The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - (Audio) Katherine Brodsky: Speaking Out in an Age of Outrage

Episode Date: March 31, 2024

I first stumbled upon the journalist Katherine Brodsky, who has been a commentator and writer for various media outlets, when I heard about her new book, No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage. The title intrigued me but I admit I was a bit skeptical. Having written and spoken about co-called cancel culture in the academic world, I expected I might find nothing new in her book, but I was wrong. Katherine was motivated to write her book after her own experience of being mobbed online after having defended a colleague in an online media group she helped moderate, for the crime of having posted a job opportunity at Fox News. While she had become aware of the growing social intolerance she was witnessing around her, it was her own experience that caused to make a crucial decision. These kind of experiences can be debilitating, as she had discovered, and she decided to explore the experiences of others, to see how they had recovered their voices, fought back against the mob, or otherwise moved on. The stories in No Apologies are poignant, and fascinating. Katherine is a clear and compelling writer, and an eloquent expositor, as I discovered during our discussion. We explored her own experience, her interests in journalism, and her own takeaways from the stories she explored as a journalist, which form the basis of the book. It was a fascinating and provocative discussion, and in many ways uplifting rather than depressing. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and that it helps others to deal with the a society that seems to be becoming increasing intolerant to free and open discussion about important issues.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi and welcome to The Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. In this episode, I had the delightful opportunity to have a discussion with the journalist Catherine Brodsky, whose career as a media journalist evolved until one point when she was moderating an online media group and defended someone who'd made a point that was quite innocuous, but who had been attacked vociferously by online mobs. and of course she was subsequently attacked and that motivated her to think about other people's experiences

and ultimately write this book, No Apologies, How to Find and Free Your Voice in an Age of Outrage. It's a fascinating book that is not quite what you think. It's a series of stories of people who responded in many different ways with many different experiences from someone who ran a knitting group and who was attacked, which you would imagine would be impossible to find something controversial about knitting in such a way.

to a young black man who spent a lot of time talking to KKK members and helping them basically come out from their experience. Many, many different experiences from anger and frustration to forgiveness and talking about the different ways to deal with this unfortunate phenomenon. And as I say, it's an uplifting discussion. She's a wonderful writer and a very eloquent speaker, and I really had a good time talking to Catherine. We talked about her own background as a journalist,

and one of the things that's fascinating about her, you'd never know from listening to her, is that she actually grew up in the Soviet Union and her family were Jewish emigrates from the Soviet Union. And like many of my colleagues, I know from the former Soviet Union, her family and her are particularly sensitive to issues of dissent and suppression, which may be one of the reasons she became sensitized and wrote the book. It was a, it's a very interesting and, as I say, pleasant discussion.

I hope you really enjoy it. You can watch it ad free on our Critical Mass Substack site. And if you subscribe to that site, the dues you pay will go directly to supporting the Origins Project Foundation, the nonprofit that supports this podcast and other efforts to connect science and culture and reach out to people. Or you can watch it on or listen to it on any YouTube listening site or watch it later on our YouTube channel, which I hope you also consider subscribing to, no matter how you watch it or listen to it, I hope you enjoyed this podcast, and I hope you'll consider supporting the Origins Project Foundation as well. Thanks.

Well, Catherine Brodsky, thanks for making time to come on on the podcast. It's really great to talk to you. I've enjoyed reading yourself. It's great. And I want to learn more about you. And one of the things that we do in this Origins podcast, and I like to do, before talking about where people are, is talking about how they got to where they are.

And I was trying to research your background, and it wasn't easy, which maybe you should feel blessed that you can't find much information about you online about your background. And I tried to stalk you online, but I couldn't. I know that you were, you know, been a writer for variety and covered culture and TV and things like that.

although obviously interested in much broader topics and came to write the book that we'll talk about, which I might as well show now, no apologies, about how to find your and free your voice in the age of outrage. And it's clear what caused you to write this book, so we'll get there. But I want to find more about your background. You said you're from the, your parents were from the Soviet Union. And you were also born there? Yeah, I was actually born there. So in the Soviet Union, right around the time that, you know, it was collapsing but hasn't quite collapsed. But, you know, being Jewish, you know, we were trying to get out. And so we managed to get out. We're intended to go to the U.S. and, you know, there was some bribery involved. And that didn't quite work out. Not bribery on our end, the bribery to take, you know, spot. And so ended up actually. in Israel where, you know, in the middle of the Gulf War. So it's quite young. You know, the part in the Soviet Union that I was born and was, was in the Ukrainian part of it nowadays. Yeah. So,

so I'm now like in the middle of two geopolitical crises and have taken pretty strong positions on them too. So that talk about those. I mean, you know, having experienced those and I will say that When I learned you from the Soviet Union, a lot came together. As you may or may not be aware, I've written about a lot of issues, some of which will raise in this discussion. You've talked about in your book, the issues of free speech and open inquiry and also social justice religions. But some of my colleagues who've also agreed to write and speak out,

and not many have. A number of them are from the Soviet Union or the former Soviet Union because they experienced, and they've all written that way. Anna Khrilov, Sergu-Klanerman, a mathematician, a mathematician, Anna Krilylov's a chemist. They experienced things and they're right about how what they're seeing now reminds them of that. And they having experienced it once, they don't want to let it happen again without speaking out. And it's interesting to see people who have seen things happen that many people here say could never happen here. Yeah. And in my case, you know, obviously I was still fairly young when I grew up there. So I was still a child. So part of that is not necessarily based on entirely my own memory, but growing up in the household, you know, my family,

where they constantly talked about it. And, you know, being the rebellious teenager that I was at the time, you know, he was like, mom and dad, you're like over the top. This could never happen here. What are you talking about? But at the same time, I did listen to them. You know, it didn't kind of go in one ear and came out the other. I definitely listened to them. And, you know, we definitely had a lot of disagreements. And then, you know, it pains me to say that I had to apologize to my parents, even though my book is called no apologies, but I do believe in apologizing when you're wrong. And, you know, when I had to at one point say, you know, you actually have a point. I am seeing what you're talking about. So they really made me, I think in general, I grew up as a much more of an outsider, because being an immigrant and being an immigrant twice, having to learn different languages. Well, let me, let's step back there. You wouldn't know you're an immigrant if to, if you want to say, I don't know whether that's a nice thing to say or not. But your first language was Russian or, I mean, was it Russian?

Yeah, Russian. Yeah, I spoke Russian. And then you had to learn Hebrew? Yes. And English, was English the third or did you learn English all along that? No, English was my third. And I had, I was very lucky at the, you know, I had a good ear at the time. So it's funny, my teachers, my parents told me that my teachers in grade, was it grade eight, eight seven um they they kind of took me aside because they they made me do maybe because i was an odd

kid they made me do all these tests so they made me do sort of like an IQ test type thing they made me do um a math test and they made me do an english test and on the math portion i scored several grades ahead but then on the on the english side i was half a grade behind and so they call my parents in and they're so concerned, they're like, we don't understand. She's doing so well in math, but she's, you know, half a grade behind in English. And my parents like, isn't that great? That's great. And they're like, what are you talking about? They didn't realize at that point I only lived in the country for a year. They thought I was a native speaker. You moved in the country, 12 or what? Yeah, it was 12, yeah. Holy mackerel. I mean, you know,

if you'd move to three or four, it'd be easy to understand, but 12 to speak so well. without an accent and to learn. And coming to school, of course, I speak French, but I never had to be thrust into an environment where I suddenly had to learn in a new language. Of course, it's the best way to learn. I've seen it happen from my kids. It is the best way to learn.

That's why I struggle like I try to learn, well, French, you know, in school. My French is com si, come so. And then my Spanish, which I took in university, I struggled. I was probably the worst student in that class. I'm just not good at learning languages anymore, but I was, I guess, luckily, well, I had this whole thing. I had a nearly photographic memory growing up and now have like the worst memory. So something happened. I lost it all. You filled up your head and that was I did. That actually probably is exactly what happened because it was around when I started university and you're doing so much reading that I started noticing,

oh, something is going on with my brain where I'm like forgetting things. Well, you know, I think learning as a child, it's great to learn many languages of a child and I think it's a gift and I wish more people had that opportunity. It was forced upon you. But now I'm intrigued and I was going to get there anyway. I always ask people why they're not scientists, but I want, and you know, because why would you want to be anything else? but you were good in math, okay?

So what did you study in university? Because I couldn't find any of this stuff. No, I studied communications. I have a bachelor's of applied science, you know, close enough, I guess. Well, I had it. So I remember taking physics in high school, and I took also biology. And I dropped out of the biology class because I just struggled, because to me, it was just memorizing things.

And I didn't find that. And I'm much older than you when it was all memorizing. Okay. So that's where it was. And then physics I liked. I actually enjoyed it because I found that it applied to the world around me. And it made logical sense. So I actually liked it.

And when I applied myself, I was pretty good at it. It's interesting because I've been rethinking my life choices a bit. I fell into, I was an extreme capitalist because I was an immigrant. It was that mindset at the time. and I wanted to, I was like, I'm just going to be a millionaire. I'm going to make all these companies. And then I started writing and it's just, it wasn't the plan. It really wasn't the plan.

Now when I look back at it, it's funny because I actually would have chosen to be a neuroscientist. Just because I'm really interested in that side of things nowadays. But, you know, that's not where my head was at at the time. Well, let's see. Before we fully leave where your head was at the time, I'm intrigued. Your parents emigrated. There were Jews from Soviet Union.

What do your dad do when your mom do? What were your role models? Well, my mom was a biochemist. And my dad, he was, so his degree would have been in physics. But later on, when he moved, he basically taught himself how to code. And so he got into the computer side of things. And he also worked as a engineer at something. points, yeah. So you have two scientists parents. So there's now no excuse for you not to become a scientist.

I do they encourage you or did they just say do whatever you want? Oh, no. They wanted me like to be a doctor. A doctor, of course. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Like, well, my dad taught us how to code. You know, we sat in the basement. I have a couple of siblings, but, you know, I was the first victim. He also did, he made me do math theorems. So, so it's funny because I'd be like, there's no way I can do. this proof and I'd be like crying why are you forcing me to do this and then he'd say I'll give you $20 if you solve this and it's incredible how quickly I would then solve it so it's pretty funny but I think it's good I mean part of why I was better at math at the time was certainly because my dad did spend time with me on that and he would get these old textbooks because he thought the new

textbooks were really terrible and they are. Because, you know, the problem with math and I think white kids don't like math is because you learn how to solve, you just learn the formula, right? You don't actually learn why, how you get there. And then it's boring, of course. Yeah. And well, now, of course, there's a backlash because you know now getting the right answer is white supremacist. But we'll know, yes, yes, that's right. I still don't quite understand it. I really don't understand it. But the bigotry of low expectations. Yeah, ma'am, sure.

No, but I like what I do like about math is how precise you can be with it. You know, there's something about it that like nowadays, it's funny. If you told me years ago that I'd be just doing solving little puzzles for fun, that seems ridiculous but actually later on in life became more interested in just doing like logical puzzles and I do a cue test for fun just to like play with the yeah yeah well that's great I would so you're so first your dad tortured you with math and nowadays he'd be you know be childish but then he but then math for money I've never heard that before that's okay well I told you I was a capitalist at the time so but did you ever consider going and do math and what you chose communication had you already started to write

By that point? Yeah. So I published my first, like, article that I've been paid for when I was about 15 years old. And it was like, it was a magazine I wrote for. I don't even remember what it was called anymore. But I got, I made $50. And to me at the time, that was a fortune. Because, you know, what are my other options folding clothes in stores?

Like, you know, and I'm not very good at that. So nobody would hire me anyways. I was interested in talking to people, actually. And as an interviewer, like a lot of the work that I've done in journalism is mostly interviewing people. And it was a good excuse to get to know people. And I can't be like, I'm just interested in you. Can we talk? It's a little stalkerish and creepy.

But if I want to do an interview with someone, that's a perfect excuse. And then you get to learn about the world from the people who like designed it in essence. So I loved that. And I also created my own publication when I was 16. So the Learn to Code part played a role like I built a website and it became pretty popular. It was I had about, you know, it's not bad for somebody to know what they were doing. It had about 600,000 visitors a month. Wow, that's great.

