TRIGGERnometry - June 07, 2020


Michael Shermer： ＂Regulation Is Not the Answer to Big Tech Censorship＂

Topics
fake news influence on election
Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Mentioned
Michael Shermer David Icke Hillary Clinton Alex Jones Brian Rose Jonathan Haidt Greg Lukianoff Bill Gates Joe Rogan Nixon Donald Trump Nicholas Cruz Hugo Messier Hugo Mercier Sean Hannity Peter Thiel Frank Zappa David Eich Steve Jobs COVID-19 and 5 more
＂How I Got Cancelled＂ - Andrew Lawrence Dave Rubin： Don't Ban This Interview

Episode Stats


Length

52 minutes

Words per minute

176.92

Word count

9,303

Sentence count

395

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Toxicity

17

sentences flagged

Hate speech

13

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Dr. Michael Shermer is a science writer, historian of science, founder of the Skeptic Society, and editor-in-chief of The Skeptic Magazine. He is also the author of the new book, "Giving the Devil Is Due" and is a regular contributor to the New York Times and the BBC. In this episode, Dr. Shermer talks about his journey to becoming a skeptic, why he believes in free speech, and why he thinks David Icke should be given his due.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.
00:00:08.060 I'm Constantine Kissin.
00:00:09.320 And this is the show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:00:14.800 And a fascinating guest we have for you today. He's a science writer, historian of science.
00:00:20.160 He's the founder of the Skeptic Society, the editor-in-chief of the Skeptic Magazine. He's
00:00:24.660 very skeptical, basically, is what I'm saying. Michael Shermer, welcome to Trigonometry.
00:00:28.720 Thanks for having me on. I'll try not to get triggered for this hour.
00:00:32.440 Well, the idea is that you trigger people with our help. So that's what we're trying to work
00:00:36.820 towards. Well, apparently I do sometimes trigger people on the far left and far right,
00:00:43.140 which means I'm doing my job. That's exactly what we do on the show. Those
00:00:47.440 are two groups of people we have triggered a lot recently, and I'm sure we'll do more of that
00:00:51.820 together. But before we get into it, just for anyone who doesn't know who you are,
00:00:56.600 most people will do but for anyone who doesn't just tell everybody who are you what is your
00:01:02.220 journey through life how do you happen to be sitting here talking to us oh well the the main
00:01:07.540 trigger as it were is my new book giving the devil is due my latest book my 13th book actually
00:01:12.360 my life's work really uh involves trying to understand what truth is that is how do we get
00:01:18.040 to the truth we want to know what's true not not just what i want to be true but what's actually
00:01:24.200 true, empirically true, uh, using empirical science and, and reason and rationality and
00:01:29.880 critical thinking. And that's the core of skepticism is, um, you start off assuming that
00:01:36.440 the claim is not true until proven otherwise, because most of us, most of the time get things
00:01:42.100 wrong. And, and so my argument, uh, for free speech and giving the devil is due is that the
00:01:48.040 devil is whoever disagrees with you or that you disagree with, or you don't like, or you consider
00:01:53.420 to be, you know, uttering hate speech or whatever. And the reason they should be given their due is
00:01:59.040 because you would want that for yourself when you're in the position pushing back against the
00:02:03.920 mainstream or challenging the accepted dogma. And you get silenced because you've signed off on
00:02:11.340 silencing others. That's dangerous. So, you know, and again, the core problem is, is that we're
00:02:18.820 on much of the time. And the only way to find out if you're wrong is to talk to other people.
00:02:23.420 So with Skeptic Magazine, we're not afraid to talk to anybody.
00:02:28.500 You know, we've done issues on Holocaust denial and creationism and climate denial and vaccine
00:02:34.300 denial.
00:02:34.880 And, you know, I'll talk to anybody and ask them, you know, what is it you believe and
00:02:39.720 why?
00:02:40.260 And just lay it out for me.
00:02:41.920 And we'll publish those.
00:02:44.060 We'll publish your very words.
00:02:45.820 And then, you know, then we'll address them.
00:02:47.860 Now, I'm not afraid to debunk them as well.
00:02:49.440 but I still think they should be given their due in a sense that none of us can get it right all
00:02:55.560 the time so we have to listen to you know dissenting voices just in case. Well I guess one
00:03:02.100 of the most difficult issues that's been brought up and you spend a lot of time in the book talking
00:03:06.100 about free speech it's the first and most probably one of the more significant portions of it
00:03:10.700 but one of the difficulties that the pandemic has brought up I don't know if you followed this case
00:03:15.660 in the UK where we had a well-known conspiracy theorist, David Icke, who gave an interview about
00:03:22.360 how the 5G masks are causing the coronavirus. And soon afterwards, there was a spate of
00:03:31.800 arson attacks against 5G masks, right? And YouTube banned that video. Then he went and did another
00:03:39.160 interview on a private platform, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think that's one of probably
00:03:42.820 the most difficult cases where you think, well, is this person's speech causing destruction of
00:03:48.800 property, et cetera? Where do you stand on something like that? Because I don't know if
00:03:52.940 I've still worked out what my position on that is. Yeah. So I know that case. I watched that
00:03:58.280 interview and then I was on Brian Rose's London Real Show to talk about it. And I think even
00:04:05.700 someone as kind of far out there or nutty or or fringy as as david ike should be given his boot
00:04:12.660 now when when i say that i don't mean we're obligated to put him on every show so he has
00:04:18.360 his voice it's up to him to to to find a platform for his his conspiracy theories and if somebody
00:04:25.000 takes them up on him fine don't you don't censor that uh and you know he's not again he's not
00:04:31.200 completely crazy you know if you listen to him he's obviously fairly smart articulate man um you
00:04:37.820 know but his chain of reasoning leads him down you know some you know off the rails down some
00:04:42.840 crazy pathways where he ends up with the lizard aliens running the world or or you know the 5g 1.00
00:04:48.040 towers now is are his words responsible for somebody firebombing a tower i would say that
00:04:55.020 it's a bit of a reach that is to say people that would do something like that if you point out to
