The Eric Metaxas Show - Socrates in the Studio: James Lindsay (Continued)

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Exposing the Insanity of Modern Academia

Noble gold investments is the official gold sponsor of the Eric Mataxis show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals. Learn how you can protect your wealth with noble gold investments. That's noble gold investments.com. Check your bucket list lately? Are you ready to take care of item number seven? Listening to the Eric Mataxis show? Well, welcome. Tune in and then move on to item number eight. skydiving with Chuck Schumer and AOC. Here now is Mr. Completed My Bucket List at age 12, Eric Mattaxas. Hey there, folks. It's a Socrates Day on the Eric Mataxis show.

As most of you know, for 25 years, I have been doing a thing called Socrates in the city, where I have had some of the most glorious conversations ever with some of the most extraordinary guests ever. We normally do them, you know, in big venues in Manhattan. We're doing them all around the country with, you know, 200 people and it's a big thing. But we've also started doing Socrates in the studio events, which means we can do even more of them. I did a whole bunch in England where I think that's what we're airing today. I'm not sure. But we, I've done so many recently. I did a few in New York recently for Socrates in the studio. And these are you know, it's kind of like a more of a PBS vibe, right?

But it's something that I feel very strongly about. The guests that we choose our guests very carefully. These are some brilliant people. They're not all on the same page as I am, theologically or politically, but who cares, right? That's not the point. The point is to explore the big questions, because I have this kind of crazy idea that if you're actually looking for

truth, you're going to be moving toward the God who is truth. And I have felt this for most of my adult life, and that's why we do Socrates in the city. So let me say that today, you're listening to a Socrates and the city conversation that I had. Socrates in the city, we have a YouTube channel. I ask you please to go there to subscribe to the Socrates and the city YouTube channel. like the videos. If you do that, YouTube promotes it way, way more. And we're trying to get these conversations way out there for all kinds of people who are seeking, who are curious, who have questions. It's just something that I feel very strongly about. I feel God has called me to do Socrates in the City. So that's, we have a YouTube channel. I've also, well,

you can go to Socratesin the City.com. You can sign up for our events. You can sign up for the newsletter because there's more and more happening that I can't possibly get to on this radio program podcast. And I would say, Eric, what's exciting is that if you've ever wanted to come in person but live around the world, if you sign up for Socrates Plus, which is the streaming platform, there's all kinds of other things, including free live stream of the event. So it comes with the subscription. You can live stream the event. Thank you. I think I would have forgotten. Socrates Plus, it's like $5 a month. It comes. comes with all kinds of stuff. You'll see if you go to Socrates Plus. Go to Socratesandcity.com

and you'll see it. But one of the things, which I think is the coolest, is whenever we do an event, you can live stream it. So it doesn't matter where you are, you know, if you can't get to California or in New York or wherever we're doing our event, you can live stream it. And the live stream is always, it has a little bit of a raw quality because it's before we edit it. So whatever dumb stuff I say that gets edited out by the brilliant young people who do this, I would like you to hear it anyway. So Socrates plus you get the live events. We're doing an event in Manhattan in May, which is, I mean, my goodness, that's going to be a big event. We're doing an event. Some of you know about the Greek cruise. If you want to know about the crews, go to So, sorry, the cruise, the Greek cruise is Ericmetaxis.com slash cruise, Ericmetaxis.com slash cruise. You have to sign, you have to call the number if you want to go.

But it's Ericmetaxis.com slash cruise. But right before the cruise, we are doing several days in Athens, including a Socrates event in Athens. We're narrowing down the possibilities of who will be my guest. But it's going to be in Athens. You could live stream it. Unless you want to actually come to Athens, you're welcome to do that. But that's Socrates in the city.com is the website.

Socrates Plus enables you to live stream these events. I really can't believe we're going to be doing one in Athens. That's absolutely crazy. So yeah, so Socrates in the city is something I just want everyone to know about. And I want to say it again. The website is Socrates and the city. the city.com. The streaming service, I'm sorry, the, the platform Socrates Plus just opens up all kinds of stuff to you. You have to go there to see more of what it is. But we worked really hard on it.

