The Big Bumper Thread of Interviews and Chat Show Clips

[DanaC]

Well that sucks.

It was Daily Show with Trevor Noah interviewing David Miliband I daresay there's another version

[DanaC]

A fantastic interview/Q&A at the Oxford Union with Armando Iannucci - creator of both the British Thick of It, and the US Veep.

Funny - but also some fascinating insights into the differences and similarities between our two political systems

[DanaC]

Very good long form interview from the WildScreen festival. Chris Packham (who I adore) interviewing Sir Richard Attenborough.

[DanaC]

Awesome interview.

[Gravdigr]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Very good long form interview from the WildScreen festival. Chris Packham (who I adore) interviewing Sir Richard Attenborough.

Isn't that David Attenborough?

[DanaC]

yes. Yes it is.

No idea where my head was at - that was his brother


Watch that Jordan Peterson interview. It's awesome.

[Undertoad]

Oh gawd yes! Did you see the channel 4 interview. I watched it twice, I couldn't get over it.

I don't even know what it is, exactly. It seems like a reach, that all the ugliness is coming from post-modernism, as he says. I have to digest that harder. Everything else is like, wow. Coming at this political world from a clinical psychology perspective seems like a really appealing approach, like he's found a bunch of real aspects to this world that we were missing all along.

10 out of 10 - as are the Joe Rogan casts with Bret Weinstein - fabulous!


And yeah, Dr. Peterson, why WOULD you ever go back to University and lecture to 300 people, when there are 100,000s on YouTube who really want nothing more than to hear these lectures and learn! Consuming some of these ideas makes me hungry for more.

[DanaC]

Oh, that interview was amazing. I posted a segment of it somewhere - couldn't find a clean version of the whole thing though except the Channel 4 one and didn't know if that would play outside the uk. Did you watch the full 30 minute unedited interview?

I really wanted to slap her. Like multiple times.

There's been a lot of commentary on it , some of which has been a bit focused on the 'Peterson destroys SWJ feminist interviewer' angle, but a lot of which has been a lot more nuanced.

What doesn't seem to have been picked up much is how that sits in the context of British news shows and how they do interviews. I've noticed over the last 10 or 15 years a particular style and approach to such interviews that seems to have been largely shaped by the giants of the late 80s-00s - Jeremy Paxman in particular.

Now Paxman at his height was something to behold - he was fierce and fearless and he forced the powerful to account for themselves . Then he became like a parody of himself - combative when it wasn't needed, artificially ramping up the adversarial nature of interviews.

That style is how interviews are done now. Some do it well but some are Cathy Newman or ....oh fuck what's his name - there's another interviewer that just really pisses me off with the 'so what you're saying is...' bullshit.

Adversarial interviews have their place - and sometimes, particularly when dealing with powerful politicians for example, it can be a good thing for an interview to ambush them into speaking truthfully - derail the party line they're towing. The trouble is it gets used indiscriminately against anybody who has been invited on as a controversial figure and in the wrong hands actively obscures the truth.

[Undertoad]

Yes! I watched the whole half-hour twice. I can see why people are bent on describing it as destruction, but it's not that. She sets out to destroy a caricature of him - and he sets out to have a REAL conversation. He seems to "win", if we want to state it that way, merely because she can't find a toe-hold to use against him... because he's being totally and completely honest.

I can definitely see how that would work against politicians - if there is even any speck of dishonesty.

[DanaC]

Yeah. This is the classic, and very famous in the UK, interview Paxman did with then Home Secretary, Michael Howard. This became the gold standard

[Undertoad]

Yup, there it is - he gets that toehold, and it's all over then he can stand on that dishonesty and it is devastating. I love how Paxman acknowledges he is going to be very rude, although at that point, any common-sense viewer can see, the actual rudeness is Howard specifically not answering the question.

[Clodfobble]

The interview on Channel 4 was good. I agreed with everything he said.

BUT.

There were some things the interviewer (because she sucked) didn't follow up on, which were brought to greater prominence in the Joe Rogan interview (who tried to follow up a little better, but wasn't as much of a Devil's Advocate as he could have been.) In Peterson's mind, a single step toward group mentality or group protection is an inevitable death march to literal genocide a la Maoism. At the same time, he acknowledges that unchecked capitalism leads to increasing extremes of inequality that lead to an unstable-and-doomed-to-collapse system. He notes that "we have to figure out ways" to correct for that, and more specifically that we haven't come up with any such ways so far.

Similarly, he notes that men and women overlap on average more than they differ, and it is only in the extremes where strongly-correlated stereotypes arise. I agree. However, he also notes that most people don't understand these statistics, with the only conclusion being that this is why people don't understand the factual nature of his statements about extremes. The other side of that coin, however, is that people also don't understand the level to which men and women overlap, and why that statistically-unlikely aggressive woman who is interested in tech does often suffer from the reality of discrimination at a social level, and often an institutional one, from her male peers. He acknowledged that gender does play a role--albeit a smaller one than is often claimed--but the interviewer was a sensationalist idiot unwilling to drill down into the nature of that percentage, regardless of its size.

Enforcing equality of outcome is not the solution, I totally agree--but neither is pretending there are no individual, non-general realities for people (of both genders) who are in the 40% but assumed to be in the 60%. Again, he glosses over this with "we have to solve those problems" and freely admits he has no solutions. That's a cowardly punting down the field, IMHO. It's not enough, from a personal ethical standpoint, to say that "A is not the problem, and I'm done." You have to continue to acknowledge that there is still a problem, and try to come up with other ways it might be solved.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Well I'll just watch a few minutes of Rogan and Peterson just to get a feel for it.
Two and a half fucking hours later... Hulk learn.

[DanaC]

@ clod - totally agree. There are a few of his points that I really take issue with - that said I think his is a voice that adds to public/political discourse in a way that is needed.
That's what is so frustrating about that ch4 interview. What a wasted opportunity to dig deeper

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Yup, there it is - he gets that toehold, and it's all over then he can stand on that dishonesty and it is devastating. I love how Paxman acknowledges he is going to be very rude, although at that point, any common-sense viewer can see, the actual rudeness is Howard specifically not answering the question.

Yea paxo at the height of his power was awesome.

Also @ bruce - ikr? I was going to watch the first 20 mins or so.....