00:05:00.960 them where David Icke was wrong, they're not likely to be changing their mind anyway. The
00:05:06.120 analogy I use is with the, you know, the famous story about the conspiracy theory about Hillary
00:05:11.600 Clinton running pedophile ring out of a pizzeria, you know, before the 2016 election. I mean, this
00:05:17.700 is as crazy as it gets. And some guy showed up to this pizzeria with a gun, you know, and hopefully
00:05:23.680 no one was hurt, but people acting on like that and people that believe that, my correcting them
00:05:32.020 on Hillary's not running a pedophile ring out of a pizzeria, they're not going to change their 1.00
00:05:37.660 mind about Hillary on this. And they're likely to do something crazy anyway, because that particular 1.00
00:05:44.300 conspiracy theory is not why they're agitated, not why they're out there doing their things
00:05:50.760 like that. In any case, um, the moment you set up a gatekeeper that says like, like apparently
00:05:57.580 Google slash YouTube is doing either algorithms or actual people sitting there watching videos
00:06:02.960 and making the decision, are we going to allow this or not? Then you're down the pathway of,
00:06:08.360 of expanding that category to include more and more things that are kind of moderate,
00:06:14.120 you know, kind of, you know, within the, the kind of the Overton window, as it's called of
00:06:18.880 discussable subjects that category gets bigger and then and then censorship expands and then
00:06:25.180 more and more of us are self-censoring or we're afraid to say what we think because we might be
00:06:29.720 canceled or censored or kicked off youtube or twitter or instagram or whatever and that's a
00:06:36.220 dangerous path to go so that's why on page one of the book i talk about the 1919 decision so over a
00:06:43.540 century ago now of shank versus the united states charles shank was the head of the socialist party
00:06:48.620 in Philadelphia, and he was distributing pamphlets, flyers to draft age men to protest the draft. He
00:06:55.780 said it was unconstitutional. The 13th and 14th amendments protect you from slavery and guarantee
00:07:02.100 your bodily autonomy. And the draft is basically saying the government can take my body and send
00:07:08.840 me off to war to die if it wants. And that's a kind of a form of slavery. Now, that's a debatable
00:07:14.740 point but that's not the point that i'm making is that just saying that uh was a criminal act
00:07:21.040 uh an act of treason at the time and that's when uh oliver wendell holmes made his famous
00:07:27.380 decision in which he included that phrase a clear and present danger that was the equivalent of
00:07:34.280 shouting fire in a theater uh shouting fire in the theater well you know over decades more and
00:07:41.100 thing got put into that bin of clear and present danger, such to the point where anybody uttering
00:07:46.760 any criticism of the government could be considered a clear and present danger. So we got to shut this
00:07:52.040 guy up. And that's where you end up with, you know, by the 70s, you end up with the language
00:07:56.440 police and political correctness. And, you know, every utterance could be considered a clear and
00:08:01.480 danger to somebody somewhere. And then, you know, by the 90s and early 2000s, you end up with,
00:08:07.540 Well, 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.
00:08:26.860 You're adults, you know, and and for this, they were, you know, totally just shattered.
00:08:32.220 Like, no, you're like our parents.
00:08:33.800 You have to tell us what to do.
00:08:35.180 this is a complete reversal of the way things used to be right well it's quite a journey my
00:08:39.920 before francis jumping let me just follow up because just to stick with the david ike thing
00:08:44.820 just for a moment let i'm just trying to work it through in my head like i said i don't know
00:08:48.580 what i think and i'm trying to work it out which is i think the spirit in which you engage with
00:08:52.180 yeah yeah yeah right so if david ike is right now i don't think he is but if he's right
00:08:57.820 that 5G masts are responsible for, at this point of time, recording 350,000 deaths around the world.
00:09:07.280 Would I not be reasonable in going out and burning down a 5G mast?
00:09:12.240 I mean, would that not be the right response?
00:09:15.020 And therefore, is his making that argument not causing me to think potentially I should do this?
00:09:20.540 Well, it's already illegal to do that, to commit violence against other people, to destroy property,
00:09:27.120 to burgle and vandal those are already crimes so anybody doing that for whatever reason it's still
00:09:34.680 wrong it's illegal and immoral period i mean if you really believed it then the way to to do it
00:09:39.780 would be to address the government to um look into the matter or curtail the activities of
00:09:47.720 telecommunications companies uh regulate the telecommunications companies i mean the government
00:09:52.900 already does this a lot. I mean, we don't have to nudge the government to be more regulatory.
00:09:59.880 The regulatory state is massive, right? So there's already an apparatus in place to
00:10:05.220 address those kinds of problems if there was evidence for it. And clearly there isn't,
00:10:11.280 because if there was, the government would be all over it. This is what government regulators
00:10:14.920 love to do. They love to nose around in private companies and regulate them. So it's not like
00:10:20.220 that you know that that isn't in place already so i'm really not worried about that but let's do
00:10:25.080 say why it's wrong i mean 5g is just an extension of 4g extension of 3g and so on all the way back
00:10:31.020 to the 90s and the motorola flip phone that you held up to your ear and the fears back then that
00:10:36.020 this was causing brain tumors right and these were just cancer clusters you know you throw a bunch of
00:10:41.220 pennies up in the air and they land on the ground they're not perfectly spaced out they're clustered
00:10:44.920 and and this is true of everything in life including cancer cases they're clustered so
00:10:51.400 you're going to get clustering of people that use a lot of cell phones and people that have
00:10:56.380 brain tumors just randomly and that's all it was and uh and so those kinds of conspiracies have
00:11:01.840 always been around as well as you know by the way bill gates you know bill gates has been trying to
00:11:07.720 conquer the world since the 90s and of course he wasn't trying to conquer the world in software
00:11:11.780 but that's a different thing than what the conspiracy thing you know and i'm now predicting