I'm proud of it. If you go to Socrates and the city website, most of my books are available there. You can get autographed copies. And also books of most of our. guests because I again this is our idea behind Socrates in the city is to introduce you to a world of thinkers um and writers and again I've been doing this for 25 years so we have quite an archive and I just want people to know about it and I want to say again I would appreciate it if you'd share this with your friends because there are people all over the country all around the world uh I have been I've been in Europe and people come up to me and say, thank you for Socrates in the city.

And I think, what? I'm in Europe. What are you talking about? They go, oh, yeah, I've been watching it for years. It has fed me intellectually, spiritually. Sosocratesin the city.com is the website. We have some new swag there. Gorgeous stuff.

I mean, really, very, very high quality, beautiful, beautiful stuff that's there. and what else do we have there? I was just going to say something and it went out of my head. That's what happens. Anyway, when you go to the YouTube channel, Socrates, oh, I'm sorry, I was going to say,

our first Socrates in the city book. It is a number of conversations. It's on the page. You'll see it when you go to Socrates in the city.com. But it is the edited transcripts. I edited it of some of the best conversations I've had in the last 20 years. It's the book. It's the Socrates and City book. It's a beautifully printed book and produced book. But the conversations in it, I think of the one I had with Alice von Hildebrandt. She was 91 years old.

These are some of the best conversations I've ever had. And if you're looking to deepen the life of the mind, that's a big part of what I hope to do, to think about the big questions, what we always jokingly describe as life, God, and other small topics. Socrates and City, you know, it's meant to be the place where you get to do that and where there's no pressure to think a certain way. This is just to help people think about the big questions. And I keep saying I started Socrates and City 25 years ago because I thought, you know, we live in a world where you're not encouraged to think about the big questions. You're encouraged to think about shallow garbage. You know, you go to news websites and they're just pushing whatever is sensational. Thinking about the big questions, taking the time to think about the big questions,

it's important, folks. We're very distracted. So that's what Socrates and cities meant to be. I should say part of the reason it's called Socrates and the city, it's not just because I'm Greek, but Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. He said, it's important to think about the big questions. I agree with him on that. And I think that if you're honestly searching for truth, you're even asking, is there such a thing as truth? You're on the right path.

And that's really, really vital that you be encouraged to think about the big questions. Let's say you're already a person of faith. That doesn't mean you have it all figured out. You need to think more deeply about what does it mean. mean to say, I believe in truth. I care about truth. That's what Socrates and city is. So the website is Socrates in the city.com.

The streaming platform is Socratesplus.com. That's $5 a month. And then, of course, the YouTube channel. Please subscribe, like the videos. That's the Socrates in the city YouTube channel. So today I'm not sure which conversation we're playing. but I do know that it's important, it's wonderful, and I recommend it to you.

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It seems, and I don't know if this is what you talk about in your book's cynical theories, but it seems that critical theory, Marxist theory, you know, the grievance studies. I remember Harold Bloom calling it that in the 80s when I was at Yale. I mean, the grievance studies that even people like Harold Bloom were just thinking, this is a bad turn that we've taken here, what's happened. But it seems, all of it seems to be corrosive, and it seems to be corrosive of what we could call Western values.

It seems to be, in fact, very hostile to Western values. So the question is, is that intentional? Maybe let's try to talk about, you know, where does all this come from? of this. How do you get to a place in the early 21st century where this kind of thing is happening, where you have president of Harvard University plagiarizing, where you have academic standards going through the floor? What led to this? And I know you've written about this and talked about it. So what are the things that got us here? Well, I mean, certainly there's kind of very prosaic issues we can talk about like the careerism and academia, the fact that the mechanism of

