Do you have to have a dream? Or is incrementalism the answer to leading a flourishing life? This week, creative polymath Tim Minchin, joins host Lloyd Vogelman on the couch for an unfiltered conversation that digs into the personal side of the Principle of Charity. Tim Minchin In addition to two decades of award-winning live performance and multiple recorded specials, Tim is the composer and lyricist of smash-hit stage musicals, Matilda and Groundhog Day . He is also a screenwriter (of the award...
Feb 03, 2025•46 min•Ep 68•Transcript available on Metacast Three years after his first appearance on Principle of Charity , the effervescent Tim Minchin returns for this first, and very special spotlight episode for 2025. Emile, Lloyd and Tim reflect on the principle of charity itself, and how themes explored in Tim’s latest book You Don’t Have To Have a Dream (Penguin Random House) relate to its application in our lives. What role can the scientific method, kindness and authenticity play in helping us consider the viewpoints of those with whom we...
Jan 27, 2025•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week leading neuroscientist Anil Seth, and spiritual leader and scholar Swami Sarvapriyananda, join host Lloyd Vogelman on the couch for an unfiltered conversation that digs into the personal side of the Principle of Charity. Can the inevitability of human suffering help us understand the existence of the ‘self’? BIOS Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he is also Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science . He i...
Dec 16, 2024•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, we’re joined by one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, Anil Seth, and Advaita Vedanta spiritual leader and scholar, Swami Sarvapriyananda, to explore ideas around consciousness. When we die, does our consciousness die with us, or is our body just a vehicle, at best, for a consciousness that continues? Most mainstream forms of western knowledge are based on an understanding that nothing exists outside of the physical world which follows the fundamental laws of physics. ...
Dec 09, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep 65•Transcript available on Metacast This week economist Gene Tunny and activist-scholar Anitra Nelson join host Lloyd Vogelman on the couch for an unfiltered conversation that digs into the personal side of the Principle of Charity. Can two diametrically opposed thinkers meet in the middle when it’s planetary survival that’s at stake? BIOS Gene Tunny is the Founder and Director of Adept Economics and the current President of the Queensland branch of the Economic Society of Australia. He is also an Adjunct Lecturer in economi...
Nov 04, 2024•35 min•Ep 64•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode we’re joined by economist Gene Tunny and activist-scholar Anitra Nelson to ask whether degrowth can save the planet, or if we should stay the current economic course. As recently as 150 years ago, pretty much everyone was living in what we’d now call extreme poverty. Thanks to capitalism, that rate is now just 9%, with a reduction of 38% in the last 30 years alone. So what’s the problem? Well, for one thing, we’ve been plundering the natural world ...
Oct 28, 2024•56 min•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast Lloyd meets Annabel on the couch to ask some crunchy questions. Including but not limited to: What makes a good leader? And to what extent is journalism responsible for partisan attack politics? Annabel Crabb Annabel Crabb is an Australian political journalist, commentator and television host who is the ABC's chief online political writer. She has worked for Adelaide's The Advertiser, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Sunday Age and The Sun-Herald, and won a Walkley Award in 2009 for her Q...
Oct 07, 2024•23 min•Ep 62•Transcript available on Metacast The inimitable Annabel Crabb joins us for this special spotlight episode where we shine a light on the changing impact of journalism in a shifting media landscape. In a world where truth is increasingly contested, can the fourth estate still be trusted to deliver reliable information which brings us together into some sort of shared reality? Or has our trust in journalism been irrevocably broken by the ‘democratisation’ of information - the relentless immediacy of self-selecting ...
Sep 30, 2024•41 min•Ep 61•Transcript available on Metacast This week billionaire philanthropist Nicolas Berggruen and philosopher Dr David Blunt join host Lloyd Vogelman on the couch for an unfiltered conversation that digs into the personal side of the Principle of Charity. BIOS Nicolas Berggruen is the Founder and Chairman of the Berggruen Institute and has spearheaded its growth, establishing its presence in Los Angeles, Beijing, and Venice. Focusing on great transformations in the human condition brought on by factors such as climate change, t...
