00:00:00.560Welcome to this interview. I'm very pleased today to be interviewing Dr. Michael Schirmer.
00:00:07.200And Dr. Schirmer, hello and thank you very much for agreeing to be interviewed.
00:00:12.100Thanks for having me. Nice to see you.
00:00:14.500Great. So I think we have plenty of stuff to talk about.
00:00:19.440Dr. Schirmer is one of the founding members of the magazine Skeptic.
00:00:25.400And you have written many books. You have written books like Why People Believe Weird Things, Why Darwin Matters, The Science of Good and Evil, The Moral Arc, Heavens on Earth, Giving the Devil His Due Reflections of a Scientific Humanist, and also Conspiracy, Why the Rational Believes Irrational.
00:00:43.920So I think there's plenty of stuff to talk about.
00:00:49.520And as we have been discussing so far, I think we should definitely talk a lot about skepticism, echo chambers, and especially issues concerning science and morality.
00:01:01.320So if I may start by asking you a personal question, what made you found the magazine Skeptic?
00:01:08.120Oh, well, here's what it looks like. Here's an old issue with Carl Sagan on the cover after he passed.
00:01:16.180And then here's our latest issue on culture wars, which we're going to get into, cancel culture and woke, progressive, trans, race, immigration, abortion, all that stuff.
00:01:28.460In the early days, we mostly dealt with the supernatural and the paranormal, things like science and religion and miracles and superstitions, astrology, UFOs, conspiracy theories, all that kind of stuff.
00:01:43.720That was kind of old school skepticism about, you know, claims that were being made in the 1960s and 70s about, you know, kind of New Age phenomenon.
00:01:53.700Since then, in the last few years, we've shifted to talking about more culture, war type topics, like I mentioned, trans, abortion, race, nationalism, education, reform, health care, energy, like nuclear power.
00:02:10.820All of these are tied together through science and rationality.
00:02:16.600That is to say, can we determine what's true about anything?
00:02:20.900So the question, you know, are we being visited by aliens or, you know, can astrologers really predict the future is really no different than asking about, you know, some political hot button topics, you know, like trans.
00:03:21.780And again, our mission, general mission is promoting doing research and education on science and rationality as a way of really trying to understand the world.
00:03:34.400And, you know, we want, you know, that's our thing.
00:03:38.280So when you started, did you have the impression that you would embark upon such a trajectory and about talking issues like whether men can give birth to children?
00:03:51.860No, I mean, when we started, it was just in my garage as a hobby.
00:03:55.340I was a college professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and that's all I wanted to do.
00:04:00.840I just wanted to be a college professor.
00:04:04.560You know, you get, especially when you get tenure, you get paid to just do research and write and teach.
00:04:09.560And I mean, that's really what I wanted to do.
00:04:12.600But the magazine got a lot of attention, and our membership grew a lot.
00:04:19.140And then my first book, Why People Believe We're Things, came out in 1997, and it did really well.
00:04:23.720And I got a big advance for another book.
00:04:26.160And I thought, you know what, this is probably more important for, you know, changing the world through the magazine, through books, through TV, through op-eds, and so on, public intellectual outreach venues, than teaching, you know, 25 students in a classroom.
00:04:46.360Which I enjoyed, but, you know, I just wanted to reach more people.
00:04:52.120I mean, I've been a college professor on and off, you know, for 40 years.
00:04:55.100But my main job is to come to the office here in Santa Barbara, Skeptics Magazine offices, and, you know, just crank out another issue, edit more articles for the next issue, and finish writing my next book, and producing podcasts, and writing op-ed pieces, just all that kind of stuff.
00:05:10.380And, you know, again, if you want to change the world, I think you have to reach a lot of people.
00:05:14.540And we're fortunate to live in the age we do, where you and I can reach millions of people online.
00:05:22.240I mean, that was not available in the 90s when I really started doing this.
00:05:26.820It was just television and newspapers.
00:05:28.880And, you know, if they didn't want to have you on the show, there was no other option.
00:05:35.080And now, anybody with a microphone and a camera, you know, can be their own TV producer or whatever.
00:05:41.280It's a crowded market, but, you know, the options are unbelievably available.
00:05:46.580So, no, I didn't think I was going to get into any of this full time.
00:05:51.120But the subjects have always interested me, since I was a college student, you know, the big questions, stuff you study, like free will and determinism, you know, consciousness, you know, is there a God?
