The Munk Debates Podcast - Bari Weiss on speech and open debate

Episode Date: February 17, 2021

Bari Weiss, journalist and best selling author on the future of speech and open debate in contemporary society, and how we forge common understandings about the things that matter in times of extreme political and ideological polarization.   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   To learn more about the episode, head to https://munkdebates.com/podcast. Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].  To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ The Munk Debates podcast is produced by Antica, Canada's largest private audio production company - https://www.anticaproductions.com/   Executive Producer: Stuart Coxe, CEO Antica Productions Senior Producer: Christina Campbell Editor: Kieran Lynch Associate Producer: Abhi RahejaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are options, and that's why we need to take this opportunity seriously. There's no way you can prevent global warming unless China is part of the solution. This is not normal male behavior. This is predatory behavior. We don't know how bad this bug is. We don't know what this bug does. All of that was thrown away in those eight minutes and 46 seconds, and that's the moment that I became an abolitionist. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Thanks for listening to the monk debates. we are stepping away from our usual debate format to provide you with a monk dialogue. That's a one-on-one

in-depth interview with a leading thinker about a big issue of our time. Like our debates, the focus of each monk dialogue is a smart and civil conversation free of spin and focused on the facts. Here's my dialogue with journalist Barry Weiss, internationally best-selling author and passionate free speech advocate. Hello, I'm Rudyard Griffith, the host and moderator of the Monk Dialogues. We are exceedingly fortunate to have a really interesting, original thinker on the program. Her name is Barry Weiss. She's a journalist, author, and free speech advocate. She's been a writer and editor at a whole number of prestigious publications,

including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. And she's the internationally best-selling author of How to Fight Antisemitism. Barry Weiss joins us now for a monk dialogue. Thank you so much for having me. Well, I've been really looking forward to this conversation, Barry. You've got a bunch of, I think, compelling and interesting arguments for us to ponder today about the nature of free speech, how we form decisions, understandings amongst each other or not, the nature of media and journalism in our time. Barry, what I want to do for the first 20 minutes or so with you as we bat around some of those ideas is put up on our quote board here, some quotes that you've said. that I think captures some of your thinking today.

And the first of these, I'll read it to you, is criticism is great. What cancel culture is about is not criticism. It's about punishment. It's about making a person radioactive. Barry, kickoff for us. What was the thinking behind that? And maybe talk a little bit about your own personal experience,

how becoming radioactive is something more than just words for you. It's something that kind of happened to you. in the course of your own journalistic career? Sure. Well, I would say there's a very strange paradox that exists right now, not just in America, not just in Canada, but in the West more generally. Speaking of America and Canada,

we live in the freest societies in the history of the world by any measure. And yet people are acting increasingly as if we are living in a closed society. So what do I mean by them? I know a lot of closeted people, and I don't mean closeted in their gender identity or their sexual orientation. I mean closeted in their commonsensical views of the world. Feminists who believe that there are biological differences between men and women, parents who want their children to go to schools where they're taught to judge people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin,

lawyers who believe in equality under the law, professors who want the right to research. search and write and speak without fear of censure. And if that sounds crazy, frankly, people have their heads in the sand. And the reason that these people are so scared, the reason they write me and say things like, I know this sounds crazy, but I feel like I'm living in a totalitarian society, they're not crazy. What they fear is what we call cancellation, which is really a mechanism of power and of social censure of this zealous cabal that is, in my view, the sort of most powerful ideology that's emerged in the West since the end of the Cold War. It's been called critical social justice. It's been called wokeness. It's been called identity politics,

intersectionality, neo-Marxism. It doesn't yet have a commonly agreed upon name, but essentially what it's trying to do is to radically narrow the Overton window of what's an acceptable thought and what's acceptable behavior. And the skeptic will say every society, every tribe, every social group has always had taboos. And of course, they're right. What's different about this modern iteration is that people are getting canceled for sins that are not really sins. and it uses the power of the thing that we're talking to each other through right now, the internet, in a kind of panopticon dystopian sense, in which everything is recorded for all time and forever.

