Holding the Line: Why Some Things Should Still Be Taboo – DTH Episode 326 with Erez Levin

Erez Levin spent nearly a decade inside Google's ad tech world before becoming one of the loudest internal voices warning that the industry was built to reward quantity over quality — and that those same broken incentives are what fuel outrage, fear, and grievance across the wider internet.

Now Erez writes at Holding the Line, where he makes the case for what he calls principled ostracism: real social consequences for people who cross clear moral lines, paired with a genuine path back for anyone willing to own it. He draws a hard line between that and cancel culture, which he says punishes disagreement instead of actual hatred.

Wilk and Erez dig into how norms actually change, why celebrating political violence deserves real cost, and how a single memo from a Wall Street investor got a group of Harvard students to retract a petition within three days. It's a conversation about where accountability ends and cruelty begins — and why courageous citizenship means holding a line without writing people off for good.

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Transcript

Transcript is AI generated and may contain errors

[00:00:00:00] Wilk Wilkinson: It took three days. A memo went out from a Wall Street investor warning CEOs not to hire a group of Harvard students. And just like that, many of them quietly pulled their names off a petition they'd signed just 72 hours earlier. My guest today says that's not cancel culture. That's a taboo. Doing exactly what it's supposed to do. Stick with me. Welcome back, my friend, to the Derate the Hate podcast. I'm your host, Wilk Wilkinson, your blue collar sage calming outrage and helping to navigate a world divided by fog and those who would spread that fear, outrage and grievance. The Derate the Hate podcast is proudly produced in collaboration with Braver Angels, America's largest grassroots cross partisan organization working toward civic renewal, this podcast amplifies the mission that we share to foster a more respectful and united America where civic friendship thrives even when we disagree. Each week, through the power of story, conversation, and connection with incredible guests, we work to build bridges instead of barriers, not to change minds on the issues, but to change how we see one another when we differ. Because friends, it really is about bettering the world one attitude at a time. We did not create the hate, but together we can Derate the Hate. So be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcast, share it with a friend and visit Braver Angels to learn how you can get involved in the movement to bridge the partisan divide. Friends, I am so incredibly grateful that you have joined me for another powerful Derate the Hate episode. So let's get to it. Erez Levin spent years inside Google's ad tech machine. The world that decides which videos, autoplay, which headlines you see and what actually gets paid. He describes the industry as rewarding quantity over quality, and came to see that same broken incentive structure as the engine behind the fear, outrage and grievance that floods your feed every day. A resident left Google and started writing for his Substack, holding the line built around an idea that he calls principled ostracism the belief that we've lost our grip on the moral taboos that used to keep the worst hateful bigotry outside the bounds of polite society. He's not talking about cancel culture. Erase hates cancel culture. He's talking about something more precise, real consequences for people who celebrate violence and hatred and a real path back for anyone willing to own it and change. Resident I get into where that line actually sits. Why norms shift the way they do, and why courageous citizenship means holding people accountable without ever stopping treating them like human beings. Let's get into it with my friend. Erase Levin. Here we go. Erez Levin. Welcome to the podcast. My friend is very good to see you today.

[00:03:41:07] Erez Levin: Thanks Wilk, it's great to be here.

[00:03:43:09] Wilk Wilkinson: Yeah, I'm glad to have you here because the work that you've been doing, I've been looking into since you reached out and looking at your Substack and some of the things that you've been writing and a little bit about your past. And I'm like, this guy is definitely speaking my language, something I really want to bring to the listeners. So so let's get right into it. I want to I want to first get a little bit of your backstory, a little bit of the why into into what you've been doing, this moral taboos, the need to I need to get to get a little bit more. Because when I saw that you had been at Google for a long time, and then and then there were some reasons that you decided to leave, or why don't we start there? I want to I want to get that base and then we'll build from there.

