00:02:45.820And then, you know, then we'll address them.
00:02:47.860Now, I'm not afraid to debunk them as well.
00:02:49.440but I still think they should be given their due in a sense that none of us can get it right all
00:02:55.560the time so we have to listen to you know dissenting voices just in case. Well I guess one
00:03:02.100of the most difficult issues that's been brought up and you spend a lot of time in the book talking
00:03:06.100about free speech it's the first and most probably one of the more significant portions of it
00:03:10.700but one of the difficulties that the pandemic has brought up I don't know if you followed this case
00:03:15.660in the UK where we had a well-known conspiracy theorist, David Icke, who gave an interview about
00:03:22.360how the 5G masks are causing the coronavirus. And soon afterwards, there was a spate of
00:03:31.800arson attacks against 5G masks, right? And YouTube banned that video. Then he went and did another
00:03:39.160interview on a private platform, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think that's one of probably
00:03:42.820the most difficult cases where you think, well, is this person's speech causing destruction of
00:03:48.800property, et cetera? Where do you stand on something like that? Because I don't know if
00:03:52.940I've still worked out what my position on that is. Yeah. So I know that case. I watched that
00:03:58.280interview and then I was on Brian Rose's London Real Show to talk about it. And I think even
00:04:05.700someone as kind of far out there or nutty or or fringy as as david ike should be given his boot
00:04:12.660now when when i say that i don't mean we're obligated to put him on every show so he has
00:04:18.360his voice it's up to him to to to find a platform for his his conspiracy theories and if somebody
00:04:25.000takes them up on him fine don't you don't censor that uh and you know he's not again he's not
00:04:31.200completely crazy you know if you listen to him he's obviously fairly smart articulate man um you
00:04:37.820know but his chain of reasoning leads him down you know some you know off the rails down some
00:04:42.840crazy pathways where he ends up with the lizard aliens running the world or or you know the 5g
00:04:48.040towers now is are his words responsible for somebody firebombing a tower i would say that
00:04:55.020it's a bit of a reach that is to say people that would do something like that if you point out to
00:05:00.960them where David Icke was wrong, they're not likely to be changing their mind anyway. The
00:05:06.120analogy I use is with the, you know, the famous story about the conspiracy theory about Hillary
00:05:11.600Clinton running pedophile ring out of a pizzeria, you know, before the 2016 election. I mean, this
00:05:17.700is as crazy as it gets. And some guy showed up to this pizzeria with a gun, you know, and hopefully
00:05:23.680no one was hurt, but people acting on like that and people that believe that, my correcting them
00:05:32.020on Hillary's not running a pedophile ring out of a pizzeria, they're not going to change their
00:05:37.660mind about Hillary on this. And they're likely to do something crazy anyway, because that particular
00:05:44.300conspiracy theory is not why they're agitated, not why they're out there doing their things
00:05:50.760like that. In any case, um, the moment you set up a gatekeeper that says like, like apparently
00:05:57.580Google slash YouTube is doing either algorithms or actual people sitting there watching videos
00:06:02.960and making the decision, are we going to allow this or not? Then you're down the pathway of,
00:06:08.360of expanding that category to include more and more things that are kind of moderate,
00:06:14.120you know, kind of, you know, within the, the kind of the Overton window, as it's called of
00:06:18.880discussable subjects that category gets bigger and then and then censorship expands and then
00:06:25.180more and more of us are self-censoring or we're afraid to say what we think because we might be
00:06:29.720canceled or censored or kicked off youtube or twitter or instagram or whatever and that's a
00:06:36.220dangerous path to go so that's why on page one of the book i talk about the 1919 decision so over a
00:06:43.540century ago now of shank versus the united states charles shank was the head of the socialist party
00:06:48.620in Philadelphia, and he was distributing pamphlets, flyers to draft age men to protest the draft. He
00:06:55.780said it was unconstitutional. The 13th and 14th amendments protect you from slavery and guarantee
00:07:02.100your bodily autonomy. And the draft is basically saying the government can take my body and send