So someone in the old world, let's say, might have been canceled for something like pedophilia, and that would have been legitimate. They would have been ostracized for that. Today, someone can be canceled. They could suffer, and what do I mean by that? They could lose their job. they could suffer horrific social reputational harm, and their family and their friends can be subjected

to a secondary boycott for something as simple as liking the wrong tweet. And it's a strange fact that we're living in an era in which we are we, and by we I mean progressives, liberals, even many conservatives, we believe increasingly in rehabilitation, in criminal justice reform, in the idea that people who have even committed murder or rape deserve a second chance. And yet there's no similar mode of rehabilitation for people that are canceled in this kind of public way, if that makes sense. It does, Barry. And what would your response be to the person who says, though, that, you know, these are perilous times that we live in a society that has gone from mere divisions to rampant polarization? And that polarization

occasionally spills over into violence. It spills over into violence that targets minority and vulnerable groups, and that violence starts with words. So we need to be careful about our words because those things have consequences, and in some cases, life-threatening consequences for those vulnerable communities. I guess what I would point them to are stories of people that, to my mind, show the effect of what Cancel culture is. So I would start by saying, you know, what do you make then of a Manuel Caffrety, the Hispanic utility worker, who worked at the San Diego Gas and Electric Company, who was fired this summer because he made an okay hand gesture

hanging out the window of his car, and someone interpreted it as a white supremacist hand gesture made by Hispanic man, and he was fired. What would they say to Tiffany Riley? She's a Vermont school principal who was fired because she said over the summer, I support the idea, of course, of Black Lives Matter, but not the organization Black Lives Matter.

She lost her job. Greg Patton is a favorite example of mine. He was a professor of business communication at USC, or at least he was until this fall when he lost his job. And why did he lose his job? He was teaching a class about business communication. And he was teaching a class about filler words, words like um, and that and things like that. And he used a word in Chinese, a Chinese word that is a filler word that sounds a lot like the N word, the most horrible racial slur in the English language. That's not what he said. He was fired for his job for using a Chinese word that sounded like a racial slur. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. I'm not talking about, again, the kind of things that should rightly be social taboo. It should be a social taboo to use the N word in your workplace or on

social media. Of course it should. That should not extend to the example that I just showed you. I think what we're seeing a lot of, and I can speak right now to what happened at the New York Times, is the weaponization of the idea of safety and the concept creep of what constitutes violence. Barry, that's a great segue to go to our second quote of yours, just to flesh out our discussion together. The truth isn't a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few

whose job it is to inform everyone else. Maybe you could use that as a jumping off point to talk about your kind of broad, criticism of the mainstream media today and how it's approaching difficult and contested debates in our society. My argument would be, and it's, I think, a pretty boring and old school one, but apparently it's controversial these days, is that the public conversation, and not just the public conversation, but progress benefits when we have the most expansive and capacious public dialogue about sensitive issues as is possible. Right now, we're living in an era in which

what political scientists call the overtune window of acceptable debate has narrowed to something like a sliver. What do I mean by that? I mean, there were op-eds I tried to get through as an editor at the New York Times arguing, for example, that, you know, there would be a reason to support Brexit other than xenophobia or hatred of immigrants. there would be reasons for people to vote for Donald Trump other than white identity, politics, or racism. Those kind of arguments are increasingly hard to smuggle through the legacy media channels. And I think that, you know, you see the effect of it where the press, the legacy press, and all of the pundits, all of the pointy heads in America told us there was going to be this massive blue wave. And in fact, what happened was not a blue wave. And there was a record number of minorities in America that voted for Trump, arguably the most controversial Republican in living memory, maybe in all of American history. It is a problem when the paper of record, and I'm not just speaking now about the New York Times, and speaking about the legacy press in general, does not accurately reflect the world as it is to our readers, but reflect the world as we want it to be.