00:11:16.720 that uh bezos will replace bill gates as as as voldemort as the evil darth vader um because you 0.83
00:11:24.040 know he's now poised to become the first trillionaire in history so he will be a target
00:11:27.720 you know and that tells us what's really going on here these are you know fear of the unknown
00:11:32.180 fear of the invisible you know the virus is invisible the you know the electromagnetic
00:11:37.720 Magnetic radiation coming from the 5G cell towers is invisible.
00:11:41.160 Nuclear power is invisible.
00:11:43.100 People fear things that have effects that are powerful that they can't see, smell, taste, touch.
00:11:48.560 And the virus is essentially invisible.
00:11:50.920 Without a high-powered microscope, you know, we had never seen a virus.
00:11:57.400 So, you know, that tells us something about human psychology.
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00:12:17.800 What is your argument, Michael, to those people who say,
00:12:22.340 look, these companies, we're in a state of national emergency.
00:12:27.140 The world hasn't seen this type of thing for at least 100 years.
00:12:30.720 companies and in particular organizations need to be responsible in these very very fractious times
00:12:38.080 and putting out an interview like the David Ike one is quite frankly irresponsible and could lead
00:12:43.420 to some very serious consequences and in times like this we need greater restriction yeah I would
00:12:49.720 say to that because I think you're referring to Brian Rose who did that um had David Ike on I
00:12:55.780 I would not have David Icke on my podcast because I would feel that I'm giving him a platform perhaps he doesn't deserve.
00:13:01.860 I would discuss him.
00:13:02.860 I would maybe write articles about him or address his claims, which I just did.
00:13:07.180 But that's, you know, that's just me.
00:13:09.120 You know, Brian Rose is his own man.
00:13:11.220 He can do what he wants.
00:13:12.800 And, of course, Google is a private company and it can censor him, which it did.
00:13:16.220 You know, I mean, YouTube, in this case, Alphabet is the parent company of Google that owns YouTube.
00:13:21.460 Okay, fine.
00:13:21.980 that's different from the government censoring people which is a separate issue but even that
00:13:28.200 i would still tell say to google slash alphabet you know you should uh be careful about going
00:13:33.340 down that pathway of censorship uh you know you start with something reasonable like we don't
00:13:38.340 want to let isis groups uh have a youtube page so that they can produce recruitment videos okay
00:13:46.260 that seems pretty simple but then you get someone like david eich uh you know who's just kind of a
00:13:51.720 fringe goofball with crazy ideas, much like when Joe Rogan had Alex Jones on. You know, people made
00:13:59.440 the same thing. Now, he did not get, that did not get censored by YouTube. This was before YouTube
00:14:04.800 started down that path a few months ago. But nevertheless, I find it very entertaining. It was
00:14:10.860 enjoyable to listen to Alex Jones get hammered, drinking whiskey and smoking a pot with Joe Rogan
00:14:16.360 and going off on his, you know, multidimensional alien beings.
00:14:20.580 In this case, they live in Silicon Valley.
00:14:23.320 I mean, does anybody really take him seriously?
00:14:27.020 Some people do, yes, but hardly anybody.
00:14:30.020 You haven't met many comedians, Michael.
00:14:32.020 Believe me, there's plenty of weed-smoking comedians who take him very seriously.
00:14:36.680 Really? Okay.
00:14:38.680 Well, I don't think they're likely to blow up towers or whatever.
00:14:42.720 Oh, they're nowhere near organized enough, believe you me, no.
00:14:46.360 Yeah. 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.
00:15:06.480 But again, you know, there's some element of moral culpability on the people that do it, not on Alex Jones's crazy ideas.
00:15:15.980 You 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.
00:15:25.420 And where do you stand, Michael, on the, you know, we've got these big tech companies.
00:15:30.480 I mean, they're not big.
00:15:31.240 That's the wrong word.
00:15:32.120 they are essentially monopolies and they get to choose what goes on their platform, what doesn't,
00:15:37.800 what gets broadcast to, you know, hundreds of millions of people. Do you think they're too big,
00:15:43.080 too powerful? Or do you think they're private companies, they can put on whatever they want,
00:15:47.720 it's not really an issue? Yeah, really the latter, because the fear of monopolies has always been
00:15:53.560 around since corporations are invented. And we regulate them or break them up, and they have,
00:15:59.700 in some case with antitrust laws in the United States.
00:16:03.380 But really as the men is competition, that is to say, we just need more platforms.
00:16:08.760 And there are people developing more alternative platforms, you know, and I think the same
00:16:14.680 thing will happen with search engines, with the equivalent of YouTube, you know, other
00:16:21.360 platforms to post videos, you know, as we've seen now already quickly in the last few months,
00:16:26.740 just the competition for streaming services for movies uh you know hulu and and and uh netflix
00:16:35.480 and amazon prime and disney plus and now abc nbc cbs are all launching their own streaming
00:16:44.060 um platforms so this is the solution to uh to monopolies is to break them up by competition
00:16:52.600 not by fiat from the government in my opinion that's that that's the better way to deal with
00:16:58.260 it i wrote about this in in my book on the mind of the market about the um uh the lawsuit against
00:17:03.600 microsoft for bundling netscape and and sort of forcing people to use netscape well by the time
00:17:11.400 internet explorer surely internet explorer yeah internet explorer yeah sorry yeah um it was so
00:17:18.400 long 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
00:17:47.840 We were 99% of everything, all the money, all the votes, and so on.
00:17:53.060 And it would be better if we were more like European countries that had, you know, four or five viable parties.
00:18:00.280 That would be good competition.
00:18:02.460 But the political system is rigged by the way it's designed here in the United States to end up with a duopoly like that.
00:18:09.040 But 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.
00:18:16.720 you know and i think he sits on the board of google or something like that so maybe he do that
00:18:22.320 but you know somebody like that you know or a jeff jeff bezos you know maybe looking something
00:18:29.260 like a youtube for uh with next to amazon prime video something like that i think that's a solution
