 We are so pleased tonight to have Dr. Maisha Cherry here to give a talk on and have a conversation with us on conversations. Dr. Cherry is an assistant professor in the philosophy department at UC Riverside. She is a former fellow at Harvard's Sofra Center for Ethics, at their Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research, and a Satataya fellow in their African and African-American Studies department. She has worked broadly on issues of moral psychology, political, and social philosophy with special attention to the role of emotions and attitudes in our shared public life. She's co-editor with Owen Flanagan of the recent collection The Moral Psychology of Anger and author of Unmuted, Conversations on Prejudice, Oppression, and Social Justice, published by OUP for sale in the lobby and the basis of our conversation today. In Unmuted, Dr. Cherry gives us a collection of her interviews with a diverse range of philosophers on her Unmute podcast. They wrestle as philosophers and citizens with vital questions like, what is it to show solidarity across borders? What does it mean to be an ally? Questions about the nature of love and what philosophy can learn from literature. We also get Dr. Cherry's own meditations on the role of difficult conversations in our moral and political life, and some general thoughts toward an ethics of such conversations. So with that brief intro, I give you Dr. Misha Cherry. Thank you so much for that introduction, and I'm so happy to be here strangely. I just came from Southern California, and there was no sun. And it feels so good to feel the sunshine, and it's fulfilling every stereotype that I've heard about Stanford. So it's so good to be here. Thank you so much for the sunshine, and thank you so much for this opportunity to share with you all. Thank you so much for coming out tonight. I know it's late. It's about my bedtime, but I've had lots of expressions. So I'm excited to talk to you. Probably overly excited, given the espresso to talk to you about conversations. So let's get started. So I started the Unmute Podcast around 2014, and there was two reasons why I wanted to start the podcast. So the podcast itself is a political, I guess you can say it's a social and political podcast, in which I talk to diverse philosophers about the social and political issues of our day. That's the tagline. If you listen to an episode, that's exactly what it said in the intro. And there was two reasons why I wanted to start the podcast. But one, I wanted to give attention to topics that I felt wasn't given much attention to, and the discipline of philosophy, professional philosophy. I also wanted to give attention to certain bodies, certain philosophers, that I felt a lot of people did not know existed. So let me be a little bit more clear about that. So in the book, I am talking to queer folks. I'm talking to trans folks. I'm talking to black and brown folks. I'm talking to disabled and able-bodied folks, young folks, older folks, people that stereotypically would not, people would not think have PhDs in philosophy. So I wanted to give attention to their work and who they were. And I also wanted to make philosophy quite accessible to the public. We have the stereotype of what a typical philosopher is and what philosophy is, that it doesn't have anything to do with our day, that there's no really practical reality other than talking about the meaning of life. But I wanted to make a lot of things that I was finding quite interesting when I read journal articles, when I read books. I wanted to make that accessible to the public. So fast forward about probably a couple of years ago, I was thinking to myself, I can do a little bit more in this regard. So I thought, hey, why won't we create a book? And the reason why I wanted to do the book, of course, was to keep along with these two particular objectives that is to continue to give attention. But I felt that accessibility wasn't a billion fully realized with the Unmute podcast. Two reasons being, one, there's a lot of people, believe it or not, that do not listen to podcasts. Can you believe that, right? So I wanted to make these conversations accessible to them and also I wanted to make the conversations available for those who were hearing impaired. And so that's why we have had the book Unmuted Conversations on Pregnancy, Profession and Social Justice, once again, which is being sold outside, right? So what a lot of people don't know, only my close friends really know that I really do not like to talk on the phone. I get nervous when people tell me, I wanna, you know, Mahesh, I need to have a conversation with you. So they were always, as much as I wanted to have the idea for the podcast and have these conversations with these individuals, they were always worries that I had, and it continues to this day, worries that I had leading up to a particular conversation. So here's some of the worries that I wanna share with you. So one worry that I had was with these, with these philosophers take me seriously. So just to let you know, in 2014, I was a first year graduate student, right? And here I am talking to PhDs, not only assistant professors, but also senior folks, very popular and famous people in our field. And one worry that I had was, would they take this graduate student seriously? All right, so that was one worry that I continue to still have. Another worry that I had was I always wondered, would the conversations be productive, right? If people were to listen to it, would they really get something out of it? And I think that was a lot of pressure that I had going in into the conversation. Another worry that I had is, I don't know how it is in other kind of disciplines, but sometimes when you read people's work, it may excite you, but then when you meet them in person. Okay, so I always wondered, would people be as interesting as their written work? Right, and I've been lucky that a lot of people whose work I have found exciting, talking to them with conversations, they have also been exciting, so I've been lucky in that particular regard. Another worry that I had was, could I disagree respectfully, right? Mind you, this stuff was live and on the air. It's one thing to, sometimes when you disagree and you're responding to someone in a paper, you can edit, right, and try to figure out, can we use these particular words? But in that moment, I was live and direct, how can I disagree if I disagreed? How can I do that respectfully because there was no delete button in that regard? Another worry that I had was, how do I handle being challenged? And then last but not least, this is something that I'm continually thinking about. The good things that I did in those conversations, how do I transfer those skills into my interpersonal life? So for the last five years, and this was not intention, for the last five years, I have become obsessed with conversations, right? Not only the conversations that I have with these particular philosophers, but also I've been hyper-aware of who I am, what I bring, how conversations are going, when I'm talking to a student, when I'm talking to a colleague, when I'm at the bus stop, right? I've been obsessed with conversations. So here's something that I describe conversations to do and the introduction or the conclusion of the book. So I say, quote, having conversations is a way for our social linguistic species to express and explain, correct and collaborate, make sense of things and make things happen. And then I say, anything that can do all of these things will never be easy, right? So people would think, and maybe this resonates with some of you all, people might think, well, what makes it difficult, right? It's the problem, the problem is the topics, right? It's because we disagree on our particular values, because we vote on two different political stances on the aisles, it's because of exactly what we're talking about, so it's climate justice that's the difficulty, it's abortion that's the difficulty. Some people might think the problem, the thing that, the reason why our conversations are difficult, the problem is the topics, they is the thing that divide us. But I begin to think over the last five years that perhaps it's not the topic, perhaps it's us. So this is a claim that I wanna make for the next 35 minutes or so. So I wanna say that if we work on us, since I think the problem is us, if we work on us, our conversations would be a little bit easier, right? Our conversations would be a little bit easier. And I think that we can work on us by asking ourselves three particular questions and I wanna explore these questions in our time together. So the first question I wanna explore is, who are we in our conversations? What do we do in our conversations? And how do we see others in our conversations? And then I wanna offer up some suggestions just in case we don't do these things well, all right? So let's first address the first question, who are we? So when we think about conversations, there is a who for those philosophers in the room, educators in the room, there's a who that sometimes immediately comes to mind and that is socrates. So when we think about a person who is a great conversation model, we think about Socrates, but those are not familiar with Socrates. We know that part of Socrates methodology is that he walked around Athens, he found an expert of the day, he was able to have an ordinary everyday conversation and from that ordinary everyday conversation, he was able to turn into a philosophical conversation when she isolated the key term and from isolating that key term such as justice or piety or love, they were able to go back and forth and interrogate and try to find what is the nature of this particular topic. And Socrates was obsessed with that particular conversation, he presumed not to know anything, right? He challenged his interlocutor, he didn't take any assumptions for granted and he challenged them so much to the point that according at least to Plato and what we have in the dialogues is that the challenge was so intense that the conversations never really ended the way that we expected them to end. They usually ended up abruptly, right? So when we think about Socrates as far as being a conversation model, we get kind of this Socratic model, right? In which particularly for educators, there's a way in which we can bring that kind of model into the classroom, right? So we're patient with our students when our students say something, we challenge them not to take certain assumptions for granted and we engage in this wonderful practice of critical thinking using Socrates as a model. But here's my question, would you have wanted to have a conversation with Socrates? Some of you, the geeks in the room, you're like, hell yeah, all right. So if