Sep 09, 2024•25 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode we’re joined by billionaire and philanthropist Nicolas Berggruen and philosopher David Blunt, to consider the merits and pitfalls of charitable giving in a world rife with inequity. Whether we think of inequality as simply an outcome of meritocracies that reward talent and ambition, or we’re suspicious of the system itself, there seems to be one thing we can all agree upon: it’s important for those who do disproportionately well to help those in need, beyond just paying the...
Sep 02, 2024•56 min•Ep 59•Transcript available on Metacast Do books have a future in the new digital world order? And can we engage productively with problematic cultural content? This week luminary philosopher A.C Grayling and cultural content creator Mary McGillivray join host Lloyd Vogelman on the couch for an unfiltered conversation that digs into the personal side of the Principle of Charity. A. C. Grayling CBE MA DPhil is the Principal of Northeastern University London and its Professor of Philosophy. He is a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's Coll...
Aug 12, 2024•34 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast This special episode was recorded live at the 2024 Sydney Writers’ Festival with Emile and Lloyd joined on stage by eminent philosopher A.C Grayling and digital content creator Mary McGillivray. Together they consider the merits and pitfalls of various forms of factual information distribution. This is arguably the greatest time in the history of the world for reading, with literally the entirety of human knowledge available in books or in the online world of articles, blogs etc. If you wa...
Aug 05, 2024•54 min•Ep 57•Transcript available on Metacast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jul 08, 2024•36 sec•Transcript available on Metacast With David Baddiel and Simon Sebag Montefiore. In Principle of Charity on the Couch, Lloyd has an unfiltered conversation with the guests, throws them curveballs, and gets into the personal side of Principle of Charity. David Baddiel is a comedian, author, screenwriter and television presenter. In 1992, he performed to 12,500 people with Rob Newman at the Wembley arena in the UK’s first ever arena comedy show and was credited as turning comedy into “The New Rock’n’Roll”. Alongside The Lig...
Apr 01, 2024•19 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode we spend time with David Baddiel and Simon Sebag Montefiore and ask - Where do Jews really come from? Are they white or people of colour? And how should we deal with the ethnic diversity within Jewish populations, with differences between Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrachi Jews? Questions around whether Jews are white or people of colour has become a fraught issue. In an ideal world (or the ideal for at least most of us in the multicultural liberal west,) it shouldn’...
Mar 25, 2024•49 min•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast Featuring the wonderful Benjamin Law and Professor John Rasko AO. In Principle of Charity on the Couch, Lloyd has an unfiltered conversation with the guests, throws them curveballs, and gets into the personal side of Principle of Charity. BIOS Benjamin Law is an Australian writer and broadcaster. He’s the author of The Family Law (2010), Gaysia (2013), the Quarterly Essay Moral Panic 101 (2017) and editor of Growing Up Queer in Australia (2019). Benjamin is also an AWGIE Award-winning scr...
Mar 04, 2024•40 min•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast Featuring the wonderful Benjamin Law and Professor John Rasko AO In this episode with the help of a cultural critic and a genetic expert we consider how to best make sense of our ancestral past and the dangers of over identifying with tribes alongside the very real opportunities science is giving us to change our genetics. While we are all unique individuals, who of course come from families and a line of ancestors, in the end we are responsible for our own lives. While we may look to our...
Feb 26, 2024•54 min•Ep 53•Transcript available on Metacast In Principle of Charity on the Couch, Lloyd has an unfiltered conversation with the guests, throws them curveballs, and gets into the personal side of Principle of Charity. BIOS Tyson Yunkaporta is an Aboriginal scholar, founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne, and author of Sand Talk. His work focuses on applying Indigenous methods of inquiry to resolve complex issues and explore global crises. John Humphreys is the Chief Economist at The Australian Tax...
Feb 05, 2024•29 min•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode we contrast two very different ways of seeing the world — Libertarianism and Indigenous Ways, to consider which model is better for society. Libertarianism, with a focus on the version of this political philosophy that came about in the second half of the 20th century, usually associated with the centre right, does in fact cut across traditional left /right lines. It sees our individual liberty, our freedom as the most important political value. It's a political philosophy ...