00:18:35.940 well that's an interesting point and you bring up the political side of all this and here's what
00:18:40.460 some people might say to the argument you've just made which is that even when you have you know
00:18:45.600 different platforms, they're all based in Silicon Valley.
00:18:48.620 They're all run by woke liberals, right?
00:18:52.220 Or people that are perceived as being woke liberals.
00:18:55.520 They don't necessarily act particularly woke anti-capitalist
00:18:59.160 in terms of their business practices.
00:19:00.820 No.
00:19:02.720 But in terms of their policies on, you know, restrictions,
00:19:08.980 in terms of their pushing of diversity in the way that it's now defined
00:19:12.760 And 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.
00:19:36.400 So 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.
00:20:03.860 Yeah, that's right.
00:20:04.860 That's a possibility.
00:20:06.380 But we saw this, you know, when the rise of television in the 60s and 70s, there were
00:20:10.980 just the three here in the United States, just the three major networks.
00:20:14.220 And PBS, you know, the government run, you know, competition, as it were, is a little
00:20:19.560 more independent.
00:20:20.120 But now, you know, we have, you know, 500 channels and just endless content available
00:20:25.460 and endless news sources and so on.
00:20:27.380 You know, there was sort of a consolidation of news media with just a handful of newspapers
00:20:32.360 papers wall street journal new york times here and the cbs nbc uh abc on television um but now
00:20:39.980 you know there's you know 10 000 sources of news and and of course we're people about that
00:20:47.080 oh it's like well wait a minute you want to get rid of a lot of those because they're so fringy
00:20:52.000 and they pass around fake news but before you were complaining there were only three sources
00:20:56.260 So 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.
00:21:16.500 You know, watch out for being in a in a bubble in which you're only reading people that agree with you.
00:21:23.140 Oh, you know, try reading somebody else that disagrees with you.
00:21:26.580 You 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.
00:21:34.560 So you have to make it a free choice. And I just think more competition and more availability sources is better.
00:21:42.680 um michael what is your position on the fact so for instance i'm more uh to the left than you are
00:21:51.000 and i'm less libertarian and i have a more can i shall i say distrust of the markets and i'm like
00:21:56.680 well if we just leave it to the markets to decide then what you're going to get is a google that
00:22:01.280 just is so big it's so powerful it just swallows up all its competitors and that's going to be
00:22:06.780 our only option. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's what they said about GM and, and, uh, IBM. And I
00:22:15.700 remember an interview with Bill Gates in, I think it was 1996 or 97, where they asked him, what do
00:22:22.280 you fear the most? And he said, I fear, I mean, they said, you know, are you worried about IBM
00:22:26.940 or this? He says, I fear that there's a couple of guys in a garage somewhere coming up with
00:22:30.400 something I can't think of. And then, you know, two years later, Google is launched by, you know,
00:22:34.820 a couple of guys in a garage and, and, and that's always the possibility. And the, and to me,
00:22:41.240 the answer to the fear of the monopolistic power of a single corporation, um, you know,
00:22:48.740 somebody like a Jeff Bezos can stand up to a Google. I mean, he has the capability and the
00:22:54.140 resources to do that, by the way, you know, now, now Amazon is a target. Everybody's afraid
00:22:58.980 that amazon is going to you know destroy all retail and there'll be no more retail stores
00:23:04.580 and so on that's the talk right now well first of all um you know the service he's provided is
00:23:10.220 is pretty valuable in a pandemic i mean they're you know he's hired several hundred thousand new
00:23:14.240 people so that's good for jobs and he's delivering um products right to your doorstep so you don't
00:23:20.640 have to go out with your mask or possibly contaminate people so that's good for society
00:23:25.000 in the pandemic. And he's making money doing it. But it's only in the last couple of years that
00:23:31.000 Amazon started making money. You know, for 20 years, they were kind of hovering on bankruptcy,
00:23:39.020 you know, constantly borrowing money and so on. And Elon is still in the same position with Tesla.
00:23:44.500 You know, they could still go belly up. He's always, you know, scrambling for more investments,
00:23:50.220 monies. And, you know, I don't know how these billionaires move digits around on the computer
00:23:54.880 screen. And to me, it's a whole other world that I'm not familiar with. But I see what they're
00:24:01.140 doing. But they're the ones taking the risk to do that. And also, it's good to remember, you know,
00:24:06.020 when we pick targets like Google, Amazon, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, we're subject there
00:24:14.700 to the availability heuristic and the survival bias. The survival bias is the people that made
00:24:20.660 it. What about all the people that, you know, that risked all of their investments, all their
00:24:27.180 savings, they borrowed money from their family, from banks, from venture capitalists, and they
00:24:32.940 went belly up. They went bankrupt. That's what happens to most entrepreneurial efforts. They
00:24:38.160 mostly fail. I have a venture capitalist friend who gives me sort of a back in the envelope
00:24:42.640 calculation. For every hundred pitches they hear, they fund one. For every hundred companies they
00:24:48.160 fund, one makes it to an IPO where the head guy is a billionaire. So in other words, one out of
00:24:55.040 100 and one out of 100. What happened to the other 99.9%? They all either went bankrupt or 0.82
00:25:03.620 they're just barely struggling along. It's like you walk into those business book stalls at the
00:25:09.460 airport and it's all these books about the successful people in business. What about
00:25:14.020 all the ones that went bankrupt and they went out of business no one writes biographies of them
00:25:18.860 it's not quite such a good read michael is it it's not a good read you know when the
00:25:22.840 when the steve jobs biography came out it's a great read and he's a fascinating character but
00:25:28.780 it was okay let's let's let's scroll through this thing and see what what the secret sauce is okay
00:25:34.120 so you go to an elite college you drop out you move back to parents house you start a company 1.00