you do, let's just say you wanna have a philosophical conversation with Socrates, would you have wanted to have a private, a sacred, a sincere, a conversation that had nothing to do with academics, all right? Would you have wanted to have that kind of conversation with Socrates, all right? So a lot of people get on his interlocutors as being not having typed skin, not wanting to seek truth, but I wanna be sympathetic towards them and I wanna suggest that perhaps the reason why they usually ended the conversation with Socrates is that Socrates perhaps was read as the following, as arrogant, as insincere, and as dismissive, right? I know we may have some Socrates defenders, I can't wait to talk to you in the Q and A, but I'm suggesting that some people perhaps may have read him as such, all right? And that's the reason why the conversations never went. The way that we thought they would have went, all right? Now these are characteristics that perhaps they interpret Socrates to have and I wanna say when people read you in this particular way, all right, and you may give them reasons to read you, it's hard, it's difficult to have a conversation when these are the particular characteristics that one have and I think the reason is because character matters in our conversations, right? So for example, it's hard to digest advice from a hypocrite because character matters in our conversations. It's hard to share something significant with someone who makes you feel insignificant because character matters in our conversation, right? It's hard to correct someone, to explain something to someone who thinks that they know it all, right? Because character matters in our conversation. So I wanna give us some suggestions to kind of think about some virtues, some characteristics, some traits that we can have in our particular conversations. And I just wanna put this out there. I don't profess for this to be novel. There have been a lot of virtue ethicists and also a lot of social epistemologists that have suggested that we have these particular virtues, but these are just some virtues that I've been thinking about lately. So one virtue that I think that we can bring to a particular conversation is that we can bring humility. And it's hard to do that particularly when we have PhDs, right? And we're affiliated with certain kinds of institutions, right? And we've read a couple of books, right? And we attach to a particular issue. We may think that indeed, like Socrates, that we know it all, right? And sometimes it's hard to come to particular issues and particular conversations with a sense of humility, right? But I think humility goes a long way. I mean, one of the things I might say for the Socrates defenders, you know, one of the things that Socrates says, I know that I know nothing. Now, whether he was sincere about that, I don't know, right? But if he was, I think that's a humble approach, right? To just know that you know nothing. I mean, just in all honesty, I was discussing this with some postdocs earlier today. I think, as a result of recently getting a PhD in the last year, people might think, hey, you think you know it all? And I think to myself, since I've gotten a PhD, I begin to realize I don't know anything, right? A month after I got my PhD, I tried to put some IKEA furniture together. And I realized this PhD means nothing, right? And it humbled me to remind me that that means nothing, right? So I think bringing humility to a conversation. I mean, if you've ever had a conversation with someone that you thought was just brilliant and they come to the conversation, just humble. I mean, it goes a long way. When it brings out of you how the conversation shifts, how comfortable it makes you feel it goes a long way. Another trait that I think we can bring to our conversation is being tactful, right? We live in a tell it like it is kind of culture. Some people are admired for telling it like it is, right? But I think bringing a sense of discernment, a sense of sensitivity to the ways in which we speak, how we speak, when we speak to each other, also goes a long way. Another virtue that I think that we can bring is just being open-minded. You know, the reality is that what we believed in, what we thought maybe 20 years ago, you may not think that today in 2019. Because ideas, if we're growing, ideas can shift. And I think being open-minded in a particular conversation, being open to people's arguments, being open to people's claim, not being so dogmatic and holding on to what we believe, I also think goes a long way. Then another trait is just being generous. I must say, I don't know how this is in other kind of disciplines, but in philosophy, another term that we refer to as generosity is having a charity, or bringing charity to a situation, right? So when you read a particular text, you may read it, and immediately you may assume that the person is saying this, right? And you give them the benefit of the doubt, and you think, well, maybe they are thinking this, or maybe they think this, right? And that's a sense of virtue that we're taught to bring to intellectual texts. And I must say that I have a tendency to do that in academia. It's so hard to do that in my interpersonal life, right? Because sometimes when a lot is at stake, it's hard to be generous towards people because we have some assumptions about what they think, or where they're going, or what they really mean, right? But I think generosity also goes a long way. And then last but not least, another virtue is just being patient, right? Being patient with others in conversations, also being patient with ourselves. And here's an example of being patient with ourselves. Have you ever talked to someone, and they're talking, and a thought comes to your mind, and you say, don't mean to cut you off, but, right? And I think in that moment, we think, when we do that, we think that what we're saying, or what we're thinking in that moment, is more important than what that person is actually saying, right? And so as much as we need to practice patience outwardly towards other people, I think we need to do that less often and practice patience with ourselves, right? And give people the opportunity to speak as opposed to thinking that every thought that comes in our mind deserves the stage at that particular point. So those are some virtues. A lot of people are not surprised that these are particular virtues, but as a result of doing the podcast, I've gotten kind of a different view of what virtues can be. So there's an interview that I have with Meena Krishnamurthy in the book. I believe this is the first chapter, and we're talking about a concept that she calls political distrust, right? And you might think that things such as distrust is not a virtue, but I think that it is, and she thinks that it is. So this is how she's imagining in the interview political distrust can be, and then I'm gonna apply that to conversations. So this is what she says about political distrust, and the context that she's referring to is a civil rights movement, and her argument is that King had to bring kind of a level of distrust to his allies, to people that he negotiated with, and that was important to keep them accountable, right? So she says, quote, political distrust is part of that system of checks and balances. It's a way of making sure that democracy and justice stays on the straight and narrow so that we are pushing forward and trying to make progress. She continues, and because of our biases and the way vested interests come into play in politics, we need another check. And I think this element of distrust can serve as that important check and point us in the right direction, right? Now mind you, her context is quite different, but I think we can take from her is that even those things that we might consider vices can be virtues in our particular conversations, right? So there are some people that I think deserve a little bit of distrust in our conversations, and that's a way to keep them accountable, to keep them honest, and we can probably think of other things that may typically be displayed as vices that can be virtues. And so I think that if we were to take these virtues and these particular traits and apply them to our conversations, I think we will be a better person when we enter into conversations, and those conversations will go a little bit more easier. So let's transition to the next question. So what do we do in our conversations? So I think that there are certain kind of what I call kind of destructive moves that we can take in our conversations, and whether we do them intentionally or unintentionally is beside the point. But these are some of the destructive moves that I think sometimes that we make and we need to watch out and make sure that we don't do them. So here is an example of a destructive move, and this is a destructive move that, interview that I have with Rachel McKinnon about allies and active bystanders. And then that particular interview, we talk about the destructive move called gaslighting. So for those who are not familiar with it, this is how she describes with a gaslighter does. She says, quote, a gaslighter downplays the seriousness of an injustice. So just imagining, just to give you a context, she's imagining you having a conversation with someone and you're coming to them to report that something has actually happened. Let's just say a sexual assault, for example. And she says, as opposed to that person putting into practice the virtues that I've kind of laid out, this is some of the behavior that that person engages in. She says, a gaslighter downplays the seriousness of an injustice if someone claims to have suffered. So they downplay it. And they tend to directly attack the reliability of the affected person's perceptions of the events or their memory of the events. So not only are they downplaying what happened, right? As opposed to say, oh, that didn't really happen. But they're also suggesting that the person that's reporting it is not as reliable as one might think. Perhaps they perceive things in the wrong way. Perhaps they're remembering things in the wrong way. So here's an example of the practice. So your gaslighting, according to Rachel McKinnon, when someone reports something to you and you immediately say, maybe you are just overreacting. Another way in which one can gaslight is someone who's reported sexual assault. And you say, well, he wouldn't do that sort of thing, right? And I wanna suggest when you respond in that way to a particular person, that you're committing a destructive move called gaslighting. Another destructive move that I think that we can play and this is a move that I echo in a book that's also in display. You don't have to buy it. I'm sorry. I mean, I work hard, so let me