It's a little bit like socialist, realist art. It's newspapering and journalism for the sake of pushing a particular political narrative rather than for the sake of exposing our readers to the widest range of ideas and news and truth, even when that truth is inconvenient. And the reason for that is not just that people are invested in this profoundly ideological movement, which we could talk more about. It's also the business incentive, which is something I don't think we talk enough about

when we talk about this topic. Remember that the old model for news media was the advertising model. You had to fear if you were an editor or a writer angering the advertiser. That's no longer the case because of the internet. The boss of the New York Times is the subscriber, is the reader. And if you look at recent polls,

more than 90% of New York Times, readers, and I don't mean to keep harping on the New York Times, it's just the example I know best. We can talk about MSNBC, similar numbers, and Fox, obviously, the mirror image in the opposite direction. More than 90% of New York Times readers identify as liberals and Democrats. So you know that you will make your readers happy by continuing to serve them outrage porn over the president or over the Republican Party because they're already there. It's like feeding them a hit of heroin.

And I know that even as an editor and as a writer myself, all of the incentives point in that direction. Because you know if you're a columnist, well, what's your goal as a columnist? You want to be widely read. You want to go viral. You want everyone to talk about the piece that you've written. The surest way to do that. And I felt this very strongly myself was to write yet another piece about how horrible Donald Trump was. And God knows I felt that way, just like many of my colleagues did.

But I think that the best and highest use of journalism isn't simply to tell readers what they want to hear. The problem is that is what the business model right now is pushing toward. And right now we don't have a good alternative business model that incentivizes, frankly, things that cut against the grain that go in the opposite direction that anger our readers. Yeah, I know these are great insights, Barry. I want to, before we move to audience, questions, put up another quote board from you. It's a great kind of summation of your views on journalism today. Rule number one, speak your mind at your own peril. Rule number two, never risks commissioning a story that goes against the narrative.

Rule number three, never believe an editor or publisher who urges you to go against the grain. Eventually, the publisher will cave to the mob. The editor will get fired or reassigned, and you'll be hung out to dry. Barry, what is your advice to journalists today, and especially to people? who are, you know, considering what many feel is an important profession, not just, you know, because it gives you opportunities to express yourself, but as you've just discussed, it's a profession that should fulfill a public good. Can we kind of put Humpty Dumpty back together again? Are you at all optimistic? That quote would suggest you have a deep cynicism about the state of the

press today. I'm the least cynical person in the world for those who know me. I'm like a little bit honestly naive sometimes. I've been hardened by what I saw inside the legacy press, but I would say I'm more optimistic than ever when it comes to journalism. It's just, can we put Humpty Dumpty back together again inside institutions that have been rotted out or that have been subsumed by this ideology, or rather that are run by leaders who don't want to sacrifice their own likeability for the sake of maintaining the values of the institution. Why am I optimistic, though? I'm not optimistic necessarily about the prospects

for legacy media returning to old-school journalistic values, but I'm extremely optimistic about what's possible in what I think of as the kind of Wild West space of journalism. If you look across the news media, present company excluded many of the most interesting heterodox, independent-minded, funny thinkers and journalists and pundits, they're no longer operating inside the legacy press. They have platforms on substack. I think of Andrew Sullivan as a fantastic example, which, by the way, he's making, I think, tripled the amount of money that he was making

at New York Magazine. I think of really provocative journalists. God knows we've had our disagreements, but on this topic, we're very aligned, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibi. I think of podcasters, young intellectuals like Coleman Hughes, people like Brett Weinstein and Heather Hine, one of the most powerful examples of cancellation at Evergreen State College. I think of Sam Harris. I think about Megan Kelly's new podcast. So there's lots of interesting journalism happening. It's just not necessarily happening inside the legacy press.

And the thing I will add, and this is one of the things that I most, excited about is that there's an opportunity, I think, to create new institutions. So, Barry, that is an optimistic view. I agree with you about how the media could be repositioned. But what about society itself? Because as you describe it, these legacy organizations are reacting to a reality. They're reacting to a reality of a world that has been fractured into a myriad of audiences, each of which is coming to a paper like New York Times for a different reason. Their business model, as you accurately point out, is based on satisfying that audience. Is there the basis to find and create bigger audiences that come to common understandings

about difficult issues in society? I mean, have we lost that as an inherent ability within our democracy? And can we regain it? I'm optimistic on this point. I've long wanted to read a common. called the things we agree on. Because actually there's a number of things that we agree on. The dangers of big tech.