Jan 29, 2024•56 min•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast In Principle of Charity on the Couch, Lloyd has an unfiltered conversation with the guests, throws them curveballs, and gets into the personal side of Principle of Charity. Krista Tippett is a Peabody-award winning broadcaster, National Humanities Medalist, and New York Times bestselling author. She created and hosts On Being , which has won the highest honors in broadcast, Internet and podcasting. Her On Being Project is evolving to meet the callings of the post-2020 world — and to accompany th...
Dec 11, 2023•20 min•Ep 50•Transcript available on Metacast On this special Spotlight episode the US broadcaster/podcaster/writer Krista Tippett joins Emile and Lloyd to discuss wisdom and meaning. Krista’s On Being radio show and podcast has enriched the lives of its many millions of listeners over decades as has her best-selling book Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living As host Emile Sherman said of Krista, “Our aim on the podcast is to have true expert guests, guests who are often scholars, academics, or advocates steeped...
Dec 04, 2023•31 min•Ep 49•Transcript available on Metacast In Principle of Charity on the Couch, Lloyd has an unfiltered conversation with the guests, throws them curveballs, and gets into the personal side of Principle of Charity. Guests Tigress Osborn (she/her) is a fat rights advocate and Executive Director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance ( NAAFA ), the world’s oldest documented organization working towards Equality at Every Size. She is a co-founding leader of the Campaign for Size Freedom , which supports passing legisl...
Nov 13, 2023•44 min•Ep 48•Transcript available on Metacast We live in a culture that is obsessed by weight. About a third of adult women in the US are on a diet at any given time, and a fifth of men. Those who aren’t dieting are thinking about dieting, with well over half of all adults actively wanting to lose weight, with men only slightly trailing women. To feed the obsession on weight, or to help people manage their weight, depending on the way one looks at things, there is a global weight loss and management industry that is expected to...
Nov 06, 2023•59 min•Ep 47•Transcript available on Metacast In Principle of Charity on the Couch, Lloyd has an unfiltered conversation with the guests, throws them curveballs, and gets into the personal side of Principle of Charity. Tim Dean Tim Dean is Senior Philosopher at The Ethics Centre, where he works to promote ethics in public and professional spheres. He has a Doctorate in philosophy from the University of New South Wales on the evolution of human nature and specialises in ethics, critical thinking and public philosophy. He is an Honorary Assoc...
Oct 23, 2023•35 min•Ep 46•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode we go back to basics and look at the practical ways of communicating the principle of charity and how certain behaviours over time have been developed for social cohesion, even when we don’t all agree. With our special guests – moral philosopher Dr Tim Dean and festival director Danielle Harvey – we have a wide-ranging discussion on what communicating in good faith looks like, what bad faith is, and how to navigate tricky topics. We discuss ways to have hard conversa...
Oct 17, 2023•44 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast With guests, Ahmed Elgammal and Michael Sacasas 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 @LloydVogelman on Linked in Find ...
Aug 21, 2023•36 min•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast In 2022, an AI generated work of art won a US state art competition. The artist used Midjourney, one of the popular AI systems that also include Dall-E and Stable Diffusion. They are trained on the millions of images scattered through the internet, using a deep learning program called a ‘generative adversarial network’, or GAN for short. It works by taking in text prompts, where you type in what you want the artwork to look like, and the AI then draws on the huge database of artworks, to generat...
Aug 14, 2023•52 min•Ep 43•Transcript available on Metacast With guests, Professor Mohamad Abdalla and Professor Robyn Horner 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 @LloydVogelman on Link...
Jul 24, 2023•34 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast Christianity and Islam are the two biggest religions on the globe, accounting for just over half the world’s population combined. Most of us know about the religion we belong to and too often learn about other religions from the actions of extreme fundamentalists, mediated by the news, and by politics. In this episode we go back to basics, to find out what Christianity and Islam actually believe. What are the essential building blocks of their theology? What do you need to believe as ...
Jul 17, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep 41•Transcript available on Metacast With guests, Dr Patti Ashley and Dr Tanveer Ahmed. 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 @LloydVogelman on Linked in Fi...
Jun 26, 2023•38 min•Ep 40•Transcript available on Metacast 