careerism in academia increasingly became something they call publisher parish. Right. So if you want to have an academic career, what are you going to do? You got to publish a lot of papers. What's the easiest way to publish a lot of papers? Well, apparently we proved make them up. It's a very fast, very easy way. So within the social sciences, at least, particularly, you can just run with these things. But now we've seen other corruptions as well. We've seen people, for example, then the climate science domain come out and say, if you come up with an inconvenient conclusion, your paper cannot be published. Meanwhile, on the other hand, we've seen that the science of glaciology,

in order to solve the problem with climate change, has to admit feminist art, had a National Science Foundation grant. So there's these other corruptions, ideological corruptions. And I think those are more interesting than the perzaic careerism that also enabled this to take place. Well, it's always many things. I mean, my only field of semi-experties is, you know, Nazi Germany. What happened in the 30s? And you have, you know, for evil to prevail, you have to have a combination of things.

And one of those is greed. One of those is cowardice. One of those is, well, when you mention that the people reading the papers or the people in power, they like certain things and they don't like certain things and you have to play to that. And of course, what that leads to is ideology. In other words, if you were publishing a paper in Germany in the late 30s that is positive toward the Jews,

it won't get published. If you're writing a book about that, Bonhoeffer experienced this. He wrote a book of the prayer book of the Bible about the Psalms. Well, you can't write about the Old Testament if the Jews are being demonized in a culture. So they start coming up with, you know, Nordic racial theory, really crackpot stuff. But, and of course, at some point, I guess this is where I'm going with this, at some point it breaks down. You can kind of carry, you can, you know, speaking of hoaxes, it's like a hoax.

You can move it forward for a while, but then eventually reality catches up with it. Yeah, right. And so what we're talking about here, it's something like that. It's like a bubble and it goes and goes. And at some point, it won't, it won't work. But I still want to kind of go back to where did, when did this start that you think? I mean, I know there's no right answer. The Garden of Eden.

Well, correct. I know. Yeah, yeah. I mean that both in the literally and metaphorically. In the West, I would guess that in the 1950s, let's say, science was science, math was math. people were doing their best. There's always going to be attending factors and qualifying aspects. But basically, there was some kind of a dedication to some basics. At what point does this erode? Why does it begin to erode? Like you said, there's many factors, I think, but the 1950s

bleeding into the 1960s, I think, is a relevant point. So the critical theorists, who are these German Marxists, who came over to the United States because their family, heritage was Jewish, so they had to get out while the getting was good in the early 1930s. And they set themselves up at first Columbia University, then Brandeis University, and then, you know, the elite universities. And the big names are what, Marcusa? Herbert Marcusa in particular, I'm not thinking of. But Max Horkeheimer, although he went back to Germany after the war, Theodore Adorno, but

Herbert Marcusa is our, I think, star of the show here. But these critical theorists start to say what you said, sort of, but would their weird critical theory, cynical, paranoid Marxist twist, which is you said in the 1950s, science was science, math was math, and then they added in, yeah, because the people who want you to think that's science said that's science, and the people who want you to think that's math, want you to think that's math. And there's a second, as Herbert Mercouser put it, he wrote a famous book in 1964 called One Dimensional Man, how capitalism makes people one-dimensional in their analysis.

everything's on the capitalist treadmill, whether you're working to earn money, to buy consumer goods so that you can have a fake consumer marketed life that you think is a meaningful. Everything's one-dimensional, boiled down to capitalism, but there's a deeper analysis, a critical analysis that says maybe it was all rigged to be this way. So maybe these scientific disciplines, in particular the social sciences that they were interested in psychology, sociology, anthropology, are telling us a false story of who, we are and how the world actually works. Maybe right-wingers, as Theodore Adorno wrote, are actually intrinsically authoritarian, so we need to exclude right-wingers from power. That's the the of the authoritarian personality. It seems, and correct me if I'm going off here, but it seems like where they're coming from, ultimately, these, I guess today we'd say cultural Marxists, where they're coming from is, and I don't know if this is where the title of your book,

cynical theories, comes from, but they seem to be. fundamentally cynical about truth itself, that they're saying that there is no such thing actually as truth. There's just people with points of view and those who have the most power can impose that on others. But they're stating that as a fact. They're not stating this as a mitigating fact. With no sense of irony.