The corruption of big pharma. The brokenness of not speaking of Canada right now, but of the American healthcare system. The poverty, inequity, the fact that it is very, very hard, way too hard, especially in COVID, to get your child a good education. Most Americans, by the way, are extremely, and the polls show this,

allergic to the idea of cancel culture and the religious zeal of wokeness ideology. I mean, there was a recent Cato study that showed that 62% of Americans admit to self-censoring. That's the majority of Americans. So I really believe that there is an ability for us to come together. I think that you're totally right that right now, the legacy press, as it serves an audience of like-minded people, it actually continues to polarize that audience. And so the question is, could one create a journalistic enterprise that focuses on, A, the topics that are totally uncovered or ignored by the mainstream that touch on some of the things we agree on.

I really want to stress the amplification effect of a few very strong. Trident Twitter users, that that does not represent the mainstream of America. Most people are not on Twitter. Most people, you know, like the dentist in Cleveland or the accountant in Dallas, they're just going about their day. They're not thinking about all of this stuff. It's the problem is that most journalists live on social media and live on Twitter and are therefore following these trends. And I think in a way, it's a bit like the tailwagging the dog. They're getting fixated by it and are allowing it to affect the things that they cover and what their perception is of the reader.

I can't tell you, you know, speaking of self-censorship and that statistic I told you about 62% of American self-censoring, the amount of self-censorship that takes place among people whose job it is to tell the truth about the world, namely journalists. and I'd include even aspiring academics who want to get tenure. It's absolutely profound. And I felt it even in myself to put myself on the hook. There are topics that I have steered away from because I have thought to myself, is this really the hill I want to die on?

Do I really want to be hounded and get spam calls to my phone calling me whatever the smear of the day is? Do I really want to subject, you know, and this has been true in my case, my family to harassment. Do I want, you know, true in my case, my rabbi to get called to say that I'm a bad person and why am I allowed to go to his synagogue? The answer is sometimes no. And that's the problem is that all of the incentives are pushing in the opposite direction.

They're pushing against being courageous and saying something different. And we need to find a way to incentivize courage because without the courage, and I'm not talking about the courage to, you know, true courage, which is going to Syria or Afghanistan and reporting on on truly horrific things happening in dangerous places. I'm talking about the courage to talk about something like transgender participation in athletics, you know, things that should be open for debate, things that are reasonable to have different positions on. That's what I'm talking about. When it takes courage to express common sense, when it takes courage to express views that up until five minutes ago were totally acceptable to hold,

you know that we're in a very dangerous place in terms of open debate and the spirit of true liberalism thriving. And that's where I think we find ourselves right now. Hi there, Rudyard Griffiths, the moderator of the monk debates. Look, this we know. Our society is becoming dangerously polarized. We don't listen to each other. We don't search out opposing views. Instead, too many of us, live in tribes, convinced that we are right and they are wrong. It's time to put a stop to polarization before it wrecks our democracy. This is what the monk debates charity is all about, ending polarization, searching for common ground. We do this by producing the world's only weekly debate radio

program through our monk dialogue series and through main stage debates on the big topics of the day. Support civil and substantive public debate by becoming a monk member. As a member, you get access to to our 10 plus year online library of great debates in streaming high definition video, a free monk debate book of your choice, ticketing privileges, and so much more. 30% off when you use the promotional code, Monk, 2021, at our website, monkdebates.com.

Again, that promotional code, Monk, M-U-N-K-21 at monkdebates.com. Join now and help fight the polarization of our democracy. Now back to our program. Barry, we're going to go to a question. Stephen asks you, in this seemingly post-truth era, how can we create a common understandings

when the component parts of reality are not only challenged, but out and out denied? It's a great question. For me, and I don't have a perfect answer to it, a big part of it comes in reasserting truths that I think we took for granted. granted and right now are under tremendous siege. And for me, the assertion of the liberal worldview. And by that, I don't mean liberal in the partisan sense, but liberal in the most capacious sense of the

word, the idea that everyone is equal because everyone is created in the image of God. The belief in the sacredness of the individual over the group, the belief that the rule of law and equality under the law is the foundation of a free society, the idea that mob justice is wrong and the presumption of innocence is right, the idea that not everything is about politics, that there are things that fall outside of the realm of politics like love and relationships and art, and that when politics comes to define everything, well, then we're living in a kind of humorless and sexless and pleasureless age. And these might seem like obvious statement, right? And certainly I took them for granted up until a few years ago. But that ideology, that thing that,

