a
• 1:25:41
  way to continue doing that well um you know publications like the new york times in the war street
• 1:25:46
  journal both with different political balances still do incredible investigative journalism and
• 1:25:51
  great reporting and they don't lose money anymore because they manage to you know people buy
• 1:25:56
  wordl and and that funds their subscriptions um and then in the new media ecosystem and i'm
• 1:26:02
  i'm really optimistic at the moment because i because of the resurgence of this subscriber model
• 1:26:06
  that you're seeing on sub stack which is not without its flaws i mean it's i think you know it is
• 1:26:12
  important to have editors and managers and board members like there is a utility in having an
• 1:26:18
  accountability structure in information um dissemination uh i don't think that i need it because
• 1:26:25
  i am a profession you know like not to toot my own home but i am a professionally trained journalist
• 1:26:29
  i've worked in newsrooms and i am old enough now that i've done enough i've done my 10,000
• 1:26:33
  hours of like traditional reporting that i kind of know what's bullshit and what's not and i know
• 1:26:40
  how to look into things and i know how to have conversations that i think are fair minded but
• 1:26:45
  there is a risk that when you've got you know everybody just opening up their own platform and
• 1:26:50
  essentially becoming their own you know news dissemination yeah outfit with no editorial
• 1:26:55
  oversight and no no truth checking or fact checking that you're going to end up with a mad
• 1:27:01
  cacophony in which everybody is captured by their own audience and just telling them what they think
• 1:27:05
  that they want to hear that's a liability but i don't think that that liability is nearly as bad
• 1:27:09
  as the algorithm liability like you know if the alternative is either if the alternative to the
• 1:27:15
  legacy media is either we find out about what's going on in Gaza from influencers on tiktok
• 1:27:20
  who are dancing to us and talking about genocide or we get it from a bunch of you know substackers
• 1:27:26
  who may be imperfect but are groping their way towards trying to have a conversation with people
• 1:27:31
  who who respect them enough to actually pay money to on a monthly basis to hear what they have to
• 1:27:37
  say i'd choose the latter yeah i think that's a really important point i'm the cal newport who
• 1:27:44
  sort of does a lot of work on technical criticism makes this point a lot which is this move back
• 1:27:49
  to subscription model really is a potentially really positive break with this sort of algorithm
• 1:27:54
  driven i mean the kind of conversations that you have would not be necessarily the best things in
• 1:28:00
  the algorithm because you're trying to bring in your own youtube numbers like you know i've got a big
• 1:28:04
  they're pretty good they're nothing like what my podcast number yeah when people have the
• 1:28:09
  yeah my substack numbers when people have the ability to actually tell each other about this
• 1:28:14
  show about my show and go and navigate manually to an old fashioned podcast feed or to substack and
• 1:28:21
  like enter in their name and receive my show people who are willing to do that there are lots of
• 1:28:26
  those but the algorithm doesn't catch it really doesn't they really you know the algorithm on
• 1:28:32
  tiktok and youtube and places like that and not they're they're just dead to my show so i think
• 1:28:37
  you're right i mean i and i could change that of course i could go down the diary of a CEO
• 1:28:42
  path or the trigonometry path you know i love those guys but they're much more focused than i am
• 1:28:47
  on producing on generating clickbait content with hysterical headlines that will catch an algorithm
• 1:28:53
  and i frankly i'm too old to care about that shit yeah i mean we we need the stuff that you make
• 1:28:58
  right or some some people disagree like not quite sure sure we need trigonometry but like you know
• 1:29:05
  cool well um you've been very generous with your time it's been great to chat through some of
• 1:29:10
  these topics i feel like um you must be tired to death with them because it's what you talk about all
• 1:29:15
  day but i feel like the conversation could go on for a million years maybe maybe you feel the same
• 1:29:19
  but the final question i want to ask you is what perspective that you see out there in the world
• 1:29:26
  would you most like people to change their minds about i would like people to
• 1:29:34
  this may not be a mind change maybe an emphasis change have more respect and gratitude for what
• 1:29:42
  liberal democracy is and for the systems that have been painstakingly put in place since the
• 1:29:49
  enlightenment and more recently since the second world war to generate the stability and
• 1:29:55
  wealth that we enjoy in the western world and much of the eastern world if you include Japan and
• 1:30:01
  South Korea um i i think we're at a moment where we risk thinking that it's cute to throw
• 1:30:08
  shit at the walls and see if we can do things better because and this comes from left and right
• 1:30:12
  right on the on the left there's this agitation and impatience with like you know the whole system
• 1:30:17
  being rigged by big corporations and white males to keep people down and like you know
• 1:30:21
  oppressed and marginalized communities have never had it worse and like we're under attack from
• 1:30:25
  the right and um it it in trans lives matter and on the right there's this you know kind of
• 1:30:32
  burn it all down ethos of like this big bloated state and we need doge to come in and hack everything
• 1:30:38
  and let's pull out the chainsaws and you know get these fancy hoity toity elitists out of
• 1:30:42
  Washington DC and all the lobbyists and the corrupt politicians you know have to be shown the door
• 1:30:47
  and people power and farage and Brexit and these two instincts i worry that every century or so
• 1:30:56
  humanity just has to like burn itself to the ground and kill a hundred million people and then
• 1:31:02
  realize what actually matters and go oh shit we shouldn't have played around with that let's
• 1:31:06
  let's put in a box and lock it up for a while those passions yeah and we did that after World War
• 1:31:12
  we created NATO and the United Nations and certain and mutually assured destruction and certain
• 1:31:18
  taboos and you know it's sort of a geopolitical order that we are now unpicking the United States is
• 1:31:24
  in particular and yeah I just don't want us to open the box totally again I mean I totally
• 1:31:31
  like survey show that particularly young people that faith in democracy is the lowest it
• 1:31:37
  it's been um and democracies clearly better than the alternative but I think people's dissatisfaction
• 1:31:42
  is coming from a place where democracies haven't been serving them and instead of saying you can't
• 1:31:47
  tear it down just make peace with it as it is we should be making democracy something that people
• 1:31:54
  that deserves to have people's faith we need to refer yes but I also say liberal democracy
• 1:31:58
  intentionally not just democracy and I could even if it's easier to take the word democracy out
• 1:32:02
  and say liberalism meaning a tolerance for other people's ideas a celebration of pluralism
• 1:32:08
  a celebration of difference in a non dogmatic way not like finger wagging you have to like respect
• 1:32:14
  my difference but like just sort of the world's a big place there are going to be people who aren't
• 1:32:19
  cool with difference they're going to people who are cool with difference part of being cool with
• 1:32:22
  difference is being cool with people who aren't cool with difference like you know liberalism in
• 1:32:27
  its classical small L uh sense of uh living a live and let live ethos and a a desire to not impose
• 1:32:36
  one's own vision of the world on your fellow citizens and the cohesion as a demos nonetheless
• 1:32:44
  in spite of all of your differences a sense that we're pulling in the same direction and that
• 1:32:48
  you know we have a universalist view of all people being basically trade it treated equally
• 1:32:54
  and you know we're all in this to try to create a rising tide that will lift all boats
• 1:32:59
  and like be fair to each other that to me transcends democracy if you could achieve that without
• 1:33:05
  democracy I would ditch the democracy sooner than having an authoritarian style of democracy
• 1:33:10
  where 51% of the population rules tyrannically over the remaining 49 percent I just don't think
• 1:33:16
  you can do it without democracy in the long term it's liberalism for me all the way yeah
• 1:33:21
  cool preach nice okay well thanks so much for joining us Josh it's been a delight
• 1:33:27
  thanks for having me catch you next time