The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Peter Boghossian: From Street Epistemology to Academic Freedom

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

Pete Boghossian is a philosopher with little tolerance for nonsense, whose efforts to broadly encourage critical thinking using Socratic methods began early on. While doing his PhD, he worked with inmates to see if he could impact on their moral reasoning through a process of Socratic questioning.Viewing faith-based beliefs as delusional, he worked on ways to encourage believers to question their beliefs. Because of the inherent difficulties in having such conversations Peter later worked with James Linsdsay to produce a book entitled How to Have Impossible Conversations, outlining a series of techniques aimed at producing productive, rather than defensive, conversations. These techniques form a part of his current program of Street Epistemology, where he takes critical thinking and questioning out into the public, traveling around the country having a series of open conversations with people, and seeing if they are willing to change their beliefs. Peter became more well known among the public when, with Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose, he wrote a series of spoof papers submitted to gender studies journals, designed to show what they regarded as the lack of true scholarship in that discipline. Then, most recently, he resigned his position at Portland State University in response to what he said was harassment from the administration, and its lack of commitment to free speech and open inquiry. All of these topics provided fodder for a fascinating discussion, which I hope you enjoy. 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, I'm Lawrence Krauss and welcome to The Origins Podcast. This week, my guest is Peter Bogosian, a philosopher who was at Portland State University. Peter's a fascinating individual in many ways. I've known him for a number of years. He actually began his work, working with inmates at a correctional facility, trying to think about ways to use critical thinking to improve moral reasoning. And thinking about things critically has really been a central part of his. career. He's been active in areas of atheism. In fact, he wrote a book called How Emmanuel

to Create Atheists, but also really been involved in getting people to question their own ideas and wrote another book with James Lindsay on how to have impossible conversations. He gained a lot of notoriety when he and Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose wrote a series of spoof papers designed to challenge the scholarship in gender studies areas, which he felt was less than optimal, let me say. And that created a big controversy. And he most recently got a great deal of attention for resigning from his position at Portland State University because of concerns about free speech and open inquiry at the university. He has pioneered something called street epistemology, which is,

getting people on the street or in classrooms to try techniques to question their own ideas and potentially change their minds, which of course is always difficult and fascinating. We talk about all of these things and more during our conversation. I think you'll find it really quite interesting. You can watch it, of course, without advertisements on our substack site, Critical Mass, or you can watch it on our YouTube channel. Either way, I hope if you watch it, you'll consider subscribing to our substack site because those subscriptions

help support the Origins Project Foundation, which supports the podcast. That nonprofit foundation supports the podcast and also all the other activities of the foundation, the public events and travel experiences. Of course, you can also listen to it on any podcast site for free as well. No matter how you watch it or listen to it, I certainly hope you'll enjoy this podcast with Peter Bogowski. Well, Peter Begossi, thanks for being here virtually with me, although we're across the content and from each other.

It's always good to see you. Your thanks, it's really, really good to see you too. And we're going to go all over the map, I think, which is what we usually do when we have conversations together in private, so we'll do that in public. But I want to start, it occurred to me as I was preparing this, and as you know, I prepare incredibly, that I've never asked you this question that I can recall in our personal conversations. But because this is an origins podcast, I like to find a people's origins. And I know nothing about your origins. I don't know what your mother and father did. What do your mother and father do?

Oh, my mother and father are deceased now. Unfortunately, I miss them terribly. Same with me. Yeah, sorry. It's something that you never. It's just, yeah. My dad was a civil engineer, and he was always very, very good with math, very proficient with math. And my mom was a manager of medical.

offices. Oh, okay. So you decided obviously you wanted to become an academic of sorts, although you became a philosopher, but this, you know, we excuse you for that. But, um, but, uh, yeah, I'm down on philosophy and I'd like, I think we should talk about that. Yeah, I'd love to talk about that. But what, what, who encouraged your, presumably that came from an interesting reading or something else. So who, did either of them encourage you to go in a certain direction? Your father want you to be an engineer or a scientist or anything like that or no they just gave me the freedom to do whatever I wanted to do I was and I always wanted to do the most intense things you know that like I did stick in knife fighting for years I did doesn't surprise

me yeah I did philosophy but even in philosophy I was always fascinated by the god question because it it seemed at the time oh this is the most profound turns out it's not profound it's not sophisticated it's rather silly yeah so it's really nothing to it. So I just, I always wanted that, that experience of throwing myself as deeply as possible in, in something that I consider to be, as Dennett says, of abiding significance. Oh, wow. Okay. So does that mean, did that, as you say, you, night fighting and other things, but did you, did you did. To my hands. How, how, how soon did that, did that, so it didn't always relate to sort of scholarly or academic things. It was anything that you thought was intense and

important. What I'm wondering is, did you read a lot? I mean, when did you decide that sort of an academic career would be, or did you, or did you just fall into it? I was always captivated by Plato and captivated by, well, just the dialogues of Socrates would just, I don't know, they were really just so wondrous. They were so magical. Well, that's not exactly the right word. And then the more I started reading

the history of Western intellectual thought in particular, the more enamored I became and the more fascinated I became with people trying to figure stuff out, what I didn't realize, and if this is too abrupt of the segues, let me know. What I didn't realize then

that I slowly came to realize and then became horrified by is that you can't figure out problems just by thinking about them. Like you need some kind of empirical, you need some kind of data. And philosophers as a rule, they're just not trained to do that. They're not trained to look at methods. They're not trained to look at data collection and analysis. They're not trained in science at all. They're not trained in the, they may be trained in the Socratic method, although now I highly doubt it.

but they're not trained in the scientific methods. So they don't have those tools available to them. And when you don't have those tools available to you, then your speculations are, not only are they untethered to reality, but when you're really good at coming up with arguments and making inferences and analysis, et cetera, then you inflate your confidence in your speculations

and sooner or later kind of come to believe it's true as you as you place yourself in a community with other people who have adopted similar conclusions. Well, look, I can't agree with you more. I mean, I think that's the whole point of my concern to some extent, not just about philosophy, but about revelation general. You don't, I would argue no knowledge comes except from observing and testing. There's no knowledge that comes. Wisdom may come, but there's no knowledge that comes from just pure thought, I think.

and without any connection to the empirical world. But let and we can go on about that. And I think we will now and later. But I want to ask in that regard. I mean, what you've come to recognize is obviously the importance of the scientific method. But you argue that's kind of recent. Did you never have a flirtation with science at all?

Or was it, was it math that was a problem? Oh, no. No, I did. I did have a flirtation. You know, I used to teach science in pseudoscience, which I love.

Yeah. No, I always had a flirtation with science, but what I didn't, I just didn't understand that. Like, it's complicated. Well, let me, let's step back a little. You're talking about your professional degree. I want to go back earlier. When you were younger, did you ever, did you ever think of, I mean, when you were in school, was science of interest to you?

I mean, like public school and primary school or high school. Yeah, it was. I don't think I received the best education until I was in high school. And then I went to a private high school and I got a Jesuit high school. he'd be the man I am today. Well, a lot of people have not only survived, but thrive from that education. Yeah, it's true.

But, you know, I was interested in science. It was, to a certain extent, you're right, the math kept me back. But it just wasn't my passion. You know, my passion was, I've always been curious about why people believe things. And I've always, I find beliefs fascinating.

And I find education. really interesting and education is a way to help people refine what what it is that they believe and to calibrate their confidence in the belief to the evidence they have or the reasoning they have for it so i ended up in the perfect in the perfect career in a sense that was before the madness took over but yeah yeah well you bet you know i was intrigued also speaking of it's a good segue about what was we're almost that i didn't realize you're what you would call what you You know, your PhD is really an edd. You have a, your degree as an education, which I didn't realize.

But let's talk about you how you got there. What was your undergraduate degree in? My undergraduate degree, what was it in? I have to think. Oh, it was in psychology. It had a huge impact on you. My undergraduate degree is in psychology with a minor in philosophy. My master's degree from Fordham was in philosophy.

I was in a PhD program in philosophy and they threw me out. And then that's a long story. And then I went to a, the ed doc program. I did my dissertation in the prisons. Yeah. And I work, yeah,

I work with prison. Go ahead. Well, no, I mean, the title of your thesis was Socratic reasoning, critical theory, moral reasoning in a name aid education.

Critical thinking, sorry, not critical theory, right. Yeah, It's a big difference. That's going to make them worse. And moral reasoning and inmate education.

No. So, I mean, your early fascinates for a Socratic reasoning and education are both there. In fact. And so why do you talk about that PhD a little bit or that whatever you call it? Yeah. So, okay. So I had the idea a long time ago from my dad. You mentioned my dad.

It was a civil engineer. We were hiking one day, and we were at a filthy stream. And we came to a filthy stream, and I said, wow, you know, how do you get that out? And he explains to me that there are various methods of taking pollution out of a stream. One is called primary, a primary cleaning where you basically dump bales of hay in, and it will get out 80%. I think that's what he said, of the particulates as many years ago. And the pollution.

But if you want to get the water clean. than that, you have to, he said the best way to clean up the stream is to not, this conversation affected my whole intellectual life. The best way to clean up the stream is to just stop polluting it. But if you want it really clean, then you're going to need, I think you call it a primary cleaning. And that's, you know, that's a machine, that's electricity, that's industrial. And the more the cleaner you want the water, the more cost prohibitive it becomes. And so at the time I was lifting a lot of weights because I was pretty serious about my, about martial arts. And then I realized that that same principle was operative when you were lifting weights.

Like if you were bench pressing from 9 to 10 is worth, is more difficult than 1 to 9. And then I wondered if that that principle were operative in other arenas and other domains. And I wondered if the same. thing could be you could do the same thing cognitively. Like I wonder if you could just throw a bale of hay in people's cognitive structures or their their epistemic lives and just clean it up, you know, not to get it to 100, but just good enough. And so, and so I thought, well, whose cognitive or epistemic structures are damaged? And then I started thinking, like, who were the most vulnerable? And then I started, then I thought, well, prison inmates. And then I thought, well,

I wonder if you could give prison inmates just enough tools to help them desist from crime. You know, not all of them, but just enough. But it would have to be something that was cheap and that they could do with themselves. You know, the highest one with the Socratic method is when you implement it on yourself, when you do it to yourself. So long story short, so I developed a program in which I pulled questions, germane questions from the history of Western intellectual thought. what is it to be a man? What is justice? Is one type of life better to lead than another?

And I explored these questions in Socratic format with men. They were all males at the time of Columbia River Correction Institution. And then I designed. So that was basic. I can talk about the study design. But anyway, but that was the basic idea. And then I, you know, ideally you'd want to do that again. science you'd want to test outcomes and you'd want to so so that was the basic idea of my dissertation

yeah and then yeah well i mean i was going to say it when i heard when i read your dissertation i thought well you know i think of you as a person in some ways who likes to think about how to get people to change their minds or think or in one way or another and you know convincing people to um to potentially get rid of um false i can't believe you read my dissertation holy shit you're like That's amazing to me. Well, no, I would like you to think I read the whole thing, but I just, like many cases. I read enough to sound good. But, but, but the purpose, you know, the purpose for it to decrease criminal behavior, I thought was interesting.

And the use of the Socratic method, which seems to me permeates in many ways. I tried to think of themes of what I know of you personally and then of what I know of you professionally. But the use of Socratic method certainly continues. throughout much of your, a great deal of your work. And the fact that it was important early on is neat. But I was going to ask as a scientist about the outcomes. Did you actually ever, I mean, you did this, but in philosophy, probably that's all you had to do.

But did anyone, did you ever, did, were there any evidence that, that your discussions with inmates did have an impact? That's a great question. So, so it was evaluated by the short answer is no. But, and the reason for that is because I couldn't get IRB approval to track. the men, because they were men, all men, to track the men after they left the facility. It was a pre-release facility,

so they were there for like nine months or a year. I couldn't get approval to do that, so I didn't have access to that data. Yeah, yeah. Because prison inmates are protected. But I looked at it in other ways with other metrics. I actually ran into two of the guys. I ran to one of the guys when I was on vacation in Seasot a few years ago.

But, you know, I could tell you what he said, but that's just anecdotal. But it was really positive. Well, that's good. But, but, but that, so then, so then I, I used, I used that I, that basic idea. And I just want to, I just want to refine something. It's not persuading anybody to do anything. It's just giving people the tools to ask themselves better questions so that, that they can figure things out.