advertise. So there's an anthology that I recently published. There's a chapter in which I'm talking about this particular concept called anger policing. And popular media, they have called this kind of tone policing is when we try to kind of control and police the emotions of others. So this is how I describe someone who's participating in a destructive move of policing. So you go to this particular person, you may be angry, right? But you're having a particular conversation with a particular person in anger. And this is what an anger policer does. The very presence of the anger is a reason to disapprove of it. So they don't need to know what you're angry about. Just the fact that you're angry, they disapprove of the emotion. They also insincerely dictate the terms of the discussion with the goal of ignoring the wrongdoing. So they're dictating terms, calm down, and they do that not so that you can actually relax or they care about your wellbeing because they wanna not focus on the wrongdoing. They rather focus on your emotional state. And being only concerned with his or own feelings, right? So they're more concerned with how your anger makes them feel than about how the wrongdoing led to your anger and has transformed your life. And thus they are unwilling to sympathize. So here's an example of anger policing. I take this from the work of Audre Lorde and she describes this after giving a speech. This is what a white woman says to her after her speech. Tell me how you feel, but don't say it too harshly or I cannot hear you, right? So this is an example of anger policing. If someone comes to you and they're angry about something that has happened, perhaps they are a victim police brutality, perhaps a man says something very sexist to them. As opposed to being concerned with their emotions, being concerned with their event, you basically tell them, hey, before I hear that, can you just tune that down? Or I can't hear you, right? That's an example of anger policing. And then another destructive move that I do highlight in the book, which is in the conclusion, is something that I call grammar guards. And I hope none of you all have participated in this practice. This is probably the most easy to do than the other ones. So this is how I explain a grammar guard. Grammar guard, the person who randomly appears on your social media feed with the purpose of being super rational man, who so mission is to save the day by demolishing every comment that doesn't have the proper logical structure or spelling. This discourages conversations, right when we need it the most. So imagine you all are on Facebook and you're engaging this real intense conversation about something that has happened politically. People are sharing and pouring out their heart and being vulnerable online, giving advice, et cetera, et cetera. And as opposed to you giving a particular comment, you basically tell someone that they spelled a word wrong, right, as a way to sidestep the conversation. So this discourages conversations, right when you need it the most. So let me testify to this and just let you know how vulnerable we all are. So this is after I wrote the book. It's like a month ago. Someone on Twitter and someone critiqued a particular documentary that came out suggesting that it was absent of a particular figure. And so they were criticizing the documentary. And just for disclosure, I was being kind of extra defensive because I know the person who produced the documentary. And so the person basically says, well, this documentary was good, but I can't believe that they had a discussion without mentioning W.E.B Du Bois. But they spelled Du Bois wrong. And so I was tempted by saying, you spelled Du Bois wrong, it spelled this particular, I was really tempted, right? And I just felt that that just wasn't the thing to do. The focus is they felt that a figure was absent. And the fact that we live in a culture in which figures, particularly black figures, are erased, then this is something that's ought not to do. And for me to respond, and I was so tempted, I'm still tempted. I hate when people misspelled Du Bois name. And even with me trying to convince them that they were spelling it wrong to bring attention, was a sidestep from the real issue, right? And that discourages conversations, right when we need them most. So if you are tempted, have participated in any of these destructive moves, here are some suggestions not to do it. So here are some actions that we can take to make sure that we're not doing this. The first thing we can do is to stop doing it if we are doing it. And my older age, I've realized that the best thing that you can tell people to do, as opposed to writing an argument and convincing them to do certain things, is something to stop, it works, right? So if you are gaslighting people, stop it. If you're policing the emotions of people, just stop it. If you're being a grandma guard, no matter how tempted you are, don't do it, right? Another action that I think we can take is perhaps do the opposite. So take for instance, gaslighting. So if you are tempted, no matter how much you think that the person that you know, you really know them and they wouldn't have done this, perhaps what you need to do, as opposed to attacking their particular reliability, perhaps you just need to listen to what they have to say. Listen to their report, right? As opposed to doubting their particular reality and their reliability, right? Another thing that we could perhaps do is to be kind of sensitive to the context. And I think sensitivity to the context will determine what we ought to do in particular situations. So here's an example. So there's an interview that I have with Cassie Herbert. And in the interview, we're talking about a concept that she calls and also Kristi Dotson refers to as a risky speech. And she suggests in certain conversations, particularly in very deep conversations that are very, very sensitive, perhaps the best thing we can do is to ask the person what they want us to do in a particular conversation. So here's an example that she refers to and this is taken from the interview. She says, and this is someone reporting or telling someone about a sexual assault, sorry, this is intense, but she says, quote, if we ask them, the person who is confiding us in the right context, properly supportive, what do you want to happen? Oftentimes, someone would tell us through that answer what it is that they're looking for. Are they looking for belief? She says that's huge, especially when a person is reporting on a serious injustice because those things so often are disbelieved. Just looking for believed often is in of itself incredibly significant. So perhaps in that moment, we need to ask that person, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to tell somebody? And we can also make it very particular to a particular context. How do you want me to respond? Is this something that you want me to do? Do you just want me to listen? And I think that can go a long way. And so this interview, this suggestion, also has me thinking of other suggestions that perhaps not only should we ask someone, but when we've been gauging with a conversation with someone, perhaps, perhaps, maybe we need to preface our conversations with telling that person what we want them to do in that particular conversation. So let me give you an example. So a close friend of mine recently texted me and they said to me, I have to tell you something. Very serious. I knew it wasn't about me, right? Because it would have been a different kind of text. So she didn't have an issue with me. She said, I want to tell you something. And I'm like, oh, this is going to be good, right? And I'm waiting, I'm waiting for what she's about to tell me because I know it's going to be juicy. And she says to me, but I'm going to need you not to judge, right? And she knows me. She knows that I'm a moral and political philosopher and all I do is all day, is judge people and things and work, right? So she told me who she didn't want me to be. So I was very hyper aware of that. So she tells me, thank God she told me before because I would have been very super judgy at the very beginning of the conversation. So she tells me that it was good too. She tells me this juicy, just juicy thing. And I was able to be the non-judgy friend in that conversation. And I learned a lot from that, right? And you can imagine if she would have kept that in. And I would have been my normal judgy self. That would have made her feel, perhaps, that would have affected our future conversations and what she felt comfortable with telling me. But I think sometimes not only asking a person what they want us to do in a particular conversation, but sometimes we may want to tell people who we want them to be. Now, mind you, this is all context. Since not all conversation is going to call for this. Sometimes there are some things that a person may tell us they want us to be that perhaps ethically ought not to be, right? It would depend. This is context sensitive. There's no doubt that I believe that sometimes we can tell a person what we want them to do, how we want them to respond. And that will be very useful, right? And then another thing that we can do in our conversation, sometimes we just need to listen. That goes a long way, right? I know this is difficult for people who love to talk. And also for people who are uncomfortable with silence. But I've learned that just listening goes a long way. And sometimes the pressure, when it goes back to the trait of humility, the pressure of thinking that we have all this knowledge that we ought to share, and maybe this is the moment to share it. And sometimes the best thing we can do on conversations, no matter how deep or undepth they are, listening just goes a long way. So that's the question of what are we to do. And I want to suggest that we ought not to participate in destructive moves. And doing the opposite, stopping, being sensitive to context can help us do certain kinds of things in a conversation that will make those conversations easier for our conversation partner, and also easier for us. Let's go to the last question. How do we see others in our conversation, right? So kind of similar to the destructive moves, I think often, more often that we are like to admit, we can have a distorted vision of the people that we are engaged in conversations with. So let me give you kind of three examples of distorted vision of the other person that I have in mind. So sometimes we might think that when we enter into our conversation with the people, that they are an audience member and not an interlocutor or a companion or a conversation partner, right? Let me explain a little bit more about what I mean by an audience member. When we perceive or view