No Safe Spaces? | Prager and Carolla | The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - S4: E44

[Music] hi everybody i'm talking today with dennis prager who you might know from prageru he's a national syndicated radio talk show host heard on some 300 stations across america and around the world i'm also talking with adam corolla who's best known as a comedian actor radio personality television host and new york times best-selling author well back to dennis he is also the co-founder and president of prager university the largest conservative internet video site in the world with over a billion views per year 65 percent of which are by people under 35 years he's a new york times bestselling author as well of 10 books a biblical scholar with expertise in biblical hebrew the third volume of his five volume commentary on the torah the rational bible will be published in the summer of 2021 it's become the best-selling bible commentary in the country back to adam currently hosts the adam corolla show which holds the guinness book of world records for most downloaded podcast we're going to talk today about the movie that these two gentlemen were deeply involved in a documentary no safe spaces and the problems it's encountered in distribution and well we're going to range out from there into issues of free speech and perhaps beyond that as well so welcome guys thanks very much for for talking with me today dennis maybe you want to start do you want to talk a little bit about well about craig or you and also maybe about the movie no safe spaces about the documentary well one relationship of prageru and the movie that adam and i are in is the suppression of free speech i testified at the u.s senate two years ago on what they were doing to prageru videos it may be the single funniest thing on youtube except for anything adam corolla does and i'm not being cute adam carl is perhaps the funniest human being in the english language he might even be the funniest in any language i but i my ability to assess that is limited well i'm number four in urdu that's very impressive i was wondering exists that's the pakistani life well you want to crack the top five you better be familiar with that's great well you see what i mean jordan i have a big problem when i appear on stage with adam and that is i'm totally happy if he talks the whole time all i do is then do you know that this is not even answering your question but i just want to say this you'll get a kick out of it so adam and i have gone around the country doing uh doing events on stage and uh he he may not even know this uh but there are times during the event well i will say to myself dennis they're also paying you so you should speak i feel a moral obligation to talk but selfishly i just rather laugh because we all need laughter and anyway his his insights are just deep anyway uh so what i said was the funniest thing on youtube was this i i was at a senate subcommittee on the suppression of free speech uh testifying about what's happening to prageru where uh hundreds of our videos are placed on the restricted list meaning if you have a filter against pornography and violence you actually can't see the video so one of them was in fact one one that i had given i only give one tenth of the videos ninety percent of other people but i i have given a number of videos on the ten commandments for example and so senator ted cruz asked the representative of google why did you surp people could see this on youtube it is still there why did you uh why did you put mr prager's uh talk on on uh on the ten commandments on on the restricted list and the man looked at senator cruz and said because it mentions murder and i remember i remember humming the twilight zone theme because i i felt i had entered an alternate universe so what do you think the reason was dennis i mean obviously look that's got to be a bit of a pr nightmare for google to do something like that so it smacks of a certain degree of incompetence to begin with and i i like to hypothesize incompetence before malevolence so so why do you think it was censored that specifically and then why with regards to is it reasonable to call what's happening with prageru censorship and why do you think it's happening because well i'll tell you the the i'll answer the last one first and this will help you realize that i think there's more malevolence than incompetence there is never an instance in the history of the world and this is my field of study since i was in graduate school of columbia that's why i studied russian was to read pravda and visit the soviet union on multiple occasions and other and other communist countries there is no instance in world history that is since the russian revolution of the left gaining power and not suppressing speech liberals offer free speech conservatives are for free speech the left has never been for free speech okay so let me ask you a clarifying question there all right because you know i come i'm a canadian and i suppose along with the scandinavian countries were tilted a fair degree to the left compared to the us and so i mean freedom of speech is in reasonable shape in our countries those countries that i mentioned and so when you talk about the left tell me more specifically what you mean and how you would define that particular state because you're not talking about the democrats per se i can't imagine or perhaps you are the democrats used to be i was a democrat the democrats used to be liberal the democrats when i was a kid in the 70s nazis real nazis not people they just call nazis real nazis with swastikas demonstrated in in skokie illinois because a lot of jews lived there especially holocaust survivors it was a particularly vicious act and jewish groups the aclu liberal groups the democratic party all defended their right because in america anybody could say anything except yelp fire in a crowded theater that is no longer the position you you look you're why did you why did you get in trouble and you're right you're i've wondered about that for a long time okay so no well i'm if you're wondering i'm not you uh you said something the left didn't like that you were not going to be told by the government what pronoun you will use okay so let me out let me ask you another question so when i look at political surveys i see that there's a very limited number of people on the right that you could describe as extremists and there's a very limited number of people on the left who appear to support the more extremist leftist propositions and so i do