[00:04:40:16] Erez Levin: Well, yeah. So I'll tell you a couple of interesting sort of threads, relevant threads from the past without spending too much time there. But yeah, I spent a lot of time at Google and my career in sort of the advertising technology space. There were a lot of things. There are a lot of things wrong with that industry, and I think it was sort of the slow motion train wreck that many of us were watching. I wasn't the only one, but I was identifying some of the key pain points and was focused on trying to address those internally within Google and sort of across the entire industry. There was a lot of patients tolerance, acceptance, support for that for a long time until there wasn't. And I was sort of on a mission to sort of do the right thing, help the industry, help advertisers, help the publishing ecosystem and that, but it up against incentives that were sort of misaligned systemic incentives and then internal incentives. And that taught me how to see the world through that lens of incentives. And so and that got me sort of outside of Google announced advocating for the same. But that also led me to the work that I'm doing now with holding the line and trying to enforce taboos, restore taboos, which we'll get into.

[00:05:50:12] Wilk Wilkinson: Yeah. And just just for a point of clarification, you were you were an ad tech with with Google or what is it, what is it exactly that you were doing or over, over at Google?

[00:06:02:18] Erez Levin: Yeah, I was in the ad tech world. I sort of Saturday in between product and sales and with a lot of the external sort of partners in the ecosystem that we worked with.

[00:06:11:03] Wilk Wilkinson: And I want to talk about that ecosystem a little bit because, I mean, I think it's very relevant to our conversation. I think it's very relevant to to things that I talk about quite often. And that's these different algorithms and the way that things play out, what that incentive structure is for, for engagement and how it works. I mean, I've been talking Erez for, for a number of years now about this, what I call the fog model, fear, outrage and grievance and, and how those things are, are typically used. And everybody knows I try not to ascribe motives to people and what they're doing and why they're doing it, you know, or I'll call out what they're doing, but I don't I try not to figure out, you know, I try to give everybody the benefit of the doubt. Right. Why they're doing it. I don't know, it just seems to me that that that model is very effective at driving division, keeping people scared, mad and aggrieved. And I want to know from your vantage point as an ad tech at Google, you're you're not just you're not just waiting around in that that pool. You're you're in that pool. I mean, you're you're big in the pool. So talk to me about that and, and expand on that for me, would you.

[00:07:32:03] Erez Levin: Yeah. So I totally agree with you. Ultimately it's the business model. And it boils down to what I am passionate about, which is I think it all stems from marketers, the people that control the budgets. They don't value the quality of the advertising. They don't measure the effectiveness correctly. They don't care about quality. They just care about quantity. So the number of eyeballs, the number of clicks, the number of sort of ads that can be stuffed on a page, that's what maximizes revenue for everyone except for the advertiser. That's how sort of low information, low quality, whether it's social media, disinformation, misinformation across the web, on social media that gets monetized really well because advertisers are not particularly scrutinizing on where they spend their budget. They have some minimum sort of like fake quality control, some vanity metrics that they care about, but ultimately they care about quantity and not quality. And that's what I'm trying to restore back into the industry.

[00:08:31:19] Wilk Wilkinson: So when you started pointing these things out Erez, what were, you know, to your superiors What were some of the things that that you were being told in terms of? Well, first of all, what was what was it that you were actually pointing out? What was the thing that you you said, hey, I'm, I'm looking at this and we've got to be doing something different or what is it that you pointed out? And then what were you getting as feedback from your superiors on that?

[00:09:05:17] Erez Levin: You know, there's so much nuance here. This is like almost a decade's worth of me sort of trying to address some of these things. And for Google's credit, and other folks, like, we fix certain things, the tolerance for fixing those things decreased over time. And so the nuances, every format, every environment, every like these things change, right? There was a big evolution in online advertising industry and the publishing landscape. The last thing, which was the big one for me and sort of what made me, you know, infamous in the industry and to a degree and internally was it's just a clear example, like small little video ads, you know, the ones that play in the bottom corner of a recipe site or some, you know, other sites, they were misdeclaring themselves as if they were sort of large players, large video players with the sound on. And advertisers were not just spending a ton of their budgets on those ad units, but also paying the same price for them, which, you know, by any reasonable person would look at it and say, that's not worth the same. And so that was the idea of bringing in sort of qualitative measurement. And yeah, that wasn't popular because there was there were a lot of people making money. And to go back to the point you made earlier, I also try not to ascribe intent to anybody. I just look at the incentives. And, you know, one of my favorite quotes is it's hard to make a man understand something when a salary depends on his not understanding it. By Upton Sinclair. And I knew a lot of I still know a lot of amazing people, not just within Google but across the industry that really like they care, they're good people, they're trying to do the right thing, but they can look away and try to, you know, it's hard for them to understand that a lot of what they're supporting and working on is, is not necessarily honest or moral. And if they raise that is the bad incentives. If they raise those issues, they won't last long within those organizations like I didn't.