00:06:03.460Why is there something rather than nothing?
00:06:19.480And I think that this may be rewarding and you feel it's a bit more rewarding than, as you said, talking just to a few people, which is rewarding, but not as I think it's rewarding to a different degree.
00:06:58.400I realize that, you know, not only am I not the only one, you know, if you're not getting a lot of hate on Twitter or X or on social media, then you might you're not doing something right.
00:07:09.420Right. You know, when I post things about Israel and Hamas or Ukraine and Russia or trans race, whatever, you know, if I don't get a lot of hate pushback, I must not be doing something right.
00:07:22.260You know, but I would just stay true to myself.
00:07:33.160And so, you know, that's that's how it works.
00:07:34.960So I think it would be good if we had a discussion that 2A degree is a bit philosophical, because I think that philosophy and, as you said, science, they directly affect how we view the world and also directly affect how we approach a lot of questions, especially those that are ethical.
00:07:57.280So I wanted to ask you about skepticism, because to my mind, skepticism is a double edged sword.
00:08:06.040It has some really good things about it, but it can also be a bit corrosive.
00:08:14.480And I'm thinking particularly of some forms of skepticism that are, for instance, moral skepticism and also the kind of skepticism that a lot of people have when they are so diffident and they cannot rest on their judgment.
00:08:29.780And it seems to me that it's the exact opposite of what we would expect from thinkers that we want to listen to, who do have the, let's say, the moral standing and the character to stand by their own judgments.
00:08:44.760So I wanted to ask you, how do you understand skepticism?
00:08:50.600You know, that's always been the question since we started the magazine, you know, and it's called skeptic, you know, so of course, I guess, well, what is that?
00:08:58.380You know, and it can easily slide into nihilism and denialism and, and cynicism, but that's not how we're using it.
00:09:06.460We're using it in the scientific sense that the null hypothesis is true.
00:09:11.600That is to say, your claim is not true until proven otherwise.
00:09:18.440They're skeptical of other people's hypotheses and theories until they get convinced by evidence and arguments.
00:09:25.320And so everybody should be skeptical, you know, kick the tires.
00:09:28.380And look under the hood and make sure, you know, that the person making the claim has evidence and reasons for it.
00:09:33.860If not, then it's reasonable to be skeptical.
00:09:37.480And now the principle applies, you know, across the board, but it depends on the claim.
00:09:43.660So, for example, you could be a global warming skeptic or you could be skeptical of the global warming skeptics, which is mostly what I am.
00:09:51.540You know, I think global warming is real and human caused.
00:09:53.520I think the doomsayers would probably go too far, but a lot of the climate skeptics, I think, are too ideological.
00:10:31.660You know, keep an open mind, you know, and change your mind when the evidence changes.
00:10:36.080So it's not a particularly philosophical or technical view of skepticism.
00:10:40.640It's more of a common sense view, I would say, a watered-down view.
00:10:44.940Because to my mind, for instance, the skeptic comes in many gradations.
00:10:49.940So, for instance, we have the pyronist who constantly asks for why, and we have the infinite regress of justifications.
00:10:55.860And then we have other forms of skeptics.
00:10:58.420But it seems to me that the kind of skeptic you are talking about is more a person who adopts a particular attitude of disbelief with respect to some large claims.
00:11:12.380So, for instance, you would say something like big claims require extraordinary evidence.
00:11:18.220And unless they are supported with those, most probably we should suspend judgment or just say that we don't have good reasons to believe.
00:11:30.420So if we want to talk a little philosophy of science, you know, Bayesian reasoning versus Popperian falsification reasoning, you know, if the claim being made is not testable, it's not falsifiable, even in principle, you know, something like maybe panpsychism or are we living in a matrix, you know, a simulation, you know, is consciousness the ground of all being and so on?
00:12:15.580I mean, maybe it's science fiction or it's metaphysics or it's fun, you know, but, you know, for us to take it seriously, there has to be some way to test it.
00:12:24.940You know, and then in terms of Bayesian reasoning, I like this because it allows us to assign some probability, not zero or not one.
00:12:34.340You know, Cromwell's rule, never assign a zero or one to any claim because you might be mistaken.
00:12:38.820Okay, but I doubt that UFOs represent extraterrestrials visitation on Earth, but I'm not 100% sure they're not.