Another way to think about it is giving people the gift of doubt. So, so then, then, um, I threw myself at another problem using the same tool set, which is religion. You know, did you read my notes? I mean, come on, I'm going segueing from saying convincing inmates to bat. No, no, it's very amazing because that's exactly the, it seemed to me you progressed from people who had clearly had some problems thinking about the world and it caused them to be in jail to other people who were diluted. And you move directly. It was a natural sort of segue. A hundred.

Exactly. To religious people. And then you went in that with a furor, right? The idea that it's besides a. manual for atheists, the idea not just a question of how to convince people to be, to think, you know, who are deluded to potentially ask themselves enough questions to overcome that, but also you began to state outright. I mean, not just ask questions. You made strong statements that faith is a, what would you call it, unreliable epistemology. Correct.

That it's, and of course it is. It's a considering faith as a way of knowing is, the biggest mistake of all because there's no faith doesn't give you any knowledge about anything independent whether it's religious faith right yeah so so so thinking about faith in terms of an epistemology is key you know it can it be relied upon can can a similar person use the same reasoning to come to a different conclusion how how would they evaluate their conclusion but again i want to really stress it's not persuading it's not convincing i've never tried to to convince anybody. Really, I've just asked targeted questions. And I found, so this is really interesting. So I found that overall Christians love to engage those questions, but go to talks,

we'd go out afterwards for drinks and beers and hang out. And I'd had some very, very spirit to long hours of the morning. I have friends with many Christians. They disagree with me and they're very honest about it, but they never shied away from discussion or conversation. I don't want to say debate because that's not what this is almost the exact opposite of what this is you're not vested in winning in fact in the gorgias plato says it or sarkt he says you know um basically you um if you win you're the loser if someone changes your mind and then you're the winner because you get to discard a false belief oh absolutely that's a really in fact i made a note when you when you talk about that elsewhere that i mean that to me that's one of the biggest most convincing arguments in

favor of free speech that that I first really heard explained very coherently by Christopher Hitchens who said the real the real the real losers when you impede free speech are not the people whose speech you're impeding it's yourself because you don't have the opportunity to find that you might be wrong and so you're you know you're you're harming yourself as much as anyone else which is what's so sad about about this fixation of stopping people from talking now and we'll get to that this this will right idea that somehow which is cons idea harm you yeah right the notion that that something you don't agree with can harm you is just is uh is yeah but it's violence yeah yeah well that fact the fact that's

violence is delusional but the fact that it can so yeah so that that so then okay let me let me say you if you're not interested in in it's intriguing to me it's clear from as you know your next book which we'll talk about at some point if possible have it have impossible conversations The idea is actually to have a conversation. Yet the title for your first book was a manual for creating atheists. That sounds to me like you're interested in convincing and not so much in having it. Yeah, that was I wanted to, that was not my idea for the title. That was the publishers.

They always screw it up, don't they? Yeah, I wanted to make the title, uh, street epistemology. And he told me that if you put the word of epistemology in the title, forget sales. No one's ever going to buy it. Yeah. Probably, probably true. Probably true. by that but but it certainly sounds like the ideas to convince people and that wasn't its intent

it's no in the book it's pretty clear that's not the intent yeah yeah i mean and you know it's it i think that's what i i view i view science is all about too is it's really confronting your own misconceptions correct in fact there's a great deal of and you have this education degree so you may know this more than me but i know having looked at education in physics there's a great deal of of evidence and data suggesting the only way people learn anything is confronting their own misconceptions which is one of the reasons well that's what it means to that that's what it means to learn if you didn't confront your own misconceptions you just be parroting something back you you would exactly people would have had yeah you wouldn't have

had justified belief you would have just gotten lucky well it's not even that you don't even remember it uh uh uh you know what do you mean well i'll give you an example One of the great things about physics is people have lots of misconceptions so you can use them. And that's why I've used science fiction, too, like Star Trek. I'm a huge fan. I love your book, by the way. But thanks. But I'll give you an example.

So once I was, I'm going to try and talk less and listen more, but as one of the recommendations of your book. But I'll give you that example. So I was once actually speaking for a lot of leaders of the free world. And it was about nonsense. actually. I was talking about the value of nonsense. But I gave the example of Galileo, and I

took a piece of paper and a book, and I was about to drop, and I said, which will drop first? And these were, as I say, significant individuals who were political leaders. And they all said the book's going to go fall first. I dropped it, sure. Then I said, why? And what is amazing, or maybe not so amazing, is a lot of them, of course, parroted the fact that, well, the book's heavier.

Okay. But they had all learned in school. That wasn't the case. They'd all got taken, you know, some physics somewhere that, you know, Galileo said all things fall at the same rate. But they wrote that down and it didn't. So, so what I did is, I mean, I took a line from Galileo, the modern version. And this, a lot of people do this demonstration class. I took the paper and curled it up into a ball and that, which you can do. And then you drop it and it falls at the same rate as the book. And I'm reasonably certain that when they saw that, they would remember the result because it confronted their own misconceptions instead of being told at a blackboard Galileo said that all things fall out of constant rate.

So that's what I mean by by it. You remember, you internalize, you actually learned it by confronting your own misconception. When you learned it on the board and passed an exam by writing that down, you never really learned it. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I guess you could look at that in terms of education. I've always believed that in philosophy, you call it the feasibility, but in science, you call it disconformation. Or falsification, yeah, falseification, is to give people a tool set. We could talk about the difference between those, but that's...

Oh, I'd like to. Pedantic. Yeah. So you want to give people a tool set that in which that they can impose upon, on their thinking, but what's even more important than the tool set is to give them an attitude. You know, this is something I used to do. I used to take an egg. And as long as they're not the thin eggs, you know, if they have a reasonably thick shell.

And I would, at the time when I taught the windows could open, and then I would take the egg and hold it, hover it out of the window and it said, well, what would happen when I dropped this egg? And you have to make sure that you drop it on grass. You can't drop it on good grass. I'm good grass. You can't drop it on cement or it won't work. And everybody looked at me as if I were insane. I said, well, just articulated what would happen. And they say it will break.

But when you actually do that, the egg does not break. It bounces on it. Yeah, Buckminster Fuller designed the geodesic tones. But the purpose of that is to not, and I published a piece about this a few years ago, the purpose of that is not to induce complexity in people, which I think is an important distinction. It's to show people that a belief that they had is incorrect and how to test that belief. And what I think is really important to things is the attitudinal disposition that someone has, the idea that they should want to change their mind, the idea that that's a good thing,

and they have reliable mechanisms to do so. But, you know, I'm, I just turned 56, and I can tell you now from a lifetime of scholarship and study and writing about these issues, I am now convinced that the most important, the most significant, demonstrably significant way for people to change their minds is for them to think that it's a moral virtue to do so. Once people think that something's a moral virtue, it's very difficult to disabuse them of things. So if we can convince people that certain things, certain epistemological considerations are morally virtuous to do, like to engage ideas, to have free speech, because it's not enough that, like, you're right, it's not enough that they just memorize something or that they go, can go through wrote and give

it back on an exam, but they have to be not only open and willing to change their mind, but they have to think it's a good thing. It's a virtue. That's a fascinating. That's a fascinating. That's a fascinating idea and it really resonates you know again we can jump that'll cause us to jump to something that's much i think we'll hopefully we'll talk more later in the conversation but that is part of the problem with modern higher education is that people talk precisely the opposite that's a hundred percent got to change your that's correct and and professors go into the classroom being convinced that they have the right answers to moral questions testing in which they don't testing people on on those questions getting back the right answer so there's kind of a filtration system

and that's also penetrated uh journals upper tier journals less so in the sciences although now it's more with just the university of Tennessee or Knoxville someplace has diversity increasing number of schools and diversity requirements but we can get that we can get to that in a minute but the idea is then and then it's been institutionalized not to do that to not change your mind to know the right answers to the questions, to say the right things, to parrot the right things back. And then you're rewarded by publishing in journals who only accept certain articles that forward those narratives. And then you're rewarded in terms of promotion and tenure. And then so basically we've, I know that this must some of your listeners thinking, holy shit, this is super, I shouldn't have sworn.

Can I swear on the podcast? I know. Yeah, you can. This is sounding, this is sounding a little label. All right. We'll just, we'll just go leap it out. Let's go back. Like, holy moly. This is sounding really postmodernist. I didn't know that progression was a postmodernist. I'm not a postmodernist. I'm saying that this is a way that what people, it's an explanatory mechanisms for how organizations and institutions become ideologically captured. Okay. Now that's interesting me because you're, well, okay, we're going, we're segueing, but let's say, okay.

No, no, no, no, no, no, you raised industry point and I want to follow. with it rather than take you somewhere else for the moment. But you're suggesting that the cause to some extent of the of the problems of universities originates with the faculty. And that's intriguing to me because it's because I see I see it as originating from entitled children who it's multi-causal. I mean, I see encouraged by faculty and emboldened by faculty. and enabled by faculty who are hesitant to say, hey, you're just being, you're just being childish. No, no, it's, but it's, it's, it's colleges of education, which almost nobody talks about. I just releases something on my YouTube channel from Lyle Asher from Lewis and Clark, who just gives the

singularly the best explanation you've ever heard for how this happened. It's, uh, grievance studies departments. I mean, it's cultural tides. It's, I mean, there are so many factors at play. You, you, you, you can't just single out one and say that's causally responsible. I guess so. I certainly will get to grievance studies. I also, I wasn't going to say this, but it was interesting to me to have an education doctor because indeed I got involved with the College of Education. I'd avoided a few places, but my last university I did for, and for a while I was going to

like be involved with them in doing some grant proposals and programs. And then I realized that they don't have the slightest idea what education is. No, it's a sewer. It's a woke cesspool. It's not even, even 20 years ago, 15 years ago, it wasn't a woke cess pool, but it was, again, an indoctrination mill. Well, it was the scholarship, the level of scholarship was just so bad. It was just the whole point. And maybe, I'd never seen this before in physics, I have to say, but, you know, I was involved in writing a big grant proposal to try and change the way perhaps potentially science teaching was taught or whatever. But it turned out that unless you reference the correct stuff. studies unless you reference these studies, then you, that was the, that was the open door to be able to get in. And it wasn't saying, hold on, maybe we have to do something different. No way.

It was really kind of a, uh, uh, uh, well, that's that for me. Right. Well, that's how the, um, ideology entrenses itself, right. Yeah. Yeah. No, I was, because those journals participate in a narrative. And, and you, you won't get papers published in those journals unless you participate in that narrative. And you won't get tenure unless you have. published papers unless you have some now it's unless you have some exogenous characteristic or what have you but but you know but I have to say I'm gonna defend up till I mean go ahead up till now in any case that's why you

know that's why science is important not just because it helps the world but because as a process and way of thinking okay and it is and in my development as a physicist over 40 years It was the exact opposite in some sense. Obviously, you became more prominent by showing, by changing people's minds rather than, okay. Pause. Yeah.

Okay. Pause. That's why two things are extremely important. And then I'd like to linger on these for a minute. One is that peer review must remain blind. If it is not blind, the whole system is compromised. If you just look at someone because they have, okay. The other thing is, are you familiar with citation justice?

Well, tell me. I mean, I don't know the terminology, but I bet I've heard about it. Go on. So it's that you, is that authors forward the citations of people whose ancestors have been historically oppressed. Oh, I see. Mm-hmm. Okay. That's, I'm not, that's what I expected it was. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you can, a reasonable person can make a reasonable inference from citation justice. Justice. So, yeah, it goes by a few other names. But the process, well, the scientific method is, I don't know. know if perfect is the right word, but it's... It's like democracy. It may not be the best thing in the world, but it's compared to everything else.

It works. It works. The only way that you wouldn't, that you would know something better is that you would have to use the scientific method to figure out what it is. Like if I told you, I said, you know, I have this little plant here. And this plant makes predictions, et cetera. Well, then you'd impose the scientific method on that to see if that did what. I mean, there is no other way to do it. It is the only way. The scientific method is the only way of getting knowledge, I would argue.

And maybe that sounds strong, and I know people get really angry at me sometimes when I say that, but there's certainly no knowledge ever comes from revelation. It's the only way. Empirical knowledge is the only kind of knowledge there is, I would argue. Yeah, well, we can have that conversation. So we can have that conversation. We're going off in many directions. Yeah, we are. Yeah, I would argue that the Socratic method is the only way to develop moral knowledge. Because I do believe there's such a thing as a moral fact.