you know, whatever we call it, you know, the enlightenment or classical liberalism or the liberal ideal or the consensus that has seemed to exist in the West since the Cold War, all of those things that I just said to you, all of those are under siege by this new illiberal ideology that's taken root all around us, including in the very institutions that are meant to uphold the liberal order. And I really think that it's extremely important right now to resist that ideology, whether it comes from a far right that says there's no such thing as truth, there's only power, or a left that says there's really no such thing as truth. There's only victims and victimizers and were locked in a zero-sum struggle for power.

It's about resisting a politics that says there's only the good and the pure, there's only the oppressed and the oppressor, there's only the victims and the victimizers. That's a road to hell. And I really believe that we need to return to first principles if we want a chance to recover truth again. But Barry, how would you push back, and you know this argument, that they would say, look, yes, there is this small L liberalism, a big E. Enlightenment. These were critical seminal events in our development as a civilization. But buried in those movements were power relationships.

Power relationships that subjugated women, that subjugated minorities, that privileged, frankly, people like me, educated white males. And we love to embrace small L liberalism in the Enlightenment because, frankly, it furthers our objectives as the dominant class or the dominant race in a society that is engaged in the wholesale subjugation of these different minority ethnic and gender groups? I would say that the way that we have achieved progress, and I'm speaking now of American history, is by people that seize the tools, and I'm talking now about the Constitution, which in part was signed and created by slaveholders, yes, who were guilty of horrible moral hypocrisy,

or who seized the tools of the Enlightenment, yes, created by dead white guys who probably wouldn't have seen me as fully human, as gay, Jewish, you know, whatever, by seizing those tools and saying, let's use them for ourselves. Let's use these tools because they're the best tools that were created ever, despite the fact that they were designed by dead white men. They were the best tools for human progress that have ever been devised. What's a better tool for human progress? progress. Violence or a conversation? What's a better tool for human progress? The idea that everyone's created in the image of God or the idea that some people are born into original sin by dint of their parentage or their lineage or their color. I know which side I would choose. And if you look at,

let's just say, the abolitionist movement, it was people like Frederick Douglass who saw in the Constitution, the ability to create a kind of second founding. It was Martin Luther King who said, this is the promissory note to which all Americans now fall heir. It was the use of those tools that led to their expansion to an increasing number of groups, especially in this country. If you want to say to me, let's throw out those tools entirely, well, what tools do we have to replace them with. Frankly, they don't look really good to me. They look like the tools of public shaming, of punishment,

of making people irredeemable without any chance for mercy or grace. They look like an insistence that some people are born better than others. And I just absolutely reject those ideas. You know, Jonathan Haidt, so brilliant. He speaks, I think, so articulately about good identity, politics and bad identity politics. Good identity politics says, I've been left out. Let me tell you about my own experience so that you can understand me better and so that you can

let me in. That's good identity politics. It's expansive identity politics. What we have right now too often is a dominant identity politics mode that says, you can never understand me. You can never understand me. And there's no point in you even understanding me. And so we're going to be locked in this kind of power struggle indefinitely.

And I just don't think that that sounds anything like progress or, frankly, anything like a society that I would want to live in. Great analysis, great insights. Let's go to our next board for you. It comes from Larry. Larry asks, I think it's clear that the election of President Trump was in some ways a response to and a rebuttal of mainstream media's political correctness. We now anticipate a swing back. That's Larry's view. How does this movie end? So where are we at, Barry? Is this like a ping-pour? game that we're going to kind of bounce around ideologically based on whichever incumbents in the White House and the mainstream media kind of follows the ball back and forth? Is that to the benefit of readers and viewers? That's a really good question. I don't think we've seen we're even close to the end of this movie, to use your metaphor. I think that the ideology that has swept through the legacy press that had its nucleation point in the universities. And then has, you know, the old idea, right, was that the radical views that students were marinating in on campus, and this was a

view shared by Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives was radical ideas. But, you know, as these students make their way in the world and they get their job in McKinsey or J.P. Morgan or the New York Times or the halls of Congress, they'll leave those ideas behind. And the good news and the bad news is that ideas really matter. And when you're marinating in a particular set of ideas during the most formative years of your intellectual life, those have an impact on you. And so rather than young people, and this movement is really coming from young people, leaving those ideas behind, they've taken it inside of the institutions, which is why you see now, and it's not just the press and it's not just universities, it's K-12 education, it's publishing houses,

