The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Inside the Liberal Arts: Critical Thinking and Citizenship by Jeffrey Scheuer

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

Inside the Liberal Arts: Critical Thinking and Citizenship by Jeffrey Scheuer Inside the Liberal Arts accomplishes two ambitious goals at once, and shows why they are inseparable: It explains the nature and purpose of liberal learning – to produce critical thinkers and well-rounded democratic citizens – and offers a probing, accessible guided tour of critical thinking, emphasizing the analytic skills that form the intellectual core of all higher education. Becoming better critical thinkers doesn’t mean we have to become philosophers. As users of language, Scheuer explains, we’re already philosophers. Advanced critical thinking simply makes us better philosophers – and better learners and citizens. In lucid and often witty prose, Scheuer guides us through the moral and conceptual heart of the liberal education ideal. In an era when colleges and universities are struggling to convey the value of that ideal to students and parents, Inside the Liberal Arts will be a lasting aid to intellectual excellence, and a benchmark for understanding what it means to be an educated citizen.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show in the sky. We certainly appreciate it.

On the interwebs in the sky, it just rotates through those pneumatic tubes that process the dot coms in the sky. So welcome to the show. Holy moly, folks. We have just some amazing guests this week. I think we have like three shows a day booked this week. I don't know how that happened because I don't know how I do too. We have like three shows a day booked this week. I don't know how that happened because I only do two. We have like three shows a day and we have people that are so smart on this show that are clearly not me. As always, we have the most amazing guests. So we'll be getting to that in a second. But in the

meantime, as always, the plugs, the guilt, the shaming, please refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Google.com or youtube.com for just Christmas. You can Google it too if you want. I mean, it's a free country. And you can do that in other countries that aren't free too, I think. If you can get access to Google. I don't know. That's a whole different political statement. Anyway, go to YouTube.com for just Christmas.

Goodreads.com for just Christmas. And all those places on the internet where you can find us, as always. Today we have an amazing gentleman on the show. He's the author of the new book, Inside the Liberal Arts, Critical Thinking and Citizenship. Jeffrey Schuer is on the show with us today, and he's going to be talking to us about his amazing new book and some of the insights and things that we're going to learn about it.

He is the acclaimed author and freelance writer. He is an information ecosystem expert, top press professional, and elite educators have sought his insight on media, politics, and most recently, higher education. He's on a mission, a mission from God. No, I don't know if it's a mission from God. I just like that line from Blues Brothers. education he's on a mission a mission from god no i don't know if it's a mission from god i just like that line from uh blues brothers he's on a mission to eliminate for society what it means to think critically and live as an educated assistant a citizen in a thriving democracy

his new book is the only book to systematically relate the liberal arts to thinking rationally and critically he uh takes liberal arts educators, students, and media and consumers through an exploration of the role of higher education and democracy. Welcome to the show, Jeffrey. How are you? I'm great, Chris. Thanks. Great to be here. There you go. We threw a lot of energy in the show. Did I get your last name pronounced correctly? Scheuer. Scheuer.

Scheuer. Jeffrey Scheuer is on the show with us today. Jeffrey, give us a.com so wherever you want people to find you on the show with us today Jeffrey, give us the dot coms Wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs Jeffrey Scheuer dot com Inside the liberal arts dot com And you can buy the book at Roman and Littlefield dot com There you go

And so give us an idea A 30 foot overview of the book And what goes inside of it Okay Chris The book started as an exploration So give us an idea, a 30-foot overview of the book and what goes inside of it. Okay, Chris. The book started as an exploration of critical thinking and the liberal arts because I kept hearing people say the liberal arts are for critical thinking. No one explained what that meant or how they are connected. And I decided I'd try to figure it out, and I hope I succeeded.

So Inside the Liberal Arts is an examination of the core, the history, and the conceptual foundations of liberal learning. And at the same time, because it turns out they're really one and the same enterprise, it's an exploration of critical thinking. The third part is why critical thinking and the liberal arts are crucial to democracy. There you go. All right. I think we hit an internet bump there. Can you feed that to me again? I know we hit an internet bump and we lost some of that audio. Sure. What I was saying was I started the book exploring the idea that critical thinking and the liberal arts are related because it's something people in the academic world, which I'm not really in but peering into from the outside, like to say. And I wanted to know what they meant.

