Challenging Opinions >>

Challenging Opinions >>


CO147 Otaviano Canuto on the Post-Covid Economy

May 18, 2020

Otaviano Canuto was a vice president of the World Bank Group. He previously served as Executive Director at the Board of the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, and he’s held other roles at the World Bank and, as well as the position of State Secretary for International Affairs at the Ministry of Finance of Brazil.

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About two years ago on the podcast I had an interview with Natalie Wynn, then called Natalie Parrott, and also known as the youtuber ContraPoints. Despite the fact that I’m a huge fan of her YouTube channel it was a pretty tense interview. If you don’t know the ContraPoints channel on YouTube, you should look it up now, she puts a huge investment into the writing and shooting of the videos, not least to the hugely in-depth analysis of the topics covered.

Because I’m a big fan of her videos, particularly the rigorous intellectual questioning in them, I was a bit disappointed that the interview was, as I say, tense, and that Natalie came across as defensive. That was my perception and quite a few listeners commented in the same vein; Natalie is a transwoman, a lot of her videos are centered on that topic and I thought that it would be interesting to talk to her about the issues that surround that and of course that would mean putting to her the views of people who disagree with her.

If you listen to that interview, I think you will hear that she didn’t see it that way.

One of the topics that we disagreed over was the way in which some trans people and their supporters can be perceived to be intolerant of any expression of views that they don’t agree with. They are certainly not alone in that, I’m not suggesting that’s true of all trans people, but there seems little point in denying that the effect exists.

To illustrate this point, I played a clip of a woman who describes herself a sex-educator, Laci Green. If you know anything at all about her, you will know that she is a strong supporter of the LGBT community in general and trans people in particular, but despite this,