00:07:08.840me off to war to die if it wants. And that's a kind of a form of slavery. Now, that's a debatable
00:07:14.740point but that's not the point that i'm making is that just saying that uh was a criminal act
00:07:21.040uh an act of treason at the time and that's when uh oliver wendell holmes made his famous
00:07:27.380decision in which he included that phrase a clear and present danger that was the equivalent of
00:07:34.280shouting fire in a theater uh shouting fire in the theater well you know over decades more and
00:07:41.100thing got put into that bin of clear and present danger, such to the point where anybody uttering
00:07:46.760any criticism of the government could be considered a clear and present danger. So we got to shut this
00:07:52.040guy up. And that's where you end up with, you know, by the 70s, you end up with the language
00:07:56.440police and political correctness. And, you know, every utterance could be considered a clear and
00:08:01.480danger to somebody somewhere. And then, you know, by the 90s and early 2000s, you end up with,
00:08:07.540Well, to paraphrase the title of your podcast, you know, people that are triggered by the tiniest little things like the paroxysm at Yale over Halloween costumes, you know, where Nicholas Christakis and his wife sent that email out saying, you know, we're not going to tell you what kind of costumes to wear on Halloween.
00:08:26.860You're adults, you know, and and for this, they were, you know, totally just shattered.
00:14:38.680Well, I don't think they're likely to blow up towers or whatever.
00:14:42.720Oh, they're nowhere near organized enough, believe you me, no.
00:14:46.360Yeah. So again, I mean, I get the temptation. It's there, you know, let's shut these people down. And I will admit, I kind of felt that same way when Alex Jones's followers started showing up at the parents of Sandy Hook shooting victims. You know, that's really bad when they do that.
00:15:06.480But again, you know, there's some element of moral culpability on the people that do it, not on Alex Jones's crazy ideas.
00:15:15.980You know, people do act on their ideas, but it's the people acting that should be held accountable and responsible, not the person that uttered the speech, in my opinion.
00:15:25.420And where do you stand, Michael, on the, you know, we've got these big tech companies.
00:15:32.120they are essentially monopolies and they get to choose what goes on their platform, what doesn't,
00:15:37.800what gets broadcast to, you know, hundreds of millions of people. Do you think they're too big,
00:15:43.080too powerful? Or do you think they're private companies, they can put on whatever they want,
00:15:47.720it's not really an issue? Yeah, really the latter, because the fear of monopolies has always been
00:15:53.560around since corporations are invented. And we regulate them or break them up, and they have,
00:15:59.700in some case with antitrust laws in the United States.
00:16:03.380But really as the men is competition, that is to say, we just need more platforms.
00:16:08.760And there are people developing more alternative platforms, you know, and I think the same
00:16:14.680thing will happen with search engines, with the equivalent of YouTube, you know, other
00:16:21.360platforms to post videos, you know, as we've seen now already quickly in the last few months,
00:16:26.740just the competition for streaming services for movies uh you know hulu and and and uh netflix
00:16:35.480and amazon prime and disney plus and now abc nbc cbs are all launching their own streaming
00:16:44.060um platforms so this is the solution to uh to monopolies is to break them up by competition
00:16:52.600not by fiat from the government in my opinion that's that that's the better way to deal with
00:16:58.260it i wrote about this in in my book on the mind of the market about the um uh the lawsuit against
00:17:03.600microsoft for bundling netscape and and sort of forcing people to use netscape well by the time
00:17:11.400internet explorer surely internet explorer yeah internet explorer yeah sorry yeah um it was so
00:17:18.400long ago since anyone used either of them, Michael, that it's, it's fair. I know, that's it. But by the time that lawsuit went through the courts and on appeal and years, I don't know, it was years and years of drug on, no one was using those technologies anymore. Right. And that's the solution. Just keep, you know, more innovation, you know, more, more inventions, more competition between people. You know, it is a, it is a concern, although we see this in politics, we essentially have a duopoly in the United States, the Democrats and Republicans capture
00:17:47.840We were 99% of everything, all the money, all the votes, and so on.