00:25:38.720 in your garage, you act like a complete asshole, you treat your employees like shit, and then you 1.00
00:25:44.540 get to be a super successful person. No, no, that's not the formula. It happened to work for 1.00
00:25:50.320 him, but this is the survival bias. We're only noticing that particular instance. So, you know,
00:25:56.180 for every Jeff Bezos, there's, you know, a hundred like him that we never heard of because they never
00:26:00.780 succeeded. They failed. And so we have to allow the possibility of super success by one company,
00:26:08.200 person because we're not supporting we're not going to back the people that failed and bail
00:26:14.960 them out uh because that's just the risk that they take and we're willing to allow that
00:26:20.380 and i suppose again coming from a question from the left what would you say of these companies
00:26:29.360 you know like your jeff bezos you know you like your amazons like your apples you know when it
00:26:33.960 comes to things like workers' rights, when it comes to that, and the fact that you've got these
00:26:38.620 large companies effectively not treating employees like they should, surely if there was greater
00:26:47.560 competition for people to go and work in different companies, they wouldn't be allowed to get away
00:26:52.000 with it. Well, to that, I would say, compared to what? The workers' rights revolution has been
00:27:01.240 around for a century. And workers' rights has expanded throughout the 20th century, giving
00:27:06.240 them more and more rights. And, you know, unions is one solution to that. I'm not a big fan of
00:27:11.300 unions, but, you know, they are an effective tool against management. And they did earn a lot of
00:27:18.720 workers' rights. And in any case, as I mentioned before, you know, the government regulatory state
00:27:24.380 is pretty powerful. You know, there's a lot of things Bezos can't do to his employees, and they
00:27:29.320 can uh complain and they have been and government uh local government state governments have been
00:27:35.020 going in to investigate like okay what's the deal here how are you treating these people they don't
00:27:39.760 get breaks they have to work you know 12 hours instead of eight hours what's going on here and
00:27:44.560 there's already laws about that so it's really just a matter of enforcement of the laws that
00:27:50.060 are already on the books which are pretty extensive um and there's a bevy of lawyers
00:27:55.720 looking for work to sue companies like that that have deep pockets when they violate workers' rights.
00:28:03.620 So all that's already in place and taking place.
00:28:06.760 So I'm not terribly worried about that.
00:28:08.980 All right, Michael.
00:28:09.420 Well, let's change the subject a little bit.
00:28:11.080 You've spent your whole life debunking myths and inaccuracies, pseudoscientific claims.
00:28:17.480 And 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.
00:28:27.360 And frankly, when the fake news hasn't been as ubiquitous as it is now, at least I would suggest that's the case.
00:28:33.460 What do you make of the political landscape?
00:28:35.720 Obviously, in America, you've probably got the election still coming up despite the lockdown.
00:28:40.660 down we had this similar election very recently here in the uk where now it's almost like par for
00:28:47.760 the course that whichever side loses claims that it only happened because of fake news or because
00:28:53.260 of in our case there was some message on a bus that was inaccurate and that's why everyone voted
00:28:58.760 for brexit and you know etc etc so are we descending into this kind of political conversation
00:29:06.480 which is no longer conversation it's just people throwing out fake stuff and then the other side
00:29:11.920 going everything the other side is fake is that the direction we're going in by the way let me
00:29:16.320 let me ask you if you happen to know this is is it that the number one search after brexit was
00:29:22.920 what is brexit by people in england what is the european union yeah right so that's pretty crazy
00:29:31.500 if it's true uh well okay there's there's some research just on that point actually let me say
00:29:36.820 because it's an issue we've explored quite a bit and i think our viewers would want me to interject
00:29:41.180 that in some ways brexit was not so much about leaving the european union and it's a long and
00:29:47.260 complicated conversation but to a lot of people it was about a loss of national identity it was
00:29:52.780 about controlling immigration so people felt rightly or wrongly by the way but they felt that
00:29:58.040 leaving the eu was about that and also about as we say in the uk sticking two fingers up to the
00:30:04.120 establishment which was really a rejection of business as usual let's just carry on in some
00:30:10.440 ways donald trump was very similar but please go ahead no i agree with that i think that's right
00:30:15.080 the rise of populism nationalism uh kind of authoritarian leaning uh governments i mean
00:30:22.280 I mean, there are still authoritarian regimes, but the UK and the United States are not that far.
00:30:28.100 But stick it to the man, kind of push back.
00:30:31.680 I agree that that's probably what it's about.
00:30:34.620 So, 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.
00:30:46.380 Wasn't there something about the EU regulating the culture of bananas or something like that? 1.00
00:30:52.280 And the UK people are going, fuck off. 1.00
00:30:54.940 We'll eat whatever bananas we want. 1.00
00:30:57.640 You're rehashing some of the most painful moments of the campaign there, Michael. 0.97
00:31:03.420 Listen, I like my bananas in the way they fucking are, right? 0.96
00:31:07.380 Sorry. 0.97
00:31:08.580 Yeah.
00:31:10.420 But I will recount some research by Hugo Messier, a cognitive scientist,
00:31:16.520 Brennan and a few other political scientists since the 2016 election, and their conclusion
00:31:22.920 is that the fake news business, the so-called Russian hacking, the internet bubbles, Facebook
00:31:28.200 bubbles, and so on, had very little effect on the election.
00:31:31.140 That is to say, back to my Hillary and the pizzeria pedophilia ring, people that believe
00:31:38.740 that are not going to suddenly vote for Hillary when I show them that that conspiracy theory 0.96
00:31:45.320 is fake.
00:31:45.720 They 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.
00:32:02.400 you know, Hugo Mercier, he actually thinks political advertising is almost a complete
00:32:07.740 waste of money and time, that it has next to no effect. And if so, that would be interesting
