Principle of Charity

"The world has never been more connected. Yet never more divided. We yell at each other from inside our echo chambers. But change doesn’t happen inside an echo chamber." - Uncomfortable Conversations This week Emile and Lloyd guest on Josh's show. If you'd like to send questions to Lloyd and Emile for our upcoming AMA, email principleofcharitypodcast@gmail.com, or ask on our twitter @pofcharity &n...

With guests Dr Norman Swan and Dr Penny Caldicott In Principle of Charity on the Couch, Lloyd has an unfiltered conversation with the guest, throws them curveballs, and gets into the personal side of Principle of Charity.       ~~   You can be part of the discussion @PofCharity on Twitter, @PrincipleofCharity on Facebook and @PrincipleofCharityPodcast on Instagram.   Your...

What do we do when we don’t feel well and mainstream western medicine can’t seem to help us. Maybe it’s an irritable bowel, headaches that come too frequently, chronic fatigue or joint pain that just won’t go away. Maybe it’s more serious - a life-threatening diagnosis of cancer, or a neurological condition like parkinsons, and we are told by doctors that there’s no cure or they have limited treat...

In Principle of Charity on the Couch, Lloyd has an unfiltered conversation with the guest, throws them curveballs, and gets into the personal side of Principle of Charity. ~~   You can be part of the discussion @PofCharity on Twitter, @PrincipleofCharity on Facebook and @PrincipleofCharityPodcast on Instagram.   Your hosts are Lloyd Vogelman and Emile Sherman.   Find Lloyd @LloydVog...

Australian Claire Lehmann left university and founded the online magazine Quillette  to counter what she saw as an orthodoxy in knowledge coming from the progressive left. Claire perceived a lack of rigor in the humanities where, it seemed to her,  ideology was trumping evidence. Since its inception as a start-up in 2015, Quillette has gone on to achieve an international reputation for f...

In Principle of Charity on the Couch, Lloyd has a more relaxed conversation with the guest, throws them curveballs, and gets into the personal side of Principle of Charity. Monday, 9 August 2021 6:30 PM ~~   You can be part of the discussion @PofCharity on Twitter, @PrincipleofCharity on Facebook and @PrincipleofCharityPodcast on Instagram.   Your hosts are Lloyd Vogelman and Emile Sherm...

Internationally recognised economist, educator and host of the podcast EconTalk, Dr Russ Roberts, discusses wealth and inequality under capitalism and questions whether there is real harm in inequality. Rather, in distinguishing inequality from poverty he says it’s the damage from poverty, not inequality, that’s more deserving of public concern and political focus. In a wide ranging discussion, we...

With guests, Chloe Valdary and Ian Haney Lopez In Principle of Charity on the Couch, Lloyd has an uninhibited conversation with the guests, throws them curveballs, and gets into the personal side of Principle of Charity. Chloe Valdary Chloe is the founder of the Theory of Enchantment, a conflict resolution model for businesses and workplaces that was developed by Chloe. It places compassion at the...

International scholar and doyen of critical race theory Prof Ian Haney Lopez and writer and entrepreneur Chloe Valdary are powerful voices in the strident and polarising debates surrounding identity politics. In this episode, we explore the shift in the understanding of racism, from the traditional liberal notion that we should treat everyone equally, to a politics actually based on race conscious...

In Principle of Charity on the Couch, Lloyd has a more relaxed conversation with the guest, throws them curveballs, and gets into the personal side of Principle of Charity. US writer and author of The Constitution of Knowledge Jonathan Rauch, explains what ‘truth’ is and why and how we must defend it. In a fascinating account of how liberal democracies ‘produce’ knowledge, Jonathan describes this...

US writer and author of The Constitution of Knowledge Jonathan Rauch, explains what ‘truth’ is and why and how we must defend it. In a fascinating account of how liberal democracies ‘produce’ knowledge, Jonathan describes this unwritten ‘constitution of knowledge’ as a global process of error checking with millions of people around the world, thousands of institutions, all searching for each other...

Welcome to Season 3 of Principle of Charity, where we explore social issues with curiosity, generosity and humility. It’s been remarkable seeing the growth in our audience over the last season. The big news is, Season 3 launches next week! We’ve got some fantastic topics and guests already in the can, exploring identity politics, inequality, whether we can mould our kids, alternative medicine, and...