They're saying this is, well, yes. So they're making this statement. And it does, I mean, it's not like they don't have a point. I mean, you can have a point, but they take it to a place that seems really corrosive. Right. So the postmodernists specifically, the French postmodernist explicitly had the view that you just articulated, that there is no truth actually at all. Everything we think is true as a manifestation of power.

The critical theorist had a much more dismal view, in my opinion. A lot of people credit the postmodernness as being the most nihilistic. Everything's rotten. and everything's power, nothing's real. The critical theorist, I think, had a much more dismal view. There is a truth. It's a liberated truth. We just don't know what it is.

We can only approach it in the negative. Like some theologies only try to define what God is not. What's an inadequate definition of God? Well, their definition is there's an ideal society, but we can't express it. So every articulation of what society is somehow falls short of what society should be. Or in the modern left woke parlance, everything's problematic. So everything, if we boil that down into the dimension of race, you end up with the sky is racist, going for a walk is racist, the river is racist, everything's racist, everything somehow has the problematic of racism in it. Why? Because society is not ideal. Therefore, we know, since we've not achieved the platonic ideal of an anti-racist society, where there must be racism,

somewhere causing things and all that they know how to do in this negative way is to say here's a place. The society is not living up to the ideal. Here's another place. And then this becomes a credentialing mechanism in those academic fields. Publisher parish model, which also emerges in the 50s and 60s. Robert Maxwell was instrumental in helping to develop that being a credentialing model for, he's a book publisher, an academic book publisher. So he comes up with this, you know, business scheme for how do you get these academic journals to make money and how do you get school libraries to buy them and you know how do you make big subscriptions of them and all this stuff and this actually becomes the birthplace of the publisher parish model because you need

people reading the journals so you need people publishing in the journals and if what if you can make it that a career contingency so you go lobby other academic departments at the universities and say oh well a great way to know who should be a tenured faculty members how many papers are they published in the last seven years and in what journals were they in and what journals have standing. So this whole infrastructure emerges at the same time as this ability to write, that's a problem, that's a problem, that's a problem, that's problem.

Because everything's not this literal, they call it liberated at this point, but not, it's Marxist. This Marxist ideal of actual, as the Soviets used the term, actual equality, where there's economic equality, social equality, cultural equality, absolute equality across all individuals and all domains alike. In one of your books titled The Marxification of Education of Education, of education.

You talk obviously about what we're talking about here. You've also written a book called The Queering of the American Child and then Cynical Theories. These things are related. This is what I find interesting about you is that you help us understand

how critical theory, critical race theory, cultural Marxism, and then LGBTQ ideology, how they're related. For somebody who doesn't understand any of that. Can you lay out a little bit the relationship between these things?

Because these are trends. We see them in culture. We certainly see them in the academy. But how are they related? How did they relate to each other? So we've already named the star of this show, I think, relevant to the American context, at least, such as Herbert Marcuse, this arch critical theorist, one-dimensional man and so on that he wrote in the 60s.

So Herbert Marcusa in one-dimensional man and then in subsequent, I mean, kind of heavy, essay that he writes in 1969 called an essay on liberation explains that basically in America, what he calls advanced capitalism, you're not going to be able to motivate the working class to be a proletariat that will overthrow and seize the means of production and bring us into the Marxist utopia. But he says there is the possibility for a better society that we've all given up on, meaning the Marxists are all very negative now. It's not going to work. the collapse of the Soviet Union is, or the, actually, the crimes of Stalin have been confessed is where we are historically. Oh, my gosh, how horrible was what was going on there. And so

they're all in this dismal state. We've got to rethink things. And so he says, we need a different proletariat. And what he says is, well, what we can do is we can bring this two-dimensional or critical analysis to the college students. Okay, hang on. So it's the 60s that this happens. This is a 60. And Marcusa, if I just want to make sure I'm understanding this. So he basically says classic economic Marxism. It's not looking good. Not in the West.