00:32:13.340 because of the billions of dollars spent in advertising before an election probably has
00:32:18.680 very little effect. And I think there's pretty good evidence for that. So whether these sites
00:32:24.520 are allowed or not, I think is probably irrelevant based on the research we have that,
00:32:29.840 fake news has always been around. I mean, it's just more prevalent now because, A, we're talking
00:32:37.200 about it, and B, there's more real-time, almost instant sources for news. So it feels like it's
00:32:44.840 more pervasive, but it looks like it's far less influential than we initially thought in 2016,
00:32:52.380 2017. And by the way, with the so-called Russian hacking, again, it probably had little effect on
00:32:59.600 the election. And in any case, let's not forget, we've done that kind of thing before. You know,
00:33:04.480 there's, you know, stories about the CIA messing around in elections in South American countries
00:33:12.220 in which we were supporting fascist dictatorships over communist dictatorships, because at least
00:33:18.160 the fascists are more supportive of, you know, American business interests, because they can
00:33:24.040 gain on it better. Whereas opposed to the communists are going to nationalize these
00:33:27.920 corporations and that's no good for American business. So, you know, we were, we were providing
00:33:32.740 money and weapons and so on to, you know, the dictatorship was called, you know, he's a son 1.00
00:33:39.540 of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch. So that kind of thing has always gone on. And, you know, 1.00
00:33:45.360 Trump is terrible about the, with the media, but let's not forget, I'm old enough to remember
00:33:50.020 Nixon. Nixon hated the media. And, you know, in those private conversations he recorded that came
00:33:56.000 out in the 90s after he was dead about you know what he said about jews running the media and 0.98
00:34:00.400 stuff is like holy crap this guy's a real anti-semi you know so you know trump is bad
00:34:05.260 nixon was probably just as bad but we didn't you know we didn't have access you know like 0.89
00:34:09.660 nixon wasn't tweeting every 20 minutes so it doesn't seem it didn't seem as bad at the time
00:34:15.600 that's really interesting i mean as a russian first of all i have to say i take deep offense
00:34:20.100 at the suggestion that we were not competent in what we were doing.
00:34:24.740 But I'm joking, of course.
00:34:26.280 And actually, of course, I was someone who initially thought
00:34:28.920 that Russia had hacked the election, blah, blah, blah.
00:34:31.960 But the evidence just isn't there.
00:34:33.900 But it's interesting that you talk about political advertising.
00:34:36.660 Wait a minute.
00:34:37.400 Evidence isn't there.
00:34:38.400 I mean, we know they were.
00:34:40.640 They tried, but they didn't really succeed.
00:34:43.220 And there was no collusion with Donald Trump and so on.
00:34:45.920 Oh, right, right.
00:34:46.720 That part, yeah.
00:34:47.260 Oh, there's no question that almost probably every single government in the world tries
00:34:51.400 to influence the American elections because it's what determines their future in every
00:34:55.380 single way, right?
00:34:56.520 So that's unquestionable.
00:34:58.160 The Chinese probably did more of it than the Russians.
00:35:00.560 We know that China funds a lot of congressional races and all of that.
00:35:04.240 But anyway, let's not get stuck too much into that.
00:35:06.820 You mentioned political advertising.
00:35:08.460 I would put it to you that the function of political advertising at this point is not
00:35:12.440 about changing hearts and minds.
00:35:13.900 It's about antagonizing your own base to go out into the world and get the vote out, number one.
00:35:21.380 But 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.
00:35:31.200 I'm in the center. You are, you know, pretty libertarian from what I know. Right.
00:35:35.740 So 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?
00:35:46.420 There'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.
00:36:01.180 Now, 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.
00:36:17.040 And there's a thousand topics we could talk about.
00:36:20.440 And most of them, most people haven't thought that carefully through.
00:36:24.180 So, you know, in other words, it's sort of after the unsighted voter, maybe not in the political parties, but in life in general.
00:36:33.260 And, 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.
00:36:41.980 But that's not true.
00:36:43.540 I 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.
00:36:53.100 It is true that facts can matter.
00:36:56.640 Again, back to the cognitive research on this, cognitive science research,
00:37:00.100 that if you present data in a way, in a particular way, people are more receptive to it.
00:37:07.220 If it's visual, you know, pie graphs and bar graphs and so on, people can grasp it instantly.
00:37:12.940 If you just put up a chart of, you know, numbers, you know, it's just the mind, just the eyes glaze over.
00:37:19.140 and and but but more importantly you have to present it in a way that doesn't force people
00:37:24.440 to have to give up some particularly deep core belief that they hold so for example the analogy
00:37:30.400 i use of you know back in my debating creation is if you give people choice between darwin and
00:37:34.860 jesus you know they're not picking darwin right a christian accepts jesus as his savior that's the
00:37:41.180 most important thing in his life right so what does he care about this darwin guy but if you
00:37:46.300 if you present it like you know evolution uh maybe the way god created uh life and and the
00:37:52.280 diversity of life this was god's method then then it takes that off the table like okay so what's
00:37:57.660 this theory all about right same thing with climate denial i i you know unfortunately or
00:38:03.320 fortunately you know al gore's success with his film and inconvenient truth affiliated climate
00:38:09.560 science with the left as a that's a that's a liberal uh cause therefore i as a conservative
00:38:15.840 have to be against that and that put it you know took it off the scientific table and put it into
00:38:21.360 the political arena which polarized it so i i just basically take that off the table by saying
00:38:27.000 something like um you know it's not a liberal cause it's just it's either true or not and by
00:38:33.780 the way, you can make a ton of money in green technology, and capitalism can save the day of
00:38:39.940 global warming. People like Elon Musk creating electric cars or something. Now, you know,
00:38:45.180 conservatives, they like to hear that. So then they're like, oh, okay, so what's this climate