[00:10:54:01] Wilk Wilkinson: Yeah. Well that is a phenomenal quote. And. that brings me to a point that I, you know, ever since I started looking into your work, it seemed to me that there was this there was this thing when we start talking about how, how we look at these things right in, in, in terms of, in terms of these, these different taboos. And, and this is, this is something, a place where I want to get to in this and, and find out how we start to really recognize these things and how working through these things as a society makes sense without necessarily using government action, but persuasion, not coercion, because I think you and I are probably fairly aligned on the idea that cancel culture sucks. I mean, I mean, that's my words, not yours. But I don't like the idea of culture. But I definitely think there needs to be. You know, I mean, you think about things like, like like smoking, right? I mean, you take smoking for an example, like I was a smoker for several years and I absolutely loved smoking is one of the hardest things I ever had to quit. Now it almost feels weird when you see somebody that's smoking, you know? I mean, it's become one of these these things, right? You just don't see it very often. And when you do see it, there's a there's a weirdness there or I'm not saying people that smoke are weird. Let me just be clear about that. But I, you know, but it's different now than when everybody was smoking. Talk to me about.

[00:12:49:13] Erez Levin: You're talking about norms. Right. And so and norms do change. So I consider myself as something I've done for a long time, a norm entrepreneur as a term that Carson Sustein came up with. And I loved it. I've seen norms change. I've driven norms to change. I was sort of spearheaded one of the first things I did at Google in sort of norm shifting, was getting men to take their full paternity leave. That was not a norm at the time, and I decided to make it sort of my mission, and I did, and I went top down and bottoms up and did all these sort of initiatives. And that became the default norm now at Google. And I think beyond in a lot of sort of big tech companies, and I realized sort of the power to be able to do that. What you're talking what I'm focused on now changing this other norm. So I agree, I hate cancel culture, I love the First Amendment and I hate cancel culture. I think we've missed a little bit of nuance because there has to be a role for some, what I call principled ostracism. I try to be very principled. I try to be very non-tribal, non hypocritical. I think there is a role, there must be a role for people to be ostracized when they violate what are universal moral taboos. These are things that society, by and large, has agreed are unacceptable within our polite society. And so the example I think of, and these are things that just exploded in the last few years, the KKK, they were defeated in various ways. And you're very familiar and you're connected to many sort of former radicals. They were defeated by various means, legal and economic, but also their hate was seen as taboo. Society said no. They wore masks for a reason. If they took their masks off and expressed that sort of vile hatred. Right? That over eliminated elimination, this bigotry, they would not have had their jobs, they wouldn't have had their friends. And right now we're allowing people to basically say some of those same sort of that same hateful bigotry, but still be part of our polite society. And I think we have to hold that line and say there's something when people cross it, we can apply it. You can apologize, you can recant, you can clarify, you can come back. And that's the way I sort of differentiate with my principles why this isn't cancel culture. Because cancel culture, they call it social death. You sort of violated some, you know, some small groups offenses and then you're out forever. Whereas what I'm talking about is something that's universal, where everyone agrees, hey, bigotry against any group, like hateful bigotry, not just, you know, a stereotype, something really, really awful, hateful like destructionist, that you have to be out. And it's not social death, it's social jail. You're almost like a time out. And so if you're willing to to apologize and clarify and make amends and sort of repair the harm that you caused, then you can come back and be part of our polite society.