Yeah. Wow. So you got the writing bug. And indeed you did. I noticed that your journalist's career was mostly interviewing people, TV, business people, politicians, et cetera. So that was, that's clearly. But you went to school then specifically because you knew you wanted to write and

And do you think with communication, do you think of being like a TV interviewer or something like that? Or was it always writing? I never thought of it as TV now. It's interesting because I started my own podcast recently. And it took me a little while to get into the habit of switching between, you know, as an interviewer, first of all, you can say anything you want to say if you are doing print and you can embarrass yourself and all that. because in the end, all I care about is getting the quotes from the person and making them feel comfortable. But then when you're on camera, that changes things. And then in the beginning, you can see, like,

I was mostly asking questions. And now I'm like commentating more and having more of a conversation. So that was a bit of a learning curve, I think. Well, that's interesting. Many people would wish I moved in the opposite direction. Because I should say that my podcast have always been. And when I do things on stage, are always dialogues. They're not meant to be interviews. And some people don't, every time, and it'll happen with this podcast.

I'll say, why are you talking when your guest should be talking? But I'd like to talk about you. But I like that. Well, I like it as a conversation. I think conversations are fascinating, ultimately. And I think that, and it's a forum that I like to continue.

So I, although I am working on listening and more and, and I have been. Well, listening is important. And then the other thing that I found, important that I, you know, teach but don't always practice is the art, the power of the silence. So, you know, this was, it's a technique, but essentially it's going to make the person really uncomfortable if you allow that silence. But because they're uncomfortable, they're going to want

to fill that silence and they'll say something that's real. But we want to be nice and help people out because it makes them feel uncomfortable. So you end up often filling that silence to avoid the discomfort. So it's something that I've, because at some point I taught interviewing skills and journalism. And that was something I taught, but I also don't always practice. It's, look, I know that. And you can see that if you watch a podcast I did with my late friend, Cormick McCarthy, the last thing he did before he died, I guess, and the writer of Cormick McCarthy, who was the question, I mean, who basically even in the best days would usually answer a question with a yes or no, and then just not say anything.

But he was old that day. And I knew that we, for a variety of reasons, that it was going to be hard to get things out of him. So I wanted to encourage him by presenting him things and having a discussion of things I knew he was interested in. But of course, a lot of it was filling the sounds and it's,

you're right. On the other hand, there's a filmmaker, a friend of mine, you probably know, Werner Herzog maybe, but who, who, who, who,

who, who, who, who, he does a great job when he's filming, he often keeps the camera rolling after the question. It tells you sometimes just to see how people react. And he keeps that in the movie.

It's often interesting to see that. I remember it's a fascinating thing to just sort of let people think about what they've said and if they want to add anything and not fill the silence. Yeah, it's true. And I think sometimes, well, you don't always express yourself exactly the way you med to and then later you're kicking yourself. And I think there's a lot to interviewing that psychological. I mean, part of why I was drawn to it and I was very interested. So I guess it's not true that neuroscience was something that I got an interest in later in life because actually now that

I think about it, I used to read books about how the brain works just for fun and and psychology books. I also read interrogation books, interrogation technique books because of the interviewing side of things. because every person is their own unique individual and how they talk and their style. I just interviewed Elon Musk last week and, you know, just learned a lot about that from, because it's a little bit of a, you know, the way he answers questions isn't how people normally answer questions. Yeah, I've never interviewed online, but I've met with him a wide variety of times and having a conversation with Elon is interesting and difficult at best. Yes, I would characterize that. And he was pretty, I mean, he was good faith with me.

But, you know, but it's definitely like, I realize that the question has to be maybe far more specific, far more just direct, not specific, direct. But even then, I'm not sure. I'm not convinced that it would work the way that I wanted to. Well, speaking of things, of saying things that he didn't. intend or not or unexpected consequences it's a good time to now talk about what got you to this point to this book um and and and and why do you talk about what happened to you and and as a preface sure well as as a journalist i was involved and um there was a group for women um that was a larger group and i made an offshoot of that group and that group was um for jobs for for women working in

media and just jobs. And we had mentorship in there, which was actually featured in the New York Times. And I don't think that would happen again. But it was, and we had some resources, but predominantly was just jobs. It was in like personal conversations. And then one day, somebody posted a job opportunity at Fox News. And she was even kind of apologetic about it. You know, we're trying to diversify it, et cetera, et cetera. But people just started attacking her like crazy. And I felt like since it was my group, it was my duty to chime in. And so I did. And I said what I thought was a pretty neutral post.

And I said, listen, like, let's stay away from personal attacks. And also let's stay away from politics in this group and just focus on jobs, which is what this group is about. And, you know, we've come apart so much over the last few years. Let's just come together. And I did not anticipate. Like, it's funny because when I tell the story to other people now, they, I usually can tell by their reaction, they know exactly what's coming and would have expected me to,

but I really did not know that was going to come. So people just started calling me a white supremacist, a KKK sympathize, that I would just as soon allow the KKK to recruit from my job board. And just it was a massive pylon made worse because at one point they said, well, you can't take politics out of it because this is a group for women. And therefore it is a group. inherently political. And I said, well, and at that point, you know, I didn't know I'd get some backlash. But I said, okay, then I'll open it up to everyone. But I thought it was being fair because I said, I'll give people a month if they wanted to leave the group, if they wanted to create a new group like this one. And even, I was even willing to give up my name of the group and promote their new group.

But that actually, then everything exploded even more. So people started harassing me. on social media, trying to reach out to my employers, past editors so that they wouldn't hire me again, attempted doxing, sending me, you know, things like, well, the one that really stood out for me, so I keep referring to that one, is literally somebody sent me an image of a mob with pitchforks. And it just said something like, you know, we have long memories. And it was just, it was just so insane. I've never experienced anything in my life like that. And at the same time, I was also getting messages from people that were messages of support. And they said, you know, we're so, I'm so. My dog is supporting you right now. My dog is very angry. Oh, I love it. I appreciate your dog support. I will. I love that.

Anyway, so so my dog supported you as we last said and but, and you got some letters of support, but you got these pitchforks and, and go on from there. Yeah. Well, the letters of support were interesting. because they tended to go a very similar way every time I'd get it. It would say something like, I see what's happening to you and it's wrong, but and you're right in this situation. However, I feel very ashamed, but I'm too afraid to stand up for you. I was getting a lot of those. And they pretty much said the same word for word.

And then I was also getting messages from people who've experienced similar things, things that, you know, in their case, you know, some people have lost their jobs, their entire careers, whose lives have been destroyed. And so that's where I felt like a certain responsibility to speak out. And I ended up writing, the first thing I did was in the book, the first thing I did was writing that Newsweek article. And at the time, I genuinely thought that my life will be just completely destroyed. At least my career would be destroyed. Because now it's, the fire was starting to die out a little bit at that time. So I thought, because people don't have long attention spans.

And there was an article that came out before that, that Newman Laps did as well. I think that's Harvard's paper. But that was, you know, pretty accurate recollection of what had happened. So the facts I think were on my side. And, but I thought, you know, I have to speak about this intolerance. culture that I was seeing because people you don't have to like Fox News to not attack somebody for posting a job there. And then you have this kind of discourse that's completely tainted by people's emotions and hatred of each other and bad faith. And as a result, you have ideas

not being challenged in any way because you have a culture of fear. So bad ideas can very easily win because there's no challenge to it. And people are just not having conversations in good faith where they disagree with each other. And I was seeing that in the culture before all of this happened to me too. I mean, I was already slowly approaching like trying to use my voice, but it was much more, I wasn't a public person at all at the time, you know, aside of my journalism. I was, but I would speak to people individually. And I would find that a lot of people actually did agree, but they would only do that once I brought it up, right? Yeah, you know, it's interesting.

At the bringing in the book, you say, like many, I have deep concerns about the way words are being twisted and identities were being weaponized, but I kept my concerns hidden and unexpressed. But then you say, it's become clear to me that this choice to be sound is costing society a great deal. And I'll just read a paragraph because I think it's interesting. It says, my story is just one of many cautionary tales of what happens when we allow the few to speak for the many. In the end, only 2% of members left your Facebook group when you refuse

to step down, and yet the noise they made prior to their departure in contrast to the silence of the rest of the members made it impossible to discern the truth of what the majority believed. This was a key insight for me in this episode. When the majority remains silent, a very vocal minority can easily gain complete control of a group, even if it's used are wildly and popular. Indeed, this phenomenon not only accounts for many dark moments in history, but also explains much about what's happening in our society today. So clearly,

the concern about remaining silent was what motivated you to not just write that article, but eventually write the book. And what I'd like to do, I'd actually like to go through things, because I mean, what the book is is a description

of 13 or 14, I forget how many case studies, one of those, maybe 16. 15, 16, yeah. Yeah, yeah, and because I wrote numbers down. I think I went up to 16 somewhere. And a very different case studies, each of which illuminates something interesting. And, you know, as someone who's experienced a lot of things myself, I'm very sympathetic to a lot of what's going on.

But the first chapter in the book is your discussion, which quite factual and interesting about the notion of a silence majority. And I want to spend a little while on that. And so I think what I'm going to do is, I was just thinking of, so you talk about, you know, things happening gradually, and you say, okay, soon harmless requests and rules are introduced. You'll told not to wear a certain dress or hairstyle because it's cultural appropriation. You're told the word man includes everyone who self-identifies with one. You're told that only white people can be racist.

And you told you must believe all women. they must have never questioned the lived experience of anyone from an underrepresented minority. Because having said all that now, we pushed a lot of buttons and already we'll get a lot of for all of that. But I think what you point out is that these things, I mean, the first thing you point out is that in a lot of countries, Canada, where both you and I are right now in the UK, things are really actually kind of scary, just not those simple cultural, pressures are turning into legalistic pressures. Exactly.

Let me just quote this, and then I'm going to ask you to comment, but there are some things I really that really hit me. You said, I love facts, and I like that there's statistics and facts at the beginning of this book. 17% of American adults, 44 million, agree with the

following statement. Use of force is justified to ensure members of Congress and other government officials do the right thing. I mean, I'm just shocked at that. Use of force to ensure that they do the right thing, of course, without saying what the right thing is. The right thing is always what you want them to do.

But the notion into democracy that almost 20% of the public is willing to use force to constrain electorate officials to do what they want. That was one of the most shocking statistics I've come across. I came across that one a little while ago, And I was very, very stunned by that number, very much so. Yeah, I mean, it's terrifying when you think of the context of the coming election in the U.S. If people are willing to, 20% of the population thinks that Congress, you know, you should use force on Congress,

which some large number of people thought in 2020. Yeah. And we're willing to take action on that. is very concerning. In Canada, and since moving to Canada, which I did it a few years ago, of course, I'm more and more familiar with some of the things, but this, the wokeness, or at least the notion to constrain language has again become officially. You talk about the Online Streaming Act.

Talk about that for a second. Yeah, I mean, the Online Streaming Act. Bill 1 of PC11. Yeah, I know, I know. I'm not trying to quiz you. Well, I'll read what you wrote. the government the power to regulate online speech and shut down social media and streaming accounts of Canadians. It's yeah, I mean, it's it's it's it's really interesting that especially in

Canada, we've gotten to that point at a place where where there's no real pushback and I think there's not even real knowledge that this is happening. Even like the, for example, nowadays you can't get news on, say, Facebook, right? There's also legislation and Facebook just sort of refuse because they were trying to charge the money, basically, to pay for linking to other outlets. It's such a ridiculous thing. And there just wasn't much pushback.

And then there is this attempt to pass a law where, you know, where they deem certain things, hate speech. But is that law hasn't been, You talk about it. It's online harm's bill. Yeah, it hasn't passed yet. Yeah, to, to, but I accidentally stumbled across that. Was that? Yeah, it wasn't something that is really talked about. I mean, that's the thing. I think a lot of the things that happen in Canada in terms of censorship, they just sort of slowly creep in and they don't, like, there's just no pushback. And part of that, I imagine is because, first of all, we have almost no media, right? And a lot, and a lot of

lot of it is indeed sort of captured by government interests, but even within, like, I, I know there would be journalists who are somewhat interested in covering these kinds of stories, and yet they don't really have the opportunity, and you have almost, I mean, and this is not, like, an ideological thing. Like, a lot of the very left-leaning publications that I used to know they were very independent and did sort of hold some of the beat to the fire of the politicians, they're gone or they have almost no resources. They've been stripped. So there's almost no media to like bring these things to attention.

Now you have a situation where you can't share stories very easily, right? Because unless you already subscribe to any of these entities, now you can't share that with your friends. So there's like a vacuum where the Canadian citizens don't really even know what's going on and that there's these attempts. I reference a bill in Ireland that I don't think has passed yet, but I think probably will. And that particular bill allows the government to fine you or imprison you merely for what they deem to be hate speech that you didn't share with anybody. You could be writing it in your journal, on your computer, and you have to provide access to your computer.

So if you don't, you get fined. or I think potentially even in prison, even for that offense, those are like terrifying things. And I don't think they're getting much attention. Yeah, thoughts are supposed to be free. And if you write them down, they're still free. And if you don't send them to anyone. And then if you do, they're still supposed to be free in a free society.