00:12:47.400You know, it's maybe there's a 1% chance they could be extraterrestrials, right?
00:12:52.200So I'll change my, I'll adjust my priors and my credence along with it if you show me some evidence.
00:12:58.780That allows us to be open-minded, not dogmatic, and just open to changing our minds.
00:13:05.840That's kind of the two ways of thinking about skepticism.
00:13:09.540Okay, so I have a really interesting question here that I'm sure you will have a good response.
00:13:16.900So when you're talking about something being testable, I suspect you mean empirically testable, because to my mind, for instance, ethical claims are unnecessarily empirically testable.
00:13:30.000But we could say that empirical claims could be falsified by data other than presumably empirical data.
00:13:38.280Now, I come from a very, you could say, traditionally metaphysical perspective.
00:13:44.260Presumably, you could give an argument against that perspective and reject my claim.
00:13:51.760But would you say that, for instance, ethical claims here are claims that we could talk about in an empirical matter 100%?
00:14:02.560In other words, let me rephrase the question for the audience.
00:14:05.020I'm not implying that empirical evidence are, let's say, something that have nothing to do with ethics.
00:14:15.560But I'm just asking whether ethics can be 100% studied by science.
00:14:21.580That's the question that I would have.
00:14:24.900Yeah, okay, let's get off the 0% or 100% and just think of it as more of a spectrum.
00:29:20.060But on the other hand, there is a very significant and organized attempt to curtail free speech.
00:29:25.320So what do you think is going on there?
00:29:27.500Yeah, I think it's, yeah, it's, it's a concern.
00:29:30.120It's the same concern when the printing press is invented and then books became popular and cheap and readily produced and widely read and literacy rates skyrocketed upward.
00:29:42.740And, you know, people discovered that, you know, the world was not this tiny little provincial thing that, you know, there was an infinite amount of information.
00:29:51.300We're going through the same thing now.
00:29:52.960You know, there were censors that wanted to ban books and did.
00:29:55.800And people had these kinds of discussions like, is this good or bad?
00:29:59.340Coffee houses, coffee house debates over the latest book or idea.
00:30:03.600You know, these are for the most part, I think, good.
00:30:06.420I'm a, almost a free speech absolutist.
00:30:09.420You know, there are very few things I think should be banned or censored.
00:30:13.180The obvious ones, you know, libeling somebody or slandering somebody that harms them.
00:30:18.740You know, just like leaking the nuclear codes to the enemy.
00:30:22.280You know, these are probably not things that should be allowed.
00:30:43.460It's just, you know, you don't have to watch him.
00:30:45.960And you can look up somebody else who criticizes it.
00:30:48.740You know, Rogan is so big that the moment he talks to somebody like this, there's dozens of videos up saying, this is why this guy is wrong.
00:33:35.880Most who don't, they, they face the problem of they may get instantly fired, but they're,
00:33:41.880they can also get more than instantly fired because it seems to me that one of the problems
00:33:46.320with what we can loosely call progressivism is that it subjectivizes things so much that
00:33:54.620it creates a form of domination in the workplace.
00:33:58.780And, uh, this may sound a bit Marxist, I'm not a Marxist at all, but I think that in this case, the, this does create a framework where the customer is always right in a sense.
00:34:12.820And there are a lot of customers with lots of different things that they want.
00:34:17.280So it seems to me that those who can, who are in academia have massive problems with respect
00:34:26.620Because the, the way I found it is that teaching philosophy is supposed to be challenging.
00:34:32.300I'm thinking of the Socrates in the early platonic dialogues.
00:34:36.340It's not supposed to be necessarily a happy thing for those who are, uh, who, who are once interlocutors, but it seems to me that this kind of education can't be delivered anymore.
00:34:52.000Uh, professors are afraid of students, uh, who will openly criticize them or turn them in to the thought police on campus, the DEI bureaucracy, diversity, equity, and inclusion, bureaucracy, and so on.
00:35:05.780Uh, and, or student evaluations, you know, all universities happen.
00:35:10.160Um, and for good reason, I mean, it's good, you know, how do administrators know what professors are doing in their classroom unless they ask the students what's going on in there?
00:35:17.680And, uh, but that could backfire, of course, when the students turn on the professors.
00:35:23.800One is, um, college campuses are no longer what you just described as they're more, they really are more like homes or a home away from home for these students that are transitioning between high school and adulthood.
