Lex Fridman: preference

Transcript context

…Sure. Interviewing folks and seeing this like a podcast as a platform and deciding who to talk to and not… That’s something I have to come face to face with on occasion. My natural inclination before I started the podcast was I would talk to anyone and including people which I’m still interested in who are the current members of the KKK. And to me, there’s a responsibility to do that with skill and that responsibility has been weighing heavier and heavier on me because you realize how much skill it actually takes because you have to know to understand so much. Because I’ve come to understand that the devil is always going to be charismatic, the devil’s not going to look like the devil. And so, you have to realize you can’t always come to the table with a deep compassion for another human being. You have to have 90% compassion and another 90% deep historical knowledge about the context of the battles around this particular issue and that takes just a huge amount of effort. But I don’t know if there’s thoughts you have about this, how to handle speech in a way without censoring, bringing it to the surface, but in a way that creates more love in the world. I remember Steve Bannon got disinvited from the New Yorker festival and Jim Carrey freaked out and all sorts of other people freaked out and he got disinvited from the… And I got invited to speak on SMERCONISH about this and I was saying, “Listen, you don’t have people to your conference because you agree with them. We have to get out of this idea that…” Because they were trying to make it sound like that’s an endorsement of Steve Bannon, that’s nonsense. If you actually look at the opinions of all the people who are there, you can’t possibly endorse all the opinions that all these other people who are going to be there actually have. And in the process of making that argument I got… And also, of course the very classic, it’s very valuable to know what someone like Steve Bannon thinks, you should be curious about that. And I remember someone arguing back saying, “Well, would you want someone to interview a jihadi?” and I’m like… Because at the moment, it was at the time when ISIS was really going for it and I was like, “Would you not want to go to a talk where someone was trying to figure out what makes some of these people tick?” That changes your framing that essentially it’s like, “No, it’s curiosity, is the cure for a lot of this stuff,” and we need a great deal more curiosity and a lot less unwarranted certainty.…

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