someone as an audience member, they are a passive listener. We view them as a passive listener, right? That person is just there to listen to us. And we are the active narrator, right? So let me give you an example. Hopefully you don't have this friend now. Perhaps you've had this friend in the past where they call you up. They're doing all the talking, so much so that you can put the phone down, make some fried chicken in the kitchen, check your email, come back, and they will not know that you left, right? That's an example of treating individuals as an audience member, right? They are just there to listen to us as we talk and talk and talk and talk and talk, right? Another way that we can view our interlocutor or conversation partner as an audience member is when we perceive them as individuals that need to be schooled, right? That's why they're talking to us. That's how we feel like we need to do all this talking because there's something that they need to learn from us, right? So we need to keep talking, they need to be schooled. That's why they need to hear our voice, right? And so it's no doubt that when you view other people as audience members, as people that need to be schooled, that you will engage in practices such as mansplaining, right? That you feel that as a man, the woman that is talking to you, even if she's an expert, she's an audience member, and therefore you need to explain something to her that she's probably quite aware of, knowledgeable of, and perhaps wrote a book about it, right? And when you treat people as an audience member as opposed to an interlocutor or a conversation partner, you might even participate in other kinds of explaining, such as white explaining, right? When we feel that we need to explain to a person of color what racism is, right? When they have lived that particular out because we perceive these individuals that need to be schooled, they have nothing to offer, they're just simply passive listeners that need to listen to our particular voice, right? And I think this flies against the model, and we were talking about education earlier about Socrates being a convert, particularly education model, but this kind of practice of viewing people as audience members and not as contributors is something that Ferry had a problem with in his book, Pedagogy of the Press, right? And he believed that true knowledge, true education can never happen in that particular context, right? When one person is doing all the talking and the one person is listening. And he says dialogue, and dialogue, which he suggests is embedded in what he calls the problem-posing system, which is very different from the banking system of knowledge where you just talk to people. He says dialogue, where there's an exchange. It rejects communicaries, right? It rejects just getting up soliloquy in, right? And it embodies communication, real communication, right? That goes back and forth. And he argues that it's only in this real communication, even in the education sense, where you think that students should be audience members. He suggests true education, true knowledge does not happen in that particular context, right? And I take from him and his idea about education, that even in our conversations with each other, true knowledge, getting to know the other, right? Getting to learn from what that conversation has to bring is never gonna happen when one person is doing all the talking. When one person and the other person is perceived as not being a contributor, when the other person is perceived as a person that needs to be school, true knowledge. And he also argues true liberation will never happen in that particular context. So I think we need to change the way in which we see individuals that our conversation partners are not audience members, right? Another distorted vision that I think we have of or we could have of our conversation partners is viewing them as epistemic laborers, right? And their epistemic, their job is to do labor knowledge or do work in the realm of knowledge. Now it's interesting because this is kind of the complete opposite of an audience member. So one might think when you view an audience, a conversation partner as an audience member, they need to be school. And some people may say, well, with epistemic laborers, you view that individual as somebody who needs to school you. So that's good, right? And I wanna suggest that that is not good. So when you view a conversation partner as an epistemic laborer, you're viewing someone as someone who ought to teach you, right? So you're engaging a conversation if you're a man with a woman and they should teach you. They should do all the teaching you about sexism, right? So when you talk to a person of color, they should do all the work of schooling you about racism, right? So what is the problem with that? Well, I think it commits what I call the group work fallacy. You all remember when you were in high school and college? What is one of the reasons why you never liked to work in groups? Cause usually what happened is one person ended up doing all of the work, right? And I think the problem of treating your conversation partner as an epistemic laborer, it's not that you're treating that person as someone who could bring knowledge to the table, but you look at that person as the person that ought to do all of the work, right? They need to do all the teaching, teach you all about sexism, teach you all about racism, teach you how to be a better person with them. And the problem with this is emotionally taxing, usually for that particular person. Usually we force people to do this and they do all this work uncompensated. And usually sometimes what happens is usually the case is that they do all this work of teaching us and we still leave being skeptical about what they just taught us, right? Now what we'll find is that usually there are certain people who have certain kind of social positions that are usually treated as epistemic partners or epistemic laborers in our conversations and these are usually minorities. So here's Adji Lorde from her essay, Uses of Anywhere. She says, quote, black and third world people are expected and expected as the word, like this obligation to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. And she says, why this has happened and the expectation is there. She says, all the while, the oppressors maintain their position and they evade group work fallacy. They evade their responsibility for their own actions. And she says, this is a constant drain of energy, right? So when we treat people, particularly women, people of color, as the only reason we're gonna engage in conversation with them is that we want them to teach us all about racism and sexism. And when we look at them as having to do all the work and we do no work, this drains their energy and it is also just not their responsibility, right? That if we really wanna have true conversations with people and we really wanna know about racism and sexism, we don't leave it all up to certain kind of groups to do all that work, right? Being a true community member, a member of any kind of polity is making sure that we share in reciprocal work, right? That we also feed ourselves and learn things on our own, right? So there's another way in which we can also, last but not least, view our conversation partners is that we can not only view them as epistemic laborers, right? They must teach us everything and we're not gonna do any of the learning on our own. Is that we can look at them or view them as emotional laborers. So what do I mean by this? So you treat your conversation partner as an emotional laborer when they always do the job of giving you advice, all right? So you only call them up when you want them to give you particular advice. They're always and always is the important word, always your advisors, right? Here's an example. So you may have someone in your life that you only have conversations with them when you need advice from them, all right? So you may call this person up and say, hey, I wanna know what you think about this, blah, blah, blah. You get advice, you say thank you and you hang up, all right? So what is the problem with this? Because we like to give advice to our friends, right? We like to give wisdom and share wisdom in our particular conversations. What is the problem with this? I wanna suggest that when we treat our conversation partners as advisors or emotional laborers, in those conversations we are always at the center, right? So we're not very much concerned about how they are doing, right? What their well-being is like. We never inquire into that particular state. We are always at the center. And usually what is also the case is that there's usually no reciprocity, that we don't return, turn the favor, all right? Here's Justice Zimmerman suggesting in the context of gender how it seems that women, or at least the rumor is, is that women enjoy this kind of work and is expected to do this kind of work and get no reciprocity. So here's Justice Zimmerman. She says, quote, we are told frequently that women are more intuitive, more empathic, more innately willing and able to offer secure advice. How convenient that this cultural construct gives men, sorry, brothers, an excuse to be emotionally lazy, right? It goes back to that laziness and not taking responsibility. How convenient that it casts feeling-based work as, quote, an internal need and aspiration, supposedly coming from the depths of our female character. And we continue with Audre Lorde again. She says, black women are expected to use our anger only in the service of other people's salvation, other people's learning. She says that time is over, all right? So it usually is the case only certain people that we use to give us all the emotional labor and all the epistemic labor. So if you have a tendency to view people in any of these particular ways, what are some suggestions, right? To get us back to viewing people as people, right? So here are some actions that I think we should take. The first thing we should do, if we have a distorted view, treating someone as an audience member, only as an epistemic laborer, only as an emotional laborer, we can begin to see them, right? Now I know this sounds elementary, but let me go a little bit deeper. So there's an interview that I have in the book with Paul Taylor. And in the interview, we're talking about Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison, but we're particularly talking about black aesthetics. And he talks about this concept of invisibility. And this is how he describes invisibility. He says, quote, invisibility is just that. And we're talking about blackness in the chapter. Invisibility is just that black folk in particular don't register as persons, as people with perspectives, or