00:38:49.240 science thing anyway? Because, you know, the studies since in the last maybe five years or so
00:38:54.900 show that knowledge about climate science is not a predictor of whether you accept it or not.
00:39:00.200 And, 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.
00:39:25.320 I'm a conservative, so I doubt it.
00:39:27.100 Or I'm a liberal and I accept it.
00:39:29.300 So you have to go around that to convince people
00:39:33.080 and then present the data in a pretty accessible way.
00:39:37.620 And it's very interesting that you say that
00:39:40.060 because it's quite depressing that everything has now become
00:39:44.140 in these binary terms, like you just said,
00:39:48.040 and it's all political and all the rest of it.
00:39:50.020 I think a lot of this, and you've said so in your book,
00:39:52.520 comes from campus it comes from the culture wars which have started on campus do you think that
00:39:58.100 the coronavirus is going to be almost a bomb to that because people are going to realize you know
00:40:03.580 what we're all in this together it doesn't matter if you're left or you're right it's a virus it can
00:40:08.480 affect anyone and it may help us to kind of come together and listen to each other more or am i
00:40:13.120 been smoking too much of the golden herb i thought exactly that until maybe just two weeks ago
00:40:20.240 when, you know, the sort of bitter fighting returned to normal here, at least in the United
00:40:26.340 States. And, you know, it would be nice to think, you know, like the old sci-fi scenario, you know,
00:40:32.160 if the earth got invaded by aliens, you know, we'd all, you know, become united as one species
00:40:37.640 against this common enemy. And in essence, that's what the COVID-19 is, is an enemy. And it looked
00:40:44.740 like it was going to do that. I think there's still some signs that, you know, people are,
00:40:48.000 most people are pretty good about, about this, but, you know,
00:40:51.420 we're kind of starting to return to our old tribal ways of, you know,
00:40:55.580 not just disagreeing with other people, but hating them, you know, that they're, 0.53
00:40:58.900 they're not just wrong. They're immoral. They're bad. They're evil. You know,
00:41:02.140 there's, there's a lot of that. Unfortunately,
00:41:03.660 our president here is kind of fuels that to fuel. He fuels his base. He has,
00:41:09.420 you know, 80 million followers on Twitter and, you know, boy, it's, it,
00:41:14.500 I am worried about that. I wish we would be more commonly united, although that could still happen.
00:41:21.800 We'll see. It's too soon to tell. You know, you mentioned the academy. I'm a professor at Chapman
00:41:28.200 University. They're really worried. If students don't return in the fall, they're not going to
00:41:33.640 pay $50,000 a year to hear me yammering away at this particular garage. They pay that kind of
00:41:42.240 money to go to a brick and mortar school where there's professors and and and sororities and
00:41:47.960 fraternities and a social life and and gyms and you know it's a whole package so this this could
00:41:55.020 change the academy it's hard to say what direction um i think that the simple transfer of knowledge
00:42:01.960 from one school to another that can be done remotely simply cheaply um you know the if you
00:42:08.920 look at the economics of the rising cost of colleges over the last say 50 years compared
00:42:15.260 to any other basket of goods that have also gone up you know a quart of milk or a gallon of gas
00:42:21.380 loaf of bread whatever you know they've all gone up of course you adjust for inflation and whatnot
00:42:26.200 but college tuition has just skyrocketed up and yet the ratio of professors to students is roughly
00:42:33.140 about the same. What's changed is the administrative structure has just expanded wildly. I mean,
00:42:40.820 there's way more employees at universities that don't teach at all. What are they doing? Okay,
00:42:46.360 well, it may be that universities and colleges will have to look into that more and say,
00:42:50.520 maybe we don't need this dean of diversity here. Because, you know, how's that? Students don't pay
00:42:55.620 for that. Students, the parents, you know, parents might start asking questions about that.
00:43:01.200 I 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.
00:43:27.120 This 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?
00:43:44.680 Yeah, 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.
00:43:54.100 It's a great book. Great book.
00:43:55.220 Yeah. 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.
00:44:05.220 that today's college kids, that's when they were born, 96 and after, the so-called
00:44:12.140 iGeners or the Gen Z. They started coming into college in around 2014 or so, and that's when we 0.97
00:44:20.220 saw the rise of kind of demanding culture of the colleges to be more like parents and, you know,
00:44:29.640 to protect them. Your job is to provide a safe home for us here at this college. And, you know,
00:44:35.620 no, that is not their job. That hasn't been their job in 50 years. In fact, the whole point
00:44:41.040 of the 60s revolution was to overthrow that idea of in loco parentis, you know, that parents sent
00:44:47.940 their kids off to college, the college administrators and professors treated them like they were their
00:44:53.060 children and the 60s was you know in a way a revolution was to say we're adults we're gonna
00:45:00.340 you know smoke pot we're gonna you know drugs and rock and roll baby so leave us alone so this is 0.95
00:45:08.220 kind of a weird reversal of what you know took place in the with the sexual revolution and the
00:45:14.360 60s and all that uh now we're kind of going back to the 50s like you know it's your job to protect
00:45:19.400 this. What? And, you know, and that gets wrapped up into this, you know, back to my book that
00:45:25.380 this is sort of a weird thing. I have to write this defense of free speech,
00:45:29.280 you know, because on that, I'm very liberal, you know, probably far left on free speech,
00:45:33.720 at least what used to be liberal. You're far right now, far right. That's where you are,
00:45:38.620 if you believe in free speech, as we all know. That's right. I mean, conservatives, you know,
00:45:42.340 when I see people like Sean Hannity on Fox News defending free speech, I'm like, oh my God,
00:45:47.280 this guy you know and you see these liberals uh that you know he's he's hammering you know
00:45:53.780 defending censorship it's like this is a complete backwards you know remember when conservatives
00:45:59.100 were up in arms about rock lyrics you know and frank zappa was defending free speech and uh you