[00:15:43:22] Wilk Wilkinson: Yeah. And I think that's right. I mean, I think that's the right move because, you know, I think I've done episodes like you said, you know, with with several former radicals, people like people like Jeff Schoep who was the former head of the National Socialist Movement here in the United States. And and he's a good friend of mine now. He's an incredible human being. You know, we've we've talked about the, the concept of, of from, from radical to redemption. Right. And how, you know, we as human beings and this is, this is very much, one of the things that I'm so adamant about is, is we have we have the capacity to to change. We have the capacity to, to change our minds. We have the capacity to forgive those who do change their minds and change their mindsets and and things like that. So I think what you're talking about here, Erez, is something that is is so important and can't be overstated is the idea that that when people screw up and I've, I've, I've done more than my share of made more than my share of mistakes over the course of my life. I've been very honest and upfront about that. And, you know, I worked a long and hard journey to to kind of change my mindset, you know, and there were selfish reasons, because I was a miserable person and I didn't want to be miserable anymore. But what we're seeing in society today, and I think this is this is the important point and that that I want you to expand upon a little bit more is when we start thinking about the hateful and ugly things that that people are saying online, the anonymity of this online ecosystem that we have and, and the way that people will so readily say the ugliest things to people that they don't know. And, you know, I've had people, you know, wish death upon me and say, you know, horrible things about, you know, me, my family, things like that. And they do it anonymously and, and there's something there that has to change. And I think what you're, you're hitting on is something that's so incredibly important that, you know, I don't wish ill upon these people. I think they're misguided. I think they're wrong headed. But dive into that a little bit more. But then also, I want you to talk about what you see as like the root cause of how this became so much more prevalent.

[00:18:18:02] Erez Levin: Oh, man, there's so much there. So a couple of different threads I'll start with actually how this started. I think there's two sort of root causes for this. One is, you know, sort of DEI, social justice has potentially some, some really good intentions and desires and motivations. Ultimately, by putting everything through an oppressor versus oppressed lens, that was really problematic because what it ultimately did was build the permission structures for what people call reverse racism. And so you could say some of these hateful, bigoted things, as long as it was against an oppressor and that just built up over time, you sort of like demonized anyone who would be called an oppressor. And then it makes it a lot easier. The other issue we have is the sort of hyperpolarization in society, things that you're addressing because people don't want to criticize their own anymore because it's sort of a, you know, it's a zero sum game. And so you can't criticize your own side because that might help the other. And so I think those are the two biggest root causes in October 7th, sort of as I saw it like exploded everything. Right. We were in this boiling frog sort of situation. It was slowly getting worse. And then that just exploded and people started saying things. And when they weren't getting punished for them, that's how it became normalized. And so we saw that online before. This addresses a little bit of your question. We saw this online before people being anonymous and trolls and things like that. But ultimately, unless you have a sort of physical embodiment of somebody that's going to go and bring this message out in American, right, especially inside the country, somebody that's an American willing to say these things with their face and name and a normal person, and not a celebrity that has a ton of bots and outside influence and things like that. That happens. These movements don't become normalized. Right? Everyone can see this as like, oh, this is some fringe and it's only online X, Y, and Z. But now you're seeing people, normal people, not just saying these things, but laundering them and sanitizing them. And I think that's actually the piece. When I reached out to you, what I was really excited to talk to you about, because I've been a big fan of Braver Angels for many years, and I'm a huge advocate in sort of yes, we should be able to talk to anybody, but what I see unfortunately happening is people are talking to what I call, you know, people who violated the taboos, like egregiously violated these taboos, expressing this elimination, this bigotry. And then other people, gatekeepers, especially, like institutional gatekeepers, representatives of the Democratic Party, either politicians or pundits and things like that, they're having conversations with them and sort of letting their hate go unchecked. Yeah. Now I'm okay with go have that conversation with them. But with the KKK, David Duke could be interviewed on TV for something. That's okay. But the interviewer has to make clear either has to challenge them directly or has to make clear that they are not endorsing, and they actually denounce and disagree with those hateful, taboo views. This is where I come at it from a very principled place. And unfortunately, I see people saying, well, we should talk to everybody. You know, we should just sort of be in a big tent and we can't we can't allow these clearly immoral views to go and sort of infiltrate our mainstream. And so, again, I'm trying to come at it from a principle place where I can criticize the left and the right and, you know, even my own people, the people that I consider in my tribe. And this isn't like Jewish tribe, and this isn't like whatever American tribe, it is just a pro humanity tribe. But when people are doing wrong, we sort of have to correct that. Otherwise we see really bad behavior.