00:35:36.780And, uh, you know, their so-called safe spaces, they're supposed to be safe spaces, like that famous viral video of, of, um, the students surrounding Nicholas Christakis at Yale University screaming at them.
00:35:49.460You know, and there was that one student, you know, this is our home, you know, you have to, you're supposed to make a safe home for us.
00:35:55.600And he's like, no, I'm not, that's not what we're doing here.
00:35:58.900You're in college, you're not at home.
00:36:14.900Um, but also I think the shift in, uh, economic incentives for universities that have become so expensive, they really have to, they really do have to make the universities appealing to students.
00:36:25.580That's why they spent all this money on climbing walls and swimming pools and all this other stuff that has nothing to do with academia or before that sports programs, you know, uh, that is pretty far removed from your Socratic model, which is what we have to get back to.
00:36:57.380So I want to ask you as a skeptic, specifically as a skeptic, when you listen to all these people who call themselves progressive, and I say this because to my mind, this is not necessarily progress, but when all these people are sort of bombarding others with message that the message that they are so sensitive.
00:37:17.540They are so sensitive and so much caring about the world and they want to create that safe space.
00:37:24.680Do you ever have second thoughts about their intentions?
00:37:30.560I think a lot of them, most of them probably do have good intentions, uh, you know, in the old days, we would have called this liberalism, you know, you're supposed to be open and tolerant of people different from you, you know, and in the 1950s, 60s, this was a good value to have because most people were not particularly open and tolerant to people different from them, particularly in America with race.
00:37:53.700So, so all, so all that's good, you know, and then, you know, say the same, you know, women's rights, same sex marriage, gay rights, you know, the, this kind of openness and tolerance, this liberal, these liberal values were really important.
00:38:07.500It's what drove those rights revolutions to happen in the case of same sex marriage and gay rights.
00:38:12.700That's, that's the fastest rights revolution in history.
00:38:15.880I mean, we went from 2011 examples I give in 2011, both Hillary and Barack Obama were against same sex marriage.
00:39:01.860Some of this I get, you know, I, I don't think trans people should be fired just because they're trans or they should be discriminated against.
00:39:07.640It, you know, just everybody should be protected by the law, treated equally under the law and so on full stop.
00:39:13.640Doesn't matter what the category is, you know, but the, the idea that then back to your empirical question about morality.
00:40:13.640Treating people instead of as individuals, but as members of a group that we're going to discreet, we're going to categorize you as, I don't have to know anything about you.
00:40:23.640All's I know is you're white and that's all I need to know.
00:40:36.640So when you're talking about, uh, people who have good intentions, I, I don't doubt that a lot of them do have, but there's a time where you, there's a play.
00:40:46.640There's a, let's say a question that comes to mind sometimes that if someone has good intentions and they don't even stop to think to, to give, let's say just a few minutes of thought to see what they are suggesting.
00:41:15.640Um, well again, so it does sometimes come down to what the law allows.
00:41:20.640This is why you do have to fight the battle, not only like what you and I are doing battle of ideas, but sometimes you have to do it from the top down through legislation, right?
00:41:29.640So, um, in your neck of the woods, they're, you know, closing down a Tavistock clinic from doing any more, uh, gender surgeries and hormone treatments and so on.
00:41:54.640Sometimes you need men with guns to make things happen.
00:41:58.640I mean, this happened in integrating schools in the South in the 19 late fifties, early sixties, that took the president setting in federal troops, men with guns to say, you are going to integrate these schools.
00:42:12.640And, and that's just the law of the lands the way it goes to bed.
00:42:21.640And I think that the modern variant of liberalism is just the direct opposite in many cases, because first of all, there is no focus on civil society.
00:42:36.640As you just said a few minutes ago, people are just treated as members of groups.
00:42:41.640And most of the time, even the individual traits and the history of the individual is treated as morally arbitrary by a lot of, by many modern liberals.
00:42:53.640I can think of John Rawls, for instance, in the theory of justice, who is saying that from a moral perspective, a lot of the influences upon individuals are morally arbitrary and their, their results, the consequences that result from them should be sort of addressed by his principles of justice.
00:43:14.640So this is, I think, a major departure from classical liberalism to modern liberalism.
00:43:19.640But one thing that I, that I see, especially when it comes to legislation that you mentioned before, is that there's yet another regress, and there's a regress towards more authoritarian and arbitrary government.