And I think that that built-in corrective mechanism that offers everyone the opportunity to weed out mistakes in their thinking, it's only found in the Socratic method. But isn't the Socratic method in some sense? what, I mean, subsumed in the scientific method, namely the hardest person, the easiest person to fool is yourself, is yourself, and so you constantly have to ask yourself questions, but isn't the Socratic method basically searching for empirical knowledge? I mean, I've read, you know, I was looking at, you know, several, one of the Socratic dialogues in your, in your newest book, in your last book on, on possible conversations. And, which took me back for for a while. And, and, and, and. and you know, because I used to read them, but it's really, it's really questioning someone and asking them, hold on, you have this belief, but isn't there evidence to the contrary?

Isn't there evidence to the contrary? So it's really kind of, or can't you think of evidence? You said this, but didn't you just say that? Doesn't this contradict that? Isn't that evidence? So it's really evidentially based in a sense, I would argue. And it's kind of, I mean, it's it's definitionally based in the youth of fro. They talk about piety and the republic. They talk about justice and the laws. But, you know, So, yeah, I think it's in different domains, the Socratic method. So you're a physicist, so I'll throw this out through this out. So many years ago, I was watching a little known show. I'm a science fiction fanatic. So I have watched literally, I don't think, I honestly don't think my wife tells me this is not something I should ever brag about. But I don't think you can name a show that I haven't watched in science fiction. Every day since I've been a kid, I've watched 30 minutes to 60 minutes of science.

fiction before I go to sleep at night. Like I've just, I have a little podcast on that anyway. Yeah, and I love it. I could talk about that endlessly. But anyway, I was watching a show a long time ago, Gene Rodenberry's Earth Final Conflict.

Really a terrible show. But one of the things that that was in it that was really interesting, they had this thing called the Synod. And the Synod were these race of advanced alien beings. And they were trying to figure something out there, having a deliberation. And I remember watching that. and thinking to myself,

there is no way that an advanced alien species would have a deliberation like that. And then I started thinking myself, okay, well, how would they deliberate? And then it just was a huge light bulb. Well, because I had been thinking about this for years before, but the way that they would deliberate

would be they would just ask each other incredibly good questions and then have a language that facilitates that. So it would be a form of embedded Socratic, It would have those conversations would have a, I would argue, not a strict Socratic structure because it would be like a skeleton that was fleshed out by other empirical sciences, psychology, et cetera. So they would ask themselves the best questions to try to falsify their hypotheses.

And embedded within that, it would have positive epistemological ambitions. So I think that if there were, and we can talk about that, because you know my position that there's no intelligent life. We're going to get to it. I promise you will get to. Okay. If they were, then that's how they would have to communicate. I can't think of any other way unless they had. But anyway, I'll pause there. Well, you know, I'm going to sound, I don't want to sing the praise. Well, that's what when at the, that's how physics has always been done for me. Physics was done for me. I mean, a lot of people think it's done by people sitting alone in a room doing equations. And that's not the way, at least not my experience. Because science is, is, is,

collaborative maybe not cooperative yeah but it was done by at the blackboard and and in my case it was you know shelley glashire yelling at me saying you're an idiot but but it was you know it was going back and forth and asking and trying to ask the right questions to get to push the next person forward and vice versa right and that's that's when science is being done well that's the way that's what science is all about it's a it's exactly that kind of now the the other thing that isn't part of what you said and i think that's because you're a philosopher is you're not just asking questions of each other because you're bound to be diluted in the end you're asking questions in nature too if you lock if you locked all those people in a room they'd come up with

the craziest nonsense you know if they could never look outside the window yeah that's cast on stint sensing has something like that so i want to talk about that because that's so important. And so I published a piece in the Philosopher's Magazine. And this is from, to take off on chapter eight, I think, I think it's chapter eight of Schmer's, why people believe weird things. And why do smart people believe weird things? Smart people believe weird things because they're better at rationalizing. They're better at coming up with good reasons for bad conclusions. Philosophers are trained in that. And this absolutely infuriated my colleagues when I published this. which I'll talk about in a second.

Truly, they lost their minds. When you get groups of smart people together and they don't tether their conclusions to reality, to an empirical reality, then they're not gatekeepers of reason. They're mouthpieces of the dominant moral orthodoxy. In this case, social justice, wokeism, et cetera. And that's one of the reasons why we've seen intellectual capture,

because we have horsepower of, for example, people in philosophy departments who are externally motivated through promotion, tenure, et cetera, and their livelihoods, to create really good arguments for totally asinine ideas. And that's one of the things we see happening. So I want to say one more thing. Instead of, you know, the rules of your where if someone published a piece that you didn't like, well, then you publish a piece refuting it. Ideally, it would be in the same journal, but that's, that's of secondary consideration. You would publish, we no longer, in the new orthodoxy, we no longer play by those rules. So, so that's out. Instead, you, you threaten them, you bring them up on charges from the diversity office.

You do all these other things that are not in alignment with the rules of engagement. But that's the basic idea of when you get, that's why intellectual diversity, that's one of the many reasons why intellectual diversity is so important because that Feynman quote that you said, you know, the easiest person to fool is yourself. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's funny because you know that one of the problems, one of the bits of trouble I've gotten sometimes is when I say things and I put the word theologians and philosophers in the same sentence and both get up and both get upset. But that was my first example. You know, because the philosopher types I know are people that I, you know,

whoever, have an empirical bent. So we like, yeah, like Dennett. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But for me, it was a revelation to see. I was once on a panel back at Yale, the 100th anniversary of some lecturership. And I was with theologians. I was the only atheist, obviously. And I was shocked and amazed at how these people who were obviously intelligent, but ignorant, but intelligent could produce the most incredible. epicycle within epicycle arguments to justify the reality of of religious nonsense. And I was amazed at how well they did it, but they were able to produce these complex arguments to justify which something on the surface seems just nonsensical. Yeah, philosophers do the same thing. Yeah, I'd never seen that because I maybe because I hadn't, except, I mean, except something I'd

discounted. I mean, when I taught a yell, it was the height of deconstructionism and and Yale's the worst of the worst at the moment. Yeah, well, the physics was, it was a good allegory. Physics was up on the hill and science hill and philosophy was down below. So it was, but you know, we, but we used to say, and I've written this, we used to laugh and smirk and feel smug and saying, that virus will never infect science and then now what's looking at what happened. We'll get there. Okay, so yeah, I guess we've done it. Your moving from inmates to religion was a sort of positive. I view two competing aspects of your activities.

One are positive, which is to sort of promote things, and one is negative, not that you're negative, but to try to dispel bad things. Correct. And so, so, trying to attack religious falsehoods or at least get people to think about them as one area. But before we go to the sort of more negative, this book, How to Have a Possible Conversation, is really the epitome of how to be, you know, I was trying to think of, I read it,

and I kept saying, I kept seeing all the things you do wrong. I kept saying, well, I do this wrong, I do that wrong. In fact, in every podcast, I probably, even though those aren't a possible, conversations. I keep noticing in my podcast all the things I'm violating in your rules. Because I want to talk about your rules, but it seemed to me that if I were going to characterize at least a fair fraction of that book, it would be just be gracious, kind, and generous. And which is what my wife tells me all the time as a way to try to be better. And it seems to me in a conversation, that does encompass a lot of a lot of the

rules. I want to, you know, you have different levels. You have fundamentals, beginners, advanced, and I don't want to go into all that unless, you know, we could have, we could do a whole, whole podcast on that. But, but you do start the book by saying beliefs can change. And I want to, I want to give me, well, of course, but what's your evidence for that? Well, there's a whole word for it's called apostasy. Yes. Okay. Right. So, so we know that people change, for example, their religious beliefs. People change their beliefs all the time. I mean, so my introductory classes, I would say to students, okay, think, so these are 18 to 21 or 22 year olds. Occasionally there are some older people, but think of a think, do you believe everything that you believe now? Did you believe that five years ago?

Did you have any changes of mind? Go back five years ago. Go back before that and think of things that you believe that you no longer believe. And it's amazing how many people will, say, yeah, yeah, I really believe a lot of things that are different. And I'll say, okay, so extrapolate out from that five years or now, do you think you'll change your mind? Most people, the overwhelming majority of people will say yes. And if you don't, then you can ask them to put, this is in the book to, you know, scale. Scales is one of the most important things that I've come up with. I just, I love it. I use it all the time. So you can ask them to rate their, what percentage of their beliefs are true, what percentage, and then you could break it down by domain.

But we know people change their beliefs all the time. I've probably changed my beliefs in the last year about pretty significant things. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I, so good. I'm glad I framed that. Obviously, people change beliefs. But I want to be, I want to, go ahead. Go ahead.

Go on that a little bit. And I've watched us, you know, as we know, I've taught a few, few classes for, I've been in this, you know, you've had me speaking yourself. Yeah, thank you for doing that. Don't worry. But, you know, and the whole, and we've talked in those classes about changing beliefs because right because people never talk about atheism even or or science changing your beliefs about the universe but but it wasn't obviously people change their minds some people some people never do

some people change the beliefs but i guess the question i really want to say is is is how the whole point in the book is that by having impossible conversations yeah it's that people change their beliefs primarily because of conversations and that's what i was going to ask you have you asked your students, how many people change their beliefs because of conversations or because of internal conversations? I mean, external conversations with others versus seems to me that potentially it's the internal conversations that change much more belief than the external ones. But I wanted your evidence of that. I wanted to hear. Yeah. Well, I don't know how one, they're so connected. I don't know how one would do that

because the external conversations facilitate the internal conversations because then people start thinking about it and talking about it with engaging it. themselves and then they go back to the people usually. So there's a covariance in a reciprocity there. Well, yeah, I mean, you can be sparked by hearing something in a conversation and go back and think about it. That's the best part of me. That's what learning is too.

I mean, I always say in lectures, the lecture itself is an important. It's going back later and thinking about it that really is the part of learning and that takes place in universities. Yeah, but go ahead. But it's, I guess you have a lot, I noticed the book has a ton of footnotes and references at the third of the book. I know a ton. And I didn't read those in the audio book.

I know. And no, no, I know. And, you know, and I'm always skeptical of authority, but or appealing to authority. But the question I was going to have is you give all these rules, which, which are make eminent sense. And, and I'm, and I'm sure you quote studies. But personally, what personal evidence that you have, do you have that these rules work is what? I mean, it's an antagonistic question. No, no, that's a, you can ask me any question you want.

That's a great question. So when I published my first book, I think in 2013 that I wanted to call Street Epistemology, now there are literally tens of thousands of people who, and they've refined it, many of these people are much better at this than I am. And you can see these videos online, excuse me, read Nice Wonder, Anthony Magna Boscow, Pine Creek, They do street epistemology and you can see people change their mind in real time or people will come back to those people and say, you know, hey, we had this conversation. It really made me think I've changed my mind. So that was the impetus.

And I want to offer something to your listeners. There's a simple technique that I talk about in the book. This is not part of the Socratic method. And again, to use what I said before, I look at the Socratic method as a skeleton that ought to be fleshed out by the latest. data and evidence from various hosh's negotiations, applied epistemology, etc.

Cult exiting. So one question that we talk about, so there's a template. If you follow the template, you can see anybody who follows the template will see the results immediately. You know, you build report.

I'm always worried about that. It sounds like a diet, commercial. No, well, you, after you do it, you know, 10, 15 times, then you can play with it or what have you. But when you,

first start just be just strictly adhere to the template you know you build rapport you listen you you repeat back to someone let's let me read them let me read the early template i mean because i was going to go through there's nine there's seven there's seven uh yeah the seven fundamentals of good conversations you call it being one is to know the goals of the conversation i wanted to spend maybe two minutes in each or let one minute each wow this is a goal podcast well okay yeah well you know it is indeed i okay it's not this is is not just fluff, you know. Anyway,

goals, partnership, build, view conversations as partnerships, which I think is very important, build a rapport, listen, then you say,

shoot the messenger, which we'll talk about, know your intentions, and walk away. So let's go through each of them in 30 seconds. I was looking for the book, but I don't have it. It doesn't matter.

I wrote it so it doesn't matter. I don't remember a lot of what I've written, so it's okay. Go ahead. Okay, so goals, you know your purpose. So basically there is it's it's very helpful to people if they know why they're in a conversation.

What do they want to get out of it? And if that changes, that's fine. But you should have some kind of intentionality. If it's just, you know, for me right now with you, it's just to have a good conversation. We're just shooting, you know, I'm not, I don't need to do anything. It's really raising my public profile, whatever. I'm interested in this conversation for people who listen to this to get more out of it than they would have Googling. or Wikipedia, et cetera.