as people with subject positions that are worth considering, right? And this is not just limited to black folks. Any kind of people, when they are invisible, when they don't register as persons to us, they can be in our face, talking words, but they don't register as persons as people with perspectives, or as people with subject positions that are worth considering, right? And he's talking about blackness. They're not racially unmarked because we actually see them, right? They're hyper-visible, but they're still invisible, right? So my suggestion is that it's not their job to be visible to us, right? We need to do whatever we need to do, right? To make sure that they become visible to us. And what I mean by that, you can do that by beginning to see our conversation partners, people that we talk to, as actual people with perspectives. They have a fresh take on the world, right? Not only do they have particular perspectives, and perspectives in a sense that they don't have a black perspective, they have an individual perspective, right? But they also can come to the conversation with also knowledge, right? That is a way of seeing people, right? But I just don't think that we should see people. We also should begin to see people for who they really are. So I have a conversation with David Livingstone Smith, and in the chapter we're talking about dehumanization, and our view on dehumanization is quite different, but this is how he describes dehumanization. He says, quote, we dehumanize others when we think of those others as subhuman creatures. You might think of me as a parent to be human, but not really human on the inside, where it matters. On the inside, you may think that I'm a beast, I'm an atom, and a monster. He has very extensive work on this, but basically he's suggesting that when we dehumanize people, then when we think that although they may look human on the outside, on the inside, we may think that they really are a monster, they really are a beast. So one of the things that he suggests that we need to do is begin to see people as actual human beings on the inside and also out. And I want to take that and go a little step deeper, is that not only should we see them as human beings on the inside and out, but we see them as persons with needs, right? And persons with feelings, right? And then last but not least, after we see them, see them for who they are and change, we need to change how we see ourselves as well. So this is very briefly, all right? You all know this, that in our conversations, I think a lot of times what we think of others has a lot to do with what we think about ourselves. So I think we need to work on not seeing ourselves as superior, no matter how much we think we know, how wise we are, how we think our age has gotten us to a particular epistemic position, right? And how we think that our social position make us in any way bigger than the other person. The reality is that we are not what we think we are, right? So we need to begin to change to not see ourselves as superior to other people and also not to see ourselves as a center of the universe. I have no suggestions of how you need to work through that. Right? But I think that's something that we all, no matter what our social position is, that we all need to begin to work on. I think once we begin to do that, then we can really begin to have some good conversations with folks and receive what they have to say. So what am I not saying, right? So as much as I'm out for these kind of suggestions and getting us to think about in very different spheres about who we can be, I think I need to be clear about what I'm not saying. So I'm not saying that we also have conversations by any means necessary, right? So I'm not suggesting that because conversations have the benefits that I've talked about early in the talk that we need to just have it, right? So we need to talk to a white supremacist, right? No matter how much they say that, you know, we are not real people, right? I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that we ought to have conversations that's gonna compromise one's self-respect or one's dignity, all right? I think there are limits and I think we need to be wise about the kind of conversations that we enter into, right? I'm also, I'm not utopian or naive about things. I do not think that conversations will solve all of our problems. That is, if we get everybody in a room and we start talking racism and sexism and all the problems in your marriage is gonna be fixed, all right? I'm not suggesting that. And I'm also not suggesting going back to the realization that conversations are not gonna solve everything. I'm not saying that by focusing on conversations that we ought not to focus on the problems, which is the topic of our conversations, right? So I'm not saying that we ought not to talk about ending discrimination or ending sexism or ending whatever what we're talking about. This is all I'm saying. I'm offering up a challenge, right? And I'm suggesting that we be better in our conversations, that we do better in our conversations, that we see better in our conversations. And I think if we do these things, then we begin to get some of the benefits of conversations that I talked about at the beginning of this talk. Thank you. So let's have a conversation about conversations. First of all, I just want to say thank you. That was really wonderful and I learned a whole lot. And I was curious, when did the conversation in your life surrounding conversations specifically begin? And like what was the context of that? Did it begin? So it's interesting, I never really, so here's the thing, I've always felt, I've always told people, all my friends know, don't call me on the phone, right? Because I was hyper aware of their certain contexts in which I'm not a good conversation partner. So I've never been the kind of person that could have conversations in a very distant way. So it's very awkward for me to talk on a phone to people, right? Because I like to have face to face, right? So I knew at that, beginning to know what your dislikes, what your comfort is. I knew that that was always a discomfort for me. Back in the day, I used to have interviews over the phone and it filled me with so much anxiety. So I knew kind of the limits of where I could have conversations at, right? But as far as the content of conversations, I don't think it really arose until I decided to be an academic in which particularly philosophical conversations is just something that we did, right? We've continued the tradition of psychiatry. This is something that we did, right? And so when I would talk about my work to other people and they're talking about their work and then that went into other kind of directions, I began to also just see the benefit of those kind of conversations. For those who do not know, some of your best work comes as a result of talking to folks about it and the phenomenon that you're talking about. And then beginning to see in grad school how those conversations can also go wrong, right? And then it just made me hyper aware of what has happened in my life previously and the conversation partner that I've been some of the things that kind of turned me off. But I think specifically being very focused on it was when I had to kind of do it professionally with the podcast, right? So all those anxieties that I kind of talked about, I had to get those under control in order to have these particular conversations. And then I began to think, oh, if I sacrifice my discomfort, look what I can get out of it. So what is it that I'm getting out of it, right? And what are some other sacrifices that I can make? And what is the thing that still makes me feel uncomfortable, right? And also, you know, I was talking about this prior to the talk, but realizing that as I prepared and prepped for these conversations that are in a book over the last five years, you know, when you do it in this particular way, you have to be so strategic and plan it out to make sure it goes well, right? Because that's just the style and the context. And it made me think, am I that strategic in other contexts? And what am I getting in this way, in this forum that perhaps I'm not getting in my private life or professional life outside of the podcast? And that's the case, what can I bring and what am I learning and what am I becoming that's good in this context that I need to apply in my personal life? And I think that's one of the things that I became kind of just hyper aware. Oh, I'm doing this good. I'm not doing this good in this other context, right? And why is it the case? Why is it so difficult in the other context? So that seems to be kind of a progression of the sorts that have got me interested. And this is the end of the day. The end of the day is that all of us need to be experts, right, because this is something that we do every day. We may not write every day, even if we need to. We may not write every day. We may not read every day. We may not watch TV every day. But if you don't live on our rock, you have conversations every day, right? And the way that technology is the case that you don't even have to talk on the phone or be face to face. But even the conversation, you can call them conversations even now. I think they are conversations. They may be bad conversations, but even the stuff that we post on social media on Twitter, we're still engaging in conversation. So if it's just something that we do as human beings, we probably need to learn how to do them well. And if it's something that we do and something that we need and they're not going right, then what is the problem, right? So it's been a slow progression. And I think that not only for me, and I'm hoping that people will see that there's an art to it, but there's also a challenge to it. And we are our greatest enemy. Yeah. So I'm wondering if we need to say a little more about the epistemic laborer point. So here is a kind of conversational style I encounter pretty often that I think does fall under the sin of treating the interlocutor as an epistemic laborer, but might not look like it if we don't qualify a little bit. There's a sort of idea that one way that we get to the truth is through an adversarial process in which one party is the defense and the other is the prosecution. And I think one way we sometimes treat people's emotional labor is like, here's how the conversation will go. I don't really... Epistemic labor, right? Epistemic labor. So here's how the conversation will go. I don't really understand about why X is bad in this particular way, it's sexist or racist or whatever. So you be the defense and I'll be the prosecution and the judge. Right. So I'm actually doing two roles. Right, right, right. And I'm doing a lot of work to try to flesh out