They never explain or define those terms. So I decided to take a deep dive into what critical thinking is and what the liberal arts are. And it turns out they're deeply interwoven ideas. Rationality, going back to the Greek philosophers, is really the core of the whole enterprise, regardless of what discipline you're in. And then the other part, after looking at the history and conceptual structure of liberal learning and what critical thinking is all about, I explore why liberal arts are so important to democracy. There you go. There you go.

So let's get into it. What are the liberal arts for people that might confuse it with politics or something of that nature? The easiest, the easiest way to define the liberal arts is they're not vocational education. They're not STEM education. They're not pre-professional education.

They're not anything really skill-based except for mental skills, which are very important there. So they include the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences as a sort of integrated whole. There you go. And so you wrote the book and inside of it, you know, I, we talked before the show about how my, one of my Wall Street friends who was a stockbroker on Wall Street and the CEO of Companies Later, he told me that him majoring in liberal arts was one of the key things to helping him in his business career. And he didn't think that that would ever translate. And so give us a deeper dive into liberal arts and what we learned from that and how that applies to life and critical thinking. Yeah. Well, most obviously we learned to be more critical thinkers, which is reasoning according to rules and guidelines and acting on reasons. But I think it's no accident that business executives are looking for liberal arts grads,

as are people in specialized schools like military academies and culinary institutes. It's getting more popular because of its success in those areas, even as it's being attacked across America. And it's also spreading across Europe and the world on the American model. There you go. They're finding something in it. And what they're finding is that it produces balanced citizens.

Ah, is that, is that the problem where we have so many people running around dining Kruger's disease where, you know, they think they know everything and everyone's a professional in something, you know, every,

every week on Facebook, whatever the newest thing is, suddenly everyone's a professional in it. Uh, you know, every week on Facebook, whatever the newest thing is, suddenly everyone's a professional in it, you know. Well, you have experts as well as pseudo experts, and I'm not sure that's a uniquely STEM, science, technology, engineering, math, or non-liberal arts phenomenon. I think you can have that disease as a liberal arts grad but maybe you're a little uh more uh immune to it if you have a good sound background and critical thinking there you go and and and you know i've been studying a lot of uh stoicism lately over the last few years and uh you know petitis and marcus aurelius and and a lot of philosophers too i mean

there's a reason you know these people resonate with us uh from you know ancient greece etc etc um aristotle etc all that um it is because you know they they put their finger on the pulse of human nature and behavior and dealing with the world. And I think a lot of liberal arts incorporate some of that. Is that correct? Absolutely. I argue in the book that both historically and logically, the liberal arts come out of Greek philosophy, which invented rational thought, really, in the West, at least in the West.

And it was more Plato than anyone else who invented it and Aristotle who refined it. And that project has been ongoing ever since. And it's called philosophy, but it has generated questions that have created new disciplines all along the way from political science to linguistics to economics, you name it. They're all, or most of them at least, somewhat offshoots of philosophy. There you go. There you go. You know, critical thinking is so important. Being able to evaluate stuff, being able to think. You know, when I sent my two nephews off to, when they graduated high school, my nephew and my niece, I wrote to them and I tried to put, I tried to espouse the letter to them. Things that were important in life, collecting stories, enjoy the journey, not the destination, take time to look around, you know, things that I wish someone had told me when I was graduating high school.

And one of the important things I told them was, you know, there are three things in life. There's the things you know, there's things you don't, you know, you don't know. And one of the most important things you need to pay attention to are the things you don't know, you don't know. And sometimes those are the arrows that are going to come at you that you don't see coming because you aren't aware of them. And when it also comes to learning critical thinking, too. And to me, that's so important in studying these things. Because, you know, we say on the show a million times, we have so many historians that come on the show too, uh, that we talk about the one thing man can learn from his history is the man never learns from his history. And this is why we go around and around.