So that's my goal in this conversation. So I've clarified that to begin with. But you can change your goal at any time. Maybe I don't think this conversation will be antagonistic. But if it is, I'll try to de-escalate it. And then so people can model that if they want to do it. So it's always a good idea to have a goal in mind, even if that goal changes. Okay.

It wasn't just to see me. No, no. No, though it's nice to talk to you again. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Then the second is partnership, which is really an important one. View conversations not as adverse,

the person you're having a conversation with not as an adversary, but as an adversary, I should say, but as a as a partner. You want to go into that? Yeah, that's part of the problem is that people look at those with whom they're having a conversation as adversaries in terms of instead of partners. That's a lot of the mistakes that we have now.

And most people are just trying to, either they're trying to figure stuff out or they're completely convinced that they know something. And then even in any case, in all but the most absolutely extreme cases, and maybe even in those cases, viewing a conversation, the person with whom you're speaking as a partner rather than adversary will produce better outcomes. Absolutely. And there was, and I made a note to myself that one of the ways you can think of your conversation partner as a partner, not as an adversary, is to think about what you can learn from them, which is actually. very helpful for me when I think about when I when I have these conversations and that and what what you can learn and how you can change your own views because of that

that's why I wrote the note Hitchens because that's where I was going to point out that yeah that's where conversations can be most important because you can change your own views and by not by not having the conversation by saying this person's an idiot I refuse to talk them you lose the opportunity to learn so thinking that you can learn from everyone is important and you know what sometimes I have to say in my own experience and I'm even older than you. Even such a thing as possible. A lot older actually, but it took me a long time to realize maybe because I've been

involved in academia so long and it's such a pompous thing to realize that there's not a single conversation I had with anybody that I haven't been able to learn from. You can learn from anybody. And you know, instead of having this a feat attitude that someone has to be of a certain, you know, whatever, intellectual character or whatever. And it takes a long time to realize that... The other thing that you can learn is that you learn that there are patterns of thought that emerge in people. So you learn that there are patterns of fallacious reasoning that emerge.

But you also realize that people who speak English, who live in the same culture, you can extract commonalities from those. And then as you have future conversations, you can use what you learn. I was in a cab or Uber once. and I had a really interesting conversation with someone, my driver, about Nipsey Hustle, long story. But that I knew that I would use that later on. So I filed that and that's probably come up in four conversations now. And I almost every time people are totally blown away when I talked about Nipsey Hustle.

But that's just a fact. That's different from a process of reasoning that people use. And that to me is what's interesting. All right, let's whip through the rest of them. Okay, okay. Rappore, which is, and that's building a process. And you know, one of the aspects that that I'm going to, you know, I'm trying, I, I got to try to be honest, self, you know, whatever, whatever. That really impacted me.

And when I thought of the things I do wrong and I and I recognize it wrong is don't have a parallel conversation. That's, I can't even, okay. And I can't spend an hour on this. You know, I do that so much. You know, someone in your example is so perfect. Someone says they've been to Cuba and talk to you. And then your response is, oh, I've been to Cuba. Here's what I did. And I'm guilty of that far too much.

know and and but but instead instead of saying that saying oh what was your experience of like what did you learn and and again i my wife is so is so much better at that because that she can ask questions and she instead of interjecting her own experience as as and and it's something it's very important and you and it makes the conversation so much more productive yeah yeah parallel talk is one thing report the bigger the golf the more rapport you need and we talk about exactly how That's why also, just parenthetically, the push that we have now to break people into ever finer categories, you know, oh, this person's black or Jewish or whatever. Yeah.

Wheelchair. We should be doing exactly the opposite. We should be looking for superordinate identities where we go up. You know, what commonalities do we have? Something else that you can do is never ask someone what they do for work. Ask them what they do for fun, right? So find things that you like. maybe they like your father, they're a father, grandfather, whatever you are a friend, boy,

you live in this city, you like science fiction, you like jiu-tizu, whatever it is that they, whatever commonalities. But the rapport building is absolutely indispensable. Anthony Magna Boscow is incredibly good at that. And yes, okay. And now the next thing, indicating that hopefully I've been listening is to listen and to listen, not talk, which is I have to say, you know, a lot of people are always criticize that they think I'm talking too much in these things. I try to have a conversation, but to listen to what the person's saying, and that means really listen, not just listen and be prepared to say something in response, but to listen to what they're actually saying. Yeah, and there

are techniques and tools that you can use, you know, minimal encourages. That's from hostage negotiation where you repeat the last few words. Rap reports first and second rule where you say, you know, put the burden of understanding on yourself, am I understanding this, and then repeat back what you think you heard. And we, I think we give like 20 or so rules in there. Okay, but that's an important one. Um, the, we'll go with last three quickly, shoot the messenger. Yeah, don't deliver messages. That's what most conversations turn into. And we talk about how to avoid that later. You know, you have a message. They have a message. Everyone has a message. Yeah. And, and, and yeah. Those are conversations. And just let me,

let me say, I'm letting you deliver your message here. So okay. All right. So feel free. All right. Intentions, intentions, which is different than goals, I guess, in a way. Yeah, people just assume that other people have bad intentions if they have different, especially now and this insane zeit guys. But they, so just assume that your conversation partner has better intentions than you think that they have. And then finally, I guess if you find they don't walk away. Yeah, you got to know when to walk away and you have to kind of have a gauge of when it's no longer safe to be in a conversation. That almost never happens to me, but it has happened on occasion and I haven't walked away. And we talk about how to do that. There's a good song about that

going when to hold them and when to fold them and when to walk away. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, you thought you'd catch it really. But yes, okay, Kenny Rogers. But knowing eventually when it's not going to, it's not going to, not going to be productive. And I think part of, but let me push back a little bit because that's really important. But part of the problem is that many of us take number seven and put it number one or two. Namely, it's quite easy to assess someone really early, early on and saying it's not worth having this conversation. Yeah. So that's not what that section is about.

That section is about as someone's become violent or there's a danger or a threat to you. Because some people will be just set off to insanity. Well, let me, let me, let me, let me be, Soccerty. he's here and say, well, that's nice, but what about people who think that hearing something that they disagree with is violence? Yeah, we talk about that in chapter six. You're skipping ahead. That's not an answer, but let's, okay, give me your answer. Okay, well, I can give you the answer. If someone, if someone thinks, I'll give you Socrates's response to that when they, they said he's not allowed to ask questions anymore. He said, why? Yeah, gross. Yeah. Yeah. Just a Socrates joke. I don't know how

of them there are. No, no, but I'm serious. You know, if you think you're being, if you think someone's going to be, it's threatening you, that's a personal perception. And I'm worried that, I mean, it's hard to think of that as objectively because we all have different senses of what's threatening. And nowadays, the big problem is people are threatened by everything. And so. Yeah. And they feel threatened by your immutable characteristics. If you're white cis, heteromail and my age, then you're in the worst possible category. So they won't even usually those people you actually have to worry about them even less because they won't even talk to you or look at you at all. They won't say anything to you. So I would argue that in some sense that seven walk away should be held really, really far down.

I mean, it should be suppressed as much as possible because it's a natural tendency, I think, of most of us to feel this person is either unworthy or antagonistic. And maybe we should, we should and that comes to intentions again. Okay, so that's when we, okay, so I have to jump ahead a little bit. So that's when we talk about scales, how confident are you the belief is true on a scale from say one to 10 with 10 being absolute unshakable confidence,

one being no possible way it's true, five being maybe seven being it's probably true. You know, many people will not have conversations with people who say 10. So they can walk away if they say 10. But once, if you follow the template, then you,

then you can figure out if you want to remain in the conversation anymore. I know friends of mine love it when people say 10. Other people are like, I'm not going to waste my time with this. Let me ask you finally. Okay. So there, I was, I kept asking myself, because we've had discussions and I've watched you and discussed with other people. And I, and as I say, I know myself, I fall, even though I try and think of these things,

I fall in many of these traps all the time when I have conversations. I do too. Well, I was going to ask you how, you know, you've written a book on this how how well do you follow it in your i mean how much when you have conversations do you find that that you can you can internalize it and you can step back or that your emotions overcome you are yeah i make mistakes all the time um i i just i just had a very heated conversation with someone two days ago someone who stopped talking to me i'm not going to go into details for that although they're they're kind of kind of interesting um and i started the conversation just by listening

to her and so she's i i don't i don't want to talk about what it is because they're legal considerations but i started off the conversation it's the the other plight of being a 56-year-old white hair or sexual man i have like 50 lawyers i have lawyers for everything um when you when you poke the hornet's nest in particular. But, you know, and I started off, I really listened to her and I genuinely listened to her. I repeated back to make sure I understood it. I built rapport even before I did that. And she was clearly not only upset, just I don't even know what the word would be.

She was just... Livid? No, it's kind of like a shaking internally. But anyway, but I managed to smooth it out. I did catch myself making several mistakes, you know, like butts or it's always good to end these things on a question, you know, at each interaction to end on a question. But so to the answer to your question, so that went well. But there have been other times where I have to kind of impose something on myself to just, so it's different. If you're trying to figure out what someone believes and they have an odious belief, there's a difference between that.

and if it's something personal about you, in which the subject has an emotional valence. So you have to kind of have an additional level of self-reflection and bringing it down again. So I think I'm pretty good, but I definitely notice myself making a lot of mistakes. And then I do the best that I can to try and correct those. Well, that's good if we can.

And I think, you know, that's the key thing, is to try and think. That's why this book's useful is, you know, it's all of us, after the fact we can ask ourselves, what we could have done better or whatever. But the reason I ask partly is because I know you personally, and you're kind of an energetic, in your face kind of person, which, of course, being in your face is sort of almost the antithesis of what you're talking about.

And so by nature, you tend to be in the face kind of person. I'm wondering how often you have to sort of step back and. Yeah, and I get a lot of switch languages on here. I get a lot of schisa from the people in the street epistemology. that's where you have to blow it no it's see i'm interrupting but but no no i know you don't mind people are going to complain i'll tell you i guarantee you but but but but but but uh but the street epistemology but that that's the again it was the next place i was going to go to because yeah you wanted to call that book street epistemology the first term i heard that term was from you and i mean and i think

you may have created but you've been involved in it more lately since since yeah that's right i step back from it because of the grievance study stuff yeah we're going to get to grievance studies but i want i want to i want to i want to hit if street epistemology because it seemed to me one example one video that you used did this video about reversing um the teaching and you asking questions and yeah the whole series about that of course when i yeah but i mean my experience of teaching is asking question but you did a whole need series but it seemed to me it began in a way which the one that you did at at Portland State, I guess, where you had that post, that sign up. I forget what it said. There are two genders.

There are two genders. If you wanted to start a conversation. There are only two genders. Yeah, there are only two genders. And your point was to get a conversation about that. But by putting that up, you raised people's tackles immediately and had to spend a huge amount of time stepping back. Was that in retrospect? I mean, I was intrigued by that because the few people you did manage to engage in conversations with, with, well, then you start asking the question and say, look, I'm not saying they're two-genitors. This is an assertion. Let's talk about it. But if you wanted to build a rapport and view it as a partnership, it seemed to me that that was potentially an unusual way to

begin such a, you know, you saw the people on the roof yelling at you because they're conditioned to think that you are some right-wing nut who's going around saying there are only two genders and we should blah, blah. And so it seemed to me that you were automatically putting them in a position of disliking you. Okay. So there's a lot there. Yeah. So briefly the in your face thing.

So yeah, I am more in your face. And I get grief from people who are regular practitioners of street epistemology all the time for that. And you can watch people who have criticisms of those. Anybody can watch these videos. Can you at least explain that since I referred to that video and I've seen it and other people may know, can you say the context of what I'm talking about and maybe and maybe. Yeah.

Okay. So we do my team and I have a nonprofit called National Progress Alliance. And our goals are to basically move the needle on the cultural madness right now, mostly, mostly on the left, although not exclusively on the left, to help people think about free speech and open inquiry as nonpartisan values. and a lot of what we do centers on the universities and the educational system, which we can get to later. So I did a nine or ten university tour around the country, and I was canceled at Berkeley,

although we managed to do that because the president who sponsored us kept threatening the administration with lawsuits. He was amazing. Those videos are up. I was canceled at Yale. I was canceled at Brown. It was canceled someplace else.