[00:22:03:14] Wilk Wilkinson: That's right. I mean, I think there's there's a lot there that that makes a lot of sense. And, and I think that I think that there's something that I want to when I, when I, when I talk about Braver Angels and obviously I work for Braver Angels. So I want to make sure that everybody understands that I am one of those people that I'm a constant proponent of having the conversation. You know, I absolutely do. And and I also make it very, very clear that I have conversations with a lot of people who say things that I vehemently disagree with. My big thing there, and I want to get your your take on this Erez, is we and you've probably seen me post this, and I know lots and lots of people have seen me post. This is we can never and this goes both ways. We cannot ever hate somebody into believing what we believe, and we cannot hate them into seeing the world the way that we do. But what I want to do is I want to have that conversation with somebody and say, look, I may disagree with just about or if not every single thing that you say, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to find out not just what you believe, but why you believe it. And whether I agree with it or not, or whether we find any points of commonality or agreement by the end of that conversation is is irrelevant. But I'm going to treat you like a human being, and I hope with everything that I have, that when we're having this conversation, you're going to listen to me as well, and you're going to find out not just what I believe, but why I believe it. I think that's where we connect as human beings. And I think the important thing there is that if we are not talking, we are turning people into the worst caricature that we think that they are. And they may be a horrible human being, and I am one that absolutely believes evil exists and evil needs to be destroyed. But I think a lot of what people I think a lot of what we see today is people classifying things as evil that are probably just wrong. And I think you've you've seen that as well, right? Where where people over exaggerate how bad somebody is. We talk, you know, we talk about affective polarization and things like that and that perception gap of what we believe somebody is versus what they actually are. Right.

[00:24:31:07] Erez Levin: Yeah. So I agree with everything. I actually try not to look at things through the lens of evil. Not to say that there isn't real evil, but generally I think most of the evil we see is not evil. It's just bad incentives bad incentives to do the wrong thing. And the piece I wrote recently is about sort of incentives for hate. And how I see it now is there are the hate today. It pays. There are strong incentives for people to hate. We have to make it costly to there have to be counter incentives. And I look at various examples to prove how this works and has worked recently. So what actually inspired me to sort of pursue this, this whole mission, because I'd been thinking about it for a long time. I didn't have the word and I didn't know how to change it. When Charlie Kirk was killed, the three types of reactions that we saw on line right there were most people were remorseful. We were sad about it, whether we knew or liked him or not. It was a sad thing. There was a smaller group of people that were remorseless. They were just sort of. I knew I had friends like that. They were just going out there and be like, I don't care that he's dead. And then there were people that were rejoicing. This third group, they were actually celebrating it. And what happened was really interesting in real time. There were people going online and sort of trying to dox the group two and three, the remorseless and the rejoices trying to dox and get them fired. And by and large, society knew where to draw the line. The people that were remorseless did not get fired from their jobs. The people that were rejoicing did get fired from their jobs, which is exactly what should have happened. If I had an employee that was just a jerk and said, like, I don't care, he was a Nazi, I'd be like, hey, you shouldn't say that. Whatever. Like, I could, I could, you know, sort of like a little demerit for them. But if somebody is actually celebrating a murder of a political violence, that to me, that person is a danger to my company, right? If that's my colleague. And so society actually knew where the line was without even sort of defining it in any clear way. And I was sort of inspired that we just need to put the pressure on. And the word taboo is what sort of jumped out at me, because I realized that's what it is. We need to name this thing. Not only does it name the thing that we've been seeing for a long time, since October 8th, when people are celebrating what happened since Luigi Mangioni, people are celebrating it. We all felt this moral disgust and we didn't have a name for it. So now it names it. It's a taboo, something that's universal, we all agree is wrong, and it tells us what we need to do, because a taboo only remains a taboo if it is punished, if they face no punishment, especially if there are strong incentives on the other side, they're going to continue. And these kids, mostly kids, right? Brainwashed, radicalized, whatever that is. I don't think most of them are full of hate. They think they're on the wrong side. There strong social incentives in place. I think about the kids at Harvard who signed the the petition blaming Israel after October 7th and then three days later when Bill Ackman, the, you know, the Wall Street guy, sent a note, a memo to all the CEOs telling him not telling them not to hire these kids. And a bunch of them retracted their signatures. So before the social cost, if they didn't sign, even kids that probably didn't agree that Israel needs to be blamed for October 7th, they had to sign it because otherwise they would have lost so many of their friends, their social circles, their connections, everything else. And all of a sudden, Bill Ackman created a counter incentive on the other side that said, hey, there's a line that you can't cross. You can still be mad at Israel. You can sort of put all the context, everything else. But if you're going to go out there and express this crazy, hateful bigotry, sort of advocating for violence and terrorism, that's something that we in polite society, the workforces are not going to accept.