To round off Season 2, Principle of Charity producer Jonah Primo talks with hosts Emile Sherman and Lloyd Vogelman, delving into what they’ve learned from the season, whether they’ve changed their minds, how the podcast has evolved and where it goes from here.  ~~   You can be part of the discussion @PofCharity on Twitter, @PrincipleofCharity on Facebook and @PrincipleofCharityPodcast on...

What do we do with our mental suffering? From everyday anger and disappointments, to life defining moments of grief and pain, we are all dealing with our emotional life, much of which can be challenging. In this episode we are going to explore two great models - meditation and psychoanalysis, to look at what they have in common and how they differ.   Meditation, particularly mindfulness medit...

When someone breaks the law, most of us have an instinct that they should be punished. In fact, that they deserve to be punished. At the base of this is a sense that we are morally responsible for our actions and we should get our ‘just deserts’ if we make bad choices.    This assumption is deeply encoded in the criminal law itself. Sure, there are other reasons we may want to put crimin...

Immigration is such a hot topic. Our borders are, in a sense, our collective skin and the question of who we let in seems to activate our primal instincts. Who comes in can feel and can at times be dangerous.    Yet we want new ideas, new brain and brawn-power to fuel our country. A larger population can bring greater economic growth and prosperity. And with fertility rates below replace...

  Up until not that long ago, storytellers were encouraged to flex their creative muscles, to look outside themselves, and armed with their imagination as well as a lot of research, to bring to life characters, stories and worlds that they didn’t inhabit themselves, often worlds vastly different to the culture they’ve grown up in.     But relatively recently, storytellers have...

In this episode, we explore the two great movements of the political right - liberalism of the right and conservatism. They are such different political philosophies, yet they share the same bed, uneasily much of the time, in right wing politics.    By liberalism, we mean the political philosophy that champions individual rights and freedoms, private property and equality before the law....

What do we do, as a society, with people who want to die? We’re talking here about those with a terminal illness , who know that the rest of their waking hours will be filled with much pain, and who want to choose when and how to end it.    Do we have the right to end our life on our terms, or is life so precious that even we can’t extinguish it? And if we do open the door, what are the...

Why is it so important to understand other points of view? How do we escape our own bubbles of bias? And when should we stop listening and focus on winning?  In this special episode, we shine a light on the ‘Principle of Charity’ itself. We look at what exactly it is and why it’s so important. We then go one layer deeper and ask when it might be problematic or unhelpful to use it.   To d...

Everyone is talking about “social impact”, or “purpose”, as a way for business to deliver greater good to society. But does having a social purpose actually help society any more than a business just focused on making goods that people want to buy, for profit?   Is social impact hollow virtue signaling, a marketing tool to make customers feel warm and fuzzy? Or does it in fact signal a profou...

We first touch on the perennial question, whether technological disruption, this time in the form of AI, will ultimately eat our jobs so entirely that there’s no paid work left for us to do.  We then take this prospect seriously enough to ask - will that in fact be a good thing?  Is paid employment the cornerstone for the good life; rich with purpose, meaning, providing us the reward for...

We are not here to argue whether climate change is real or not. It’s real, and it’s bad. We are here to ask the much edgier question - should we fight or adapt? Our guests include Rebecca Huntley, one of Australia’s leading social researchers, who shifted her entire career to exclusively fight climate change, using her expertise in human behavior to galvanise action. We also have Alan Heeks, a rep...

Leading economist Gigi Foster lets us in on the dirty little secret - our lives have been given a dollar value, and it’s used by governments to make a whole range of decisions, from whether we’re given that life saving medicine, to when to shut down an economy because of a pandemic. Covid19 has let us into this secret room, as we as a society grapple with how much economic pain we should suff...

Media professor and feminist Catharine Lumby sees a role for pornography in a healthy sexual diet, whereas public ethics professor Clive Hamilton has the self-confessed unfashionable view that it’s destructive and demeaning. They’ve clashed in the media, and we bring them together for the first time to see if we can tease out this complex topic, in a conversation that exemplifies the principle of...