00:43:33.640Because in my mind, the, the progress in political philosophy ever since the 17th century is to a large extent, a progress that has to do with curbing the arbitrary authority of government.
00:43:47.640But now it seems to me that the, there are so many elements in council culture that give authority, how should I say, arbitrary authorities to governments, because, for instance, hate speech laws, they are so subjective, that is just to the, is left to the discretion of particular people to under, to interpret what constitutes psychological harm.
00:44:16.640Because, on the one hand, I do think that there is such a thing as psychological harm.
00:44:21.640But the, the way that people understand it are vastly different.
00:44:26.640And it seems to me that once we subjectivize hate speech laws, and we also connect them, combine them with the silence is violence mentality, we have created an extremist ideology, where everyone who doesn't enthusiastically celebrate the latest trend,
00:44:45.640is basically someone that violence against them is self-defense.
00:44:50.640Because if disagreement is hate speech, silence is violence, then anything short of waving the latest version of the flag is something that, that constitutes an existential threat.
00:45:05.640So it seems to me that there are two things going on, and a lot of, a lot of this progressivism is leading to an increase in arbitrary government.
00:45:16.640Do you think that this is, this has a hint of truth in it?
00:45:19.640Oh yeah, I, I, you said it even better than I would say it, so I'll just say ditto.
00:45:47.640I mean, part of it's the, you know, the kind of the structure of the news media, you know, you know, you, you send the camera crew to where the school shooting is not where the school shooting isn't.
00:45:57.640So where there's protests and riots on campus, of course, they're going to get covered, you know, but most college campuses, I used to do a lot of talks on college campuses.
00:46:27.640Uh, that said, we do have to push back because even if it's 1% or 5% or 10% causing the problem, um, they can silence the majority who don't want anything to do with that.
00:46:48.640This is an old, very old sociological phenomenon.
00:46:51.640So to break that, you have to speak up.
00:46:53.640And the more of us that speak up, the more everybody else can see that they're thinking like the majority us think, not like the minority of the far left.
00:47:03.640And so in, uh, social psychology, this is called pluralistic ignorance or the spiral of silence where everybody thinks everybody else thinks something when in fact they don't.
00:47:12.640And until somebody speaks up, uh, nobody knows this, but the more people speak up, this is why you have to have free, free press and free speech.
00:47:20.640And, you know, people, uh, letting their voices be heard so that everybody can see that actually most people don't agree with these far left positions and then they're freer to speak up.
00:47:31.640And then they're less likely to be canceled or fired or whatever, when everybody can see what's actually going on.
00:47:38.640So number one, how did this minority come to have so much political pool?
00:47:44.640And number two, what is going to happen with the clash within the protected groups camp between, for instance, uh, the trans group and the, and the pro pro, um, Islam group?
00:48:03.640Because there seems to me to be in a lot of, I mean, many campuses, there are a lot of people who are talking about the Israel Palestine conflict and they have already picked up a side.
00:48:16.640And, uh, a lot, many of the times the side they have picked seems to me to be antithetical to the values that they claim to profess.
00:48:25.640In other words, when we're talking about the movement queers for Palestine, there are several questions as to how important they are, but what's going to happen there?
00:48:35.640Because the protected groups that a lot of the progressivists that are in fact regressivists are claiming to defend, they, they're fundamentally clashing.
00:48:45.640So what's going to happen there with that clash?
00:48:48.640Well, I, of course I don't know for sure, but I do think, um, this too shall pass.
00:48:53.640I think the pendulum is swinging the other way, maybe not on the Palestine Israel question just yet, but, but soon.
00:49:00.640Um, I mean, I, I think it's good that we've all been exposed to the rabid antisemitism in, uh, in these college campuses and a lot of these, uh, pro Palestinian, uh, protests, you know, again, an argument for free speech and covering all this stuff.
00:49:18.640Let everybody have their voices heard.
00:49:30.640I want to know what people are thinking that these hate speech laws, like, well, you know, Holocaust, when I was writing my Holocaust denial book, denying history about the Holocaust deniers.
00:49:57.640And so I think in the case of, um, the, you know, the current crisis with, um, Israel and Palestine on college campuses, uh, you know, I think those recent congressional hearings with the presidents of Penn, MIT and Harvard to not denounce antisemitism was a wake up call.
01:00:14.880Oh, well, I mean, you already know the answer.