It's Hollywood, it's big tech, and it's increasingly corporate America. So I think that this movement that I am really fixated on, because I think it's one of the under-told stories of our time, the way that it is managed to capture so many of our institutions, I think it's going to continue to roll through them, and it's going to continue to be unscrutinized by a press that otherwise should be telling us this extremely important story. It's a story that I want to continue to tell, and that is, you know, if culture is downstream from politics, which I've always believed that, then it's going to continue to find its way, I believe, inside the mainstream of the Democratic Party in the years to come. But let's see if I'm proven wrong. How does the Internet deepen the so-called paradox of intolerance? Here I'm referring to Carl Popper's famous formulation that in order to maintain a tolerant society, we must be intolerant. of intolerance. I mean, this is something you've thought a lot about, Barry, as a person who

has campaigned and taken a strong view on anti-Semitism in its various guises and forms. I mean, to what extent is intolerance valid because we are trying to stamp out those intolerant beliefs to create that space of tolerance where civic dialogue can occur? These are difficult, blurry lines to color within? Going back to something I said before and some brilliant question, there absolutely should be intolerance for bigotry.

The question is, what is bigotry? Is it bigotry to say, I support Black Lives Matter as a thought, but I don't support the organization Black Lives Matter because I don't believe in abolishing the nuclear family or I don't believe in defunding the police

or unraveling capitalism, which are all, tenants of the organization. In our current milieu, too many people in too many positions of power want to say that that's bigotry. I don't think that that's bigotry. I'll give you another example. Is it fair to hold family members accountable for the bigotry or past bigotry of their relations? An example that I always think about when this topic comes up is Majdi. He's a Palestinian business owner in the Midwest. He runs a company called Holy Land Catering. It's a really successful catering and restaurant company, or at least it was until tweets that his daughter had put out when

she was 14 and 15 years old, which were unapologetically racist and anti-Semitic. They were wrong, were ousted. Now, she apologized. He fired her from the business, but his business was still decimated. He lost his lease. He lost a lot of his major contracts. Is that, I mean, to use my language. Is that American? Is that liberal? Is that fair? That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. I'm not talking about taboos on Holocaust denial. I'm not talking about taboos on discriminating against people because of their skin color or their gender or using racial slurs. I'm talking about an attempt to widen beyond reasonable recognition the boundaries of what bigotry is and then therefore we're smearing people as bigoted as a way to remoralize society and narrow what is an acceptable

position. Barry, I just want to thank you. You know, this is the culmination of 20 dialogues that we've done this year. And our conversation with you just really captures perfectly the spirit of these evenings. Our ability to have conversations about difficult issues to express complicated ideas with incredibly lucid and thoughtful analysis. do all this in a civil and substantive way. I just really appreciate your time, your contributions to the learning of our community. My pleasure. Thank you for listening to my dialogue with Barry Weiss. And if you enjoyed this extended interview format, you'll be glad to know that we'll be taking

the opportunity from time to time to feature more Monk Dialogues on our podcast feed. You can also access them at any time on our website. Visit www. Monk Debates.com forward slash dialogue. Again, that URL, monk debates.com, that's MUNK, Debates with an S.com, forward slash dialogue. We also always appreciate your feedback on this podcast. Please drop us an email at podcast at monkdebates.com. Let us know what you thought about Barry Weiss's conversation with me. and what if any new ideas her thinking has stimulated in you.

Again, love your feedback at podcast at monkdebates.com. Please also consider giving us a rating on the Apple podcast platform or wherever you download your audio. We appreciate those ratings and reviews. And finally, thank you for being part of our community and helping the Monk Debates bring back the art of public conversation, one dialogue at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffith.