Interesting Ideas From Philosophy For A Better Life - Alex O'Connor (4K)

Alex O'Connor, welcome to the show.

How splendidly we progress. Uh, the first time on a Skype call, second time was in person in Austin, and now something of a sort of cinematic production. I fear that next time we'll be in 3D or something.

Mm-hmm.

It's good to see you again.

Good to see you as well, mate. Uh, how are you feeling in the aftermath of Peter Hitchens?

Validated, vindicated. Uh, I must say that I was a little bit... I was in two minds about uploading that, that interview. He does... There, there was a bit of a, a mixture of opinion coming from him. He wasn't speaking entirely clearly, must have been something on his mind. He said, as he's getting up to walk out, "I don't think you should run this." And I'm thinking, "Look, if, if, if my guest tells me that they don't want me to run an interview for any reason, it could be because they've had a bad hair day, then I'll respect that." And so I thought, "Damn, am I really gonna have to, you know, be the bigger man here and just not post this at all?" But then he kept saying, "Oh, run it if you like. You know, I can't stop you from running it. I just don't think you have any moral right to run it" And I asked him, "Why?" And he said it was because I am a propagandist for drug decriminalization, a subject which prior to that, by the way, I'd spoken about once ever, and that I'd intentionally tricked him to appear on my podcast in order that I might fool him into a conversation about drugs. Now, before the podcast started, I said, "Mr. Hitchens, you have, uh, about three subject areas that we both talk about where I think there's a bit of crossover, that you've either spoken about or indeed written books about. And those are the decriminalization of drugs..." I also mentioned this in my email. "... The existence of God or r- religion," I should say God and religion is the topic. And, uh, the third was monarchy. At this point he says, "Well, you know, monarchy's a bit boring." Okay, notice, listener, that he did not take this opportunity to tell me that he thought that drugs were a bit boring and would rather not really talk about drugs at all or for too long. Okay, fine. So I'm thinking, "I agree with you, the monarchy is incredibly boring." In fact, that's the entirety of my point about the monarchy, is that it's essentially just boring more than anything else. So let's just do the other two. So I say, "We'll run for about an hour, ideally." He says, "That's good, you know." And I say, "But, you know, if the conversation flows, it can be an hour and a half, it could be two hours." And okay, he says, "Well, look, you know..." I, I say, "Sometimes they can be three hours long." He says, "Well, three hours might be a bit long, but we'll see how we do." So I'm thinking about an hour and a half. An hour and a half on what was now, in my view, two subjects. So at about 40 minutes into this potentially 90-minute podcast on the same topic when he told me that we've been going around for too long on said topic, I was a little bit bemused. But I did think to myself, "Maybe I've done something wrong here. Ma- maybe I have, uh, upset him in a way that obviously was not intentional." You know, I wasn't trying to bring this out of him, although, you know, it does do quite well for the channel. It's not like it's something I would do intentionally. So I did think to myself, "Well, maybe I've done something." So I listened back and I sent it to some friends, including you, and thank you for listening to it, and, and saying that like... Most people just said, "You have to run this." Uh, "He's, he's been completely unreasonable." And so there have been criticisms. People have said, "Well, you know what? It was a bit boring," or, "Yeah, it was going around in circles." I submit that that was his fault, by the way. Uh, because he does this thing, which I've noticed in a lot of philosophical and political discussion, uh, which is the sort of, "I know this one" attitude. When you do a lot of interviews-