But I was surprised this hate bill, this, this, then Canada defines hate as the bill defines as the emotion that involves detestation or vilification. and that is stronger than dislike or disdain. So if you suggest anyone should be vilified or detested, maybe for good reasons, and, you know, it's really amazing. Well, that's the thing. I mean, it's not that I'm like a fan of, you know,

quote, unquote, hate speech. And there are certain things that I personally, subjectively would consider hate speech, but that's the issue that it is subjective. And, you know, we might get together as like, you know, pretty reasonable people and decide, yeah, saying this particular thing or yeah it's it's not good it's it's you know we'd consider that hate speech but then you also have groups of people getting together who are immensely unreasonable and then

in their view hate speech is anything you know i mean i've i had to be rendering well i had somebody get mad at me merely for i uh it was a microaggression i mispronounced her name you know and and and And there was a whole campaign for that, you know, that this person started. Although, yeah, it was, it's just, you don't know. It's kind of in the eye of the beholder. And I just, I have a bad, hard time with names that had nothing to do with, you know, her ethnic background or anything like that. So that's the problem. Because once we allow people to decide, we're allowing often, again, those fringe voices that I mentioned, like they do are the ones who get more, they're the more active. voices. Like a lot of people who are just more common sense human beings, they stay out of politics, they stay out of activism. They don't get involved in these things. And therefore, their voice doesn't really have much weight. So who gets the weight? It's generally the radical voices, the extremists, because they're very involved. And they use these bullying tactics. And like you mentioned in my group, it was later that I realized, oh, it's only 2% or something like that that was,

that was actually actively offended by this. And in the meantime, it felt at the time, like everyone was against me, except for the people who were sending me these messages of support. So there was no way to tell. And at the time, too, I have to say, because I am kind of, I have a people pleaser tendency. I thought, well, maybe I'm wrong, right? Like, I definitely struggled with that.

I was like maybe if so many people are telling me that I'm an evil person, like maybe I am doing something that's evil and I'm not understanding. And I really spend time reflecting and I would tell friends of mine, um, the story. And I would, I would make myself look more awful than I even was just to get more of their honest perspective. Because I, and I didn't want to leave anything out. I didn't want to paint myself in a more positive light than it was. And it took me a long time to like, come to the conclusion that I did. And I think a lot of people struggle with this. So I didn't apologize, right? Because I didn't ultimately feel like I did do anything wrong because I'm stubborn about not admitting, you know, I have no problem apologizing when I'm wrong. I have zero problem

with that. I'm quick, quick to do it. But when I don't feel, because it's not the truth, then I become very stubborn. And in that situation, you know, these people, and I'll tell you, what like really changed it around for me. And, and I guess I also mentioned that in the book, but it was a big, big lesson for me. It's like I looked at the people and I thought, how are they behaving? Like, would I ever behave that way? If I strongly disagreed with myself, what would I do? And do I respect those individuals who would behave in such an awful way where they, you know, bully and call names and accuse people and try to get, you know, make sure that you can't make a living, anymore. I mean, that is not a person that I respect. So why would I care what they think? I care what

people I respect think. And that's where I've sort of arrived and that changed everything for me. That's where I found my strength because before that I had so much self-doubt. Well, it's hard not to when you're being attacked and have been someone who's seen this, you know, when you're vilified publicly and I've been that way too. It's hard. It's really, no matter how tough you are. It's hard. It's hard. to, you know, not begin to believe, even though it's a, even if it's a small group of very loud individuals. And it's, it's great to do two things. One, one, as you just said, why, as Richard Feynman's father once said to him, why do you care what other people, or his wife, sorry, not his father,

um, uh, why do you care what other people think in the first place? And, and, and, and, and, and, and, realize who, you know, who to respect and who not respect. And when situations like this happen, you quickly realize who you should respect. But also, yeah, to realize that it's, not that it's just a small group. Again, I know personally that in difficult times have been reassured when some very significant individuals, and I won't mention them now, but when they're right, you'd say, you know what, there's a large number of people who aren't saying anything and they agree with you. And so it's really hard, and we'll see that in these stories, and it can be really hard on an individual and they're close, their families, if they have any,

that people often don't realize how maybe they want to. I mean, they want to hurt people, but I don't think they realize how hurtful it can be. And it's in any case, let me, let me give one more. And by the way, how hurtful it can be to object to speech, I will say personally, I don't think, inciting violence is one thing, but the purpose of freedom of speech is to allow speech that you detest. And I don't, I don't think any.

And, you know, there's a difference between saying, I hate this person and saying Jews are X. Yeah. But even that, you know, I'm in the extreme of thinking that ultimately people can show how stupid they are by being allowed to speak rather than being puzzled. I have mixed feelings these days. I think my mind is hard in the current times with what's hard in the current times with, what's going on. Well, it's a combination of things. So in particular, so I would have considered myself a free speech absolutist. Now, I still do in terms of the legal side of things, but does it mean that you have to give, you know, do you always have to provide a platform for someone yourself?

Like, it's like, okay, if you're inviting people to dinner party, are you going to, you know, necessarily want to invite somebody who's just, you know, is an awful person. No. So I think you have the right to now you can have conversations with people that you find their views abhorrent if there's a value to that conversation. And the value is either, well, you're going to potentially debunk it or you learn something new about their perspective. Maybe you had it wrong. Exactly. You learned that's the whole point. It was and and I learned it from Christopher Hitchens who learned it from whom that the point of freedom of speech is not to give freedom of the speaker, but freedom of the listener to learn that they may be wrong. And Christopher was a model for me

in the sense as a friend of mine. He could have conversations with people that I couldn't imagine being in the same room with. People thought him as a bulldog, but on a personal level, he had friends from across the political spectrum. And there's a difference too where like you can talk like one of the people in my book is Daryl Davis who talks to members of the KKK. Well, you know, there's a difference. he would talk to them and have sort of friendships and as a result and he's a black man right born in the civil rights era but you know these people as they got to know him they left the clan and some of them were like leaders so it's it's crazy but and it shows you what what speech can do and engagement but nobody owes that and it's also different it's not like he had them on his show and you know he was like praising them

and and singing you know and i think the one that the one that's the one that's the one that's you know and i think the one thing that has shifted for me in my understanding of free speech is this idea of like sunshine is the best disinfectant because I think in the age of social media there is a problem with that and that problem is that you don't always get to disinfect quite right so on the one hand for example when yeah like I say October you know when anti-Semitism sort of became more more prevalent like I was seeing it because I was attacked frequently and I'm pretty good at ignoring it. But I think people didn't understand the scale of it.

And now it is visible and they understand they came back to me and they said, you know, okay, we were wrong. We see the scale. So being able to see it and it's important because you want to then, you can't address something you don't see. And that's something that Daryl says in the book too. But also at the same time you have this problem where, you know, some really insane rhetoric based not rooted in fact

can spread very easily. And there isn't really a chance to give it that sunshine because the people sort of stick together and it's easier for people who have these kind of views that are hateful to find each other. It's the same thing with conspiracy theorists, right? For conspiracy theorists, it's not that there's more people

who are tending to think that way. It's just that it's much easier for them to find each other so they built communities and the problem with these communities is that it becomes very difficult to leave them because that becomes part of their identity, not even just the conspiracy theory that's holding them. And a good example of that are the flatter first,

where, you know, essentially, you know, I haven't seen that documentary myself, but somebody told me about a documentary where somebody actually realizes towards the end, you know, it's like, actually probably you're right that the world is round, but I've made all these friendships. and it's like a cult

and I think all these things I think a lot of this by the way comes down to cult-like thinking and indoctrination but it's very difficult for people to leave their communities behind and that's and that keeps them trapped in these

like ridiculous beliefs. Well that's the longevity of religion but anyway we'll talk about that at another time but the let's I want to go to the case studies but let me let me read one statistic which is which will tell you why,

which will reinforce, at least reinforces for me, why one should be worried if one wasn't already. Because I know all the people say, oh, this is just a marginal thing. But here, look,

let's look at the younger generation, which is being indoctrinated with this stuff. Students and young adults who've grown up with the idea that speech itself can be a form of violence, which it isn't, by the way. Speech is not a form of violence in case people wonder. Sticks and stones.

It can trigger. I'll make the, devil's advocate's argument. I wrote about this in a little essay once upon a time, but speech being violence. So actually it could feel like violence because it actually can provoke similar reactions in the body. The problem is speech is in the eye of the beholder. It's a highly subjective thing. Yeah. Same with offense, which we'll get to. Offense is in the eye of beholder. And that's where it should stay. Anyway, the percentage, okay. in attitudes towards free speech

should be shifting dramatically in the wrong direction among high school and college students. This is what's worrying. According to a Pew Research poll, 62% of US teens, age 13 to 17, say that they value others being able to feel welcome and safe online

over individuals being able to freely speak their minds. This notion that's not safety because I will talk about later feeling safe as being unsafe. But in 2022, a survey conducted by the Buckley Institute at Yale University, found 41% of college students said they were in favor of using violence to stop hateful speech, a rise of 5% from 2021, and nearly half, 48% agreed that sometimes speech

can be so offensive that it merits the death penalty. This is what's amazing to me. And then, finally, in the 2023 survey from the Institute for Global Innovation and Growth at North Dakota State University, and alarming 76% of students said that they would report. report a professor for saying something offensive. And that's the reason many of my colleagues who are still teaching are worried. And I can understand that. Well, there was more I was going to go on to there, but I'd like to get to some of the stories and go on sort of a little review of each one before we get to sort of some concluding remarks.

And I want to put you on the spot something because you actually pointed out something interesting is that in defense of the concern about open air being the best disinfectant and saying well but it's hard because certain things ideas get pervasive and you got to do something about it

I want to come back to that I want to hate with it because some of the people here especially when we talk about COVID and other things because you've got to balance one versus the other and I want to have that discussion if we get there but let's start with Maria Tuscan and the moral of that each of these chapters begins with kind of a lesson, an object lesson from each person's experience.

And this one is called Build Your Own Community. So why do you mention about what happened to Maria? Remarkable when I first in the knitting community, you figure docile community. I find it like it wasn't funny what happened to her, but I found it funny that the knitting community would be in such an uproar of something like that. So in her case, what had happened was there was a woman who was heading on a trip to India. And she said, you know, it feels like something like it feels like being in a different planet. I think that's something. She said something along those lines, which, you know, I've traveled a lot and certain places feel very different.

I don't really see the offensive part, but people got incredibly offended and started, you know, going. By the way, not an experience, just to come back to this, she wasn't saying she experienced this. She said she was excited about it. And going to India was like being offered on a seat, being offered a seat on a flight to Mars, which is a money people would think of as a positive thing. So she was so excited.

It's like being offered a seat and a flight to Mars. It's so different from everything she's used to. An excited, wonderful comment. And boy, what happened. Exactly. And it's like this, I guess they saw that as what making a different culture exotic or it's just it's like you can't be excited about it like cultures are different um i come from different cultures myself like that's it's just such a i don't think people in india would be

offended as what i'll say and that's generally the case it's not it's people being offended on behalf of other people and and and it's not serving the people of that culture anyways um she got you know a huge pile on people it became a huge scandal within the knitting community And then Maria just felt like, you know, this is wrong. And she felt like a moral obligation to say something. So she filmed a video and she kind of, you know, stood up for this person. That person, by the way, did apologize. It was Maria who did not.

Yes. And then as a result, like her, she was completely taken out of the world of knitting where, you know, people didn't want to collaborate with her. They started campaigns against her. her business, it was just such a horrific story over something that, you know, I just don't get it in a way. And then at the end, and then she started sort of making fun of she created a different yarn brand where she started making, you know, fun of some of these woke things. Yes. Yeah.

She responded by basically provoking further, which I found out, which is my natural tendency too. So I kind of, I was amazed by it. I don't know if it's my tendency, but I respect it. And I think she did it with humor, which I think is one of the best ways to deal with something like that. Almost everything is best out with humor, in my opinion. Yeah. But with her, like I think the reason that the key lesson is building your community is because ultimately she built her own community around her that was much smaller, but was a community that was more accepting of different perspectives and wasn't about. you know, just canceling people and going after their livelihoods.

And she got more of a smaller but loyal base. Unfortunately, the story didn't, you know, but I won't spoil it. Well, no, no. The story doesn't end well for a lot of people. The point is that it's not as if these are all heroes whose lives have been great. I mean, you know, there are consequences. But the point is that these people act. And, you know, yeah, she had to end her.

You can tell this. Well, I don't know whether it's not a mystery book. So I don't know. But if you don't want to tell us. It's not a mystery book. I mean, these stories are out there. But, you know, she, it's unfortunate because when I was fact-checking the book, you know, because I wrote it like, you know, you would know how long it takes to get from writing and to publish date.