In fact, uh, you know, sometimes the whole thing where we try and erase our history, uh, one of the problems with that is, is we need to learn from it instead of erase it. So critical thinking is just so important in how that deals with it. In the context of what's going on in colleges, one of the disturbing things I see in colleges now is this attack of being able to debate ideas and talk about ideas. Yes. You know, and there's a lot of stuff that comes from the right political right on it. I'm a moderate Democrat, and I can see both sides of the extremes of our parties

that fight against this stuff, you know, the book banning, the, you name it. You know, if somebody has an opinion that hurts your feelings, you're going to shout it down instead of, like, trying to debate it. If somebody has an opinion that hurts your feelings, you're going to shout it down instead of trying to debate it. In college, there used to be these great bastions of debating and ideas. Some of my favorite things of watching great debates, whether it was Christopher Hitchens in debate measures, or there's the famous Baldwin. Liam F. mf buckley yeah that that's such a great thing but you know a lot of those debates you have now uh you know there's recent you see

recent the news where you know people can't even if they have different opinion can't get up in and free speech those opinions without being shouted down. Yes, it's unfortunate, it's sad, it's wrong, it has to change. It's difficult to change because it's an amorphous cultural environment that we're talking about. But people like the dean of Stanford Law School have to stand up for free speech, as she did when her students tried to shout it down a visiting speaker they didn't like absolutely there has to be debate respectful debate in universities they are laboratories of democracies yeah those above all i just want to go back to something you said earlier chris

about your advice to your nephews and nieces. It was great, wise stuff. They probably threw it away, but you know, I mean, that's what you do when you're a teenager. Maybe after reading it. And, you know, I have friends who are going to school now, or about to go to school, and I just tell them, be curious, explore, find what you love, because what you love because what you love is what you'll learn best and what you'll do best and that's what motivates all real learning yeah having an open mind having an open mind which does not mean not having opinions yeah you can have your opinions and I have strong opinions like you um but there has to be respectful debate or democracy just doesn't work yeah and and in opening your mind to so many things i i've been you know i i'm not using this

as a i i i'm just showing in politics how i've moved it's a good example that's what i'm trying to say so i've gone from being a a Republican to being a very far liberal. I didn't really realize how far out I was. And then now I'm a moderate Democrat. There's lots of. I would have kept you out there. Oh, yeah. And I can see, I can look at both sides of the political spectrum because we talk a lot about that on the show.

We have authors that written political books. So, you so you know i have to i have to kind of take all sides we've had republicans and democrats on the show um and so but with just about any topic aside from politics uh you know i think people watch me on facebook i was talking about this the other day on my facebook post i'm like a of you have seen me journal on Facebook and you've seen me, my ideas progress and, and, uh, maybe progress is not the right word. Maybe they digressed. Uh, who knows? I guess someone will be the judge of that. Um, but you know how my stuff evolves and how I evolve. And to me, God, if I was the same person I was five years ago or 10 years ago or 15 years ago or 20 years ago, I can't imagine ever having that life. And so being able to critically

think and do philosophy and understand stuff, I mean, there's always so much insight. And going back to it, I keep a copy of Marcus Aurelius's book right here next to my desk. The meditations, the meditations. It took me 50 years to get around to them, but, uh, I probably should have read them sooner so I can have, Oh, here it is. It's right here on top of my speaker, uh, meditations, Marcus Aurelius. Um, the, um, so I was wondering where it went, uh, but, uh, so what are some other things that people can do and, and, and how can people learn liberal arts better?