00:17:53.060And it would be better if we were more like European countries that had, you know, four or five viable parties.
00:18:02.460But the political system is rigged by the way it's designed here in the United States to end up with a duopoly like that.
00:18:09.040But at the very least, it would be good to have, you know, some tech billionaire like a Peter Thiel launch a new platform to compete with YouTube.
00:18:16.720you know and i think he sits on the board of google or something like that so maybe he do that
00:18:22.320but you know somebody like that you know or a jeff jeff bezos you know maybe looking something
00:18:29.260like a youtube for uh with next to amazon prime video something like that i think that's a solution
00:18:35.940well that's an interesting point and you bring up the political side of all this and here's what
00:18:40.460some people might say to the argument you've just made which is that even when you have you know
00:18:45.600different platforms, they're all based in Silicon Valley.
00:18:48.620They're all run by woke liberals, right?
00:18:52.220Or people that are perceived as being woke liberals.
00:19:02.720But in terms of their policies on, you know, restrictions,
00:19:08.980in terms of their pushing of diversity in the way that it's now defined
00:19:12.760And in all of those respects, Facebook, Google, Instagram owned by Facebook, YouTube owned by Google, the power is consolidated into the hands of five or six people who all think the same, who when they make a decision about, let's say, banning somebody off their platform, there's no question that they collude with each other because those people get banned simultaneously across a different platform.
00:19:36.400So even if you have another search engine, it's likely to be based in California, it's likely to be run by the same types of people. And then the political shenanigans that you then get as a result of that kind of mindset being the only one that's involved is that you end up in a position where even if you have three different YouTube-like alternatives, they still all ban David Icke.
00:20:27.380You know, there was sort of a consolidation of news media with just a handful of newspapers
00:20:32.360papers wall street journal new york times here and the cbs nbc uh abc on television um but now
00:20:39.980you know there's you know 10 000 sources of news and and of course we're people about that
00:20:47.080oh it's like well wait a minute you want to get rid of a lot of those because they're so fringy
00:20:52.000and they pass around fake news but before you were complaining there were only three sources
00:20:56.260So what's the number? You know, is it 16? Is it 27? Is it 245? What's the right number of sources? And the answer is just let the market decide that. Let people choose. Give people some accountability for making their own choices. And, you know, let's address it that way.
00:21:16.500You know, watch out for being in a in a bubble in which you're only reading people that agree with you.
00:21:23.140Oh, you know, try reading somebody else that disagrees with you.
00:21:26.580You know, but you can't force people to do that because they're not likely to accept the content you're forcing them, forcing upon them.
00:21:34.560So you have to make it a free choice. And I just think more competition and more availability sources is better.
00:21:42.680um michael what is your position on the fact so for instance i'm more uh to the left than you are
00:21:51.000and i'm less libertarian and i have a more can i shall i say distrust of the markets and i'm like
00:21:56.680well if we just leave it to the markets to decide then what you're going to get is a google that
00:22:01.280just is so big it's so powerful it just swallows up all its competitors and that's going to be
00:22:06.780our only option. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's what they said about GM and, and, uh, IBM. And I
00:22:15.700remember an interview with Bill Gates in, I think it was 1996 or 97, where they asked him, what do
00:22:22.280you fear the most? And he said, I fear, I mean, they said, you know, are you worried about IBM
00:22:26.940or this? He says, I fear that there's a couple of guys in a garage somewhere coming up with
00:22:30.400something I can't think of. And then, you know, two years later, Google is launched by, you know,
00:22:34.820a couple of guys in a garage and, and, and that's always the possibility. And the, and to me,
00:22:41.240the answer to the fear of the monopolistic power of a single corporation, um, you know,
00:22:48.740somebody like a Jeff Bezos can stand up to a Google. I mean, he has the capability and the
00:22:54.140resources to do that, by the way, you know, now, now Amazon is a target. Everybody's afraid
00:22:58.980that amazon is going to you know destroy all retail and there'll be no more retail stores
00:23:04.580and so on that's the talk right now well first of all um you know the service he's provided is
00:23:10.220is pretty valuable in a pandemic i mean they're you know he's hired several hundred thousand new
00:23:14.240people so that's good for jobs and he's delivering um products right to your doorstep so you don't
00:23:20.640have to go out with your mask or possibly contaminate people so that's good for society
00:23:25.000in the pandemic. And he's making money doing it. But it's only in the last couple of years that
00:23:31.000Amazon started making money. You know, for 20 years, they were kind of hovering on bankruptcy,
00:23:39.020you know, constantly borrowing money and so on. And Elon is still in the same position with Tesla.