So, yeah, so it took a while. And then as I was kind of going through the book and making sure things were still up to date, I found out that her business was shattered, you know. So that was unfortunate because I was hoping. that would have been like a nice victory story. And I think it's also important to know, you're right. Like a lot of the stories, like the reason that some of these people are even in the book is like, because at some point have heard their story, was introduced to them. A lot of those people did okay. But there's so many people who have been entirely destroyed. They're just not wanting necessarily to have a spotlight.

And so there's a lot of people that I've talked to. who have reached out to me, who had to leave the fields that they love, you know, don't have work. Like there's many more of those stories than there are success stories. Yeah. And there's some of the stories that will talk about. And I can relate in a similar situation where we're fortunate to be able to, you know, be at a point in our lives where we can survive that and move on to do something else. And it's very freeing.

But for many people, when your livelihood, depends on it. You don't have any choice. And it's a... But, you know, someone like her who's lively dependent upon, I just want to read her quote to just give her just too. She said, it's easier if you're just an individual, but I don't know how you could live with yourself if what you're doing is going against your conscience.

Integrity is really, really important to me. It's something that was instilled in her by her family in an early age, according with some help from old classic novels by authors like Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. They're all about living with integrity. and she was a woman who did and never did anything wrong, but got excited. And I guess, I don't know the quote, well, it's your quote. You say, building new, better communities as well as institutions as the antidote to toxic ones.

That's true, if it were only so easy, however, and especially when the institutions are powerful, and it's not always easy. And in her case, she couldn't do it. In fact, that's the big challenge. it sounds nice to build communities, but it's often a challenge. Well, you can build little communities around you that might just be your friends, right?

When it comes to building a community for something that you do, that's professionally, that's certainly harder. With friendships, I think it's better to have fewer friends, but friends that, you know, see the best in you and that don't, you know, always have good faith and you feel like yourself with and have authentic relationships with,

than having, you know, a hundred or a thousand strangers. Well, as a very, as a very dynamic woman, a friend of my wife's from Australia, he worked for the government there. He said, well, you know, it's okay if they don't like me. I got enough friends. It's kind of crowded as it is. So it's okay. Yeah.

Yeah, but it's hard for people. Because I think, and I know with COVID, like, I think, because community, I think is a very big underlying aspect to why we're even seeing a lot of these things happening. I think people are lonely, people don't have a sense of community, things that bond them. So they find these communities often based on, you know, something more ideological. And they cling to them. And I think that's, it's just been made far worse by the, I think it started way before COVID, the pandemic.

But I think it definitely amplified everything because everyone was so isolated. And then the toxicity of the social media world on top of that, I think that didn't help things. And especially because people now saw their lives as being online because they weren't meeting people in person. So I think that just made things so much worse. And we're still there because I think people now don't meet other people as much in person. Well, it's certainly a lot easier to be mean online as we know than in person. And we'll maybe talk about that. But number two is Kat Rosenfeld, who says, and the moral there is don't seek approval from bullies.

Why don't, well, she was a young adult fiction author. And why do you tell what happened to her? And I want to quote something from her because it resonated with me. Why do you tell what happened to her? Yeah. So Kat is, yeah, so she was in the young adult writing side of things. She was actually in a similar group to my group. So it was part of that network.

And there was an author who was coming up with a book that was about that people decided was racist. I don't even think they had read it that book because it wasn't out yet. And so they said, you know, let's do this campaign to have this book, you know, sent back for revisions. But because this is now controversial, you know, we'll go to revisions and I will never come out of. revision. So essentially they wanted to kill this author's book. And Kat made a post on social media sort of referencing it without being overly specific, but they figured it out. And so they sort of went after her and there was an account like a sock puppet account on on X that was I guess spewing some racist things. And they accused her of being that account, which was completely

ridiculously false, provably so too. But, you know, that didn't help. Facts don't matter when that case didn't matter. Exactly. So they did this whole campaign to try to get her canceled. But she's a very fierce person, I would have to say. And she is one of those people where like her community can be tiny.

She doesn't care. But she wrote a piece about it later on. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll get to that. But I want, I want. The thing that she noticed at the very beginning, even before this happened, was she noticed that, you know, there were people mobilizing, you know,

to call out certain writers who, you know, and say there were more deserving candidates. Yeah. And so push out people for more deserving candidates. She said it was very high school. There was a clique of four women. If you traced it back, any time there's one of these big blowups, it would always be one of them. There is, and I've seen it happen in both.

both personally and in other examples in my own field of physics. Where you see the people speaking out the most, you can't help but feel there's some jealousy. People who feel that some people are achieving something that they would like to be in, and that either they or others that they know are more deserving, and the solution is to take down the people who somehow have achieved success.

It's happened in, as I say in physics, it was a campaign that eventually got rid of a vice president of research at a university of a physicist I know named Steve Shue. It was a group named Particles for Justice that basically ended up saying he was racist for supporting research that was published in the National Academy of Sciences. Or recently there was an article that came out,

there's a black physicist, Hakeem Oluge, who spoke out in favor saying that James Webb wasn't a homophob. And a young woman that was discussed this article a young woman physicist not only attacked him and made very suggestive arguments about inappropriate things he might have done they didn't do, but also apparently had a book coming out at the same time as his and we're telling people not to review his books for this. You can't help but sort of feel this kind of, that somehow it's a sense that either the people

are there don't deserve it. And even if you don't deserve it, you don't want them to have success because you don't and you can't help but think that there may be as part of the fact that your success isn't as great that drives some of these people to be so vociferous in their desire to ensure that to remove people that they don't like so that no one else can hear them yeah no exactly and the thing is it is that removal is permanent because what's the point of all of this ultimately like is it to if you're trying to just protect society right then you know, maybe you have a conversation, let the person know what they're doing, give them a chance

to correct their behavior. You know, there's a few other things you can do if the person is actually, you know, at potential fault here. But a lot of these things are designed to destroy the person entirely and doesn't matter what they've done. The punishment seems to be like the same. Because I do think there are certain cases where, of course, like a person has some accountability, has done certain things wrong, has to, you know, take the yell, as they say, as the kids say. But at the same time, you know, if your goal is to have a better society where maybe there's less racism or less, you know, sexism or whatever it is, then you would take steps to help that, you know, and figure out what those are.

And it isn't just to remove that person permanently. And as we've seen, you know, the goal of somebody losing their job is to eliminate their voice forever. And as somebody on another podcast, Bridget Fetis, the one who has actually said it, so I'll give her credit, is that it was essentially, what's the goal of like having someone lose their job? Well, now they can't make a living and they can't make a living how they're supposed to live, how they're supposed to feed themselves or their families. So it's literally the elimination of that human being from the face of the earth because that's the natural consequence of that. And then it's the same, you know, and there's people who've taken their lives over some of these accusations. And I don't know if some of the accusations were had some merit to them or not, but they were completely judged in the court of public opinion. so you know certainly the person didn't deserve even if the worst accusations were true that person

didn't deserve to be you know have their entire life taken away absolutely and and the case even whether undeserved or deserved um just because you know in the case of removing an actor or someone else just because you don't like them doesn't mean no one else can ever you're deciding that no one else can ever watch or appreciate or enjoy anything. they've ever done because you don't. That kind of, that kind of solipsism is extreme. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, I've quoted this before often, Rick at your face, who was on one of the podcasts, use this example. I love him. You know, it's like someone going to a city center and seeing a sign, you know, on a, on a, on a billboard saying guitar lessons and you tear off the number. And then, and then go home and phone them and say, I don't need any damn guitar

I mean, it's like, it's like, okay, just if you don't like it, just leave it. You don't have to watch it. You don't have to listen to it. But it doesn't mean no one. That's the heckler's Vito. That's the heckler's Vita situation, right? Where you're seeing so many people where they'll be like a live event and people are like, hate the speaker. I mean, there was one recent example, fire I think tweeted about was it was a concert by a musician. I think he was an Israeli musician or maybe just Jewish. I don't even know. People can't tell the difference. But the truth is, but it was a sold-out concert, right? So people wanted to see him. And yet there were these disruptors. And so they were taking away somebody else's ability to hear somebody else. And it's the same with lectures. So it's not to say that this is difficult because there are some cases where I'm like, okay, if my money is going into it, I'm a student.

And let's say it's like a Holocaust denier. and it's being propped up by the university, how would I feel about that? Right? So I have to ask myself that question. But I mean, you know, that's, look, I think the point of all this is that there are, there are,

it's hard to generalize about a lot of things and you have to look at things by a case case basis. And, and if it's something, particularly, if it's something is particularly emotional to you, it's hard, it's harder to have a rational perspective on it as well. you need a universal basis at the same time right because you can't this this is the problem because a lot of people that I've seen being like free speech advocates when it comes to something that is affecting them suddenly they're like yeah let's cancel that speech and so you do have to have

a certain consistency like I won't you know I have a particular outlook on certain things where I don't support maybe certain speakers at all, but I won't, you know, advocate for their removal. Now, I won't go see them, but I won't advocate for their removal because I want to remain consistent. At the same time, if it was a speaker who was denying a violent event that is well, well documented,

or calling for violence in some way, or promoting that violence, that's different to me because I have always drawn the line at violence. Well, promoting violence is one thing. Denying reality is not the same as promoting violence. So denying that something happened, if it happened, is stupid, but it's not, you know, in my mind is speech that should be protected. And even, I haven't protested any of it.

Chomsky to say that the Nazis in Skokie should be allowed to march, you know, in the old days. Yeah, I just think that I think we have to be aware that it isn't like a perfect thing, just like libertarian, you know, like if you think like everything is going to work out. It's not. So there's going to be downsides to it. Like, yeah, because maybe people will come listen to it and some will be convinced because there's not an opposition or then maybe somebody's a better speaker than somebody else. It doesn't mean that the argument is stronger, but it just means it's the other is represented. That's why I no longer try to do debates. I used to debate a lot because it's never informational. It's always rhetorical. By the way, I had to, when you talked about your attitude,

I don't know if you were influenced by Kat Rosenfeld, but her statement was remarkably as thing as yours when she said, I had definitely at a moment where if someone calls you a racist, the first you think is like, oh God, am I? And the thing was that, you know, after a few days of this and seeing how these people behaved, I was like, do I care if this person who was tweeting like the most vitriolic, horrible shit at a stranger over and over? Do I care if this person thinks badly of me? No. Even this person's good opinion would not be a compliment. I don't want that person to think well of me. It reminded me, and that's why, as you say, she said ultimately her defense of all this was creating a small

circle of loyal friends whose opinions you care about and trust. These are important lessons because many people, many of us have experienced this, many people will experience this. How do you respond to this to either a mob hate word or even a small group of friends? One of the solutions is to find a group of law friends who you can talk to and be honest and their criticism, but never cruel. You know, what was interesting with that is when I heard her say that, because I had, you know, I had to arrive at that earlier since I was in the middle of it.

But it was really reassuring, I think, to hear that, her saying that. And a lot of the stories I found like little bits of myself and them, you know, even though they're all quite different, but there was a lot. And I did too. But I think many other people who haven't had the experiences will still feel little bits of themselves.

I mean, I created the foundation I have by taking a small group of people who were willing, who were loyal friends who were. And it's the way to, and now it's, It's, you know, and I'll talk about it. One of the people talked about it somewhere else, but I mean, it's hard to work within institutions. It's great if you can create something that you can control. And that's been, you know, for me,

moving away from the institutions of academia, to take something that we have control over that there is not some nameless group who tell you what you can do is a very liberating experience, if you're lucky enough, as I am, and some other people are, to have, opportunity to be liberated and do what you want and still be able to survive. Now, speaking of KKK and that, let's talk about number three.