what's going on to get the truth to emerge via this adversarial process. And I think that often does actually count as treating someone as... It doesn't count as treating them as an interlocutor in the right way, but I don't think people in the moment recognize themselves as not doing the work. Right. Do you know what I mean? And depending on the kind of context that you're in, that can be... No, no, keep the mic because I got another question for you. And depending on what kind of context you're in, that may be a very intellectual activity, right? And the person who's able to do that is an intellectual master. Then let's go back to Socrates. Right. So we might say that Socrates is doing both of those things, but we praise him for that technique. Right, here's the thing. Socrates contributes nothing. He contributes nothing in that conversation. He does exactly what you say some people do. He's the judge and the prosecutor. And the person he's talking to is doing all the labor, they're doing all the arguments, right? But we praise that particular strategy, right? And I think I find value in that in some cases up to a certain extreme, but you're absolutely right when that is the position, right? What we're really asking is that you do all the work. I'm not gonna do anything, but judge it. Right? And I think that's problematic. I want Socrates to contribute. And we can say, well, that's not his methodology and he's on to something else. Oh boy, wouldn't I have him contribute something? I mean, imagine if the dialogue was a philosophical paper. Right? He would contribute nothing, right? To philosophical notions and knowledge, right? He wouldn't give any credit. Why would we cite him, all right? So I think that kind of thing can be considered valuable, but I don't think it's valuable. And I think it's because we're getting other people to do the work, but you're absolutely right. It's housed under a type of intellectual approach and only certain kinds of people with certain kind of intellectual aptitudes can serve both as prosecutor and judge. And I think that's problematic. Yeah. There's a question. Yes. Thanks. I would like to hear your thoughts on conversations on the internet. Yes. That's sort of a case that I'm interested in. And specifically, I wonder if we should even count those conversations because many of them happen in public and that seems to really change the dynamic. And that might be a thing that has nothing to do with the internet essentially, but I mean, panel discussions are sort of, can be irksome to watch for the same reason. And also maybe that's what's so annoying about Socrates that it wasn't actually a conversation because it was a public performance of almost a takedown of his opponents. Right, right, right. So I think there's some distinction between conversations that happen in private one-on-one and in public that really change at least the level of difficulty of getting those right. So that's, before that back to hear more about. No, I think that's good, I think that's good. So I'm gonna try to argue because I just want to disagree with you, I just mean. I want to argue that those are conversations, right? I think the fact that you can hit reply, when you reply to people, you have now engaged in a conversation. Whether they are productive, whether we learn anything from them, whether they are full of virtues is another question within itself, right? But I do want to say something about that reply and comment button that therefore creates a conversation in some kind of way. So here's the thing. When there's an audience involved, things get very, very problematic, right? And we can play into as human beings, we can play into that particular audience. Let's go back to Socrates. His conversations was interlocutor, not happening on the stoop, right? We're just him and his interlocutor. There's an audience. So is he playing into an audience? Right, we never even, we never really questioned that, right? We know that like people following him around because it was kind of like, oh, he's about to get somebody, right? He was entertaining, right? But I want to say that just because there's an audience doesn't necessarily mean that we can't still do good in a particular conversation, right? Now, the question is, are we playing into that particular audience? And when the playing for likes, when we're saying things just so we can get a ooh, when we're saying things just so that we can disagree and people can agree, that's when it becomes problematic, right? Where, as Ferry says, we're not going to get true knowledge out of that, right? And sometimes we have a tendency to play for audiences. Here's the thing, I've learned, and I'm learning this because it can be very difficult, particularly on Twitter, where you have to say so much and so little and you want people to like what you guys said, right? I've come to the conclusion that when I go to Twitter and I want to say something and I keep adding it and making it right, I realize I'm doing this too much for an audience and I just stop it, right? Because I realize that I don't want to say things as a performance, right? But there's no doubt, I mean, there's been this research says now the way that social media is designed, what it does to our brains, right? Of even the likes that we get, right? And there's no doubt that that interferes with the kind of conversations that we can have. But I think there are ways not to play into the audience. So here's an example that I saw on Twitter about last year. Some of you all may be familiar with this. So sometimes it is the case, particularly for like woke people online, that when a troll per se says something, what people do is retweet the troll and then they say a particular comment in which they can respond to the particular troll and it's not necessarily like to get the troll, it's for performance. So let the audience member know that this person did not defeat them. So it was one quote unquote, let's just call that troll now a person. So one black woman, she's saying some things on Twitter and a young white brother responded and basically was trolling her. I guess we can say trolling activity. You know how she responded? Very sympathetically, right? And what ends up happening in that conversation on Twitter is that although they know it's an audience, right? Because it's online, it just becomes about them too. So with the young man admits, he's like, I'm sorry for coming out either way that I came at you. This wasn't his exact words, but I'm basically going through something in my life, right? And she says to him, I understand, just this sympathy and this honesty that's going both ways. And who would have thought that the conversation would have ended like that, right? So as much people say, oh, people play your audiences or whatever, whatever. And there's no doubt that it is the case, but there's moments and there's lots of moments that probably don't get a lot of attention where people are aware of an audience, but they're not playing into the audience and some good things can happen, even with the intent of playing into an audience and being destructive. So I think that's a good example of what can happen online, even in the misdemeanor audience of how things can go very differently, but also go quite right. But there's no doubt. I mean, what's happened online is just a microcosm of what we do privately, right? I don't think that's a different phenomenon. There's different incentives, right? Or maybe more incentives in that particular regard, but there's no doubt that we get into a room full of people and we want to say the smartest thing in the room. Or we want to disagree with somebody because we want people to applaud us, right? Or we say things that would get people to clap. That happens offline, right? And I think online we're able to see just more empirical evidence of that. But the challenge, I think we can have some good conversations online. There's just some conversations that we can't have in person because I'm never going to see you, I'm never going to meet you. I think some good things can happen online. I'm not pessimistic in that regard, but they can only happen when we make them happen. Yeah. Thanks so much for sharing. I'm hoping that you would advertise a little bit more. Okay. For those of us who might be new to your podcast, is there a favorite interview or two that you've done? Probably like choosing your favorite child, but. Right, right, right. Not only that. We're gonna make it back to some people. Okay, so let me, Let me just say, I mean, I've been tremendously, I've been tremendously grateful. Like I said before, I started the podcast my first year of graduate school. I sent out these random emails to folks and I basically said, Hey, I'm gonna start a podcast. It's gonna change the world. And I can't interview when they were like, yes. No one turned me down. I'm like, you guys are crazy, but okay, right? So I'm pretty grateful that I had the opportunity to talk to these people. And I just felt that it was a supplementary education for that school experience. And it still is, to me, I feel like I'm cheating. Like this can't be real, right? I have an opportunity to talk to whoever I want to talk to. And I get to share that with people, right? So it's been a treat. It's been a real treat. And I'm pretty grateful for the opportunity. As far as favorites. So I'm not gonna say favorites. Let me say one of the most challenging ones. And one where I thought I wouldn't learn as much as I thought I would learn. All right. So one of the most challenging one is the interview that I did with Nancy Bauer, who is a philosopher at Tufts University. And she does work on pornography, right? And you know how you may have expectations for the way someone was gonna respond? She'd fulfill none of those expectations. And that was a challenge. Okay, now how do I shift? How do I adjust? And when I decided to put that particular podcast in the book, the private part of me was like, okay, edit this out. And I refused. So the first question in the book, I asked her, so Nancy, what is pornography? And I think she's gonna give me a philosophical answer. And Nancy responds back. I think that's a horrible question. Right, that's what she says to me. I mean, she doesn't say horrible, she says something else, right? And she says, do you think I'm gonna, I mean, she doesn't say it with this particular tone, but she says, do you think as a philosopher, I'm gonna give some answer that's different from my common sense of pornography? I think people know what pornography is. Common folk know what pornography is. I know what she was doing by that response, but it totally took me off guard. And there were several responses that took me off guard. And I loved every moment of it, right? Wasn't