I mean, of course, buying your book, I guess, is a part of it. That would be a huge leg up for those who, those who read it. Uh, and I say that with at least some modesty because the book is somehow smarter than I am. But I want to go back to what you were saying about free speech because there's really two opposite problems that I see as creating the situation of intolerance. One is, yes, we have a generation of college students who are much more vulnerable, much more given to slights and triggers, and they have to grow up. That's just not how society works. And they're not being prepared for society by being so sensitive that they can't take some challenge and some controversy and some

dispute. And that's one problem. And the other problem is Trumpism, because it has shrunk the spectrum of dignified debate, because so many of the Republicans have gone over to the far side to the lies and the conspiracy theories that it's very hard to debate them. It's very hard to debate them. So I think those are the two problems we need to overcome. I don't have an easy solution or silver bullet, but critical thinking is part of it, certainly. It most definitely is. It's almost like evolving as you have evolved i have not evolved as you have i've gotten older um but i wouldn't say my opinions

have changed that much i i admire you that you're open to that you know it kind of comes from a survival sense in a business sense um On one hand, I was damned. On the other hand, I was blessed. And so it's a, is there a dichotomy sort of thing, analogy for that? But I grew up in a cult. And I grew up with a very heavy religion that was trying to program me into being a bot for them

very harshly. And I asked a lot of questions. For some reason, I was born with a brain that went, no, I don't think so. I'm not doing your thing. You got to explain it to me before I get it. And, um, it, it sent me on this course in life where I constantly ask why people do things. Why do you believe in things? Why do you believe that? It, it, it makes my show great because I'm curious about people. Why do you live the life you did? Why did you choose to go down a pathway?

Um, you know, to me, life is these beautiful forests of pathways where you, there's multiple forks in the road and you choose to go left or right or whatever the variation is. And you go down that road and, and, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's all about the journey and not the destination. So it's curious to me and I have an innate curiosity for people as to why they do what they do and how they do what they do. And, you know, I don't think I have the best life. I don't think maybe I chose the best things. I think, I think people that tell me that they have no regrets are foolish. Um, but what do I know?

Maybe I'm wrong. And I consider that as well. So I've always kind of had this thing where I'm always like, what the fuck is going on? And why are we doing this this way? And it's helped me in business being an entrepreneur because I can look at business models and I can go, why did they do it this way? How could this be done better? And how can this be innovated? And so it's helped me in a lot of different ways, even though I'm still scarred from childhood.

But that's another matter for my psychiatrist to talk to later today. Well, curiosity is the driving thing. If you don't have that, you have a problem. But it's all about asking questions. And I think critical thinking, learning to think critically, to make distinctions and to make connections and to see generalities and particulars and to go back and forth between them, I think that helps us to formulate better questions. And it doesn't give us answers, but it helps us to see where the good questions lie. Yeah. And I was lucky in life to have people that validated the way I was thinking. George Carlson?

George Carlin? Carlin. George Carlin. It's Monday for me today. Sorry. George Carlin helped save me. I'm probably alive today because of him. Because what he talked about with religion, I finally met somebody outside of my cult that, that, that spoke reason to me and,

and made me realize that I wasn't alone. There were other people who thought like me, uh, for some reason I had a natural thinking process to it is, is, is one of the, is one of the problems that we have in today's society um a laziness of the mind where people you know we we all want to be entertained and one of the problems with uh uh social media especially i think in recent years and i think that's what gave rise to trump and other things um is that we've kind of become more and more lazy where we want to be entertained we want instant entertainment you know and i'm guilty i'll admit to it i'm guilty of spending four hours on in a night watching tiktok going through it and

then suddenly i wake up and the lights are on in the morning um and i watch movies late at night when i should be reading yeah you know i i wrote a book called The Soundbite Society in 1999. Oh, wow. It was about television and radio and how they atomize information and how doing that helps the right and hurts the left. And that was before social media completely fractured and fragmented the media landscape and where and how we get news and how we tell news from non-news. So, and before me, there was Neil Postman, a great writer and media theorist who wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death about how television is corrosive. I think Facebook is worse. I think all the menu of options kids have today for social media are just absorbing their time, fragmenting their attention. They're probably

learning some mental skills that we don't have. They certainly are better at using their devices than folks of my age are but um what is lost conversation reading core elements of community of citizenship of democracy uh are getting lost there there you go i mean i've i've been i you know i've been single all my life and uh i've tried getting married a couple of times. I just don't have the millions for the divorce. I'm still saving up for them. And so I have a lot of quiet time in my life and being a business owner. I mean, I was married to my companies really for most of my life.