[00:28:09:06] Wilk Wilkinson: Yeah, I absolutely believe there needs to be social consequences for those that that celebrate murder and violence. I mean, this is this is absolutely one of those things. And I don't like you. I don't consider that cancel culture. I just think that's what a polite society does. We don't we don't allow and I don't mean allow in terms of.

[00:28:33:01] Erez Levin: My life or whatever. Yeah.

[00:28:34:22] Wilk Wilkinson: Right. But but yeah, we are not going to to put up with people celebrating the murder of, of innocent human beings and just, just pretend like that's okay, because when you do, you get more of it.

[00:28:50:08] Erez Levin: And we and that's exactly what's happened, right? Luigi Mangioni, no one was fired for celebrating him, as far as I know, like Charlie Kirk, there was just enough pressure that it actually forced employers because otherwise. And employers like, yeah, I don't like what he said, but he's my best employee. This is uncomfortable. I'm not going to sort of not invite this person to my dinner. But we have to like everyone in society, even if you know it's a person you love. And I'm not saying this person again, just a social jail. They need a time out. There needs to be told there's a line and if you cross it, you can't be part of many of the social, sort of normal, polite society functions.

[00:29:25:07] Wilk Wilkinson: No, that's absolutely right. I mean, I spent a lot of years in business. I was in operations management for for more than a decade. And one of the most important lessons that I ever learned Erez was if you tolerate, you know, the fastest way to ruin a good employee is to tolerate a bad one, right? And this goes to that same thing. And, you know, people, for whatever reason, haven't haven't understood it. I mean, it's kind of like subsidies, right? You you just get more of what you subsidize. And when you subsidize bad behavior, you're inevitably going to get more bad behavior. So we as a society have to decide where do we draw that line, and how are we going to make sure that instead of getting more of this behavior, you know, more of the ugliness online, right? I mean, we I want to go back to my, my, my Fog acronym that I've used for so long fear, outrage, and grievance. We in this in the media ecosystem to kind of take this thing full circle as we kind of approach the end of our time here. We in this, in this internet ecosystem, have monetized fear, outrage and grievance. We have made it very, you know, going to your your Holding the Line Substack and your recent recent article Incentives Against hate. You know, well, there's been a lot of incentives for hate for a long time, and it's become very profitable for certain people. You look at. The most Prominent influencers online, the ones that are making the most money off clicks and engagement. And it's not like they're talking about the beautiful field full of flowers and and cat videos and things like that. No, they are peddling fear, outrage and grievance, and they're doing it in a very, very lucrative way.