expecting it. So it was kind of like you feel a shift when you're not expecting it and you're recording, right? So how do you adjust? So that was the most challenging one. And then I will say a conversation that I thought that I just never thought that I will learn what I learned is two of them. So the first conversation, the conversation I have about disability with Joel Michael Reynolds. And I just learned so much about disability. And my mother was disabled all of her life. And even my experiences with my mother cannot compare. I mean, I still didn't know what I, and this just goes to show, no matter what your experience is, you still don't know what you think you know, right? There's more to learn. And having a conversation with him about, I mean, it just totally changed my way in which I respond to disability, right? So he's introduced me to concepts such as they're called disability porn or inspiration porn, right? In which you see a video and you may see a person who's disabled work out in a gym. And it's like, if he can do it, you can do it. And what's more problematic with that, right? And then also in that conversation for him, I kind of learned about well-being and disability, right? That people might think that because you're disabled, then you don't have a flourish in life, right? That your life sucks, right? And he challenges that particular idea and give good reasons for it, right? And prior to that, he was like, yes. And disability, a lot of disability, yes, is probably perhaps for some people is the pain that you encounter. But a lot of disability, troubles or obstacles with disability has a lot to do with the ways in which you constructed the world. So perhaps if we change the way in which we construct our world, disability won't be such a hell of a life for some people. So create ramps on the street. Put a lift on a bus, right? And so I, I mean, it changed me, right? Another interview that changed me was an interview with Kyle White, who's a philosopher at Michigan State University. And we talked about climate injustice and indigenous folk. And I was raised on the East Coast. And so living on the East Coast, I never had a lot of encounters with Native Americans. And he's a Native American. And I never really had in touch with Native American issues. And learning from that conversation that what's happening, climate change doesn't affect everybody equally, right? It disproportionately affects certain people. And a lot of those people are disenfranchised minorities. So I was able to be educated about the ways that climate injustice affects people. And how a solution to climate injustice is tackling colonialism, right? And how we can all respond to that. So I think that some of the best interviews, and I think in a lot of interviews, allow me to change the way that I previously thought and also the way in which I respond to the world now, right? But those are the things that come to mind for me, yeah. I wanna be greedy with the mic here, but you were talking about Twitter and it reminded me, I actually saw a viral post on Twitter where someone posted a screenshot of a conversation and I can't say if it was a real conversation or not. But I made an interesting point where they said, whenever someone talks back to me online, like they messaged me and they're just being hate, like hating on me for no reason, I try to compliment them. It throws them off and the conversational tone just completely takes a 180 a lot of times. And it makes an interesting point because just within a cross of a few messages by the end, the person who was originally being hated on jokingly says, I gotta go to bed, love you. And they get in trouble, I love you too, back. And I'm thinking, okay, well that's nice and that's sweet and stuff, but I don't, I feel kind of suspicious about the notion that flattery somehow is supposed to bring some kind of constructive element out of hateful discourse. And so, I just wonder if you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, I would hate it to be the case for every response, so that's what one is doing in every response. I mean, that's a lot of work and that's a lot of rewarding or particular kind of efforts. And I don't wanna say that that's not a positive approach that hasn't worked in that person's life. One of the things that I've been thinking about lately is why do we always respond to the negative stuff? Right? So, a lot of things that I see people retweet and then respond to is always negative, right? And sometimes I wonder, was easy to respond to negative stuff because then you're gonna respond to something that's completely opposite and maybe you may get that audience kind of affirmation or uptake. I would like to see people retweet positive stuff and I'm particularly talking about celebrities and popular activists or famous activists. What are some positive things that people, what do you have to say about that stuff? Why aren't we rewarding those kind of comments, right? I mean, I also have a view about, this is just my view and I wonder if some of you all disagree, I mean, we can have a conversation about it. But even about kind of hate mail and how people advertise the hate mail, I'm not gonna say advertise, but they display hate mail online, right? And I just wonder, are we feeding it? Are we promoting the message? Are we creating a billboard for it? So I would like for us to spread the positive stuff and be in conversation with the positive stuff. We know that the hateful stuff is happening, right? But I would just wonder if we give attention to the positive stuff, maybe perhaps that will continue to be birth, right? And perhaps retweeting the negative stuff is exactly what they want to happen. But also when we retweet stuff, we're putting that in the atmosphere, right, to a larger audience. Not only to a larger audience, it becomes, I mean, what people say, the hate that people say, when that is spread, and I wanna get metaphysical, just can we stop spreading hate? Even if we're doing a retweet, I think that's still a way of spreading the hate. I think we need to spread more love, more positivity. I know this sounds so like YouTube motivational-ish, but I'm serious about this, right? What would happen if that stuff began to retweet and we get in conversations with those kinds of things? Yeah. All the things that you said tonight sound to me like wonderful advice and suggestions for people who want to have productive conversations. But a lot of times when you are interacting with a person, they don't really wanna have a conversation. I mean, a common technique of salesman is to engage you in a conversation. What kind of car are you interested in? But their purpose is not to have a conversation, their purpose is to sell you a car. Right, right, right. And I think more often than not, in our society, as commercial as it is, and as focused on people's goals, economic and otherwise as they are, it's rare that people actually want to converse. So how do you make a judgment that this is a good situation or a good person to have a conversation with? Right, right, right. As soon as you mentioned salesman, it made me think about another paper that I wrote. It came up this year, hate to advertise. But I do talk about a kind of methodology that I call kind of the salesman dialogue. And I talk about, you know, you've entered into a salesman dialogue when that person acts like they're having a conversation with you. It's how much, you know, like a salesman does, they act like they're having a conversation. How much do you wanna spend on a car? Right, right, what kind of car do you want? What do you want? So you may think, oh, this person really, when I hear what I wanna say, but they've already have a script prepared, right? They already have their objections ready. They have one goal in talking to you and they just wanna move you to that particular goal. That's something that I'm acutely aware of and I kind of challenge us not to be that guy, right? Not to engage in that kind of salesman dialogue. But here's the thing, how do you figure out what kind of conversations to engage in? This is kind of, sounds very familiar to a conversation we had prior to this lecture. So one of the things I do wanna say, it goes back to the example that I said prior to people who have taken on the initiative, for example, of wanting to talk to white nationalists, for example, right? Speaking of that, and this is connected. So there've been like these interviews on television with white nationalists, right? And people might say, well, I think we need to hear what they have to say, right? And one of the things I've been acutely aware, is that I don't want an interview. I really wanna see an actual conversation, right? And the ways in which white nationalists have gotten a platform have been via interviews and not necessarily conversation, right? And when someone is interviewing in this particular way, it is a propaganda machine. It's advertising, it's a commercial, right? And it's not really taking advantage of having an actual conversation in which that person is coming in, not to advertise their views, but to perhaps be persuaded, right? So I think what's happening in that particular context is not actually a conversation at all. But how do you choose? I mean, in some ways, I don't wanna be as rigid to say, well, I already know this person doesn't wanna have a conversation, so I'm not gonna have a conversation, because at the end of the day, we don't really know that's the case. It goes back to the example that I use about what happened on Twitter. We may think that that troll doesn't really wanna have a conversation, and then it goes a whole new different way, right? And I think sometimes, we just may have to just play that out and allow it to be context-sensitive. I don't want us to prejudge, right? I think that certain kinds of people, because they have certain kinds of views, don't really wanna engage in a conversation, so therefore, I'm not even gonna waste my time. I think some people will surprise us, and I think we need to be open to being surprised. But when we figure out that the person is not, doesn't really wanna engage in an exchange or sharing or not open to be persuaded, but they have one thing on their mind, which is to change your mind. Then perhaps you can say, okay, I've heard what you have to say. It was nice talk to you, right? But it may be the case that you enter into a conversation with someone who comes with a self-man-approach, and then it can go in a different direction. And I think your tolerance level would just, you would just have to play that by ear, what you're willing to tolerate. Are you willing to take that risk that it could go in that direction or not? I think it's up to you. I'm curious about what you say, the