And so being someone who sits down and contemplates stuff, who tries to innovate companies, and I have a lot of quiet time on my hands, other than when my dogs are back talking to me because they're not getting any treats. And so that's been one of the most important creative times and learning times and pondering my existence to tiktok and youtube sometimes is sometimes i try and quote fill my quiet moments with that noise and and i i've been very aware in the back of my hind brain that i'm going you know what you're doing chris you're just filling your you know it's kind of like when people eat bad food which i've also been guilty of is is eating emotionally because you're you're like you're like i'm bored what should i do oh fuck it i'll eat a giant ass burger and then spend half an hour you know three days trying to process that crap through my system because i don't know i had nothing better to do today i guess i don't know um and and so there's kind of

a laziness of the mind and so lately i've been getting after myself and I go, knock it off. Take some time just to sit and kind of think. And I did that this weekend. I turned off all my, uh, all my, uh, call of duty gaming that I normally do and contact that I play with my friends. And I just kind of went through stuff and audited a bunch of things and went, Hmm, what's everything doing? You know, what's this? I actually found two podcasts. We had it published, um, that people had asked us to hold. And that's always a bad thing. Um, and, uh, we, they asked us to hold them till the publish date and we never

exercised them on the publish date. So, uh, being able to sit in the quiet, in the stillness and to not have some of these distractions, like you wrote about in your other book, and I'm really curious about that. I'm going to delve into that and probably order it. The Soundbite Society, How Television Helps the Right and Hurts the Left, but also there's probably a whole new second book

you can do on that with the Fox News lawsuit. But just being in the stillness of our life. Yes, and stillness doesn't have to be mindful meditation. There's a whole spectrum of activities. We can't run our minds at warp speed all the time. We can't be reading the Magic Mountain all the time or Ulysses. We need rest, relaxation. But I found, first, I watch a lot of baseball,

which I find very stimulating and interesting. It's not, I wouldn't say an education, but it's fun. And I'm thinking all the time when I'm watching. Another thing I do is I do a lot of puzzles, which I love, and like Sudoku, for example, which is really a mental workout, but it's in a very abstract realm of logic. So you're not thinking about the world. You're thinking about solving a logical problem. Although it involves numbers, it's not mathematics. And I do that, and I'm addicted to it.

I love it. So there's a lot of different ways to use your mind, to rest your mind, to run your mind at low gear. There's not one formula, obviously, for everyone and many different speeds at which it can be run or rested. There you go. And in the title of your book, you talk about citizenship. And in the breadth of the book, you talk about how it can make us better citizens. Give us some more insight into that. How does it make us better citizens? Well, good question. Citizenship is intimately wound up with liberal arts.

And I would argue all education, absolutely all education is for citizenship because what is citizenship? It's everything, it's every context in which there's some give and take between an individual and community, a transaction where there's both give and take. So if you're helping a neighbor, it's citizenship. If you're walking your dog, it's not citizenship. If you're cleaning up your dog, it is. After your dog, it is citizenship. There are many ways to do that, and I figured that there are really three main spheres

in which this happens, the economic, the cultural, and the civic or political. And the areas of learning outside the liberal arts are mostly geared toward the economic. They make you a better producer, better consumer, etc. But they don't affect the other two realms and only the liberal arts uh promote all three of those realms of citizenship so that's basically my argument for the liberal arts and it's an argument for democracy because that's what citizenship is it's participation yeah involvement it's speaking it's voting it's volunteering it's everything. It's volunteering. It's everything we do. It's marching.