[00:31:09:14] Erez Levin: And we can't take away their incentives for the most part. Like they're going to make money, they've got bots and everything else, but all of their followers don't have that same luxury. They don't have that same economic security. And so they need to know. That's what I kind of want to do, is sort of make those guys pariahs. That's not to say no one's going to follow them at all, but they sort of, you know, no one's going to be inspired to then go and hit the front line and chance for the same things. Because they do have jobs. They do want the economic security. They do want to be part of polite society.

[00:31:40:21] Wilk Wilkinson: Yeah. Well, I think we we need to again figure out a way to. Well, and I think Braver Angels has done a, done a good job of you know, we talk a lot about courageous citizenship and wanting to make courageous citizenship the honored norm now. And that is the next chapter of Braver Angels is this idea that that we are going to reclaim as individuals. We are going to reclaim our agency and say, you know what? We are not going to partake in this ugliness. You know, we are going to reclaim our agency as individuals. We're going to take this out into our communities, and then we are going to scale that to a national idea, that courageous citizenship, which is not reducing people to their to their ugliest caricature. And we are not going to cancel people from making mistakes. We are going to welcome people in after they have learned that being this, this ugly, hateful human being, you know, is not acceptable. But once, once we can all start, you know, I don't want to talk about or can't we all just get along. But I do want to say that what you're talking about is so hugely important in the concept of citizenship and just say we have to be able to define. What is acceptable. What is not acceptable, and then figure out a way, as human beings to come together and really get things done. And if that means calling out things as being taboo, that's what it means.

[00:33:12:09] Erez Levin: Yeah. I'll close with one thought here. That sort of wraps it up. So, you know, my my Substack is really a very principled thinker. And so what I've tried to do is define this line as much as possible. It's tough. Right? It is a there's a big gray area of what's crossed the line. And does everyone agree on it? And what's the context. Because somebody that's a comedian that's telling a joke or whatever it is, like every single instance requires that nuance. So I'm trying to do that in a principled way with frameworks and things like that. We're not going to get it perfectly. What we can do is there in stuff that is so egregiously over the line, something that everyone sees today is so clearly wrong and bad, and if we can just get that out of our polite society, our mainstream politics, that regular discourse, like not let it seem like it's normalized and tolerated, we will come a very far away. There's still a lot in the gray area. We always want to get better. And that's where, you know, organizations like Braver Angels, we can work with people. We can try to bring them back. It's not immediate cancellation. It's try to understand. What were you trying to say? What did you really mean? Were you trying to be hateful? Do you understand why this could have been hurtful? Oh, somebody learned they process, they came back. Great. But the people that are so clearly over the line and are proud to stay there because it pays or because they're, you know, they're really ideological on that. You know what? You can you can have those views, but you can't have those views and be part of our polite society at the same time.

[00:34:40:12] Wilk Wilkinson: That's right. That's right. And that's a phenomenal point. And I think that's a great place to wrap it up. Erez Levin. Levin this is this has been a fantastic conversation. We could I think we've got many more conversations in our future. And yeah, the Substack is E Levin 11 at Substack.com And that's the well, the spelling will be in the.

[00:35:06:15] Erez Levin: It's called holding. Holding the line is the name. So if you search for it'll come.

[00:35:10:11] Wilk Wilkinson: Up search holding the line, and we'll have the link to it in the show notes. Incredible Substack. You're doing great work, my friend. I appreciate you a lot. Thank you so much for joining me.

[00:35:21:08] Erez Levin: Thank you. Wilk

[00:35:23:05] Wilk Wilkinson: Friends, I want to thank you so much for tuning in. And if there's anything in this episode that provided exceptional value to you, please make sure to hit that share button. If you haven't done so already, please be sure to subscribe to get the Derate The Hate podcast sent to your email inbox every week. We really are better together. So please take a moment to visit Braver Angels and consider joining the movement towards civic renewal and bridging our political divide. This is Wilk wrapping up for the week saying get out there. Be kind to one another. Be grateful for everything you've got. And remember, it's up to you to make every day the day that you want it to be. With that, my friend. I'm going to back on out of here and we will catch you next week. Take care.