The Big Bumper Thread of Interviews and Chat Show Clips
 

Does what it says on the tin...

Put your interview (and comicon panels etc.) clips here if you want to separate them from the other tv show threads.

I'll open things up with Jonathon Ross interviewing Benedict Cumberbatch (2011):

For Sundae:

Mark Gatiss interview from 2006, discussing his novels and the writing process:




Up until quite recently, we had a professor in our school who spoke just like Gatiss. He's gone off to Australia now, but he was a really lovely man to work with.

I think all the Gents have lovely voices.
And immediately recognisable to me from hours spent listening to the commentaries, especially when I was too depressed and anxious to even look at the television.

Thanks, chick.

Oh they do. But there's something so gentle and graceful about Gatiss.

Nice little interview with Andrew Lincoln of Walking Dead fame:

Noel Fielding:

Hang on, Andrew Lincoln of Teachers fame?
That's how I know him :)

Eating up the interviews, thanks.

Yup that's the fellah:-) he was also Egg in This Life

WOW.

I had no idea Andrew Lincoln (Clutterbuck?!) was from the UK. Watching that interview was a trip. Thanks for posting it.

First five mins is a fairly rambling and chaotic intro, but the interview itself is awesome. Richard Herring's award winning Leicester Square Theatre Podcast runs weekly - used to air for free as an audio podcast and you could pay a small amount to download the full filmed version. He's had some excellent guests and the interviews range from silly to serious. Stephen Fry, in his interview, famously admitted to a suicide attempt the previous year.

Here's an excellent and really in depth interview with Ben Goldacre, on bad science, big pharma, use and misue of statistics in public policy making etc:

Lovely interview with John Oliver:

Man, I barely bother with tv chat shows now. John Oliver, sometimes. I used to quite like the Daily Show interviews. Mostly though it's all podcasts and made for web interviews that impress me.i've been particularly enjoying interviews with tv writers and directors , showrunners and so on.


A really good interview with Damon Lindelof from The Verge:



I am loving the Kevin Pollak Chat Show. Really in-depth long-form interviews.

This is another Lindelof interview and is one of my favourites from the KPCS archives (personally I am not much into the rambling 20 minute intro and just scoot straight to the guest):

Shows you might enjoy: Showrunners (a documentary) and The Writers Room (a half-season TV show.)

Missed this when you posted it :p

I've seen the documentary, Sgowrunners - watched it a few months ago - it was fascinating! There was also a really good Q&A with the makers.

I've seen some of the Writers Room - haven't been able to find all of them to stream. Again, really interesting.

This was a really good interview from February.

Still pains me somewhat that the Labour Party voted this guy's younger, gawkier, and least-likely-to-hold-any-position-of leadership, brother to lead the party instead of him.

They might have won the election.

nope

Well that sucks.

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

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

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

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

Awesome interview.

Isn't that David Attenborough?:stickpoke

yes. Yes it is.

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


Watch that Jordan Peterson interview. It's awesome.

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

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

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


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

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

I really wanted to slap her. Like multiple times.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BUT.

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

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

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

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

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

Yea paxo at the height of his power was awesome.

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

Some interviewers are a tad aggressive... :rolleyes:

Can't stop thinking about this, I think it's remarkable that an avowed anti-Marxist acknowledges that Capitalism is a broken game. It feels like we've never had that before!

Similarly, Bret Weinstein, another important Rogan interviewee, comes from a rather lefty perspective, and then acknowledges that markets work and are very productive.

To me this is what we've needed all along. I feel like these new public intellectuals are onto something. It's very exciting! They start by breaking the standard identity politics at the university, now they want to break the standard thought about other things.

They are serious thinkers and absolute experts in their fields. (Peterson's work in Psych is very widely cited; Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist, whose work on genetics in mice may change all research science that uses mice.)

They aren't covered on regular media whatsoever because they can't possibly fit into a Bill Maher-esque left vs right scheme. The media can't understand or even recognize something outside the model, so... it attacks them!

And the best way -- maybe the only way to consume their ideas is in the form of 2 hour conversations, unbroken by commercials or any other interruption. And suddenly this is available to us all because Internet.

Viva la revolucion!

To be fair, though, similar things have been available on PBS for decades. But nobody watches PBS. And the only reason anyone listens to Joe Rogan's podcast is because he was a famous comedian who made idiots eat raw horse uteruses on reality TV. I mean don't get me wrong, I'm still an optimist, but it's hard to disentangle my optimism from my nihilism--like, if it doesn't work, America will fail, but the human race will go on anyway, and that's fine, too.

Naw, really, this is a phenomenon that's happening. I think he gets like 30M downloads per month these days. (Most downloads are audio, the YouTube numbers are a fraction of it)

Me, I despised FF, and I think Rogan is just an above-average standup.

But his thinky podcasts are brilliant: just a long conversation between a curious person and a serious thinker. Rogan is the conduit in this setting, and he does a fine job of it. He's bringing these people to the rest of us, and letting their ideas go out there.