It's everything we do to try to affect society. There you go. Because if you have a, you know, we've seen what happens if you have an authoritarian society and the damage that it does. If you go, hey, we're just going to let one guy just take care of everything. We don't need to get involved with anything. Just trust him. I'm sure he'll be fine. See how works out you just shut down the press and the second thing they do is shut down the universities just like happened in hungary recently where they

kicked uh soros's university out of budapest because liberal arts and a free press are the two bulwarks of democracy that authoritarians cannot tolerate there you go you know i i was uh i was watching over the weekend somehow i tripped into a video on gaddafi and how he took power and how uh uh you know initially he was seen as this person that uh was going to be a revolutionary, like you've seen with Castro and other authoritarians, Stalin. I think that's how he tripped into it. He would sign, it was the thing about how he would sign the death certificates

that were very Stalinistic, and he would televise them to televise the terror. And, of course, these weren't valid crimes that people committed. These were sometimes political hits or sometimes just things for the first person he had killed was a man whose only crime was being guilty of studying abroad in an American university. And as you mentioned before, they go after the people with the critical thinking minds first. And the books, they go after the books first. So if you've seen that in Florida or other places, you should be worried about what's going on right now.

The non-Saxon societies don't need citizens. And Florida is looking like a place that doesn't want citizens. And it's interesting how people embrace that. You know, we have a lot of great journalists that come on the show too. place that doesn't want citizens. And it's interesting how people embrace that. Um, you know, we have a lot of great journalists that come on the show too. Uh, and I have a, I have a huge,

uh, love and appreciation for journalists. We have a journalist now that's, uh, um, being held prisoner in, uh, I believe from the wall street journal,

being held prisoner in, uh, Moscow, Moscow. We've had, uh, people who've talked, uh,

written about Khashoggi,oggi and the atrocity there. And one of my friends on Facebook was complaining about how, oh, the journalists and all the news agencies and, oh, the, you know, the recent coverage of the Trump arrest, you know, is over, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I, I recognized that there was a laziness in their thinking in their, in their thing. And the problem was there were people jumping onto their Facebook feed going, Oh yeah. And, and I, and I said, Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And as nicely as I could possibly put it, the problem that you're espousing is you want people to turn off their brains and not think, and you want them to be lazy because, Oh oh my god it's too much work to think about this and everything else you have to think about you need to respect the fourth estate and the importance of this and why this moment is seminal

in history this isn't just a this isn't just a an enforcement of of of a law in new York. This is a signaling around the world of democracy, a renewal of democracy. It's not just New York. It's going to be Georgia. It's going to be D.C. But I wouldn't let the media totally off the hook, Chris, because it's a minor quibble

compared to the point you're making. But it's challenging for the media to cover abstract and procedural things like a trial, like an arraignment. And when they cover Trump's motorcade door to door from Mar-a-Lago to the Palm Beach airport, and all you're seeing is cars going down a highway that's not very newsworthy they have to find a better way to illustrate the story than boring to death with stuff like that yeah there is a i i would agree with you there's there's a thing perfection to it and maybe they need to have more scholars on and talk about the importance of what it is i mean they try to

but i mean we've i've had some constitutional uh scholars attorneys and professors on the show and you know understand the relevance of of how powerful that is i mean when when people see democracy you know democracy was really thrown under the ropes under that administration and we came within a few people standing between him and authoritarianism. If you've listened to the shows and the authors that we've had on, um, general Milley stated at Biden's inauguration that, uh, we barely landed the plane as he said it.

Um, and, uh, people don't realize how fragile you mentioned Hungary, how quickly and easily that fell to authoritarianism over a few months of COVID. And once you lose it, it's really hard to get it back, if not impossible. And the atrocities you have to go through, like I said, I was watching the Gaddafi, his whole arc of going through his political career and how Libyans woke up one day and went, holy shit, we've had a monster. Uh, you know, you look at what was going on in Russia where, you know, the Russians for so many years were willing to sleep with Putin and go, well, you know, he's not the greatest dude. And yeah, we lost some

democracy and freedom, but Hey, we've got jobs and some money here and we can buy some cars uh well we'll sell out right well eventually it always goes bad which it always does with the authoritarian it's just a matter of time it's doing now yeah it's just doing now but the renewal of what we've done in showing that no man's above the law and showing the madisonian thinking or whatever you want to call it jacksonian, or the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution being able to say that no man has a law above the law, that no man is king, that everyone has to follow the rules. And the precedence that it sets for a president in the future, that they better damn think about what they're up to a whole lot more, is important.