00:23:44.500You know, they could still go belly up. He's always, you know, scrambling for more investments,
00:23:50.220monies. And, you know, I don't know how these billionaires move digits around on the computer
00:23:54.880screen. And to me, it's a whole other world that I'm not familiar with. But I see what they're
00:24:01.140doing. But they're the ones taking the risk to do that. And also, it's good to remember, you know,
00:24:06.020when we pick targets like Google, Amazon, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, we're subject there
00:24:14.700to the availability heuristic and the survival bias. The survival bias is the people that made
00:24:20.660it. What about all the people that, you know, that risked all of their investments, all their
00:24:27.180savings, they borrowed money from their family, from banks, from venture capitalists, and they
00:24:32.940went belly up. They went bankrupt. That's what happens to most entrepreneurial efforts. They
00:24:38.160mostly fail. I have a venture capitalist friend who gives me sort of a back in the envelope
00:24:42.640calculation. For every hundred pitches they hear, they fund one. For every hundred companies they
00:24:48.160fund, one makes it to an IPO where the head guy is a billionaire. So in other words, one out of
00:24:55.040100 and one out of 100. What happened to the other 99.9%? They all either went bankrupt or
00:25:03.620they're just barely struggling along. It's like you walk into those business book stalls at the
00:25:09.460airport and it's all these books about the successful people in business. What about
00:25:14.020all the ones that went bankrupt and they went out of business no one writes biographies of them
00:25:18.860it's not quite such a good read michael is it it's not a good read you know when the
00:25:22.840when the steve jobs biography came out it's a great read and he's a fascinating character but
00:25:28.780it was okay let's let's let's scroll through this thing and see what what the secret sauce is okay
00:25:34.120so you go to an elite college you drop out you move back to parents house you start a company
00:25:38.720in your garage, you act like a complete asshole, you treat your employees like shit, and then you
00:25:44.540get to be a super successful person. No, no, that's not the formula. It happened to work for
00:25:50.320him, but this is the survival bias. We're only noticing that particular instance. So, you know,
00:25:56.180for every Jeff Bezos, there's, you know, a hundred like him that we never heard of because they never
00:26:00.780succeeded. They failed. And so we have to allow the possibility of super success by one company,
00:26:08.200person because we're not supporting we're not going to back the people that failed and bail
00:26:14.960them out uh because that's just the risk that they take and we're willing to allow that
00:26:20.380and i suppose again coming from a question from the left what would you say of these companies
00:26:29.360you know like your jeff bezos you know you like your amazons like your apples you know when it
00:26:33.960comes to things like workers' rights, when it comes to that, and the fact that you've got these
00:26:38.620large companies effectively not treating employees like they should, surely if there was greater
00:26:47.560competition for people to go and work in different companies, they wouldn't be allowed to get away
00:26:52.000with it. Well, to that, I would say, compared to what? The workers' rights revolution has been
00:27:01.240around for a century. And workers' rights has expanded throughout the 20th century, giving
00:27:06.240them more and more rights. And, you know, unions is one solution to that. I'm not a big fan of
00:27:11.300unions, but, you know, they are an effective tool against management. And they did earn a lot of
00:27:18.720workers' rights. And in any case, as I mentioned before, you know, the government regulatory state
00:27:24.380is pretty powerful. You know, there's a lot of things Bezos can't do to his employees, and they
00:27:29.320can uh complain and they have been and government uh local government state governments have been
00:27:35.020going in to investigate like okay what's the deal here how are you treating these people they don't
00:27:39.760get breaks they have to work you know 12 hours instead of eight hours what's going on here and
00:27:44.560there's already laws about that so it's really just a matter of enforcement of the laws that
00:27:50.060are already on the books which are pretty extensive um and there's a bevy of lawyers
00:27:55.720looking for work to sue companies like that that have deep pockets when they violate workers' rights.