And it doesn't look like we can. If your goal is to make the United States communist, which of course, it was the goal of world communism to do that, it doesn't look like it's working. But he's saying, wait a minute, I've got another idea about how to take the idea behind Marxism, not necessarily economic, but a previous idea. and we can use that. So what is that previous idea? Is it the idea of pitting one group against the other,

pitting, we're not going to, we're not going to pit the workers against the, what? Management or bosses or owners. That won't work, but we've got another idea, the same concept. We're going to pit this group against that group, right, this group against that group. Which, by the way, is the very opening. I mean, it's got an artistic preamble,

but when you get past the preamble and get to the first chapter, It's only a two-chapter document, the Communist Manifesto. The first paragraph of the first chapter, Carl Marx says that the history, all of history, all of the history of man is the history of the conflict between classes, and he lists a bunch of different classes. And then he says, and in a word that means oppressor versus oppressed. So that's the fundamental idea. We're going to do this oppressor versus oppressed.

But even Marx in the Communist Manifesto, 1848, is admitting there are different ways the class structure to society can come out. Well, here's Markruza saying we're not going to get it economically, a little over a century later. We're not going to get it economically. And what can we do? And he says, you know who has, he says there's the people who understand the theory. We can get them in the colleges. And then there are the people who have what he calls the vital energy for revolution.

And who are they? He calls them the ghetto populations, racial minorities, especially the black populations, in the literal what they called ghetto by that point. But ghetto still had its kind of older meaning, like cordoned off, outsiders, say, right? And so the sexual minorities, the feminists, he's naming these people the mentally ill, the prisoners. He's naming these groups explicitly. They have common cause and a vital energy to overthrow a society that's not working for them. They can be led to become a new proletariat if only we could get them to understand the problems that they have in life in the oppressor-oppressed dynamic that we can give to the college students.

So Marcusa sees all this in the 60s. He comes up with this idea. It's a brilliant diabolical idea, but it originates with him. Well, he probably borrowed it from Mao Zedong, actually. He probably borrowed it. By this point where in the 60s, the cultural revolution's been raging in China. Mao had been brought back to power, full power through the cultural revolution. And that actually turned out to be an identity politics game primarily that Mao played.

We're going to class. people as either red class or black class, we're going to pit them against each other in different categories. And Marcruza speaks glowingly of the revolution, of the revolution taking place, the cultural revolution taking place in China. He probably borrowed the idea, imported it, and put it on the ghetto populations, the outsider populations of the United States, as his new, he calls it literally the new working class or the new proletariat. And so he says this, So now you see that this whole identity politics constellation that we call intersectionality is going to come downstream. Eventually the black feminist, that's literally a school of thought that combines black liberationism and feminism in the sexual minority, sexual liberation.

Eventually this is all going to fuse into some melting pot of Marxist disaster. What's so fascinating to me, and I know a lot of this stuff, but as you talk about it, the end of the end of the end of the end. intentionality. In other words, it's not like, well, this stuff happened. It was planned. That's what's so hard to take in, that there were people who were hardcore ideologues, activists, who wanted to make this happen and had a very fertile environment because, of course, the academy has tended radically left for some time. I guess we could even ask, when did that? start? Does that start with John Dewey? I don't know. I mean, that he's an education reformer. I don't know that he's responsible for the academy attending left. I think that also started primarily in the

60s. I mean, I'm not entirely certain of that. No, I mean, I can tell you, William F. Buckley writes his book, God and Man at Yale in about, I think, 1951. He's criticizing Yale of the 40s as being as being communist and atheist. And I think you can trace it way back. before that but it's kind of like a trickle-down theory that probably then as soon as we stop being seminaries well yeah I mean it's it's just interesting but in any event so we're talking about where we are now and you're saying that this this catches on and here we are I mean I remember already in the 80s at Yale when I was there critical theory and Derry Dada was was held up I mean this was already had

completely taken over the humanities in the early 80s yeah well think about the spirit of the 60s, right? Yeah. You were one dimensional, you were square, you were boring unless you were doing all this. They didn't use the word woke back then, but if you were doing all this critical analysis that was in such high fashion, especially in these academic corners, you were hip. That was the word they used, in fact. Hipsters are downstream from this, in fact.