So we would go and we would, do a kind of street epistemology. It's called, well, it doesn't really have a name, but you put people, you make a likard scale. Strongly disagree, disagree, slightly disagree, neutral. I'm hearing an echo in my head. And up to strongly agree. And then you put people on the neutral line,

you read the claim, and then they step to a line. And then you engage in a form of Socratic questioning with them to see if they change. And if anybody changes anybody else's mind, if they change their own mind, and we encourage them to move along the line. So basically what you, and we will release the videos of that. I do this other thing that you haven't, that you don't see in that video and that, okay, before I go on, was that clear? Yeah, yeah, no, I think sort of clear. The echo thing was when bottom line is you put, you actually, there are actually physical lines you draw and people line up.

And the whole point is that there's a statement and people. you know, say whether they agree with it or disagree with it, and then there's a conversation. Correct. The problem is sometimes if the statement is, there are only two genders, and that's all people are. Okay, hold on. Hold on. Okay, we get a bill to there. Hold on.

Okay. So what you don't see, but we'll release videos about that, is that we ask people in the audience beforehand to come up on the board and write any claim they want down. And we tell them that we want them, which is the purpose of the whole tour, to be able to talk about things now to calibrate their beliefs to the evidence that they have in a way that they're not comfortable talking about it in their university classroom. So what they should be getting it out of an education, they're not, I'm attempting to give them some of that. And what you, so I use this thing, oh, you probably, you're a scientist, it's called the Delphi

technique. You know, it's a predictive model. I've published a piece about this. It's a predictive method for asking, it was originally used in, among people to make predict, predict, of certain technologies. You know, where do you think we'll be in 20 years, this technology? And then it goes through multiple iterations. But I do the same thing. I have a modified Delphi technique that I use with questions people produce. And so the audience votes on what questions that we're going to ask.

So I don't pick those questions. And rare occasions, I throw some questions on the board just so that to get the ball rolling, if you will, but I usually don't even do that. So the question that you saw, there are only two genders, we didn't come up with that. In fact, there are like six or seven questions. One is, one is about, is the earth overpopulated? I didn't come up with that. I don't come up with any of these.

I shouldn't say any. Maybe once in a blue moon is a question that I put on the board before him that people happen to vote on in that iterative process. But I don't come up with those questions. People come up with those questions. The people involved at that time or are people at an earlier time? And anybody can come up. And anybody, we will write literally any question on the board anybody wants.

Oh, so that question that they saw was result of an iterative process that had already occurred. That at Portland State, no, that was not. Most of them, so if they're in buildings, then we do the iterative process. If they're outside of buildings, then we usually ask people what claims they want to talk about. And then they'll throw out a claim. And then I'll refine the claim, you know, and sometimes if they throw out a question, I'll make it into a claim. but I don't choose those claims. So the bottom line is that their only two genders came from talking to people at that time

and then making a big sign. And there are six or seven others that we did that day. And those are all different claims, none of which I didn't come up with any of those. Okay. So, okay. But the interesting thing is that, of course, people from a distance only see the claim and don't know what you're doing. And so, you know. So what should you do in that question?

No, no. the look I said you say well what are you doing if you're interested at all yeah yeah exactly that's but but I guess the point is that if you if as you know if people feel they're being attacked they become defensive and so you know it was interesting to watch those people my natural inclination was to assume these people were closed-minded you know whatever and then some of them I realized well they'd been you know somewhere else and they were seeing someone who they thought was coming and evangelizing on campus like I've used to see in campus too, and you dismiss them or just say get off campus because you're annoying people.

I'm not sure that, yeah, I don't think that that's the most, that's a remarkable hermeneutic of charity. I don't think that's what was happening. In fact, I'm quite confident it was not what was happening. Okay, good. Well, I've tried to assume the best. Okay. Anyway, we've got about conversations.

Sorry, go on. No, it's good to assume the best of our people. Yeah, it's hard to do sometimes. But anyway, speaking of the best, so I've gotten that part of, you know, that part of this conversation, where I wanted to talk about ways of getting people to think about the things. But then, you know, going from inmates to religion to the conversations. And now I'm going to move, then you turn to sort of attacking another shibboleth. Religion was one and you'd make these statements that it's an unreliable epistemology,

which I agree with completely. The other shibboleth, which you then turn to, and I cannot talk to you without having a discussion, is grievance studies and gender studies and your experience and the fame and your hoaxes. Because that, those had a big impact on, on you and on your career as well. And your experience at Portland State, among other things. So in 2017, I've kind of talked about this to death, but okay. No, we know, it's only going to be, the good thing about this is we've been going for an hour and 20 minutes. This is a small part of the conversation, but I think it's an important part. Yeah, I mean, I figure that's what most people talk to you about almost uniquely.

But I think it's an important discussion to have because the context of what's happening in a broader sense now. I mean, one used to be able to make fun of certain disciplines because everyone realized they were just, not scholarship. And I think and and and and we even studies and to some extent gender studies are examples of these of these kind of disciplines and that will then of course that will provoke a lot of people the fact they said it. But you you and collaborators and colleagues some of whom I know decided to do to do this using a technique which I guess and correct me if I'm wrong and you will I know maybe it was inspired by Alan Sokol who did a famous directly yeah Alan Sokol did a famous

folks which I wrote about and talked about you know arguing that that that you could you that nonsense if you if you phrased it in the terms of you could if you if you took terms from advanced physics you could make a philosophical paper that was full of nonsense and it would be accepted and and he gave it you know and it was a great example, and it caused people, cause a lot of discussion. Now, you guys, you started this with a paper, which I think you wrote with James Lindsay, I don't know, but I think it was the conceptual penis as a social construct, in 2017, which, you know, anyone who parses those words realize this is nonsense, but of course, you did get it published, but it was in a low-impact journal.

Correct. And there was criticism of that eventually because people said, hey, well, any, you just have to pay the money. There's some journals, and it's true. There's some journals where if you pay the money, you'll get published. That's just the way it is. But then you follow it up with 20 hope people. Hold on, hold on. So the key at this juncture is critics said to us, this does simply does not do what you claim to do. This does not show that there's a problem in the literature. This is not. If you really wanted to show that, you need to do ABCDE, higher range. bank journals, more papers, et cetera, et cetera. So they gave us a roadmap.

And so I said, dude, let's do this. I mean, they've just literally given us the best gift we could possibly have. And he said, okay. So we did it. Yeah. So that's the point. Exactly what they wanted us to do. Literally exactly.

And, and there were 20 papers. And eventually it got, it got exposed because one paper called gender place and culture. In gender place and culture. What was it called? sorry it was it was in the that was the journal and look okay and it was the impact factor of that yeah and that's what was the paper do what was that time oh it's about uh the queer performativity and uh dog parks in portland that was the famous dog park queer cracker okay yeah yeah and anybody eventually it caused people to criticize enough that start people started to investigate it and the

wall street journal did investigation right yeah so that's so i think we had seven published or accepted We had seven, seven were published. We had 13, probably probably would have been published, I think 12. I mean, I can't remember. That's been some social scientists made that prediction. But we got better at writing these toward the end. And we really figured out the logic of this. And we immersed ourselves in this absolutely fully.

Like this was literally all I would do is read the grievance studies literature, morning, noon, and night. And you learn that the absolute, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, popcorn jargon that, you know, just salad, word salad. That's just these words that don't relate and they go out and the same. Okay. So, so it's, it's less the word salad and more that you need to forward certain ideas and just hammer them home.

And once you realize what ideas should be forwarded, then, you know, you're looking at the top journals in the field. You're looking at high pace or you're looking at, you know, you mentioned genderploculture. But it's fascinating to me, maybe this jumps ahead of a little. bit. But would anybody say, oh, wow, like, you know, we asked you to do this and you did it and maybe there's a problem here? No, what I see someone just pointed out to me the other day on Wikipedia, it's like low impact journals. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? These hypay, nobody would say, this is the lead feminist journal in the world in Playa. Okay, you want to

call that a low impact journal? Great. Take it out of everybody's promotion and tenure basket. Great. I'd love to see, I'd love to see Hypatia. deserve the ridicule it gets. No. I mean, so, so even after you did this, so that's like the disconfirmation criteria, the defeasibility criteria. We did exactly what they wanted us to do. And then they're changing, they're moving, they're not even moving the goalpost. They're just, they're just saying, you know, and then they're making a tax on me and, you know, they brought me up on charges, but I'm getting, you know, I know you're getting defensive about it. But my point was to say, the first one, the first one, the concept of penis was in a low-impact

journal. But then you proceeded to do, then you proceeded to do, publish these papers in significant journals and get rave reviews before the before they were I mean I was I loved one of these things someone said it was it was it was enlightening about the intersection between masculinity and anality I just right I mean I how could you write that so like a Woody Allen line I mean it's and and that you know it was important for feminist scholars and so um the significant contribution to the literature was one quotation yeah yeah yeah and and And so the question is, but some people have said, so I want to ask about your retrospective view of this. Obviously, you're going to attack a lot and it's natural to jump to a defense.

Some people have said that it just, it's, it's a hold on a second. I just want to say, it's not that I'm, yeah, I guess I'm a little defensive. It's just that it's just, it's just not true. Like the things that they're saying, they're just false. I know. And it's very frustrating. Like, yeah, it's, it's not like they're attacking me. for something I've done and then I'm refused no it's that they're attacking me for

something I didn't even do oh yeah I know I've been there done that so yeah I mean it's that's the most the worst part is when you didn't you know you just what are they they're creating a straw man and that they like and then there you know any but having said that what are your thoughts after the fact some people have said that that you know even the ones who well there are a lot of people who were mused by this and supportive of it because I do think it shows the lack of scholarship and silliness of a number of the assistance. But what they also said was that it actually may show the system works, that eventually

peer review will lead to discussion, which will eventually reveal things as nonsense. That's completely ridiculous. Okay. No, I read that. I read someone say that. Foundly false. Right. Well, I've thrown that out as a way to get you to respond to it.

Well, if that were the case, it wouldn't have been the Wall Street journalists and others who picked up on the piece, it would have been the reviewers. It would have been internally. The other thing is that there's a built-in prophylactic to prevent any form of discussion or any form of exposing this, the charlatanism. And that's the institutional review board. You could never have, so we should probably back up and say, and there are punitive mechanisms in place to prevent people who want to do this. Now that I'm not in the academy, I could, if I wanted to do this again, I will leave it at that. But, you know, they brought me a, on on three charges and it was a total kangaroo court you know falsifying data uh you know what one was

plagiarism i pled guilty by the way to their charge of plagiarism i plagiarized adolf hitler's mind comp and i said i'm i'm guilty and i said in that meeting repeatedly i have plagiarized out of hitler's mine comp i am guilty and they found me innocent of charges that they themselves brought up against me plagiarism and I pled guilty to it and they they would so yeah so the um there's a mechanism in place to because remember these are moral actors these these are not scientists trying to you know build a better small trap order these are people who are on a moral crusade and you say these are people who are you referring to the investigators or the journal or the investigators the investigators absolutely were on a moral crusade there's no question about these university

investigators are just, they're calling them investigators as an insult to the word investigator. Yeah, their offices in search of tasks and they need tasks and, and that their staff with people who are true believers. True believers, they believe exactly. They don't want to, they don't want to hear anything else. They know what the answer is in advance. It's not necessarily to have the questions. Yeah. Correct. And, you know, I can say that to you because you've experienced it. I've experienced it, but from people outside looking in, they must think we're paranoid. Yeah, yeah. But it's not it's happened to so many people right now.

but but even bracketing that aside so okay so what was your question like well my retrospective well you know I was gonna well what's your retrospective on it and then we can I was gonna go to your experience of Portland State but let's let's talk about your retrospective and maybe I'll include Portland State as part of it but yeah what would you do differently would you do anything differently or yeah I made a fatal mistake that I made an absolutely fatal mistake One of the fake researchers, we needed to give her a degree. And so I gave her a doctorate in feminist studies.