00:28:03.620So all that's already in place and taking place.
00:28:06.760So I'm not terribly worried about that.
00:28:09.420Well, let's change the subject a little bit.
00:28:11.080You've spent your whole life debunking myths and inaccuracies, pseudoscientific claims.
00:28:17.480And now, I think we've never lived in an era where the term fake news has been used quite as ubiquitously as it has been.
00:28:27.360And frankly, when the fake news hasn't been as ubiquitous as it is now, at least I would suggest that's the case.
00:28:33.460What do you make of the political landscape?
00:28:35.720Obviously, in America, you've probably got the election still coming up despite the lockdown.
00:28:40.660down we had this similar election very recently here in the uk where now it's almost like par for
00:28:47.760the course that whichever side loses claims that it only happened because of fake news or because
00:28:53.260of in our case there was some message on a bus that was inaccurate and that's why everyone voted
00:28:58.760for brexit and you know etc etc so are we descending into this kind of political conversation
00:29:06.480which is no longer conversation it's just people throwing out fake stuff and then the other side
00:29:11.920going everything the other side is fake is that the direction we're going in by the way let me
00:29:16.320let me ask you if you happen to know this is is it that the number one search after brexit was
00:29:22.920what is brexit by people in england what is the european union yeah right so that's pretty crazy
00:29:31.500if it's true uh well okay there's there's some research just on that point actually let me say
00:29:36.820because it's an issue we've explored quite a bit and i think our viewers would want me to interject
00:29:41.180that in some ways brexit was not so much about leaving the european union and it's a long and
00:29:47.260complicated conversation but to a lot of people it was about a loss of national identity it was
00:29:52.780about controlling immigration so people felt rightly or wrongly by the way but they felt that
00:29:58.040leaving the eu was about that and also about as we say in the uk sticking two fingers up to the
00:30:04.120establishment which was really a rejection of business as usual let's just carry on in some
00:30:10.440ways donald trump was very similar but please go ahead no i agree with that i think that's right
00:30:15.080the rise of populism nationalism uh kind of authoritarian leaning uh governments i mean
00:30:22.280I mean, there are still authoritarian regimes, but the UK and the United States are not that far.
00:30:28.100But stick it to the man, kind of push back.
00:30:31.680I agree that that's probably what it's about.
00:30:34.620So, again, people don't have to know anything about what Brexit really means or what the trade deals are going to be and how the pricing is going to work for bananas.
00:30:46.380Wasn't there something about the EU regulating the culture of bananas or something like that?
00:30:52.280And the UK people are going, fuck off.
00:31:45.720They already hate Hillary, right? So most people are not nudged one way or the other by some particular story on some fringe internet website. Instead, we're pretty predictably tribal and going to, you know, vote one direction or the other.