distinction between an interview and a conversation. Declaration, I'm a journalist. Because it seems to me that your point about an interview can become propaganda, which is true if it's not done properly. Could be, yes, yes, yes. But it strikes me that actually coming to the point about a confrontational, adversarial conversation, the best interviews are adversarial, where somebody's views are challenged and challenged robustly. It strikes me that has great value, where a conversation with somebody, say that was broadcast, might actually have the opposite effect and make, sort of humanize somebody whose views are abhorrent from time to time. So I would be a big defender of the interview as long as it's done properly. Well, one might say that in the conversation, the person is challenged. Yes, indeed. Right? So what exactly is done? So the challenge that can happen in either context, and here's why I'm critical of the interview. Right? Now, I'm not committed to the, because these are interviews. So I'm not very committed to that particular structure in a conversation. So I'm not really committed to that particular structure. So let me elaborate a little bit. So it seems to be the case, and tell me if you agree or disagree with this, which I know you will, journalist. What I find a lot goes back to audiences. Everybody's privy to this. And I think the media in some ways, this is gonna get a lot of views. Right? So that's what White National is on. And we're just gonna, there's handsome White Nationalists that tell us just where their views come from, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so you have, you know, it going into their ear asking this particular question, and they're not challenging them at all. Right? And the whole purpose of the interview in that sense, because, I mean, one might say from a very strict definition of an interview. I ask you these particular questions, and it's more of, typically when we read these particular interviews, we wanna know more about this particular person. At least that's sometimes how journalism works, right? You wanna put a spotlight on who this person is and what this person believe. And that's what I'm talking about, the strict definition of interviews. Right? Where it becomes kind of, just merely a reporting of sorts. Right? And then you can have some interviews that are actually challenging. So you go to the Gail King and R. Kelly interview. Right? Which was an interview slash conversation, which she's not trying to report and get a notion of who R. Kelly is and all that. I mean, yes, that is present. But there's also a challenge in this happening in that particular conversation as well. Right? So I'm challenging the media capitalizing on highlighting or showcasing in interview and form the views of the white nationalists. And I think when that is the goal, usually it's the case that there's less challenge, challenge that's happening in that particular context. Yes, I think it comes back to what I said about doing an interview properly. I mean, I'm a bit old fashioned maybe, but I mean, it strikes me that an interview should not simply be a way to present somebody unchallenged. The whole point of an interview is to reveal what, if it's a politician, what that person really believes and to challenge those beliefs where they should be challenged. Do you think the media is doing a good job of that? Not in every case, no, that's self-evident. And I think that the media has moved into a phase that is very different from how it was obviously several years ago. I think the media has slid into a world of or rather has joined a world that is very much. If you can tell Mike a little bit more, yeah. Sorry. I feel that what has happened is what you might call a mainstream media has been seduced into a world where taking sides is now seen as in some ways a good thing or in a way that wasn't the case, before because the more traditional form of journalism that was that valued objectivity or rather valued the aspiration to achieve objectivity has been kind of devalued now. Right. And much more emphasis is given to, well, nobody is truly objective. There's no such thing as objectivity. Therefore, you must conclude that all journalists, all journalists have a view of the world and therefore you should allow that to be expressed and you end up with the kind of media we have now where you have Fox News on one side and whoever on the other side. And I think that to me it's very important that we hold on to a journalism that is still attached to the aspiration to seek a kind of objective truth. And I don't, I'm not shy about that. I believe in facts. But unfortunately. Not alternative facts. Not alternative facts. Yeah, exactly. Unfortunately, we're in an era where there's my facts and your facts. All right, all right, all right, all right. I agree. I totally agree. Thank you. Thank you so much. This is really interesting. I think kind of piggybacking off of this salesman question. When you kind of don't have a choice, like you need to have a conversation with somebody and there is a disparity of power and you kind of need your points to get across in some way or even need a voice to communicate them. What's a way of opening the dialogue as the underdog? Give me a context. I think that would be very context specific, right? Yeah. So give me an example and let's see if we can play with it. So I was thinking of two contexts. One is kind of one of the examples that you use as a woman coming to like a police officer some kind of authority official after being harassed and kind of the person is downplaying it, but to the extent that they're not open to taking some of the advice that you offered as the person in the position of I need a report and I need some kind of empathy and kind of what is a way of kind of getting that person to see you as human? Yeah. So I think the first, my immediate response is, no, that there are some people who won't do that. And therefore one ought not to go to that particular. No, I'm just, I'm just. So you notice the Audrey Lorre quote was, no women are expected to teach or educate people about their humanity, right? Think about what she suggested. She says, not about the issues that are affecting African-Americans, but about humanity. That's the conversation we're having. That's just a conversation I refuse to have, right? Right? And so when you, I mean, that's just my stance. And I think in some ways, I think if you have to, it's a lot of work, first of, can I say this? If you are in 2019 as a grown adult that have any kind of knowledge about ethics or people, whatever, and you still need to have conversations with you about other people's humanity, you're at such a ground level. It's just too much for me. It was my fragility and with what I need to transform in my own life for me to even have that basic conversation about my humanity. That's a lot of work. First of all, that's a huge task to take on. But it's also, you're not there yet. It's also, you know, so it's like, wait, you're not there yet? That's a lot of work to do, right? And I would hope that other people can do that work for you, right? So other people that are more socially positioned, maybe they need to do the job of convincing their cousins of your humanity. But I think it's too much epistemic and emotional labor for you to do that convincing for someone else, right? That's number one. So just figuring it out in some ways. And I would hope that, like, people that you go to, that you feel that you can, at least you assume or think or expect or have some kind of empathy towards you already meet that baseline criteria that you already see you as human, right? But I think it's impossible to think that, oh, in one conversation, I'm gonna convince you I'm human and then we're gonna go to the empathy stage. Girl, if you could do that in one conversation, I'm gonna give you a no peace prize, right? I don't think all that can happen because the empathy is not gonna happen without the humanity and they even convince you that humanity cannot be occurring one time. That person has a lot of work to do, right? So let's go back to the, so I would suggest that other people engage in that particular work, right? So when they teach people about your humanity, they reach that stage, maybe then you can have a conversation about the empathy part, right? But I wonder if you can get a little bit more specific here. So other than the humanity part, which I don't want you to do, all right? And I want other people to take on that job for you because that's a lot of work, it's a lot of work. What are some other kind of social positioning are you imagining? So I guess another one would be you're sitting at a conference table and you have a presentation, you're trying to get through your points and then somebody just completely takes over. There's a lot of some kind of explaining. You're trying to politely get back on track. Right, right, right. And I think in some ways, it's difficult because you're trying to practice some of the things that you said, like you don't wanna become abrasive, you don't wanna interject too much, you wanna give somebody a chance to say what they're trying to say. Where do you politely kind of ring it in and make it yours? Right, right, right. So they're like, hey, I should have added another trait. So remember I said that with all the virtues that I talked about, that perhaps things that we thought were vices could be virtues, right? So perhaps some of the stuff that you said could be a virtue in that particular context, right? So you go back to a moment, so let's just say, the person who's doing something a little bit more explicit. So they meant to say they said a racist comment, right? I do not want you to take from this talk that I must be tactful, that I must be generous, right? And that particular context, perhaps the best thing you can do is to say, I wanna say this respectfully, but I do not agree with what you just said. This may be uncomfortable for everyone, but I'm not complicit in what you just said, right? Maybe awkward. To say that in other contexts, I'm not complicit in the fact that you don't, you're not a vegan, maybe, right? But in that particular context, that's a virtue, right? So speaking up, and I'm not necessarily saying call out and call in, but speaking up and not supporting that speech act in that particular moment. And saying that respect, you can say it respectfully or whatever, but just saying, I don't agree with that. Well, I don't stand with that, I'm not complicit in that. It's a virtue. So I think that is gonna be an end to our night because we're gonna have to go up on that stage for as long as we're actually allowed to. So I'd like you all to join me in the game. Thank you all so much for being here. Thank you.