And authoritarians like uh china and russia and iran all those people right now are going damn it damn it democracy renewed itself and that's the beauty of it we're starting to we're starting we have a long way to go but alvin bragg's prosecution in new york is just the tip of the iceberg as know. There's a lot more coming down the road for Trump. It's going to dwarf what this case does. Yeah. I think the Justice Department will go through from Jack Smith's thing. But the important part of this discussion is the citizenship of it. The people need to be active in it. Yeah. You mentioned war scholars on the air, and

to me, that's just also the tip of an iceberg, because I think we need more scholars doing journalism, more journalists doing serious scholarship. We need to break down some of the barriers there between learning and teaching institutions, which both media and the university are. News is just adult education. It's all for citizenship. So there could be a lot more cooperation and less division between those spheres of society. Yeah.

And it's amazing how many people don't do critical thinking on stuff like all of people that will say something to me in passing or a political comment i mean where did you see that and they're like oh i saw it on a meme on facebook or tiktok i'm like wait you're you're basing your whole political decisions or whatever you're processing in the news through a meme you saw on facebook yeah and the laziness is just just what kind of shocks and amazes me. But, you know, I may have been gutsy. It has to be trained out of you at some point. You have to be disciplined in some institutional setting to get, you know, to demand truth and verification of facts.

Mm-hmm. Yep. So there you go anything more we want to tease out in your book to get people or jeffrey before we go oh thanks chris just that it's uh it's a wide-ranging short book uh it's a little challenging in parts but it will pay off because I think it'll make people appreciate more what liberal learning is and why it's important. I think it'd be great for students, graduate students, for educators and, and thoughtful,

curious people like yourself. There you go. And we'll see. I'm excited. There you go. I like your book, the soundbite society. I'm going to check that out and probably order it. I'm excited. There you go. I like your book, The Soundbite Society. I'm going to check that out and probably order it. You might need to update that thing for social media.

The TikTok Bite Society. I've been told to do that. And I always say I'm waiting for a younger person to come along and update it for me. There you go. The Instagram TikTok Society. I'm immersed in social media at which i shrink from i can't blame you though i mean it really comes down to it but it is you know it's so addictive and i think a lot of the crises we're seeing in our life are coming from social media

you know i i grew up i didn't grow up but i came of age in social media when it was, you know, the Wild West, when Twitter started and everything else. And, you know, you saw the Arab Spring and different things and everybody was like, kumbaya, it's the new, it's the thing that will save the world and bring us all together as a humanity. And I'm probably guilty of saying that. And a lot of us didn't understand that sometimes with these sort of technologies or new things, that there's a Pandora's box element to them where there's the good and the evil side of both. We saw that in China in 1989 at Tiananmen Square. We thought there was going to be a big revolution and it didn't happen. But people want democracy everywhere. They want it, whether the government likes it or not.

There will always be people in power to stay in power and by whatever means necessary. And I think it was, I can't forget. I forget the journalist who said that to me. But they will fight to stay in power and they will fight to cover up their misdeeds so they can regain power. And that's why it's so important for people to educate themselves and be smart. Thank you very much, Jeffrey, for coming on the show. Let's get your dot com so we can find you on the interwebs. Thank you, Chris.

It's JeffreyShawyer.com or InsideTheLiberalArts.com, Roman and Littlefield. That's R-O-W-M-A-N and Littlefield.com. There you go. Inside the Liberal Arts, Critical Thinking and Citizenship, wherever fine books are sold. Order up today, folks. We certainly appreciate you tuning in. As always, refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Guilt them into subscribing to the show. No, don't do that.

We're just being funny. You don't have to guilt them, but you can prod them a little bit. Tell them to go to youtube.com for just Christmas. Goodreads.com for just Christmas. And LinkedIn.com for just Christmas, which seems to be the smartest internet network these days.

Thanks for tuning in, everyone. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time. And thanks, Jeffrey. I'll get that