00:32:02.400you know, Hugo Mercier, he actually thinks political advertising is almost a complete
00:32:07.740waste of money and time, that it has next to no effect. And if so, that would be interesting
00:32:13.340because of the billions of dollars spent in advertising before an election probably has
00:32:18.680very little effect. And I think there's pretty good evidence for that. So whether these sites
00:32:24.520are allowed or not, I think is probably irrelevant based on the research we have that,
00:32:29.840fake news has always been around. I mean, it's just more prevalent now because, A, we're talking
00:32:37.200about it, and B, there's more real-time, almost instant sources for news. So it feels like it's
00:32:44.840more pervasive, but it looks like it's far less influential than we initially thought in 2016,
00:32:52.3802017. And by the way, with the so-called Russian hacking, again, it probably had little effect on
00:32:59.600the election. And in any case, let's not forget, we've done that kind of thing before. You know,
00:33:04.480there's, you know, stories about the CIA messing around in elections in South American countries
00:33:12.220in which we were supporting fascist dictatorships over communist dictatorships, because at least
00:33:18.160the fascists are more supportive of, you know, American business interests, because they can
00:33:24.040gain on it better. Whereas opposed to the communists are going to nationalize these
00:33:27.920corporations and that's no good for American business. So, you know, we were, we were providing
00:33:32.740money and weapons and so on to, you know, the dictatorship was called, you know, he's a son
00:33:39.540of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch. So that kind of thing has always gone on. And, you know,
00:33:45.360Trump is terrible about the, with the media, but let's not forget, I'm old enough to remember
00:33:50.020Nixon. Nixon hated the media. And, you know, in those private conversations he recorded that came
00:33:56.000out in the 90s after he was dead about you know what he said about jews running the media and
00:34:00.400stuff is like holy crap this guy's a real anti-semi you know so you know trump is bad
00:34:05.260nixon was probably just as bad but we didn't you know we didn't have access you know like
00:34:09.660nixon wasn't tweeting every 20 minutes so it doesn't seem it didn't seem as bad at the time
00:34:15.600that's really interesting i mean as a russian first of all i have to say i take deep offense
00:34:20.100at the suggestion that we were not competent in what we were doing.
00:35:13.900It's about antagonizing your own base to go out into the world and get the vote out, number one.
00:35:21.380But also, if it's true, then isn't what we're doing here completely pointless, Michael, which is having a conversation across, you know, Francis is on the left.
00:35:31.200I'm in the center. You are, you know, pretty libertarian from what I know. Right.
00:35:35.740So what's the point? I mean, if we're not convincing anyone, if we're just, is this kind of mental masturbation just for us, or is there actually any point to what we're doing?
00:35:46.420There's probably a joke a comedian could come up with that. But yes, well, again, the point of free speech is to have conversations so that people can listen and reason themselves to a particular decision.
00:36:01.180Now, you know, which way you vote is maybe a separate issue from a hundred other things we might think about and talk about, you know, abortion, immigration, gun control, you know, vaccines versus anti-vaxxers, you know, the Holocaust and creationism.
00:36:17.040And there's a thousand topics we could talk about.
00:36:20.440And most of them, most people haven't thought that carefully through.
00:36:24.180So, you know, in other words, it's sort of after the unsighted voter, maybe not in the political parties, but in life in general.
00:36:33.260And, you know, there's this meme that was going around years ago that you can't reason somebody out of a belief that they didn't reason their way to in the first place.
00:36:43.540I know from just personal experience, emails I get every day, people, I changed my mind about this or that after I read your book or read your article or you made me think or whatnot.
00:36:56.640Again, back to the cognitive research on this, cognitive science research,
00:37:00.100that if you present data in a way, in a particular way, people are more receptive to it.
00:37:07.220If it's visual, you know, pie graphs and bar graphs and so on, people can grasp it instantly.
00:37:12.940If you just put up a chart of, you know, numbers, you know, it's just the mind, just the eyes glaze over.