I should have given her a doctorate in gender studies. There are not many people who have doctorates in feminist studies. And so one of the journalists called around and found out that the person doesn't exist. And that was really the undoing of the whole project. And that was a huge mistake on my part. And I lament that. But anyway, we would have gotten more papers published. and we would have had time to put out videos explaining what the problem in the system is

and why it's leaking from the academy to the society. Because at the time that, now everybody knows that's the case. But at the time, that was the one major piece that was missing, that these corrupt bodies of scholarship are affecting public policy. And they're just, yeah, okay, so let me pause there and see if you have any questions. Well, you know, I love where you're going because each time you do it, you're hitting on something I want to touch in the right order. So exactly it is so you know gender studies yeah it's affecting public policy but that's moved to another area of so-called scholarship

which is really affecting public policy a lot more and that's critical race theory. Correct. Which may serve gender studies squared. Is that unfair to say or that's it? I've never thought about it like that. That's an interesting way to say it. Yeah, I mean so many people have done such wonderful work on critical race theory and that is these things are byproducts of the academy they're they've not only spilled out they're now um they're they're now not the only ascendant but dominant in oh they're dominant they're not the dominant not just society but in the academy in science organizations they they're they're they're one of these things where the assumptions are not questioned it's assumed to be correct and then we work from there it's just like

assuming God exists. Right. Right. So there's not even a possibility of it being false or wrong. And there are no conditions under which it could be falsified. It's not falsifiable. So if it's not falsifiable, it's not science. So if it's not science, what is it?

It's ideology. It's just being taught. It's just being, it's a moral value that there's an insanity right now. There are multiple insanities in the culture, some of which are competing with each others, others are not. Critical race theory. Anything, any, any department with studies in it is almost universally corrupted. Now, you know, it's a, go on, sorry.

No, go ahead. Well, that's from the book, by the way, when two people speak at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was thinking about it. I was going to, I remember that was that from the book. Oh, we say, no, you go. No, you go. It's like in Portland with that famous Portlandia thing where people are a four-way stop and no one ever wants to go. But the difference, so it's not falsifiable.

but it's even worse. I mean, string theory may not be falsifiable, but it's not critical race theory. I was thinking about Brian Greene's criticism of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but the difference is, well, there's two things. One, the difference is string theorists are actually looking, the honest, the string theorists are looking for a way to find it falsifiable.

So their goals are honest, but there's another big difference, although maybe it's not such a difference because people used to get kicked out of the academy for this too. But the big difference of critical race theory would always amaze me. It's exactly like the old witch trials is, if you do question it, then it's proof that it's true. That's that it's proof that you're racist. If you do question the assumption, it's like being a witch. You know, if you were thrown in the water and you drowned while you weren't a witch,

if you were a witch, if you were a witch and you'd be killed. So there's no winning. That's the Kafka trap. That's correct. Yeah. And that, to me, strikes me as perhaps the most insidious part of it is not just that it's it's dogma, that it's a secular religion, which it certainly is. By the way, I think I was the first person with Lindsay to come up with that idea,

and McWhorter and others ran with it and good for them. And we published a piece in All Think Privileges the Original Sin. And we talked about this as a religion. I think I was the first person, Andrew Doyle. Probably. I know I know. Yeah. And I think it's a common thing of great minds think a lot.

I remember before, because I didn't read a lot of literature, the first thing you heard of you with secular religion. I was under debate in Oxford on is everyone religious? And I and I and I came on the side saying yes because partly because if if everyone wasn't religious then we wouldn't need science, everyone automatically be a scientist. Yeah. But also that secular, that people just because people weren't religious in the true sense, they could be secular religious and that's correct. That's and that's become in some sense even more insidious because it is it is because now they've captured secular uh, organization. and institutions like the academy,

and they have institutionalized these ideas. That's the problem. These are not fringe ideas. They're not fringe theories. It's not only, you said, you know, DeAngelo's claim about white fragility, although I don't think you used the term white fragility. It's that that's been institutionalized.

So any kind of questioning of the orthodoxy means that you are part of the problem, and therefore we need to, you know, you need to go to training or you need to remediate that somehow or sign these papers or you need or go or leave leave yeah leave yeah leave now what do you have to say with this a good friend of mine has who we talked to said and and it should be obvious but isn't it unusual that all these university leaders heads of the National Academy of Sciences of the of the

of you know the editors of scientific journals all say are you know take heads of universities. Our university has been racist and we have to overcome it. But if they really believe that, shouldn't they resign? Yeah, that's what I've always said. And I put out a long time. One, be the quit and equity. Yeah. If you genuinely believe that, and I've put this out, on Twitter, it's a repeat. If you're a white, then you should resign. If you genuinely, the other thing is much less simple, excuse me, it's even simpler than that. If you actually believe that do away with legacy admissions but they don't it's the simplest thing in the world just do away with legacy emissions yeah i mean that's something i'd be in favor of of course well i would be in favor

of that too but you especially you know you talk about equity and and the generations of accumulated wealth and social capital and educational capital etc well then do but they don't do that so it tells it tells me that they don't believe that that's just it's verbal behavior it's virtue signaling is Which is the worst signaling is verbal behavior. They don't they don't actually believe it. So they themselves are part of the problem, which leads to my prediction. We are going to come. And I don't know.

It's obvious that this has an expiration date. I don't know when it is. We haven't talked about this at all. But we see, I guess you can make parallels to Tuskegee, we see the mutilation of genitals of children in under the guise of gender reaffirming, gender affirmation, et cetera. this is so utterly grotesque and monstrous. No sane person is going to be able to defend this practice and what happened in a few years from now. And we are going to look back in this,

and I'm going to predict you. You think you're smart. Don't think you're smart. Make predictions. We are going to see epic gaslighting. We are going to see unprecedented gaslighting. People say, I never believed that. I never went along.

I had nothing to do with it. That wasn't me because that's the only way that this can be. It's not even a rationalization of the thing. It has to be an abject outright denial of the horrors. And we have see something to a lesser extent now with diversity, equity, and inclusion. And again, as I've argued for years, people have been hoodwinked by these words. Like I can understand how a normal person on the street. It sounds good.

Yeah, it sounds great. It sounds great. I used to be, you know, when I was department chair and I would be 30 years ago, 20 years ago, trying to, you know, encourage those good words. And they are good words. They are, you know, well, maybe equality, but an equity. I was going to say equity. Yeah, yeah, I bet you didn't use equity.

But so get to get back to what we were talking about. So the same thing with the history, the trajectory, the, I don't know if it's an emerging theme, but one thing we've talked about is all of this stuff falls squarely within the domain of skepticism and how do we figure things out? How do we know what's true? in around 2012, I recognized it was a problem. I started asking people for evidence for, you know, what is the evidence of microaggressions, trigger warning, safe space, no, but no one had any evidence. People would get increasingly upset. And I would really be

conscious about how I asked the question. So in that sense, I wasn't an interface at all. I was just asking and sometimes in writing literally nothing, nothing. And it wasn't, nobody thought it was a problem that were institutionalizing these policies for which we have no evidence. And again, if someone's getting becoming upset with you for asking a question about a policy, what's the evidence of the policy, as opposed to just providing the evidence, you are not the problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's right. If they had a problem, they just present, if they had evidence, that they just present evidence, but they don't have any evidence.

Yeah, you know, and so they say exactly, that's, and it's just, you know, and that's what frustrates me the most as a scientist. I don't, you know, I'm used to the other disciplines that may be putting them down. But when I see science journals like Science Magazine making these statements that medicine is sexist or racist, I said, what's the evidence? Show me some evidence. Universities are for better or worse have been the most enlightened area in terms of, you know, racism and sexism, far more enlightened than the rest of the society early on. But they're the safest, they were the safest places to be instead of the opposite.

No, absolutely. Many people have repeatedly state that and, you know, what happened to Nicholas Christakis and Yale. Yeah, sure. And I think what's really important to understand in this conversation is that you and I are operating more or less within the same paradigm. Reason, evidence. I don't want to say scientific skepticism because that might be too narrow of a band. Skepticism, but what the scientific method is. I mean, yeah, scientific methods. That encompasses at all. Right. Okay. So for the people not operating under that paradigm, those, I don't even want to say,

because I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. Those ways of viewing reality are there themselves subjective. And they, and there are bodies and lines of literature on this. They seek to preserve the power. It's called privilege preserving epistemic pushback. They seek to preserve the power of those who advocate positions in alignment with them. So anyone who would use, for example, evidence, reason, epistemological rigor, all of those features are examples of people who participate in a reality in which their sole goal, whether they know it or not, is to preserve their position in the social hierarchy, to preserve their position. as white colonialist oppressors.

So that's the way that these people are thinking about the problem. You know, Aubrey Lloyd's famous, the master's tools cannot disable the master's house. The idea is that you can't use the very tools that created oppressive systems in hierarchies to disable those hierarchies. You need new tools. And in their case, you also need new epistemologies

like standpoint epistemology. You need new ways of overcoming oppression, not the old ways of evidence, reason, science. Yeah, these tools, which work, have become the enemy, absolutely. And unfortunately, I mean, as I say, as an defeat scientist, I watched this with amusement and scorn. Nothing amusing about it. No, no, exactly, because we could say,

oh, that was just the English department, you know, that. But now it's those same perceptions are being used in science. In fact, I just told you, this morning. I mean, I'm writing a piece. It's so ridiculous that in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, it was just a big meeting where they were, where some historian of science said, you're all racist and it's a racist thing. And so they've gotten rid of the word intelligence. You can't search for intelligence because apparently that is a is a white construct, as it was described in the meeting. And what that means is it shuts down the tools. You can't

use a tool at all. You can't listen or look. So that's the, okay, but this is what's crucial to understand. That's the goal. goal is to remove the tools of analysis because the tools themselves produce racist outcomes which perpetuates systems of inequality okay so yeah okay good great so let i want to i want to it's so disgusting i want to move away from this area in a second but i want to say because people ask me this too and it's an impossible answer but i'll ask you so what do we do oh that i think that's actually a far easier question than people think that it is okay uh i could spend an hour on this let's see if i can just give you the, I thought a lot about it too, so, okay.

Yeah, the first thing you have to do is to just, this is a very unsexy answer, but you just have to show up. Like if you have meetings, et cetera, like when you look at meetings of people who go to these, especially public meetings, they're only like 10, 15 people.

And they're the most radical fringe leftists, the most woke people imaginable. There's almost never anybody, any centrist or someone who says, hey, let's take another look at this. So show up. The second thing is, you know, Parahesia, speak truth in the face of danger.

And yeah, you'll lose your, I'm giving you the short version of this. Yeah, you'll lose your friendships, et cetera, but your life will be much better off. Third thing is you have to document, document, literally freaking everything. Document, document, videos are the gold standard. Make recordings, look at whatever the state law is, if there's a one party or two-party recording city, if I have to tell people that records. So obviously don't break the law. And then make those public, like Paul Rossi and others have done, because that

That's just that that's just the problem is that there's so much craziness. And let me just finish. And the most important thing by far is that we have to build new institutions. Like at this point, everyone, I hear all this. Oh, you know, how do we save this or this atrocity? You know, my very dear friend Joshua Katz, what they did to him at Princeton, absolute disgrace. I mean, utterly unmitigated disgrace. Just one example of many, many disgraces.

I mean, in his example, it was egregious. Like he spoke against the orthodoxy and then they came for him with a vengeance. Yeah, but we have to build new institutions. Yeah, I was going to get to the new institutions. I don't want to dwell on it because I know you want to mention you're awesome. But I was going to say what you're talking about is ways to what you can do about combating these local injustices or fringe groups. But what do we do about the fact that that it's embedded in. in every major institution of society from the,

from government now to scientific societies to academia. I mean, you know, you can't just, I can document, and I do, I write pieces saying, look what the National Academy of Sciences said, isn't this ridiculous, but, and it's, and of course, part of my purpose is that my, I say one of the things we can do is educate and publicize, but it's hard to know how to go beyond that.

Yeah, so this is a huge, I mean, this, I didn't screen. screaming about this since 2013, 2012. I've been to nobody, almost nobody listened. Now here we are. So, okay. All right. Well, now, well, you know, I know you don't do jiu-jitsu, but it's a little bit like, you know,

a rear-naked choke when someone is choking you out and you're about ready to go unconscious and then you say to your coach, hey, if someone has me in a rear-naked choke and I'm about to go unconscious, what do I do? Well, that's the wrong question. The right question is, what should you have done to not put yourself in a rear-naked choke? Okay. But right now, we're a little bit beyond that because we're in it.

Yeah, because we're in it. So I don't, I think that the way not to do this is to attempt to fix any institutions. I want them to burn. I don't think that any solution is, oh, you know, we got a free speech here. No, no, no. In fact, if anything, we need to accelerate the decline of the institutions. Yeah. I mean, that's one attitude.

It's an anarchist attitude to some extent. I wouldn't say it's an anarchist attitude at all. all because we're building, you know, and it's not, you know, Walston. So, look, we are building. I wasn't going to spend much time. We are building. Okay. So there's, so there's a new institution, which has been created with, with the goals of free

speech and all of the things we're talking about, University of Austin and raised a lot of money. You're involved in it. And the question. And so. There are many others, not just me. You know, I know. I know. I've talked.