believe that in some sense it's more difficult for people on the left to draw distinctions between acceptable leftist ideas than it is for people on the right i mean on the right you draw the line with claims of racial superiority on the left there's there's obviously trouble brewing on the extreme but defining exactly where it is and drawing a border around it is seems to me a relatively complex task and well you asked me why i got in trouble i mean i got in trouble because i said well i'm not sure where to draw the line but that particular law compelling speech with its implicit theory of identity that's gone too far as far as i'm concerned but you know the fact that that caused so much trouble i think is indication of the fact that it's difficult to draw the line and so well i'd be interested in both your comments about that well i i think you're on to something with the extreme part of the right wing party is pretty definable and i think most reasonable people agree that the farthest right um you know jews shooting laser beams into the into the sky and shooting down satellites or whatever crazy stuff comes out of q and on or sort of far right stuff racial things of that nature um i think we can all agree that that's pretty definable and that most people on the right will not cross that border uh and william buckley helped with that wouldn't you say i would but on the left i feel like there's a much greater sense of well we don't agree with aoc but we're not going to say anything about it or we're not going to define it or or the squad so there's a much more you know i live in california most everyone i work in hollywood everyone's on the left their thing is sort of like we don't like what gavin newsom is doing but he's still our guy and you know we'll go well that's part that's part of this difficulty with drawing borders like i've had conversations with democrats about the idea of equity for example which is a no-go zone as far as i'm concerned because of its connotations of equality of outcome but they insist generally speaking that most of the people who are using the term equity are really using it as a proxy for equality of opportunity they're lying to you they're lying they're flat out lying either to themselves or to you and and both are dangerous equity why if the if the word equity means equality why don't they use the word equality well that's right that's my argument doesn't mean equality well what do you think it means exactly i know what it means it means equality of outcome just exactly what you implied it meant that's okay so it means why do you think that's so toxic because it means standards don't matter it means results matter is there equity in the nba how many jews are in the nba how how many uh how many japanese are in the nba there's no there's no equity in the nba and there shouldn't be i only want the best basketball players and i want the best pilots and i want the best physicists and i want the best uh do you know that they they are dropping uh the the i follow music i conduct periodically i'm very into music so uh the new york times has advocated the dropping of the blind auditions for the new york philharmonic no longer shall you choose the best violinist or oboist you choose based on the color of the violinist or oboist that's equity okay so you have you're making two arguments about equity one is that it flies in the face of a rank order of value with regards to competence and it's predicated on uh distribution of equality by immutable characteristics like race and sex and gender perhaps sexual preference all these things that become part of the cultural context and that's equity and their the word is being used because it doesn't mean equality of opportunity which means a playing field that's open to everyone who strives forward and who are then chosen on the basis of their merit and how would you define merit just out of curiosity well i think i'm sorry dennis but i think i think the blind you know it's really hard to quantify certain things like who is the best oboist it's it's it's difficult but that's why you put the curtain up and you decide and you have experts listen you have experts listen it doesn't mean they're right it just means the only thing they're factoring in is the ability or the perceived ability of the oboist on the other side of the curtain and once you pull that curtain down you sort of bring everything into question okay so so you know if you're trying to hire someone in the u.s the laws are set up this way and and i know these laws quite well so if you want to hire someone you're bound by law first of all to do an analysis of the job requirements so you have to make a list of what competence means in that particular context so that's merit as defined by that job then you have to have to use the most reliable and valid test that's legally available that's to to to do this election or you can be or you're liable under the appropriate employment law so merit has this very specific definition it's it's sort of within occupations so you define it within an occupation and then you have to use a selection technique that is that assesses for that and that should be blind to immutable characteristics like race etc and i mean that's how the law was set up for years and now we see this situation where this is restorative justice that's the doctrine is that what we're seeing why do you have a problem with that exactly well i'll i'll give you an example in my mind um you know dennis brought up sports um i try to think why as human beings are we so attracted to sports like everyone loves sports but why does everyone love sports why is the ratings for the oscars plummeting every year in the ratings for the super bowl going up every year you know if you just looked at a chart of the super bowl starting in 1970 and the oscars starting in 1970s 70 the oscars i think out rated the super bowl but at a certain point the oscars have you know less than 10 million and the super bowl is always you know 40 50 million so what is that as human beings what are we responding to well what we're responding to is when we watch the super bowl we believe that the best players are on the field regardless of whether the entire defense of side of the ball is black or asian there's never or anything there's there's never been an instance of the owner's son starting on the defense or the coach's son starting on the defense now it doesn't mean these are it doesn't mean there's not a 12th guy who's on the bench who is actually better but it means in the coach's eye