Daryl, you mentioned earlier, Daryl Davis, talking to everyone, even awful people. What are a remarkable guy, an interesting fellow, as you say, black guy who grew up in a period where he experienced racism in the real sense, not imaginary sense. and then he talked to someone, right? Isn't that the way it worked? Isn't that how it started? It started, yeah. He talked to, somebody approached him. He was performing, I think it was boogie-wogie music. He's a great jazz musician. And the guy admired his playing. I thought he'd never seen a black person play that kind of music before. And then as they got talking, it turns out the guy was a clan member. But he started bringing. and getting other clan members to come see them. And it's kind of where it started from there. Daryl, in many ways, has been my role model

ever since I heard of his story before I'd even talk to him for this book because I, you know, that's why I do talk to people. I choose to talk to people sometimes who, you know, are, say, Holocaust deniers or, you know, pretty indoctrinated into the Nazi side of things and the real stuff. Not the things that everybody gets called,

every once in a while. And I do talk to people whose views I do find abhorrent and in large part because of him. And also, I remember watching this guy on TV who was also a member of the KKK or just not KKK, but neo-Nazi group. And, you know, by all means you should write this guy off. You know, he actually committed crimes. He went to prison. Bad dude, you'd think.

but here he was at this point in his life, realized he was wrong and was actually helping get other people out of those groups. So it just showed me that somebody you would find just so completely abhorrent in their actions and their beliefs. And yet even they can sometimes change. And I say, I emphasize sometimes because some people, as as Daryl says in the book, they'll go to their graves and they'll never change. but some people do and you have to understand why they believe what they believe and if you don't understand you can't address it either and you know in his case a lot of the recovery I'll call it was done because they got to know him and he says you know how can you hate somebody you don't know and in his case you know and he talks in the book about you know the different reasons that

people might end up in these. I'll just call them mind cults because that's really what they are. And it's a lot of reasons. Not all of it is necessarily just based in hate. And he managed to get, I mean, there were like, I think 30 people that have given him their hoods because they got out, including clan leaders. Yeah, when you say he was collecting hoods, I thought he was collecting honorary degrees. And then I realized what he was collecting.

I sometimes slip and accidentally say hoodies. Like, that's not it. That's not it either. That's definitely not it. But it's a, but it's, I think a valuable, a really valuable lesson, at least to me. And so it guides me a lot in the work that I've been doing now. Absolutely.

Reading his stories that way. And, you know, it's more generous than I usually am. But one should remember that people rarely do bad things because they want to do, but they usually think there's a reason why they're doing them. And if they're hateful, I mean, if they're awful things, there's usually a reason they think they're doing the right thing. They're just wrong. I mean, there are people obviously psychotic and et cetera. But and so there's the hope that people, you know, if they can be, if they can see that they weren't doing the right thing, will change.

And but it requires talking. And I think there's a statement he made here. There's two things that I want to say about him before we leave. One, he says, Davis believes that elected officials like senators and congressmen do have an obligation to sit down. talk with people with whom they disagree. Why? Because they do not represent one particular group. They represent everybody in their district. And they can disagree with one another. It's the saddest thing about the U.S. And one of the reasons I left is the fact that it's dysfunctional because politicians, which is the politics is supposed to be the art of compromise. It's not that at all. And it's

groups that are refused to listen to one other. And if you don't do that, then I don't know what the future of democracy is. Although Canada is obviously on the same path, sadly. Yeah, exactly. But Davis says, you know, what's the solution to tell people to grow a pair of balls, explains Davis? Get them to realize they've got a voice, speak out. But one of the things that I think is the last thing I want to mention about him, which just points out, it says it all, as as Ricky Jervais might say, in the process of talking to these people and being willing to reach out to people whose views are abhorrent.

And in principle, who in the abstract would hate him, he was even once called a white supremacist by an anti-racist group. And I think there you go. It says a lot about anti-racism that they would call this black guy a white supremacist. And I think that's... I mean, I was being called a white supremacist and white supremacists hate me. Yeah. Of course, but at least, but you're not black.

It makes it easier. I'm not black. I know, it's easier to make the point with someone is. You used to be white, although now one would sometimes. Jews are now, you know, they're now white. They didn't used to be white, but now they're white. I don't identify as white. Yeah. I try not to identify. It's any. But it doesn't, it doesn't accept, they don't, but I don't get accepted. Like, it's like whatever label, like the neo-Nazis want to stick one label and the, and the, you know, the, that's the problem of, you know, we'll get to it. But one of the big problems of anti-racism is it's just racism warmed over. As Thomas Soles said, the famous, you know, the famous. black economists who has also said the big problem of what you pointed out is that people protecting other people from things they don't want to even need to be protected from is part of

in a book which he just wrote of social justice fallacies the idea that people think they know better than people who are experiencing it what they should be experiencing because they know it's a very all of this comes from of us academics and I've been an academic most of my life so I know the attitude. Yeah. Let's talk about the next person, Steve Elliott, who did suffer tremendously. And his is stick to your principles. He was Me Tooed.

And during the early stay, I mean, during the height of Me Too, me too craziness, which I know about. And why don't you, why don't you tell what happened to him? Yeah, I don't know why, but his lesson, he has one of the ones that resonates with me, the most, even though I have no personal experience of being Me Too. For all I know, but essentially, you know, it's interesting because I encountered Stephen in a setting where I heard him speak before I read about him, which gave me an ability to sort of see his story from a different

angle. And what really resonated with me, so what happened with Stephen was that he was named in a list called shitty media men. Shitty media men. It was an anonymous list of accusations. And he was accused of the most, the worst thing, right? Rape. And he's a Hollywood screenwriter, right?

Yeah, so he's a Hollywood screenwriter. He's also an author of books and he used to edit. Yeah, he's labeled in shitty media men for rape, which is almost provably false in his case, as you can point out. Yeah, in his case, it's pretty much provably false. because of, you know, he's been very open about his own sexuality.

He doesn't have intercourse. Doesn't involve having intercourse with women. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So in his case, so a lot of the people around him actually knew that he wasn't guilty, but they still sort of condemned him. And in particular, he talks about how things became even worse following that anonymous accusation because he ended up suing the person who put out that list of anonymous

accusations. And he's somebody who was very interested in the justice system in general. In fact, let's stop there. He was not only interested in that, this is intriguing to me because this often happens. If you think of Al Franken, people who are me too, were people who are the most sympathetic to feminist causes. He had considered himself a far-left feminist, thought he was doing everything to be good. The Rumpus, which he served as an editor-in-chief of, was extremely liberal and intentionally diverse. He claims credit for discovering literary figures like Cheryl Stride and Rock

Roxanne Gay and giving them a platform. Under his leadership, the publication at monthly events to make sure, and always included women and people of color, people of color, forgive me. We were trying to be good and these were the things we thought we were supposed to do. And it is interesting to me that I've seen those people often singled out. People like him, a physicist Jeff Marcy, who got singled out of me too, with someone who was an extreme feminist who'd work hard to have students who fostered them and developed them. And they seem to be the most susceptible. It really, it's a surprise. Well, on the one hand, it's easier because, you know, they are in that world, so it's easier to target them. On the other hand, I also think some of them are guilty.

I mean, even in my case, like I know some of the people who were, it was a very tricky time for me because during Me Too, there were a lot of people that were named that I personally knew. And with some people, I just, I don't know if that was true or not. And other people, some people were convicted, you know, so it wasn't, it was. And I, and I knew I had some experiences with them. Luckily not anything like, you know, worthy of. So I mean, there's a lot of people who are also posing as, um, feminists who, you know, are actually, you know, so it's, it's a mixed bag. But I think in this case where I found this story. to be important was that it is it is about you know accusations, anonymous accusations and no due process whatsoever, not even really a fair due process in the court of public opinion in that way, right? You have somebody making, having no risk, making an accusation that's the worst, the most vile accusation and the person takes the bruntless accusations with no repercussions if you're lying or wrong. Nothing, zero.

But every repercussions we'll see in the case of his case and others, every repercussion for the person who has basically no way of responding to an anonymous accusation other than saying it's false. Exactly. And that's where to me, that's where the story was. Because no doubt there are people on that list who probably, you know, have done bad things. And I remember when that list came out, you know, I was like, well, as a woman, I kind of want to be warned. But at the same time, you know, ultimately, after I thought about thought it through, I thought, yeah, no, anonymous accusations should never be done this way. It's one thing is your friends comes to you and says, listen, this guy's kind of a creep, okay, yeah, you want to know that. Because you can't always go to, you know, through through

due process for all sorts of reasons in court. Maybe they haven't done anything that's worthy of that. But maybe they're still creepy, you know. Well, like you've been, you know, somebody touching inappropriately. Yeah. Well, I mean, like I bit, like, for example, I've been touched inappropriately. Like, am I going to go out and destroy this person's life? No, it's still inappropriate. I wish at the time it could have been more vocal about it and said, listen, what the hell are you doing? That's the problem.

I think most people wish they'd done something differently, and that anger and resentment builds up. But it's happened everywhere. All of us have been touched inappropriately or spoken to her inappropriately. It's part of life or better or worse. If the world were wonderful, it wouldn't happen. And part of being an adult is learning how to deal with it. And sometimes you don't deal with it the way you wanted to. But if you don't, you then can't say, well, society's got to deal with it

because I didn't deal with it the way I want and I'm angry now 10 years later or whatever else. No, and there's proportionality too. Like I have a friend whose name I won't mention, but he got very badly canceled during the Me Too era. And I didn't know him very well when I found his story or when we connected. So, and I thought to myself, okay, like, in his case, I don't even know that this was an accurate representation of what had happened. But I thought, okay, what if everything that he's being accused of didn't? It's true.

What does he deserve as a consequence? And there was clearly like a massive disproportionality there. And so that's where I think, again, I come back to this. A lot of the times the punishment is kind of the same no matter what somebody does. Like if somebody misbeaks, like they shouldn't have their world canceled versus somebody who actually does an action that truly harms somebody. And that's what problem. I mean, there's a quote here. There's all the cases were lumped together in the public's imagination from rape to saying the wrong thing at a party.

It was easy to convict in the court of public opinion. And this is Elliott's point. And it sounds trite. But it's so not observed today. You've got to assume innocence. You have to assume innocence. That's the point in Siss Elliott. There's no other way.

I mean, it's imperfect, and you're going to end up with somebody assuming somebody is innocent that isn't. But unless you have more information and there's an anonymous circulate, but unless you have more information and there's an anonymous circulating accusation, you have to assume innocence.

And you have to act as if they're innocent. You can't deny them the opportunity. You can't say, I'm not going to be around that person because it might look bad for me. this notion that it is imperfect and I don't know if you you quoted here or someone well yeah renterne Franklin it's better have a hundred guilty person should escape than one innocent person should suffer and but in this case this notion is just it's never brought up it's an

accusation is made and and in his case even though there were even though there were clear reasons, provable reasons, as there have been for many people, why it's impossible. The accusation is all that's necessary. And innocence is never assumed because it's assumed as a property of, and I think you talk about it, a property of me too, believe all women, you know, that sort of thing, that it always has to be. Yeah. And once it got to that point, I think that's where I got really problematic. it because of course talking about, I think it was an important thing to be able to talk about what was going on. And it was happening, by the way, to men too, maybe to a lesser degree, but it was. And I have men that shared their stories with me. I think being able to talk about it and figuring out ways to deal with it, I think we're important. But once it becomes, you know, let's just accuse, you know, every day somebody was being accused. And then the accusations got more bizarre, too. So to me, that was the problem with it. And I guess

that's what happens with movements. And I know Elliot, Stephen talks about that in greater detail, too. Yeah, he said, what started as a movement, can I interrupt you? Because I'm going to read from you, so I'm not really interrupting you. I'm giving you a voice. I don't get offended, so. That's good. Because I tend to interrupt.

But anyway, but what started as a movement based on creating awareness, eventually turned into a mob focused on punishment, if not revenge, against often indiscriminate targets. There's a moment in every movement where it becomes irrational. The moment it becomes irrational and people are finding reasons to support it, it's a mob. That's a letter quote, and I think it's from Stephen. And I think that's the key point. When a movement becomes a mob, then you've got to be worried about it.

And what's important is here's a guy who's speaking out, sticking to his principles, but what you have to realize is that life changed. You say he didn't really talk to anyone. He stopped going outside. He didn't even watch TV. He just read books for 15 months. He went to a hibernation. I have a very famous friend of mine who was hit, and he said he never read anything but the sports pages for six months because he knew, you know, because it'd be in the newspaper all the time.

And it's incredibly difficult for you and your family. And that's the other thing people don't realize. It's not just the individuals. It's everyone around them. Their family, and it's often hardest on the family because they can't speak out. But he says even today he doesn't think he'll ever be able to make a living as a writer again. Losing his agent, his publisher, and his opportunities was hard. And this is a guy who won the suit, by the way, the one the lawsuit, let's make it clear.

But more than that, he says, I lost my tribe. I lost so many close friends, so many people that I thought were really important in my life. That was harder than anything else for Elliot. Anybody that tells you otherwise is not being honest, and I know this, or they have not been canceled in the worst possible way, getting kicked out of your tribe is particularly difficult because you lose your entire identity. As Elliot learned, you no longer know who you really are. And it's hard for many people to recreate themselves in a different way. Some people have and we'll talk about them here. And I know from that experience. But that. And that's the thing too with, you know,

we're thinking about somebody like Kevin Spacey who actually has gone through the legal system. Yeah. And in the eyes of the world, he's still guilty. And I find that kind of interesting because I did look at the court case and even in my own mind like I'm struggling with it right and once that accusation is made or accusations in particular it's very hard to doesn't matter if you're found innocence to be honest in fact it's often never even covered you know I mean not and that yeah you know the statement about Kevin Spacey you're being found innocent in these in these court cases received far less print of course and and and And in fact, he says it.