I am. But I'm talking to you now. So you're involved. So. And so, and the, and look, I wrote, I had early on said, hey, this is great. What can I do to help if I, you know, I think it's important to create institutions. I happen to not think that they're going to, that it's in any way going to have a, it's going to replace Harvard or Stanford or Princeton or any of those places, certainly not in the present time. And nor I don't see a path for that.

But I'm almost positive. You're wrong. and I place a very high degree of confidence in that. Okay. It's great to have an alternative, or a seeming alternative. However, the really good scholars and all of... The really good scholars at the institutions I've just named

are working for truth, free speech, understanding, pushing progress, pushing the limits of knowledge forward. You know, the people, I know a lot of people of these institutions that I criticize, but the scholars that I know at them are all are all on board with what we're talking about because that's how they become successful scientists.

And therefore, therefore there's a lot of work going on at those institutions, real research, that is productive and good and, and moreover, the question is, how so University of Austin's read a lot of money it's got people like you and so and other people coming in not one living in Austin but coming in to give to give you know talks there spend two weeks and give a seminar that's not a university however correct yeah and and

unless unless people march move with their feet which means leaving their highly paid cushy positions at at elite universities where they are able for the most part to do what they want to do and they just ignore the nonsense around them, then it's not going to, then you're not going to create an alternative institution. Yeah. So I'm going to just to go ahead. I interrupt no, no. I'm being so much in the conversation. I'm being the, I'm being provocative. If you're in the devil's advocate, I want you to respond. Yeah, there's so much in the conversation. And I still have things from the other question you were asking, resident in the back of my mind, taking up some bandwidth. But, um, okay, just last week, two people from I,

Ivy League institutions, Joshua was not one of them, called me. And, well, one was from Ivy and the other one was from near Ivy called me and said, hey, how can I be involved in this? These people have known for years, or at least one of them known for years. You know, right after the school was announced on Barry Weiss's Substac, they got thousands, thousands of applications from tenured faculties from lead institutions. I got hundreds myself and I'm not even in the administration. There was no advertised position.

There was nothing. They've raised over $100 million, $550 acres of land. There's a clear need. People want this. People are sick of the shit that's going on. They don't want to, they just want something new. And I just want to be crystal clear. I think Ralston College is Stephen Blackwood's institution.

There are other institutions that are coming up. And I think all of those together, it's not just like this University of Austin. I think all of those together are only a good thing for the. educational landscape. You're right. So just think this is a thousand points of light. No doubt about it. This has been in one year, one year, 100,550 acres. They just, it just think a year ago they started this. A year ago, I was with the president hanging, having drinks of them. And so, so we just did the forbidden courses program. And these kids were amazing. I published something on my substack about an article. Every one of these kids, incredibly smart. The elite of the elite of the elite. But not just,

and it was a completely merit-based system. No exogenous characters. Boom. What is your merit? And then they looked at that, you know, can you write, what the essays, et cetera. Race was not a consideration. Gender was not a consideration,

sexual orientation. None of the things that shouldn't be considerations were considerations. And it was a remarkable, it was an extraordinary experience. Neil Ferguson taught there, our mutual friend, Ian taught there. You see, I think it,

I'm sure it was a great experience. And I view it as a fantastic. fantastic summer school. That's a fantastic summer school educational experience. And it'll be interesting to see. It'll be interesting to see. And I look, I hope it flourishes. And I do think of thousand points of light. I mean, I became involved in a in a college in London, which was their first liberal arts college because it was it was a small school that was going to be based on Socratic method. And moreover, all of the humanity students had to listen to scientists like me talk about the scientific method. and I thought, well, this is a great example to do it.

So I think lots of different examples are good. I just, I suspect it's not, it'll be, it will be interesting to see if it changed. Because eventually you see the problem is once it becomes the university, there's going to have to be tenure and promotion decisions. There's going to have to be HR departments. I don't think there's going to be tenure. Okay. And that'll be an interesting thing to see if it changes.

Yeah. So if higher education could function without tenure will be an interesting thing to see. Yeah. Six months ago or maybe five months ago, I was in a meeting with a bunch of other people, Glenn Lauer, a bunch of people with their public folks and non-public folks. And we discuss, okay, so we're building an institution from nothing. What do we do? What are the entrance requirements? Do we have SATs?

Do we have writing samples? Is there promotion? How do we promote? Do we promote? Is there tenure? Are we going to have a basketball court? Are we going to have a wrestling around? So we're literally building this from scratch, but to use a phrase, I'm sure you're familiar with.

we're building off of the shoulders of giants. So we're looking at what's work, what's effective, and how do we make sure that that commitment to truth and free speech is there? So 2024, the institution will be going online, not online, up and running, so shall we say. I wasn't going to spend a lot of time on it. Look, I think, as I say, I applauded at the minute I saw it. I talked to IAN and others and you.

And I'm all in favor of the goals. and but I'm not sure I'm in favor of destroying the existing stuff but but that's the well but that's the other thing that's the other thing you don't you don't it's not binary you don't have to do that I just my I said that because I okay so I don't really care what the old institutions do the legacy institutions do them I just don't care and I also just at this point I just don't care about any criticism of these things I'm building something sure somebody can sit and bemoan and criticize all they want. You can try to fix a system that's clearly broken. That time would be far better invested, not trying to do that, but coming on board and

building new things, making something meaningful, making something worthwhile, that from the get go, it is committed to truth. Yeah, but okay, I agree. I agree with you completely. As a philosopher, I think it's important. As a young physicist, I'd say what you want to do is go to, is do the best physics you can do and and and and and there are clear places to go and do it and those and because you can you can isolate yourself to some extent no longer because of of a lot of the rules that are being developed but um but uh you want to do the best research you can do and teaching is a part of it and um and and that should be your goal as a young scientist go where you can do the best science and and and and and by the way,

interestingly enough, which is amazing to me, but I wrote about this a while ago, there's an example at least I know of, of one young scientist from Australia who went to China, which is not exactly a place for free speech and enlightenment, but said, hey,

I'm able to do my science much better here because in the laboratories, you don't worry about all these other, you know, woke issues. So yeah, it's a dictatorship. It's a, but hey,

I can do better science here. So it's interesting question. They have different, they have different heresies over there. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, okay, well, look, I wanted to have that discussion. But it took time about from other things I wanted to talk to you about. So we're going to go long, a little longer than I plan. But I want to now move.

So we covered most of what I wanted to do in that regard. But now I want to quickly, all things reconsidered. What is that? Okay. So did you used to listen to NPR? Of course. So all things consider, no, I listen to NPR and I was on it a lot. So okay.

Okay. Back in the old days, I used to do that kind of stuff. Okay, okay. So, okay. Do you have a moment where you just stop listening to NPR? Was there just something or was it a gradual for you? That's an interesting question. It maybe was gradual, although it was also a moment.

I mean, it was just changing lifestyle where I thought, stop yeah yeah I guess I stopped I like listening to music more than talk in the radio so I started but but I think it was the question of um yeah I know where you're getting so why do you why don't you well uh so the conservatives want to defund and PRO and by the way just I just have to discharge this because it's in my mind you know I wanted to say you know what should be done about this when you asked me that question I just want to get this out because it's just like it's interfering with my thinking okay sure The solution to this, these problems are not to vote for right-wing extremism.

Yeah. That's not the solution. The solution is not to go to the far right for this. The solution is to keep a moral center. And, you know, I'm a classical liberal broadly. And just to come back to those principles without their being an extremist on the other. And to make sure that liberalism is classical liberalism, not not extremist left stuff. That's correct.

Yeah. That's correct. And similarly, the solution to. ideological capture of the far left of our academic institutions is not to build a right-wing academic institution. That's actually making the problem worse. Okay, so now back to all things reconsidered. So I don't want NPR defined. I'm not a conservative. I know everyone calls me a Nazi and a conservative and a moron. I'm not at all. I hardly ever call you those things. said everyone.

Yeah, they don't want NPR defunded, but I want an NPR defunded, but I want an NPR that we can trust that all people can, people can listen to. There's so much disinformation, misinformation, poor journalism. I just want some, a place, you know, I used to love NPR, and I used to donate to NPR. And it's become something horrible. It's ideologically captured. It pushes certain narratives. So I decided to do something about it with money for my nonprofit and I have a um show called all things reconsidered and it starts with testimonials uh of people who used to be former listeners to NPR that's the framing and then it goes to someone we have someone who used to to work at affiliate stations affiliated with NPR and she gives a

five to 10 minute setting something up or explanation of something kind of behind the scenes it's called morning sedition and then a very good friend. of mine who's his book is forthcoming called The Gift of Violence. He's one of the first crop of American Jiu-Jitsu black belts. He's a Connemar Gregor's coach. I don't know if that means anything to, but he and I do an analysis. This is a five episode. First series is five episode of various NPR stories that are insane. And we talk about them and we analyze them like here's a question they should have asked, et cetera. One thing I've learned from doing this that's so, I've listened to you hundreds of hours of NPR so you don't have to.

One thing beside the brain damage is that I've listened to is that I've learned is if they want to, so they'll interview people, softball questions, it's not data driven, it's almost purely ideological, but they'll always ask somebody on the other side of the aisle what the argument is for their opponents. So they'll ask left-wing woke people what their arguments about guns or walls or immigration or whatever it is, as opposed to actually asking people who believe those things. It's fascinating. And almost invariably, they're mischaracterizations, their caricatures of what people actually believe. And I would like the reform of NPR. But, you know, actually, I have to say you resonate with me because there's a, the one NPR program I used to listen to actually because I was involved in it was, I used to a lot of science Friday.

And it used to be a great, it was a great science program. And now it's sort of half of it. Yeah, no, I have a Flato. But now it's just like woke half the time. And it's, yeah, it's terrible. It's terrible. A real disappointment to me. And it is.

That's what it is. It's a disappointment. And I don't want it defunded. I just, I want it to have some integrity. Yeah. Yeah. That's what we're doing. Okay.

Now, go ahead. Now, now I want to move from from the subcommittee. to the ridiculous or actually from the ridiculous to the sublime is actually truly I want to talk about two bits of philosophy to end this okay one I want to give you a chance now to really demonstrate how long you are anyway let's talk about life elsewhere in the universe okay okay I promise you I promise you and I know we've had this conversation oh yeah we have had this conversation met me and what was the second thing you wanted to talk about oh I want to talk about some classical philosophy I want to talk about infinite regress I want to end this conversation on a really high note, which is really a philosophical, we began a little bit of philosophy. I want to end with philosophy. So those are the two things we're going to do. All right.

That sounds good. So as you know, we've had this conversation. I actually think we had this conversation in the airport in Portland as well. Yeah. I am a little self-conscious. I had this conversation with Brian Keating, our mutual friend a little while ago, a little self-conscious because, okay, but I'll throw out there.

I don't think there's intelligent life. Certainly, well, I don't think there's intelligent life, and I absolutely don't think there's intelligent space fearing life anywhere in the universe. I don't even think there's another celled organism anywhere. Yeah, I know. And that's a perfectly reasonable postulate. Is it really?

Wow, I'm surprised that you're reasonable. Okay. No, no, no. I mean, it's a priori, we don't have any knowledge one way or another. So the question is, what arguments do you have to support it? I point out, once again, that we're going to stop looking for intelligence anymore. because then he's going to stop looking for intelligence because it's so you know it's now a white supremacist concept but

right so we may not know the answer but but what's i mean what i would argue i i i would argue um that i think it's it's a reasonable presumption i think it's false i think it's likely to be false i can't say it's false but what are your arguments well well let me let me let me say so if if and i'm just maybe this is cheating but i'm going back from a previous conversation you You say it's false because you think the distances are so great. Is that the bottom line? Oh, I mean, you mean, you think it's false because we haven't heard from anyone. Is that why you're saying?

Well, the Fermi paradox, yeah. Well, hold on, but we let's step back for people they not have heard the fairing paradox. Fermi paradox makes he said if they're out there, how come they haven't, we, we don't, they haven't visited us or know. Yeah, where is everybody? Because you, if you actually took the time it takes to, you know, potentially visit another planet, colonize, and then move on. And if you're in sole purpose in life was colonized in the galaxy, it could have been, you argued, one could have been colonized by now and therefore we should see it everywhere. Anyway, so go on. Sorry, I'm waiting in focus here. No. So is your question to me, what is my evidence for this belief?