00:46:05.800 know madonna is defending free speech and and they're trying to censor her videos and you know
00:46:10.760 and all that what happened to that you know that's kind of that's what i'm writing about
00:46:16.920 Well, maybe I'm a conservative.
00:46:18.200 I'm in favor of censoring Madonna songs.
00:46:20.360 But anyway.
00:46:22.460 Okay.
00:46:23.360 No, mate.
00:46:24.020 That makes you a Russian. 0.99
00:46:25.260 You're in favor of censoring women. 1.00
00:46:28.580 Now, wouldn't you say the case, Michael, is, look, we can blame the kids all we want.
00:46:34.120 But as a former teacher and you're a university professor, the parents have got to take the
00:46:38.500 buck for this, surely.
00:46:39.680 They've raised these kids.
00:46:40.880 So they need to take responsibility that they've raised these mollycoddled children. 0.99
00:46:45.640 Yeah, I agree.
00:46:46.920 Yeah. But, you know, when you're an adult, you still have some responsibility and moral culpability.
00:46:52.640 I do believe in free will, at least a form of free will in which you have some accountability for your actions.
00:47:00.180 So I put some of it on the students, but yeah, the parents.
00:47:04.140 But when you go a little deeper, it's like the crime wave that started in the 60s and peaked and started going back down in 1993.
00:47:11.780 three, you know, that the parents of kids then were, you know, super cautious and careful and
00:47:18.400 worried and scared. I remember the milk carton kids, you know, the picture of the little kid
00:47:23.680 on the side of a milk carton, you know, who was kidnapped, you know, and it wasn't until later
00:47:28.340 that, you know, the criminologists and statisticians pointed out that, you know, 99% of kidnappings are
00:47:33.820 by one of the parents in a divorce dispute, in a custody dispute. So, you know, letting your little
00:47:40.240 Johnny or Mary, you know, walk down the block to the playground, they're not going to get kidnapped
00:47:45.060 unless you're going through a custody dispute with your spouse. Right. So, uh, that culture
00:47:51.740 of safety ism was probably overblown. Uh, you know, I, I now have a four-year-old, I have a
00:47:57.500 29 year old and a four-year-old, uh, my four-year-old now taking him to playgrounds. These
00:48:02.780 playgrounds are designed by lawyers. I mean, they're just like super padded and extra careful
00:48:07.380 and nothing can go wrong, it's like, wow, what happened?
00:48:11.680 And it's that culture of safetyism, you know, that we can't allow anybody to hurt.
00:48:17.840 According to Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff, anyway, in their book, that's one explanation.
00:48:23.140 The other hypothesis, by the way, is screen time.
00:48:26.260 Not just television, but more focused social media screen time seems to affect kids more,
00:48:32.520 uh girls more than ways maybe double uh the rate of anxiety depression you know the cancel culture 1.00
00:48:40.460 is very destructive um and i mean i kind of get a glimpse of that i'm an i'm an okay boomer you
00:48:46.420 know i'm 65 so i i don't i don't worry i don't do a lot of social media but i can feel it like
00:48:52.240 you know i have a book come out i get you know positive review positive reviews super positive
00:48:56.880 comments and then one pops up that you know that's super negative and i'm like oh my god and i can't 0.99
00:49:03.500 that's all i can focus on is this guy this is this fucking asshole said this about me i'm gonna get 0.99
00:49:08.300 just like calm down shirmer now multiply that by you know a hundred every day every hour these kids 1.00
00:49:15.440 you know reading social media you know they the negativity bias you know we're we're losses are
00:49:20.900 twice as much as gains feel good you know negative comments are twice as potent as positive comments
00:49:27.000 are rewarding so it's like oh boy now so you know some are calling for um not regulation so much as
00:49:35.560 recommendations to parents you know maybe you should allow your kid on a screen two hours a
00:49:40.580 day or three hours a day that has yet to be worked out because the data is still coming in on what's
00:49:46.020 the right number you know but surely there's some balance between your kid run out go outside and
00:49:51.860 around with other kids at playgrounds and get some sunshine invite a vitamin d is supposed to be good
00:49:57.520 for covet 19 so versus sitting in the you know back room on a screen there's some balance there
00:50:05.540 yeah for sure well michael listen it's a great book and we recommend uh everybody gets it and
00:50:10.820 reads it given the devil his due uh tell everybody is it out already or did we get an
00:50:15.920 yeah it's out yeah it's published by a cambridge university press it's out it was out in england
00:50:20.640 first and then uh in the united states so and it's available everywhere unfortunately all book
00:50:25.720 most bookstores have been closed when my book out so that was unfortunate but um but of course
00:50:30.820 amazon back to amazon and amazon's not the only one that will deliver books you can actually also
00:50:37.400 go to skeptic.com and order a signed copy because I went back to my office to sign hundreds of
00:50:43.060 copies. So we have them available. Well, if you want a signed copy with Michael's personal
00:50:48.020 coronavirus on it, make sure you go to the website and get that. Don't give Jeff Bezos your money.
00:50:53.980 Make sure you get the sign. Yeah, you just lick it. Yeah, exactly. That's what you want. But Michael, 0.99
00:50:59.120 thank you so much for coming on the show. Before we let you go. Oh, thanks for having me. You guys
00:51:02.300 are a lot of fun and it's good to be pushed a little bit. I appreciate it. Well, there is more
00:51:06.120 for you on that front because we've got one more question for you okay and the question that we
00:51:11.360 always end our shows with michael is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society
00:51:16.500 that we really should be yeah well i would say it's talking about talking that we should be
00:51:23.260 talking about letting other people talk especially people you don't like uh because they may be right 0.95
00:51:29.900 partially right completely right you might be partially wrong completely wrong in any case
00:51:35.060 uh it's it's good to have your position changed because if nothing else it strengthens your own
00:51:41.500 position i hear what you're saying but i'm not going to stop interrupting francis um
00:51:46.520 but on that note michael thank you so much and thank you guys for watching
00:51:51.180 we'll see you all very soon with another brilliant interview or a live stream
00:52:05.060 We'll be right back.