01:00:16.880I mean, this postmodernism, this assault on truth that we can't know truth, that, you know,
01:00:22.880objective moral values and objective empirical truths aren't, uh, don't exist.
01:00:28.880They're just the subject of, uh, culture bound in a particular Western culture that is no better than any other culture.
01:00:35.880All that stuff we've been, you know, talking about and going through, you know, for the past half century.
01:00:40.880And, you know, it started in academia, but it's filtered out now into the corporate world and culture at large.
01:00:48.880I mean, these ideas are no longer constrained to classrooms, unfortunately, which is why we have to broaden our audience.
01:00:55.880And, you know, alert people, this is what's going on.
01:00:58.880And because we know from polls, most people are not on board.
01:01:02.880Just say, take a diversity, equity, and inclusion, uh, bureaucracy that started on college campuses.
01:01:07.880Now it's a $10 billion a year industry just in the United States, just in corporate America, just all corporations putting their employees through these training programs.
01:01:19.880It's, it's a massive, huge business and they're all required to do it.
01:01:23.880Um, but if you ask people, how do they feel about it?
01:01:56.880Now that, you know, there's pushback against this from the, both the bottom up by people like me and you, but also top down, you know, where people like Christopher Rufo are agitating politicians to change, um, the law that is legislate DEI out of the world of business and then academia.
01:02:18.880I think though the problem with this is that, uh, I don't see it going away.
01:02:23.880I hear a lot of the people, and I think you said it before that it is a sort of fashion and it will go away.
01:02:28.880I have an argument and I want to hear what you're going to say about it.
01:02:32.880So it seems to me that it is the wokeness is the perfect divide and conquer tactic because it, and it is the combination of multiculturalism and social justice in a particular understanding of both terms.
01:02:51.880Because multiculturalism, it says on the one hand that there are many groups within a culture and those groups that are not dominant should not have pressures to assimilate to the dominant culture.
01:03:04.880And then the instrument of social justice comes and says that we need to address historical, um, injustices.
01:03:11.880And by doing this, we are going to not just allow the pro the protected groups to be, we're going to actually treat them preferentially.
01:03:21.880And the question there seems to me that if that, that a lot of the groups that are placed within the protected category have clashing interests.
01:03:32.880Uh, for instance, the trans, uh, lobby and the radical feminist lobby, they have clashing interests and both of them have clashing interests with a lot of, uh, let's say immigrants who are talking about, uh, completely subverting, uh, some basic institutions of the Western civilization.
01:03:50.880So the problem seems to me, and that's where I get very skeptical.
01:03:55.880And I don't think that this is just, uh, um, this is just an issue of not thinking it through is that every time that we see people from each of these groups clash with each other, the official narrative, at least from the progressives is that the reason why they clash is because they have remnants of the pressure to assimilate to the dominant culture.
01:04:19.880So in other words, the way to keep clashing groups together and the way to keep them from killing each other is by inventing a common enemy, hold them together and give political support to the progressive parties and constantly demonize the group that is pronounced to be dominant.
01:04:40.880So it seems to me that this doesn't seem to me to be going away.
01:04:50.880I'm not a prophet, but I see the pendulum swinging back the other way, maybe cause I'm overly optimistic.
01:04:57.880Um, you know, there is pushback against these most people again, survey survey show most people are not on board with these particular movements, the ones you just went through.
01:05:07.880Uh, and again, the more of us that speak out, the more other people that are afraid to speak out or will then speak out and say, no, I'm not on board with this.
01:05:15.880A lot of life depends, you know, turns on clashing rights or conflicting rights.
01:05:20.880You know, Thomas Sowell famously said, you know, there are no solutions.
01:05:43.880And by the way, it's just to point out, it's only male to female transit that we're talking about here, you know, female to male trans the other way.
01:05:52.880It's there's no particular issues that are on the table there.
01:05:55.880Um, so, you know, I want to support trans rights or human rights.
01:06:00.880But if you are a male to female trans and you want to compete against women in women's sports, I'm going to say, no, that's not, that's not fair to the women.
01:06:10.880So it depends how we understand human rights to what we understand them doing.
01:06:15.880And, and, and, you know, women spent, you know, a century fighting for their rights and to say, we're going to take them away now and let men dominate you again.
01:06:22.880You know, this is just perverse, you know, it's just, it's not right.