Edited to revise number of downloads, and per month not per ep

It is pretty exhilarating - there's something about it that reminds me of the 'pamphlet wars' of the 1790s.

I have to say he's made me reevaluate some of my own views/outlook. Not just him - I've been watching a lot of Stephen Pinker's stuff as well, but mainly Peterson.

I was never anti-market as such - I've always seen the value in markets for some kinds of things - trading is a pretty fundamental thing for human society and we couldn't very well continue with localised bartering systems with the human population as large ads it is - not without reverting to some pre-technological age

I also don't think I've ever been that into the idea of a revolution, frankly - except maybe for a brief spell when I was 18 and wanted to burn the world.

Marxism has always been more of an analytical tool for me - but with a bit of class loyalty thrown in. Dad was from a fairly wealthy, upper middle class background but mum was northern working class and hers is the family I was most connected to on a day to day basis. So I kind of arrived at socialism partly through being aware of unions and that kind of old school labour culture. Not marxist, just trade unionist.

Revolutionaries always seemed kind of heroic and exotic - except for the ones I met who were mainly ineffectual dicks.

What he has made me question is the emotional response I have to the hammer and sickle compared to the one I have to the swastika. The former always seems to me a noble but twisted dream, or broken promise. The latter encapsulates the evil man is capable of. Not because I am ignorant of the death toll under communism, particularly under Stalin, but because the original dream seemed a noble one: egalitarianism and an end to class oppression. And because an offshoot of that theoretical model articulates the nature of inequality and ways to ameliorate it.

But it is interesting to see the pathology behind marxism as a movement. Marx's philosophy was flawed because - ye know - he was a man of his time trying to understand a rapidly changed set of social and economic dynamics. The market as we understand it was pretty damn recent. The concept of paper money as we know it (as the thing of value itself and used as currency in the modern sense) was like 150 years old or thereabouts when he was born.

The shift to a primarily waged notion of work was a massive shift in how people saw themselves and their place in the social and economic system. Even thinking about it as an economic system at all was new.

And there was absolutely a sense of what we might now call class difference but what then may have been called breeding or quality that was a fundamental part of the existing social structure. It was voiced as such. If anybody started the 'class war' rhetoric it was the middle-class intelligentsia and their conviction that the lower orders were of a different classification of man which was given full voice during the run up to the age of revolution. The gradual compression of the middle class and the concentration of wealth upwards, the alienation of the labouring classes from some kind of comprehensible place in society into a waged workforce is an understandable direction to see things going. Things must have seemed so untethered.

But that period where notions of deep and immutable differences between social classes persisted into the explosion of markets and collapse of the pre-industrial setting only lasted maybe 200 years at most. A century either side of Marx's work. And at the other side of that the world looked very different to how he had pictured it looking as a result of all that.

But the idea of even approaching how we organise society in terms of oppressor and oppressed being a fundamentally dangerous notion is pretty compelling. It isn't that this is something I just now considered - but the current kaleidescope of oppressed-v-oppressor matrices has kind of stunned me - and I think Peterson's helped link those things up in a way I hadn't really done before.

When I think of political correctness, i think of the way racist jokes became something you just didn't say unless you were very sure of your audience, and the way it became socially unacceptable to call shops owned by Pakistanis, the 'paki shop'.

I think of political correctness as social and cultural pressure to try not to be a dick about race and gender, because more and more people thought that would be a good idea. And institutions trying not to be needlessly offensive about some of the people they served or catered to (replacing 'crippled' with 'disabled' in official publications and so forth). Led to a large extent by the media and a new generation of programme makers, stand up comedians, and (quite mainstream by today's standards) political activists

That's how political correctness seemed to start in the 80s/90s, from my recollection of it - and that doesn't seem like such a bad thing. A culture that values a responsibility not to needlessly cause offence or engage in casual cruelty towards those who are different seems a pretty good thing to me.

But a society that adopts a legal right not to be offended is a terrifying idea.

This is different though. PBS is the ideas. That's great and all, but it's kind of like any subject you might see an interesting documentary or current affairs programme about. This is the ideas + the zeigeist.

As someone with a background in history I am finding the whole situation fascinating.

Eric and Bret Weinstein together on The Rubin Report



2 hours and 47 minutes with maybe 10 minutes of intermission

Changed my mind about a lot of stuff! (Re-centered me on climate change!)

Here are the smartest brothers on the planet.

Brain now full. I'm exhausted. I may need to watch it again though.

Sam Harris and Steven Pinker are co-headlining a show at LA's Dolby Theater next month. River Cuomo of Weezer is opening for them. It's a big place, 3400 seats.

to sum up, it's

2018: Intellectuals are selling out huge theaters... and rock stars are opening for them.

Eric Weinstein has dubbed it, now, the "Intellectual Dark Web" and yesterday there was an NY Times opinion piece on it.

(paywalled, so right-click and browse anonymously) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/o...-dark-web.html

The fourth Joe Rogan podcast with Jordan Peterson just dropped

The first bit is talking about how revolutionary it all is. How this is a unique moment. How YouTube is the next Gutenberg.

We are in an amazing time.