While he won the case, it will never rewind the destruction of the media outlets that covered the initial accusations against him. Far fewer cover the settlement. And I've seen that happen. It's much more because it's clickbait. You get a much more attention for making a salacious, you know, a devious accusation than to make the statement that it's wrong. And by the way, the same is true.

I've noticed this as a scientist. This is not just these kind of emotional and cultural and things. In science, I've often seen, you'd see journalists quote some scientists, oh, this new discovery is this. And all of us realize it's garbage. And then three weeks later, when it's proved you wrong, there's never a newspaper story about it. It's part of the problem because it's not as exciting.

It doesn't sell papers. Or anytime there's a mistake, Macon, you know, made, making made um it's uh it's something that um does not get covered once you there is a correction that's like hidden somewhere in small font on the page that nobody's reading anymore because they moved on yeah now you you can say here he says as ali concludes we've reached some kind of critical mass where everybody knows somebody's been false accused i keep hoping it's going to be a critical mass but it doesn't seem to be you say we can only hope this means the tide is finally shifting and that we as a public longer reflexively condemn and punish based on anonymous accusations. I'm afraid you're too young and

optimistic. I think we'll talk about this. People have said the tide is shifting and I keep seeing things where, you know, big events we may talk about. And a friend of mine once said, you know, it's going to get worse before it gets better. And so far, I've yet to see the opposite. it. What I'm seeing is the pendulum swinging back potentially, and I'm not in a nice way. Yeah, not in a nice way. Okay, let's go. The next person, Peter Bogosian, who happened, no, specifically, because Peter's been a friend and I've actually appeared in his classes and spoken out for him. And I will say, I'm proud of the fact. I think Peter, anyway, that I helped him write his letter of resignation, so, which I, which, you know, I mean, helped edit it and suggest.

things he wrote it. But, but, but, um, his case is an interesting one because, because, um, he, he was at a, well, in Portland where I happen to live at the time, but, but he started out being well known because of getting in trouble because of the grievance affair. So why don't you, why don't you talk about that? Okay. So the grievance affair is actually have first, I actually heard, I didn't know his name, but I did hear of the grievance affairs, which was, um, you know, essentially, Planting ridiculous articles, I guess. Ridicrous articles in gender studies journals, you know, about gender studies journals. Rape and dog parks and things like that.

Yeah, the one that stands out the most is the rape and dog parks. Yeah. And there's a few more that were accepted, you know, and I think that made a lot of it. Yeah, you're young, as you, as you are. And you may, I don't know if you were, you probably weren't even born when the so-called affair happened, but. I do know if those are. Yeah, but you know of it because you mentioned the book,

but it's, it was a takeoff on that. Alan Sokol wrote, Alan Sokol wrote it, was making fun of postmodernism in 1996, I think, and wrote a piece based on physics that was just nonsense and published it in a, in a distinguished social journal, and then announced it was a hoax later on. And they did this for, I think, 20 papers.

They submitted it to journals, and seven of them, I think, got accepted these journals. But that, I'll make you put them on the radar. Yeah, exactly. So that put him on the radar. And I think a lot of people, I think by the way, we put him in the in the sense that he was actually called to task because of misconduct or research misconduct because they wrote, they wrote these spoof papers. And so therefore it was research misconduct. And he was immediately called to task by the university for that. Yeah, definitely a shame on him. But, you know, he was also somebody who was quite an, he would bring in a lot of different kinds of speakers who were maybe not so well accepted by the orthodoxy.

And as a result, you know, he was definitely getting a lot of backlash, maybe wasn't so loved by certain individuals on campus. on campus and he was already knowing that he was already learning about diversity, the famous diversity panels, the university, and he discovered when he went to one of them, as you say, there was no diversity in the diversity panel. It was made of

potentially faculty members, but they all had the same opinions and they were identical. And that's when he started to and he was reported, I'm just summarizing from you and then we could talk, two times reported. One, he was asked by a student if race was a social constructor,

a valid biological category, he responded that as an educator and a philosopher, not a biologist, and that question should be asked to a biologist. He was reported for that. And then he asked, I remember when in telling me this, he asked the university's chief diversity officer

to explain diversity to him, and he offered to take him out to lunch, and he was reported for asking that question, reported for asking the question, gives you a sense of where he's at. I imagine they were seeing it as sort of, adversarial positioning, but at the same time, it doesn't mean that you have to do like investigations into him for that or report him. And he was being investigating up the zoo.

I mean, he talked to me and it wasn't easy. I mean, Peter is a, as you say, talked about, fuck you. Okay, just don't stand up with these guys. But I know personally from, from talking to him during the time when he phoned me up, that, that it's still, no matter how tough you are. It takes its toll on you personally and you're in your family and worried about that. And but nevertheless, he points out that why shouldn't some people be offended? And and and and and and and why shouldn't you say fuck you? So maybe we want to talk about that. No. By the way, I think part of his fucky reaction is is because it's ultimately it is an emotional thing. So I think sometimes people people builds these walls to sort of deal with that, you know, because if you're constantly

receiving an onslaughter of hate, in his case, you know, he apparently was spit on, people draw bags of feces on at his office. They, they, I think, threw a swastika with his name underneath it. So, I mean, the proportionality of somebody's disagreement with him, you know, whether it's questioning DEI policies or doing the, you know, the hoax papers, it was just extreme. And this is, you know, it ties back in with that statistics that we were talking about earlier, where people feel justified that they can just take, you know, use violence for speech that they don't like or speech that they think is bad, harmful speech. This is also why, you know, I tried to at some point talk to and teach. members and reason with them, which is kind of insanity on my end, probably. But I didn't know that much

about them, but I just, I was trying to talk them out of using violence. But to them, the way that they see a person that they just, you know, because they think they're horrible, they see them as Nazis. And therefore, they're not human beings anymore. That's why it justifies the violence, because they're not using that violence against actual humans. Well, that's a long history of that, right? Jews and everywhere else. Right, right. And they don't see that. The whole way to create violence is to not see someone as human.

And that's an old goes back. But he also makes a point after using the FU about three or four times again, that's all you need to say. He says, but here's the reason. People think that if they say they're sorry, they'll be redeemed. They'll be forgiven if they just apologize. But there is no forgiveness. There's no forgiving of people in the new religion.

The new religion doesn't forgive people. And this is a new religion in his case. would say of social justice, I suppose. And I've said it too, that, you know, I'm a well-known atheist, but the one thing Christianity has is redemption. The new secular religion doesn't even have that. Well, and we need redemption very much as a society if we want to actually have a functioning society. And the fact that there is no, you know, you're this or that immediately and there's no conversation, there's no opportunity, not just for redemption, but for like trying to understand. where that person is coming from, or even if you're really so inclined to change their mind,

you know, I don't think that's what conversations should be based on. But at the same time, like even if that's what you wanted to do, to try to do that first before, you know, making that person no longer exist, which seems to be the ultimate goal, at least not exist in a way that's functional in society in any way over anything that you disagree. It's an emotion. reaction too, right? And for people who don't know what he did, ultimately was choose to resign. Choose to resign not because of accusations that were outstanding because of various accusations. He was cleared. He was clear. And those accusations had no due process. I know from, I know from experience and also from talking to him. No due process. But even in those no due

process investigations, he was cleared without an apology. But that wasn't the reason he quit. He basically said for the last sentences of his of his letter of resignation. For 10 years, I taught my students the important of living by your principles. One of mine is to defend our system of liberal education from those who seek to destroy it. Who would I be if I didn't? And he basically said, this is a system I can't be a part of. I can't change it from within, not at my university. I can't be a part of it, and I'm going to resign.

And I think, you know, that was a strong. And it got a lot of attention because of that, I think, because he, he, he, he, it was a statement about, about the state of academia. I'm having a problem and not him. What was that? About the state of academia, yeah. Exactly. A lot of people are. Abysmal. Okay, let's move on to a student, I think. Christopher Wells. Are we doing all 16 chapters? What was that?

I said, are we doing all 16 chapters? We may. We'll see how long we go. We'll see until we get both tired. I wanted to, but we may skip some. We'll probably go faster through some of them. But just so we know, we're on number six. But remember, we spent about 45 minutes talking about other stuff. So, so, which is important. So Christopher Wells, a student said, don't be open-minded, but don't be gassed. Let's just briefly mention what, what, what he did, you know, because it's an interesting case, really.

It's really the story of what, what university should be for everyone is what happened to him. In a sense, I saw it an uplifting story rather than a depressing story like some of the others. So why don't you, why don't you? I thought it was, you know, he's. His journey was interesting. So he was a very outspoken student, but he started out in, he was part of the young Democrats. I think he was one of the leaders. He had a club in high school. Then he kind of got to know this friend of his is like a Ben Shapiro character and they would argue all the time. And that introduced him to, I think, a different way of thinking, though he,

you know, still remained more left-leaning. But when he entered university, he found that the environment was just very non-tolerant towards any kind of dissenting points of views. And, well, you probably know the story better that I do at this point. Because I've read your book more recently than you've written it. Yeah.

But, well, what was important is he did what, should happen to universities. The environment was intolerant, but he nevertheless met people with whom he disagreed. He met conservatives, had lunch with them, and suddenly discovered they weren't evil people, which was a revelation for him. And I know that feeling. I mean, it's really, and so he said, well, you know, he was thus beginning to question his overall politics, which is what all of us should do. And it's a story of basically a young man who learns to be open-minded and to understand, at least like what's named David, and was it David or Darrell, like Daryl, learns to be able to talk to people with whom he disagrees, and that maybe their ideas might actually change his own mind.

and in some cases does. And what he did do was openly questioned. I don't think he suffered. I don't know if I don't remember from this. No, there was a point in which he had. And I think his girl, yeah, he did because of the whole black square fiasco. I think he had sort of questioned that. But at a certain point, I mean, he's okay now, but he,

he had a bit of a transformation because he was a little bit radicalized at a certain point and then he realized that's not a good way to go about things. And he now looks for just more kind of civil discourse with people and he doesn't feel like he always has to state his opinion about everything. So he did go through, I think, quite a journey with that. But what I found interesting about a story is, you know, we talk about Peter's view from the from the professor, and we'll talk about other professors who've had experiences. But this is the view of the student, and here's the thing that should also be chilling. I quoted some of the statistics at the beginning of your book because they were chilling.

But he points out that older professors tend to go along because they have no choice. They go along with this. They're not true believers, although he's yet to meet a conservative professor. He said they tend to have more of a Nome Chomsky land than Nome's a friend, but that's okay. The new crop of, but this is the thing that's chilling. the new crop of PhDs in their hand are true believers. Those are terrifying ones. They've been ideologically vetted because let's face it, right now,

these days, many colleges and universities require applicants to fill out DEI statements in order to be considered for a position. So you're choosing the true believer. A lot, of course, some of the students, you know, some kids I know and postdocs, they write it just to, you know, they do it just to get through. But unfortunately, you get more and more of the true believers who are then going to become the senior faculty. and so this is the worrisome thing is that the system of imposing loyalty oaths is getting slowly getting a faculty who are true believers in this nonsense.

And then you get students who are true believers. And I think a quote from him at the end is, I mean, I was really amazed at his maturity for such a young person. But he said, I think what I really noticed is a generation of people being told exactly what to do, said Wells. And then when they enter the workplace, and you have to kind of figure out it out, they're lost. So it's not just political at that point. It's a weak generation. It's an utterly helpless generation who've been coddled in every sense, yet are so self-righteous. I've heard, and this is students, you know, I was at Harvard there.

So there's many Harvard students, I've heard someone say that when they go out and get jobs, they don't last because they suddenly discover that, that, you know, because the employers discover they're coddled, people who expect to be entitled for everything. And in the business world, that just doesn't work. And so you've got a generation of people who are actually going to suffer because of being inappropriately educated. And they're cuddled by everyone. Like, I mean, coddled in school, but I also, because I'm an Eastern European, you know, my parents did not coddle. I wish they codled more. But, you know, I see how parents are, about their kids. And it's like, man, you let the kid run the ship, the show.

You know, it's like not a healthy thing, I think. And Jonathan Hayden and Greg Laganis, where I think the coddling of the American mind. But Wells looks at the struggle of past generation. This is I found where he's particularly astute. He looks at the struggle of past generations who've had to deal with wars, food shortages, and other profound hardships. He can't help but notice that for whatever reason,

my generation thinks we're in the worst of times. like the people who are really entitled, especially university students being entitled, not because of race or anything. Yeah. Universities entitled, they think they're somehow unsafe and somehow in the worst of environments when they're in the safest of all environments. If they're going to complain about anything, they should complain about the cost of real estate. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, or the cost of tuition, which is certainly ridiculous. Well, the next two chapters are on two episodes in Brett Weinstein's life. The first one, I have to say, I'm more sympathetic to the first than the second, and I want to talk about it. The first one is famous. Why don't you tell the story? I'll let you. Okay. Well, it's the famous Evergreen story.