So you've got this kind of frisson or this cachet of cool moving in a particular direction within academic circles. Oh, Eric, you just think math as math. There's a whole other dimension you don't understand. You are square. You're boring. You're so quotidian. Yeah. And so there's this kind of like weird academic arrogance layer where these people peddling critical theory at first that eventually became postmodern and just artsy-fartsy and stupid. I mean, literally just stupid. had an academic credential or status given to them that they didn't deserve. Now, you combine this with the fact, again, I come back to my fake papers, we wrote 20 of these.

I could not write 20 math papers in a year. I could not write 20 physics papers in a year. That's kind of the point is that the humanities are, it's such a dramatically different standard. If you do two years of reading so that you, have the citations kind of lined up in a particular domain, you can make papers in the critical domains as fast as you can write. So dozens of them is possible in a short period of time. You can flood the zone with nonsense. Add in that it's those are the people who get to go to the pinkies

up, champagne parties, you know, and all of this. And you kind of have this recipe. They have the publisher parish advantage because they can publish very quickly. It appears that they're doing academic work. Nobody knows what they're talking about because in fact, what they're talking about is nonsense, but they're PhDs, so they must mean something, right? So they've got this error that they're not just smart. They're so smart. Nobody knows what they're talking about. Oh, they're really smart. You put all these things together and it's almost a perfect storm. Like you said, many ingredients allowed the Nazis to rise. Many ingredients allowed academia to completely pervert itself. Later, eventually, they, you know, go gangbusters on student services.

new dorms, building fitness centers and all this, they've all become financially beholden. So now what? Well, you got to keep the kids coming. You got to lower the standards. You got to keep them happy. All of this. And then what happens if you have, say, 2% of your students are radical activists who everything's, you know, sexist and I can't stand it. Well, you can't lose those 2%. So you better bend administrative policy to make those 2% happy so they don't go away. So later structural forces come in by the 90s and early 2000s that just accelerate this problem. until finally, I think in the, maybe with the publication of the Glacier paper, I don't know, the whole thing, the bubble pops, the whole thing throws over. And now we're looking at, you know, academia and kind of tatters.

Well, see, I said that is the question that I want to ask. Now, what are we looking at? Because, you know, we're asking whether the West has a future. It's interesting because if you think about, you know, you talk about the rise of the Nazis, you talk about, you know, Soviet communism. Eventually, I mean, it took 70 years for Soviet communism, but eventually they run out of other people's money. it breaks down. Eventually, the Nazis, you know, that's not as a good example, but evil keeps taking different forms, you know, the demons look for different hosts. And in this case, I think that is the question. Where do you think we are? Because in 89 and 91, you know, the collapse of Soviet Union,

the Berlin Wall comes down. Everybody's thrilled, naively not really. realizing that as much as standard, you know, economic Marxism has fallen apart, it's gone underground and it is, you know, like a fire, an underground fire moving through the institutions. And so today with, you know, you say the academies and tatters, I mean, is it really? I hope it is. I hope that there's a reckoning. But what is your sense given what we've been talking about? So I think that this is a very interesting question at a very interesting moment. And normally you don't have the opportunity to say that. These are big truths that we're talking about big things. And the analogy to the Berlin Wall coming down and the fall of Soviet communism are also very poignant. Because you said we all believed we're at this turning point in history.

And then we have to now reckon 30 years later with where we really? So I think we're in the exact same kind of moment. Again, had you asked me this question, say, in October? which is just a few months ago, I would have had to answer it, you know, maybe cautiously, optimistically, but somewhat differently. But after the election of Donald Trump, and this isn't to make this about Trump or Trumpy kind of, or MAGA or whatever, after the election of Donald Trump, we have to admit that we are now in a moment. The election of Donald Trump is in a way, not to draw the parallel literally, in a way tantamount to a Berlin wall falling. we're in now a completely different area. It doesn't matter if you like Trump or not.