00:37:19.140and and but but more importantly you have to present it in a way that doesn't force people
00:37:24.440to have to give up some particularly deep core belief that they hold so for example the analogy
00:37:30.400i use of you know back in my debating creation is if you give people choice between darwin and
00:37:34.860jesus you know they're not picking darwin right a christian accepts jesus as his savior that's the
00:37:41.180most important thing in his life right so what does he care about this darwin guy but if you
00:37:46.300if you present it like you know evolution uh maybe the way god created uh life and and the
00:37:52.280diversity of life this was god's method then then it takes that off the table like okay so what's
00:37:57.660this theory all about right same thing with climate denial i i you know unfortunately or
00:38:03.320fortunately you know al gore's success with his film and inconvenient truth affiliated climate
00:38:09.560science with the left as a that's a that's a liberal uh cause therefore i as a conservative
00:38:15.840have to be against that and that put it you know took it off the scientific table and put it into
00:38:21.360the political arena which polarized it so i i just basically take that off the table by saying
00:38:27.000something like um you know it's not a liberal cause it's just it's either true or not and by
00:38:33.780the way, you can make a ton of money in green technology, and capitalism can save the day of
00:38:39.940global warming. People like Elon Musk creating electric cars or something. Now, you know,
00:38:45.180conservatives, they like to hear that. So then they're like, oh, okay, so what's this climate
00:38:49.240science thing anyway? Because, you know, the studies since in the last maybe five years or so
00:38:54.900show that knowledge about climate science is not a predictor of whether you accept it or not.
00:39:00.200And, and, and unfortunately, just the way it is, you know, people that accept climate science don't seem to know any more about it than people that deny climate science. So having scientific knowledge by itself is not a predictor of whether you accept it or not. So when people are commenting, say, on social media about their position on climate science, they're actually just virtue signaling to their fellow tribal members.
00:39:29.300So you have to go around that to convince people
00:39:33.080and then present the data in a pretty accessible way.
00:39:37.620And it's very interesting that you say that
00:39:40.060because it's quite depressing that everything has now become
00:39:44.140in these binary terms, like you just said,
00:39:48.040and it's all political and all the rest of it.
00:39:50.020I think a lot of this, and you've said so in your book,
00:39:52.520comes from campus it comes from the culture wars which have started on campus do you think that
00:39:58.100the coronavirus is going to be almost a bomb to that because people are going to realize you know
00:40:03.580what we're all in this together it doesn't matter if you're left or you're right it's a virus it can
00:40:08.480affect anyone and it may help us to kind of come together and listen to each other more or am i
00:40:13.120been smoking too much of the golden herb i thought exactly that until maybe just two weeks ago
00:40:20.240when, you know, the sort of bitter fighting returned to normal here, at least in the United
00:40:26.340States. And, you know, it would be nice to think, you know, like the old sci-fi scenario, you know,
00:40:32.160if the earth got invaded by aliens, you know, we'd all, you know, become united as one species
00:40:37.640against this common enemy. And in essence, that's what the COVID-19 is, is an enemy. And it looked
00:40:44.740like it was going to do that. I think there's still some signs that, you know, people are,
00:40:48.000most people are pretty good about, about this, but, you know,
00:40:51.420we're kind of starting to return to our old tribal ways of, you know,
00:40:55.580not just disagreeing with other people, but hating them, you know, that they're,
00:40:58.900they're not just wrong. They're immoral. They're bad. They're evil. You know,
00:41:02.140there's, there's a lot of that. Unfortunately,
00:41:03.660our president here is kind of fuels that to fuel. He fuels his base. He has,
00:41:09.420you know, 80 million followers on Twitter and, you know, boy, it's, it,
00:41:14.500I am worried about that. I wish we would be more commonly united, although that could still happen.