So they had a day at Evergreen where they basically wanted to only have black students on campus that day. And no one else but black students. In the past, they've had days to sort of. of showcase the importance of black people by not having them on campus that day, but then they've changed it and made it, like, excluded everyone else. And so he, you know, wrote an email, stood up against that, didn't agree with that. He basically said, is it okay for people to choose not to be there? That's their right. In fact, it's an important form of protest, but forcing others to not be there is not his oppression. It's not protest. That was exactly.

Exactly. And things kind of went escalated from there. In his case, you know, his own students actually stood by him, including students of color. But in terms of, you know, he was just, he was pretty much driven out of the university. And there was a lawsuit as well. They actually, yeah, he was driven. They basically called for his firing, made it unsef to be on campus. He wasn't supported by the university and eventually, and wasn't protected and filed a lawsuit, which he eventually won. And then left because obviously the environment was so toxic. Him and his wife. Well, I think the condition of the lawsuit also was that they leave. So it was, yeah.

I mean, and exactly. When the suit's sold, they have. had to leave and submit the resignation in return for some money, and then he was able to have another life. But it was the fact that based on that statement, it was untenable for him to remain at the university in every way that he could see with no support from the university. And universities, I've often said this, not the first time, the real problem of the universities are the academic administrators who have no spine and no gods. They will go with the wind. The minute they see that there's a protest, that it won't look good on social media, they'll flip whatever.

They'll defend free speech in a moment until it looks bad on media. And you saw that in the testimony in the former Harvard president who talked about free speech for anti-Semitism, but not so much for people who might. Oh, yeah. It's ridiculous. Someone's name. And here's the point. the statement of this chapter is know that your friends will disappoint you. And this was the point.

We said earlier that a lot of old faculty go along with it. Faculty are terrified. So many faculty will write letters. When I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal on the ideological corruption of science, I got letters from faculty. Thank you me. But they wrote under pseudonyms because they were so concerned that their own administrators or colleagues would learn about that.

Does that sound like Russia? I mean, you know, in the old days, and that's the problem. It takes a lot, you get a lot of private sympathy, as you did, and he did. But very few people will be willing to speak out. And look, there's a very good reason, because they speak out, the same thing is likely to happen to them. And they may not be in a position to support their families or anything else. So it's, you can condemn people that don't speak out, but, but when, it's, you, you, you, can also understand it.

I can understand it. That's why, you know, I think some people come up at people pretty aggressively for not doing so. But I do think it's such a personal choice. And I don't know the personal circumstances of each person. You know, they can be sick. They can have mental health issues. They can have families that depend on them and no other recourse. And so while, yes, that contributes to this environment, you know, I want people to be able to still make that choice freely.

and on their own terms ideally and not be like just forced to do so. But I know and you I know you said the second part of his story you're a little less sympathetic about, which is interesting because I, so the second part of the story revolves around more the, you know, the COVID, the pandemic and Ivermectin in particular because he took a very vocal stance for, you know, you know, for ivermectin. And also he talked about the lab leak when it was, you know, considered for some reason. Which I am sympathetic to why I think the evidence is. Yeah, the lab lake, yeah, I think has a strong evidence. And at this point, the tide has has shifted a little bit

on that particular point. Ivermectin, maybe not so much. And I encountered Brat, when he was talking about Ivermectin. And I sort of defended his right to speak about it, not because I believed that he was correct. I actually don't know if he is. And in fact, I would probably even, right now, I'm probably more in the direction of he's not. However, I do defend his right to speak as somebody who is, you know, has some science background. And frankly, like, his ideas should be debunked by people who have the facts. Yeah, exactly. He shouldn't be de-platformed. I'm a hundred-bra. I'm totally, I agree with you. It's not that. I'm sympathetic to the ridiculousness of somehow having YouTube or other organizations somehow

the platform. By the way, he also questioned the efficacy of vaccines, okay? And it's probably worth, I don't know, maybe because, you know, you're worried about time. I'm not so much, but we'll go on for another half hour or so. But, you know, the next person is Aaron Kariadi, who's, who was literally fired as a professor, a medical ethicist, who was fired for refusing. to publicly refusing to take the COVID vaccine. And his arguments were good ones. I mean, his arguments for personal freedom. He had felt he'd been exposed.

He had natural immunity. And he was against a vaccine mandate. And the problem, so let's put them together in a sense because it's an issue that's an interesting one that is not so cut and dried. The problem that both Brett and Aaron point out is that there's a lot of power. the government is basically forcing people to say forcing the assumption that there's scientific consensus and also enforcing mandates and and silencing people who disagree all of which sounds awful now um the the the thing that's common about all this and one of the reasons i was kind of

hopeful about covid at some level was that it demonstrated that's at the forefront science is not certain. When you don't know, when you're in the unknown, almost anything goes. And science is a dialectic, as Jonathan Rauch has really written a beautiful book about. It requires debate. It requires people like Brett Weinstein to say, no, I don't agree with this, even if he's wrong. It requires that because only then will you find out what's right. And you also may not even know what's right. You may not know for years. Yeah, for years. Because, you know, when it comes to vaccines and, you know, you have to test people for many years, so you won't know the answer. And so it's important to have that debate. But from the same point of view, my wife used to work for the government of Australia, putting

scientists together with the government. And her point was that neither group knew what the other wanted or needed. Scientists seem to think that every public decision should be based on what they said was right. And politicians tended to say that, you know, will you? use the science when it agrees with what we want to do anyway. But the point is that where I'm, I guess I'm less sympathetic is that government has to make decisions even when they don't know all the answers. What I condemn the four is saying that there's scientific consensus. The Mr. Fauci is someone who I think did not behave well, but I never expected. He had been an administrative or laboratory for 40 years, which meant he knew how to play up to government officials. He's, he

You wouldn't survive as an administrator for 40 years unless you'd known how to play within the system. And he learned my problem with the whole pandemic narrative, like, because I was pretty outspoken about all of that. It wasn't the vaccines, which frankly, I don't even think I'm like authorized to really talk about because I don't have that expertise. So I don't really talk about it. I know what decision I've made for myself. And it's something that, you know, statistically, I can look at some. statistics, I can analyze those and there were less vaccine less people in the hospitals that were vaccinated.

So I'm going to go based on that. It doesn't mean that there weren't like vaccine injuries because there were. It's very difficult to know the exact numbers. And frankly, I haven't invested my whole time into really like analyzing that to be like speak with any authority. So I don't. I did speak with some authority, I think on the mandates because and some confidence because I was very opposed to the mandates. That was the issue. But that I don't think you need to know the

signs for like... Well, but I agree with you. And it's not a scientific issue. That's the point where I think it's kind of trite, and I understand completely where Brett and Aaron, you know, astutely point out all of the issues. But what, and so it's their job to point out those issues and those uncertainties. It's their job to do that. But they should not expect government to actually on their statements necessarily because government has a lot of other things to consider. So where the problem was saying that the science was settled. But the government couldn't do what government should have done, which is to say the science isn't settled.

But we view the risk of the pandemic to be greater than the risk of vaccines, and we view it as a public safety issue. And we're imposing mandates not because of science, but because we think just like we impose seatbelts, we impose many things that on infringing people's rights because we, we're making this assumption that if you don't have that, that if we, if more people take the vaccine, fewer people will die and you, by not taking the vaccine, you may be, you may be endangering other people. It may not be right. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, but part of why they did overall, if you follow the thrill line is like they wanted to control people's behaviors, right?

So they said things. So either they censored things that weren't that were true, true information like in the case of Facebook about the vaccines or they, you know, they very much controlled the narrative. They controlled people behavior. I'm sure they knew that certain certain things like are provably not effective. And they made policies and people often didn't challenge them. I can't say that I challenged it from the beginning myself because I had a level of trust for the government. And then when I started thinking logically about some of these things, I'm like, okay, this does not compute. This does not make any sense.

And so they treated the population. They didn't trust the population to do the right thing. Like let's say the masks. And let's say we say they work, right? Let's not get on to that argument. But like, let's assume they work. Yeah. And yet the government at one point said, well,

well, masks don't work, right? Because they wanted to control the supply instead of saying, well, actually they do, but we really need them for healthcare for frontline workers. Now, some people will behave in selfish ways and not share them and still, you know, hold the supply for themselves. But a lot of people, you know, if you seem the best in people, often they will actually deliver. And maybe I'm optimistic, but I have seen that in real.

life in certain situations. So in any rate, the government thinks that the population won't do the right thing and therefore they need to be manipulated. And now they have a situation where they've lied to the population repeatedly and it destroyed. The public health trust is destroyed, which is awful. Because if something else happens, we're not, we're going to see a far worse situation that we saw during the pandemic. Look, I can't agree with you. The government shouldn't lie. They should be honest what they're doing. And of course, when they are, they'll be thrown out of office. But that's a different story. When they say we're doing this for the real reasons, that unfortunately, politicians feel they have to lie and they do it. But I didn't want to, but I brought this up, not to put you in a

trap, but to remind you of what you said, not really, but remember, you said, well, you know, when we talked about allowing people to say things, you say, but what if they do it really well? And now I'm really worried that people get, you know, someone's a good speaker, that people believe this stuff. And so you've got to, I'm going to try and be generous and say the government has people like Joe Rogan spouting crap. And, and, you know, and by the way, I was on John Rogan and he was really amazing when I was on with him. But nevertheless, you know, and these people are charismatic. You've got that other idiot who's not Joe's in any of that guy who got fined for saying that the kids, the families got sued by the families of the kids. Oh, I know who you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, anyway, whatever. Let's see, it will remain unknowing, but it's probably just as well. But, um, yes.

But you've got to worry, you've got the government saying there are charismatic people who have a platform who are telling people, vaccines are dangerous, don't take them. And so you've got the, so I've got to say, I've got to at least ask, what would I do if I was in that situation? I don't know. I mean, I would try to be honest. But you've got to say to yourself, well, maybe the government, just like you said, maybe we should, you wouldn't have that person. and speaking at university if they were denying the Holocaust or whatever it was and doing it charitematically. And you've got to say to the government, well, maybe they would encourage, because they're so concerned about public safety, maybe it's not the end of the world to tell,

you know, social media that you should be careful to. So now we're deciding, though, right? Exactly. But I want to point out it's not a black and white issue. It's a, it's, I can understand when they're charismatic people misinforming the public in a way, that could kill them and could kill other people. Government has a responsibility at some point to take care of people's safety. Did they do it right? Probably not. But my point is just that I guess you have to balance. No, it's not. But I think you have to balance out, you know, what do you think is going to do the most harm in this situation? And I would, I guess I will be on the

side of it's done more harm to treat the population like they're stupid and to not be honest with them and to censor information, yes, there'll be some harm, I think, that will come from lunatics talking about, you know, insane things. And some people, a proportion of people will listen to them. And when they have a megaphone, there is more, a greater danger there. But when you just censor them, I think ultimately you ruin trust in your own system instead of building up the trust in your own system. Ultimately, censorship, as Richard Nixon learned, hiding information is never a good thing. In the end, in the end, it comes out. And the worst thing, in some sense is leading a distrust in science. Now, a distrust in scientists is different than a

trust in science. But ultimately, science is self-correcting. And it's the best thing we have. And so you're right, the damage that's been done to vaccinations, to people who won't want to vaccinate their kids against measles. There's people for other. Yeah, exactly. And that's the thing. The consequences of that to me, we're so much worse than some people listening to Joe Rogan or whoever. But it's easy in hindsight to say, you know, all I'm saying is that it's a, it's, they're conflicting things that government has to deal with. And it's not always just the science that should make the decision. And, and, but, you know, but I also believe that government shouldn't censor and they should be honest. There must be a way to do it better.

But people are so sick and tired of, of governments that are, that think they know better, that lacked transparency, that never apologize for getting anything wrong. I mean, they, as much as my... Have you ever known a government that's acted otherwise? No, but I, but wouldn't it be nice? You know, I think people are aching for that. They want that so very much. And what, I don't think it would do harm to a politician who did this.