Well, yeah, what's your evidence for this belief? Because I guess if I may ask you to ask me a previous question or I'll just say, state it. What is my confidence in the belief? My confidence is over 50% but not very much. Oh, that's appropriate. Yeah. I mean, let me let me say at the beginning that no one, any statement about life else were in the universe is a statement without evidence one way or another. It's a, it's a presumption based on on on very little, well, obviously no empirical evidence, except for the fact that we haven't heard anyone yet or seen anyone yet. Right. So you're making inferences from, you know, the Drake equation and you're filling those in with conservative estimates. And I've said the Drake equation isn't an equation. It's just a list of things are ignorant of.

Right. But it's a good list. Yeah, it's a good list. And even with the most conservative predictions, I was going to publish a paper year ago, write a paper. I don't know if you asked me about it, I think. Oh, about whether or not, yeah, whether or not that each stage of the Drake equation or you could look at new constants that have been added as, as, as, you ask me. cultural variables at the time, you know, when we were concerned about killing ourselves. Oh, interesting. A variable. Yeah. And then you can kind of mark so that that's really a marker for where how we think, where we

are in our society culturally at the time, what the variables and the Drake creation would be. Anyway. But you asked me, you know, why? Well, let me respond to your question and then you can respond back. But yeah, I mean, if you're asked me, yeah, there's lots of reasons I would think that you wouldn't have heard. I mean, the Fermi paradox is.

is not a problem for me. I, there are lots of ways. I mean, civilizations may not survive. Universe is a big place. Intelligent civilizations have no real need to communicate if they become a, and also there's no need to, I mean, my other argument is you could use the Fermi

paradox to ask why the world wasn't colonized way before it was if you asked, you know, how quickly could humans have propagated over the entire world. My bet is if you just use the laws of physics, you'd find out it was much quicker than it actually happened. Because the point is, I think people don't like to leave where they are until where they are is pretty miserable. And then they motivated. And so they can spend a fair amount of time in a nice place. But the basic argument is I step back and look at the probabilities and say, life evolved on earth about as soon as the laws of physics allowed

it to. what life required was was organic materials sunlight water those are ubiquitous everywhere we look there are 100 billion stars or so in our galaxy 100 billion solar systems 100 billion galaxies and so um unless we are unless there's some good evidence and some good argument for why we shouldn't be typical and there may be yeah there may be that's that's the other variable yeah there may be And I'm willing to accept there may be. There are lots of there are lots of precursors, you know, lots of things that had they been different,

we wouldn't have evolved. But, but, but, but unless someone could give me a definitive argument for why we are not typical, then my assumption is we are. That's all. But it's not based on anything. Yeah. Okay.

So that's, yeah, that, that's reasonable. And we, it would seem again, okay, well, the first is Carl Sagan's, Carl Sagan's comment, you know, we could have been the first. There's no way to know that either. But we've seen nothing. We've seen SETI has picked up nothing. There's been no Von Newman probes. And you would think that there'd be at least some von Neumann probes.

You would think that you would have seen some, I don't know what it would be. It is a big place and it's hard to find. It's really hard to find. Look, I'll give you the argument I gave me the physical Star Trek, which I think I gave there the first time years ago. And you may have read it, but obviously it didn't influence you. Um, the, the, uh, so you got to, if you're listening, what are you listening for? You know, I gave up watching TV a long time ago, but one of the reasons why, you know, I watch, you know, I watch online stuff, but regular TV.

One of the reasons was there were 200 channels. I never found what I was looking for, but by the, for the purpose. I'll give you a list of stuff to what. You should watch devs on Netflix. Yeah, no, no, no, we'll talk about that later. This week, by the way, in my podcast, as we're speaking, which will now date this, You can listen to my podcast to my, I'm talking to Alex Garland, the writer and director of Graf. So listen to the podcast. It's over just now. But anyway, but yeah, there's lots of good stuff to watch, but you can always find another way to watch it.

But the only, but what I'm saying is that commercial TV, I stopped watching because it was just hard to find what I wanted. And by the time I've founded this program was over. I'll give you a list, but back to the back. But also, so in the real universe is, you know, an infinite number of frequencies to, you have to figure out what you're going to do. and then there's you know then you have to figure out what's what signal you're going to give and all those things are reasons that I'm not higher than like 51% or what have you all those those are all counter examples or reasons why my belief could be disconfirmed it it I remember at the end of our the conclusion of our last conversation you shrugged your shoulders and like yeah you could

be right maybe I don't know I mean And I think that's the thing. We don't, we don't really know. I have long speculated, no, this is maybe maybe this will make me sound like a kook, but I have long speculated that the very model we're using of the universe is not accurate. So I even think thinking in terms in those terms is not correct. I have absolutely no evidence for that whatsoever. I have, you know, reasons that I've speculated about that I could attempt to articulate

but it would it would seem and again I'm not a physicist it would seem that there would be something and we have nothing and what is the reason we have nothing well a reasonable person could infer from that because we're alone that that's one possibility and yeah so then but you know but Carl Sagan also said Carl Sagan also said another favorite quote which probably didn't originate with him but you know but you know the quote maybe absolutely of evidence isn't evidence for absence. And so there are lots of, there are lots of plausible reasons why simple things like,

you know, it's hard for signals to propagate across the galaxy in certain bandwidths that we can detect on Earth. There's lots of, there's lot, we're just beginning. Correct. Process of listening. We're just, we're just beginning. And as a colleague of mine, in fact, I had a podcast with him, who's saying, no, you don't want to listen.

You want to look for optical signals. And so we may be looking, have been all of the work so far have been in the wrong remain. If you're actually rational, you really want to have, you know, like a flashlight and turn on and off. And so, yeah, I would, I would, but. Yeah, and there are eminent, eminent scientists like Avi Loeb. I know you disagree with him, but who believe that there is a high likelihood of visitation. Yeah, well, yeah, I'd say there's a, that's a set of measure. I mean, yeah, right, right.

But anyway. Yeah, so, so I just want to throw that out there. Because it's been something I've been thinking about since, since childhood. And there's certainly no necessity in it. I think we both agree to that. But anyway, I just want to. The good news is that we're going to, I mean, the really good news for me is that we're entering an age where we'll at least have some more empirical data. Because all of this talk is just talk.

And that's the part of the Drake equation. It's fun to think about. But we don't know anything. And as I've argued, you know, a lot of people talk about habitable. When someone says a planet is habitable, it doesn't mean it's habitable. And a lot of, and astrobiology is a field where there's lots of talk and not, a lot more talk than there is. Yeah. And people do that.

They ascribe higher confidence values to their speculations. Yeah, yeah. And so we certainly should be skeptical. And I think that, and obviously you are and I, and one should be. But I think the fundamental point is that we're going to have, we are, we have new tools, JWST and other things. We are going to be able to look at the atmospheres of planets. We'll get evidence, I think.

I mean, it would be, it would be shocking to me if there wasn't evidence for life elsewhere. But microbial life, I mean, it's just hard to imagine how you could have a root that didn't produce that. Yeah, and well, either we're the first or, as my speculation, I think our models are wrong. So there's something fundamentally off. We're really brains and vats or in a simulation or there's just something we can't even fathom. Okay. Well, that's always a possibility, but it's unlikely. Well, that's the thing is how do you ascribe likelihood to any of these?

That's part of the problem. I mean, the point is if there's no evidence whatsoever for it, it's probably not likely. And, and there's, but there's no evidence for any of this stuff. Well, you know, you can ask them, but look, you know, let's actually here's, this is a beautiful segue to the last topic. Oh, okay. The problem with the matrix theory that you have is the very thing that people miss about it. So we're in a simulation. Are the people who develop the simulation?

Are they in someone else's simulation? Is there infinite regress? So let's talk about inferrugress. I mean, that's the problem. Because if they're not in a simulation and they're more complex than us, then why would we assume that we couldn't arise naturally and not be in a simulation? Yeah, and just before we go to that, the idea would be you would then, so if you're trying to figure out if you're in a simulation,

then you would build a simulation and see if the creatures in the simulation could figure out how they figured out if they're in a simulation. You just run that billions and trillions of times in tandem. And then you'd, you know, you could do some cool stuff like technology, mine, your simulations. but you would then see how they figured it out and see if you could use that tool to figure it out. And then maybe they get the idea one of your many simulations and they do the same thing. And then so it's simulations all the way down. But the idea of turtles all the way down comes from broadly from Hinduism.

People have written about it. History of philosophy fiction wrote about in 1794, et cetera. It comes up. It comes up the infinite regress problem is fascinating. Our mutual friend, I think about him quite a bit. kind of a mentor to me, Victor Stinger. Vic and I had this, used to converse about this at length,

and I know that, I know that you, you both, you disagreed with each other, but I do want you know that he always spoke fondly about you. Oh, sure. Okay. Yeah, you disagree with people I admire. So it's okay. Yeah, yeah, he really liked you.

But, so it's taken as, so there's the epistemic regress and philosophy, which I don't really want to talk about, but I'm talking about the kind of the metaphysical, or the, I think it's an academic superstition, this idea that there can't be an infinite regress or turtles all the way down. You know, so Stenger in God in the multiverse

talks about this, you know, infinities all the way back, infinities all the way forward. But it's taken as a truism among academic philosophers that you cannot have an infinite regress. And it's always struck me as bizarre. I've always heard that without an artist. argument. And then every time I've asked anybody, even people who work in that, they've looked at me like I'm insane. Like it's just a given that you have to, you know, Hume talks about that a lot. And Christians, you know, you debated one of the Christians, William Lane Craig. He talks about, I think it's a Valenkin. He talks about, you know, the Big Bang, et cetera, et cetera. Dialogues concerning natural religion is when Hume talks about it. Russell talks about it and why I'm not a Christian, et cetera. But there's no, there's no, um, not only is there no reason. I know you might disagree with Schengen on their physics on this,

but let me just, let me give it in its most humble form. There's no reason to believe that there can't be an infinite regress. Yeah. See, this is the problem with philosophy. Exactly. You can't, I mean, to assume that it's just basis, okay, let's look for examples or possibilities of it, but to assume that the, I've often said, in fact, I've probably said it with Lane Craig, is that common sense doesn't mean anything. The world doesn't care if it makes sense to you. The world is the way it is. And so lots of things don't make sense.

Quantum mechanics doesn't make sense. You may not like it, but it exists. And so, in fact, Scheng was probably wrong about, well, I think he had some misconception about cosmology, but an infinite future seems to be likely. Potentially, if you wait long enough, an uncountable number of universes might be possible. And I like the most,

my favorite form of infinite regress, if you wish, which still is plausible, was Feynman's. Is there a theory of everything? There may not be a theory of everything. As you said, nature could be like an onion, and each, all you do is peel another layer and another layer and another

layer and it could go on forever. And that's fine. That doesn't mean, like Sisyphus, we should be smiling, as, as Kemi would say, because sure, maybe we'll never know everything, but each time we peel back a layer, hey, how How satisfying is that to reveal a hidden layer of reality?

Right. And so that I think is part of the problem in physics you seek a unified field theory. There may not be a unified field theory. There may not be a way to wed the realm of the very small. That's the other problem with quantum mechanics and gravity. Exactly. But we keep working. The point is we just keep working to see.

And the answer is we'll never know. by just thinking about it or by talking about it, we just got to work on and see if we can, because nature is going to be the ultimate arbiter of these things, not philosophers. Yeah, and it's amazing how many philosophers. And that's what I think what happens when you get in a community of people who don't understand the role evidence ought to play in belief formation. They don't understand. They haven't been trained to think like a scientist. They've been trained to think like philosophers, I think that that is perilous to us all. Well, you're right.

I think that it is perilous to us all. And people call it scientism, but I don't. I don't either. We all have to. The science is a process, not a discipline. And the scientific method is a process. And it's one that has to permeate all of society. Because all it is is asking questions, looking for evidence and testing, and

retesting and that should be the basis of public policy of our lives and our thinking and and it's not elite scientism to say that it's just it's just an expression of saying well you know if you detach yourself from reality you're going to come up with bad decisions I completely agree that's a great way for us on on such agreement is a great way for us to end this this as usual it's been enjoyable conversation and I hope other people found it as enjoyable as I have. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. And I'm going to come and visit you up there in Canada. Oh, good. Yeah, it's much nicer up here. It's Valhalla. Oh, I can't wait.

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 Originsproject Foundation.org