00:41:21.800We'll see. It's too soon to tell. You know, you mentioned the academy. I'm a professor at Chapman
00:41:28.200University. They're really worried. If students don't return in the fall, they're not going to
00:41:33.640pay $50,000 a year to hear me yammering away at this particular garage. They pay that kind of
00:41:42.240money to go to a brick and mortar school where there's professors and and and sororities and
00:41:47.960fraternities and a social life and and gyms and you know it's a whole package so this this could
00:41:55.020change the academy it's hard to say what direction um i think that the simple transfer of knowledge
00:42:01.960from one school to another that can be done remotely simply cheaply um you know the if you
00:42:08.920look at the economics of the rising cost of colleges over the last say 50 years compared
00:42:15.260to any other basket of goods that have also gone up you know a quart of milk or a gallon of gas
00:42:21.380loaf of bread whatever you know they've all gone up of course you adjust for inflation and whatnot
00:42:26.200but college tuition has just skyrocketed up and yet the ratio of professors to students is roughly
00:42:33.140about the same. What's changed is the administrative structure has just expanded wildly. I mean,
00:42:40.820there's way more employees at universities that don't teach at all. What are they doing? Okay,
00:42:46.360well, it may be that universities and colleges will have to look into that more and say,
00:42:50.520maybe we don't need this dean of diversity here. Because, you know, how's that? Students don't pay
00:42:55.620for that. Students, the parents, you know, parents might start asking questions about that.
00:43:01.200I don't know, but with this generation of students, I think that would be the number one priority, Michael, to be honest. So it seems. And obviously, one of the things that we've talked to a lot of people about in the past, but with the rise in tuition fees, there's also a rise in student expectation in terms of their power and influence and their ability to say, well, this is how things should be at my university.
00:43:27.120This is, you know, I am demanding that this person who I don't like does not speak on my campus or I'm demanding this, I'm demanding that. So do you think that we might start to see a cultural shift simply as a result of the fact that universities are going to have to rethink their model a little bit?
00:43:44.680Yeah, I think that's entirely possible. You know, my friend and colleague, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote that book, The Coddling of the American Mind.
00:43:55.220Yeah. So they, you know, their hypothesis is, you know, twofold that that that's got a culture of safetyism in the that arose in the 80s and kind of solidified in the 90s.
00:44:05.220that today's college kids, that's when they were born, 96 and after, the so-called
00:44:12.140iGeners or the Gen Z. They started coming into college in around 2014 or so, and that's when we
00:44:20.220saw the rise of kind of demanding culture of the colleges to be more like parents and, you know,
00:44:29.640to protect them. Your job is to provide a safe home for us here at this college. And, you know,
00:44:35.620no, that is not their job. That hasn't been their job in 50 years. In fact, the whole point
00:44:41.040of the 60s revolution was to overthrow that idea of in loco parentis, you know, that parents sent
00:44:47.940their kids off to college, the college administrators and professors treated them like they were their
00:44:53.060children and the 60s was you know in a way a revolution was to say we're adults we're gonna
00:45:00.340you know smoke pot we're gonna you know drugs and rock and roll baby so leave us alone so this is
00:45:08.220kind of a weird reversal of what you know took place in the with the sexual revolution and the
00:45:14.36060s and all that uh now we're kind of going back to the 50s like you know it's your job to protect
00:45:19.400this. What? And, you know, and that gets wrapped up into this, you know, back to my book that
00:45:25.380this is sort of a weird thing. I have to write this defense of free speech,
00:45:29.280you know, because on that, I'm very liberal, you know, probably far left on free speech,
00:45:33.720at least what used to be liberal. You're far right now, far right. That's where you are,
00:45:38.620if you believe in free speech, as we all know. That's right. I mean, conservatives, you know,
00:45:42.340when I see people like Sean Hannity on Fox News defending free speech, I'm like, oh my God,
00:45:47.280this guy you know and you see these liberals uh that you know he's he's hammering you know
00:45:53.780defending censorship it's like this is a complete backwards you know remember when conservatives
00:45:59.100were up in arms about rock lyrics you know and frank zappa was defending free speech and uh you
00:46:05.800know madonna is defending free speech and and they're trying to censor her videos and you know
00:46:10.760and all that what happened to that you know that's kind of that's what i'm writing about