I think it would actually do, it would build trust with their population. And if they, get something wrong and they admit it and they say here are the steps like even in a job interview you go into a job interview and they ask you you know tell us to some of the times where you failed or whatever they want to hear is understanding when you failed and how you're now correcting force exactly in fact i you know my last book was called the edge of knowledge but it's it's what in england was called the known unknowns and what i said is the three most important words in science but they should be for everyone for teachers parents, and particularly for politicians, say, I don't know. And then to do something and say,

that didn't work. You know what? We tried it. It didn't work. We're going to do something else. Wouldn't that be refreshing if we could just hear that? Yeah. And I understand why a government in the middle of a pandemic crisis doesn't want to say the words we don't know because we look to protect us. A lot of what happened during the pandemic, a lot of the social issues we encountered were because of fear. But, and so the government, government has to create the sense of, you know, we've got those guys. But I think you can still do it. Even like a good leader does it, you know, we'll say, this is what we're working on. Here's some details. So you understand what's going on, but not necessarily that you've solved the problem.

Yes, it's maybe a little scarier to live in a world like that, but I think it's going to be better. world is a reality and what we try do much to do and part of the problem of social justice is convinced people that shouldn't live in a scary world well it's always going to be scary and yes and and you know and people turn to their parents in fearful times for certainty they want to know will I be okay and parents will lie and say okay yes because they're consoling people turn to their god in times of fear and and people turn to their government in times of fear like the pandemic and they don't want to hear I don't know they don't want to hear that no and so And governments know what people want to hear.

And it's true. I mean, it's sad that human nature is like that where, you know, it's why people with massive confidence often gain power. Because somebody who says, oh, I don't know. I'm not sure I haven't decided. That's not going to be the person who gains the power. But actually, probably the person you'd rather have in power. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. It's a person who can, yeah. But, you know, it's hard to know. It's hard to know. It's a difficult question. And Winston Churchill, we'll get to him at the end of this, was a great leader. But because he could, he could get people to resonate emotionally as well as intellectually. And that's part of being what gets elected.

But, you know, I think this discussion we've had is so interesting and I appreciate it. That it's all, it's, I would almost be willing to end here. Because, but I do want to go, I want to go to one more case because I found the person. the person who impressed me the most, perhaps of everyone, would surprise me. I mean, was James Des Moor. Okay. The story, and maybe I'll, you know, tell you what, and it's a story because, because the moral that you give there, it's such a generous one, is put your shelves in the shoes of your critics. Here's a guy who's life is, in principle, destroyed, but he says, know, I can understand why people are doing that.

And if people haven't heard of James DeMore, why don't you just give the brief, you know, all these are you to say Google and many people have heard of it. Yeah, it's the Google. Yeah, so James DeMore was a Google employee who behind the infamous Google memo where he basically talked about, you know, the distinctions between men and women and why, you know, they might perform differently in the tech space. And I think his intention was really to, um, create an environment that would actually be more inclusive to say women being in the tech sector.

But it was taken as, you know, just saying that men and women have any kind of differences. It was very controversial at that time and probably still is. Let's do him justice by reading what, by quoting him, as you do in the book, just so people know. I mean, the famous thing is people say, oh, this guy got fired because he said men are better engineers than women or something like. that. And oh, well, he's just a misogynist, but that's far from the truth. And I thought he was a misogynist at first, by the way, myself when I heard this story. When I first heard it, I agree. And that's why I read an argument with my brother and my dad about it. Well, I think for me, one of the most refreshing things is to discover I'm wrong. And it's lovely to read about this

guy. And that's why I think I want to talk about him. You know, he said he went to a program about diversity and they asked for feedback, so he gave him feedback. He said, I really thought that there were elements of the culture that were harming Google, so I wanted to improve it. One of the areas of the memo was to get the strongest extension was DeMor's claim that men were better represented in tech than women due to biological differences, namely that, quote, more men may like coding because it requires system monetizing and, quote, women on average have more openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. He added that women also tend to have more interested people than things and thus prefer jobs in social and artistic areas and that they

are more prone to anxiety and thus on average may be more likely to perform well and maybe less likely to perform well in stressful tech jobs. He said this. He suggested that the workplace can be better adapted to these differences by making positions less stressful without having to engage in what's properly called reverse discrimination. So we argued controversially, although there's many arguments that support it, that there are biological differences between men and women that affect their behavior and affect their job choices. And he suggested that if that's the case... It doesn't mean it affects every single person, but, you know, but it may not. You know, and averages, yeah, they're always, you know, there are always not only exceptions, but it's statistical. But he argued

that one should at least discuss it and see what you could do at the workplace that would make, might encourage more diversity by making, in his case, less stressful. So his point was, he didn't want to favor people on the basis of identity. He wanted to look at the underlying reasons, which is an incredibly scientific approach. And I was impressed by the fact that, yeah, he basically went to things by trying to look and look at the research and try and come up with an answer based on experimental empirical evidence.

You say that somewhere here. And of course, he got fired for it. He got fired for it. He got demonized for it. And what I found particularly, I guess, inspiring was in spite of that, you know, he talks about the polarization. And he says, and he actually continues to have his girlfriend, which is nice. But he argues that Google has problems because there isn't really much competition. They're printing money.

therefore they don't have to try and look at what might be right but what looks good because it doesn't really matter. But he actually argues that, well, you know, no one likes to think of themselves as Hitler, but I can see how others would think of people like me as them. I mean, he was fired. He looked for other work opportunities. And this is the sad thing again.

He went to 20 interviews, I think you say, and at every stage before they knew he was, he passed the interview. The many people knew who he was, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he says, I understand how people reacted the way they understand, whether, way they did. And, um, he continues to have fun playing and doing what he does. I was, did you find it shocking? I guess I found it really remarkable. No, I did. I remember having the conversation with him and being quite surprised by him. In fact, I think I was almost trying to set him up in a positive way and he kept sort of self-reflecting a lot and looking and taking a lot of credit for like things that maybe he had done wrong, really understanding other people's perspectives. Because I think

the way he was painted in the media was like these, this tech bro dude. And I think most people never even took the time to read his memo to see what it was, although I'm sure I would have offended them anyways. But he was one thing you have to realize about him, he's actually extremely autistic and he's extremely shy. So a lot of the way that he had expressed himself really came from then, I don't think, understanding this, like the social cues of things. And then and then when I talk to him, He was just really shy, really reflective. And yeah, really tried to put himself, that was the thing that stuck out to me. He's like he really tried to put himself in the shoes of these people.

And, you know, with me, I also did that and then moved on to this other phase. And I don't think he moved on to that other phase. Yeah, he basically has tried to under, he said, you're right, he understands as an autistic person. He understands that he probably could do things. things differently, but he also does stay, and I'm really up front. One of Google's justifications for firing DeMore was that through his words, he had contributed to creating a culture that was not, quote, work safe, particularly for females. So it was necessary to fire him to protect Google employees. And his point, which is absolutely true, is a safe work environment doesn't imply that it

must protect people from words, but rather the opposite. You know, one necessary agreement is the feeling that you can speak your mind without being unfairly judged and where your failures aren't seen as inherent flaws in yourself, rather just failures that can be learned from. And it's such a generous way of doing it. It's also pointing out that this ridiculous safety aspect of protecting people who feel unsafe because words makes them more unsafe because eventually everyone is afraid to say any words. So everyone feels more unsafe. And they don't have the resilience either. Yeah, yeah. They don't have his resilience. But his point is that a safer environment is one in which people can speak their mind.

And very few people would say that, and I found that remarkably insightful. And I would like to meet this guy because, boy, he seems like a delightful fellow. He also is hopeful, which is amazing. Their last statement about him is, he says, I don't think it needs to hit rock bottom to get better. I think things can just incrementally improve. It's possible. What a nice and naive attitude, because once again, I think the statement that it's going to get worse before it gets better, as far as I can see.

I have a similar attitude, I suppose. You know, look, I think one of the natural things that happens to you, especially when you experience, you know, what people call as a cancel culture or what I call silencing culture, is that you rage against the machine, you know, essentially, right? And so you become very negative towards that part. of society that would engage in such a way. And I certainly found that to be true in the terms, in terms of me being more like obsessive about things like that in the beginning. And as time has sort of progressed, I found myself, A, seeing other people change that people I respected and liked who were raging against the machine and change in ways that I no longer liked them that much. And also seeing how, first of all, it happens, it does happen and people get mad at me

when I say it happens on all political sides. But it does. It does. Because I witnessed it happened. I've personally been, you know, attacked by every side at this point. So, I mean, it does. So I try to focus, in my approach, I try to focus on behavior as opposed to ideology, because it's really about the behavior or humans. And, you know, I focus on the things that I want to protect and I don't want to destroy people and I want to bring them in. I think there is this kind of vilification of, you know, oh, everyone who's woke is evil and all that kind of rhetoric.

And first of all, you don't know, okay, somebody puts, I don't know, pronouns in their bio. First of all, you don't know why they did that. Yeah. But also it doesn't make them a bad person. It means that this is how they're thinking about things right now. and you ideally can have conversations and people assume that you can't have conversations with all of these people, but that's not actually true. And my life experience has shown me that I have talked to people on all stripes, you know, and yeah, some people are going to be aggressive, not willing to

change their minds. But if you don't come at them aggressively, if you come with them with like a level of understanding and explain how you feel, but also listen to them, they are, you see, you. see changes and I have seen changes. And I've seen changes in my environment where I bring up a lot of the topics that I'm concerned about and I can have open conversations. I was afraid to mention my book in some of my circles, but I did it. And I was surprised. I was so pleasantly surprised. People bought the book. Somebody today posted how a photo of the book and how they liked it. And you don't know and you don't know how people are going to respond until you give them the opportunity to do. do so that's right and it's been more positive i even posted about the book in my in my facebook group that i

still have technically oh really yeah that's that's great well i mean but at the same time you have to be prepared and and the last part of the book and the beginning is last chapter conclusions no apologies you have to realize that if you didn't do anything wrong as your argument is and other people have argued you don't apologize for it and and necessarily and it's good advice and i've learned this myself is that one of your advice was from a famous public figure. I don't know which one, but I've known, experienced it myself. Two-week rule. People are furious. If you can just ignore the flurry for two weeks, if that's all it is. I mean, if they're going to lose your job, it's a different story. I'm not minimizing. But if you can deal with ignoring the crap for two weeks, then, you know, instead of

feeling like a lot of people do these sort of apologies that are done, you know, you remember from the old Maoist apologies for being, and a lot of these things you see are just that, oh, I'm so sorry, I hurt people, I didn't know, I was very. So your point is don't apologize, and I think, and I was surprised you didn't, I don't think you quote, you know, the famous quote, which is attributed to Vincent Churchill,

which a friend of mine told me first, and it actually goes back much further. Someone said it was, it was, oh, what's his name? No, anyway, I'll think about it a second one, my favorite authors. But anyway, don't apologize, never explain. Never apologize, never explain. It's often attributed to Winston Churchill. And there's a second sentence for that, which is, because your enemies won't accept your apology and they won't listen to your explanations. So don't bother. But I think the argument you give here for why, if you believe you're doing something right,

not to apologize, which you do at the very end of, which you explain is your own, your own experience, why you didn't apologize, why, well, obviously, you admire the people who don't. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, you, uh, you, you, uh, you, when you, when you do think you did something wrong. Very quick. But, but, but, but, I apologize for stepping on other people, when people step on my foot. That's, okay. Okay, there we go. But not to, to, for things you didn't do. No. You know, there's a great set of stories here. And I want to give you the last word, and I want to give you the last word by reading what

you say. So I'll be really getting the last word, but it's the last, it's the last paragraph of the book. Is that okay? If I give you the last word that way. So model the behavior and attitudes you'd like to see. This includes always considering whether you might be wrong, no matter the situation or debate. That's not a sign of weakness.

That's a sign of strength. but when you're not wrong, don't let fear silence you into submission. Always bear this in mind. When you've committed no wrongdoing, no one holds the authority to demand an apology from you, nor should you feel obliged to offer one. Stay firm, stay true. When your conscience is clear, don't be coerced or surrender your voice.

Set it free and never apologize for this, which I think is good advice. Well, I enjoyed our discussion. I hope you did too, and I enjoyed the book. and I think it's important for people to see what I liked about it, among other things. It's important to see put a face on this, see the effect on individuals, the many different ways responding, and how hurtful behavior that you might otherwise think is righteous can really be. So I know you've had that experience I've had too, and I've enjoyed that. I hope you've enjoyed the conversation.

I have enjoyed the conversation, but now that I've said that, I could have the last word. Yes. technically yeah so go ahead no that was my last word no but I do think wow that was a joke but I know it's a good joke

and I was going to say thank you but then I'd have the last word but oh gosh darned we're going to have to fight it out and then somebody's going to somebody's soda how about we just don't say anything and I and I stop the recording and you say yes

we go in silence okay let's do it yes I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world.

To learn more, please visit OriginsprojectFoundation.org.