What you have to say is true about the election of Donald Trump in 2024 is that people have looked around at their society, not just in the United States, but meaningfully here in the United States, and said, what we are doing isn't working. You don't have to like Donald. Donald Trump is irrelevant to this. He might even actually be in the opposite direction, more relevant to this. story in the sense that a lot of people have this visceral reaction against, like an allergic reaction against Donald Trump. A lot of Democrats have been absolutely, you know, he is the worst of the worst. If they'd run any other person, maybe I'd consider. But millions of Democrats in the United States said what we're doing is failing so badly, I'm willing to risk Donald Trump.

If things are falling apart spectacularly, if things are, manifestly not working, that's good because then people wake up. That's exactly right. And so what we're talking about now is that so many things have gone so far in a certain direction that many people who were blithely drifting along said, wait a minute, this is bad, we need a change. And politics is only one example of this. But so for me, to bring it back to the question of the academy, the world of, of higher education, it seems so entrenched that even with all we're talking about, do you, I mean, maybe it's, is it the market forces that will save us that parents won't send their kids to crazy, you know, elite institutions because they now know that those degrees aren't worth what they were worth 10 or 20 or 50 years ago? Some of that, I think, will play a role. It's hard to tell what the mechanisms specifically will be.

But what we are in is undeniably what we're in now is a moment in which a very large number of people across a very broad segment of the political spectra are saying what we've been doing isn't working. We need to find something else that will. Now, this is a dangerous moment as well because there are good solutions that can enter into a space like that and there are very bad solutions. Adolf Hitler famously said, Weimar is not. working. We need to make Germany great again. And lots of young Germans were like, yes, we do. And that wasn't such a good solution. In fact, it's one of the greatest, and to diminish anything, but one of the greatest cautionary tales about how to pick the wrong solution to a problem that the history has furnished us. And so we're in this kind of a moment, frankly, again, Weimar America has not been

working. We're making America great again. But the question is, are we going to do this by legitimate means, or are we going to fall prey to the, you know, the easy promises of a demagogue? And I think that this is the, so I can't tell you the mechanisms. I don't know if it's going to, oh, market forces will do this. This is too granular for a moment of this magnitude. We're now in a space where something has to change. I would say at least plurality, if not a majority of people recognize something has to change. We've got to find solutions we have to figure out to credential people to be professionals.

This is a problem that demands a solution. Necessity always is the mother of invention. So solutions that may not look anything like what we've had before will come along. Well, one thing we do know from, say, Germany in the 1930s is some new ideological programs, probably not. Oh, all the people who believe this are the ones who we should credential. That's probably, you know, the ones who have the German science. Right. This may be not the right answer.

But what is the right answer? do we know who's good to be this kind of professional? This is a problem that necessity has thrust upon us. And we have at least the warning signs that were not given to the Germans in the 1930s of some very wrong answers and what can happen when you take them. And hopefully we have both the capacity to speak into this space to push the or nudge the issue into better directions rather than worse so that good solutions can emerge. But I think there's as much danger there is in this moment, drawing parallels to the rise of the Nazis indicates that I think there's great danger in this moment. There's also unbelievable hope, probably in similar measure.

I mean, genuine hope, not the false hope of exciting demagogue. Yeah, yeah. To figure out how to navigate the challenges of a world that's technologically completely different from what it was 70 years ago or 50 years. ago. And yet that is, as I think you would greatly appreciate and do greatly appreciate, is waking up very quickly to, we better figure out how timeless truths apply to these problems, because these expedient solutions, whether we talk about the expedience of the demagogue of Hitler, or whether we talk about the expedience of the careerism of the academy, those aren't good answers. Wow. Well, I think we'll have to leave it there. But Dr. James Lindsay, really, very

grateful for you and for your time today. Thank you very much. Thank you, Eric.