these are the 11 best players to put out on the defensive side of the ball and the offensive side of the ball and we never question it when you then watch the oscars and you see a lot of the diversity and a lot of the forced diversity you think to yourself are these really the best seven or eight films of the year or are we trying to conjugate some way to open it up for things that are better or different i should say than just the best film and once you start down that path i argue it's a very slippery slope we tune out we lose interest what's the big beef on the on the oscars best films every year it's like i didn't see half these things and where they were they really the best film and then i saw two of them and i didn't like them so you don't think we trust the selection process so i wanted to answer your question you said why do we like sports so much and that'll lead me to another question that maybe i can direct to you so i think dennis will find this interesting maybe he'll agree maybe he won't but the word sin is derived from the greek word hamartia which means to miss the mark and so it's an archery term and you know people are very very goal directed and what you see in sports is the assemblance of teams of excellence competing and cooperating because they're playing the same game so that's the cooperation to hit the target and every time someone excellent hits the target it's it inspires awe in the audience and that's why everybody leaps up sort of not even of their own accord right they're possessed by the spirit of the game and so there's something that's very very deep going on in a sports spectacle because we're all participating in the celebration of the team effort to to facilitate the ability of the individual to attain the goal and that's that runs through sports it's dramatized in a way that's not rationally criticizable and your point is if that's gerrymandered then people won't appreciate it anymore but here's the question i have for you why do you think that the the meritocracy of sport is so widely accepted and and not a subject of of public attack when there is a public assault on the idea of merit in almost every other domain why does sports get a get a pass so to speak i believe in sports we would all realize the absurdity if we tried to mess around with the meritocracy of it if you said there's not been enough jewish heavyweights in the last 30 years we need to get a jewish heavyweight and put them out there with tyson fury or whoever the current heavyweight belt holder is i think we would all understand the sort of bizarre nature of that and we all sort of inherently understand it wouldn't it wouldn't work or back to dennis's example if we took you know why do you think it's more obvious to us i think you might be right but i can't figure out exactly why we we seem to accept i mean people suffer for for the distinctiveness and athletic ability i mean it's a trope of many many american films you know there's the the boy who would like to make the football team but can't and it's painful and so we accept that that pain is real and it exists but we don't use that to justify an assault on the meritocracy of sport i just can't figure out why it's so self-evident you say it is but dennis you have any ideas about that well because it's more objective than subjective if you hit uh 40 home runs you're you're a great player we don't have 40 home runs in in almost any other area of life so uh so you think it's a measurement issue yes it is a measurement issue that's exactly right stats are the are the fans are crazy best baseball fans can tell you the batting average of the first baseman on the detroit tigers 12 years ago this is what they live for stats but there were no stats in much of life back to my overweight right so so well so that also means that the people who are criticizing our society for its for its power base say rather than its merit base they're partly led to that conclusion by the fact that the stats of life are not nearly as obvious as the stats in sports i would argue sorry for cutting you off dennis but i i would argue that in this particular case stats are on the other side so they go delta airlines has less than 14 african american pilots delta airlines employs less than six percent female pilots and less than one percent transgender so if you think about the stats we do love stats but they get used against us on the other side when they're constantly talking about you know police reform or the fire department is in a mostly hispanic neighborhood but yet the fire department doesn't represent the constituency of the of the group that it serves you know because it's only 13 latino they they do love stats but they love them from a different side of the equation right but exactly but those are not stats of excellence those are stats of of what jordan calls immutable characteristics right the stacks are easily measurable but yes that's what i was pointing out about sports but i believe that other stuff is measurable too i i believe that it is that unless unless one enters the world of the absurd which we have entered beethoven is greater than uh anybody composing music today uh is greater for that matter than any non-german composer who ever lived uh the greatest composers were overwhelmingly austrian and german so why do i care i only care about there being great music i'm a jew i know wagner was a rank anti-semite and hitler's hero and i love wagner's music i don't give i don't care when i listen to his music when i hear the ring or you know any of his other operas the the man was a genius so uh i don't assess assessed by that at the university of pennsylvania they took down the english department english department and an ivy league university took down shakespeare's picture because he was a white european male and they put up a a non-white lesbian uh instead not because of measurable excellence but because of immutable characteristics yeah well i guess adam's point is that it's easy for people to default into easily measurable statistics when the alternative measurement systems are somewhat obscure it's harder to rank order musicians by their quality i mean you could look at how often their pieces are played by major orchestras for example but you know you could make a case that that's a consequence of systemic prejudice as well so you have these stats that that signal immutable group membership that are pretty comprehensible and they lead people astray because they can't evaluate the broader context of excellence so easily i mean we have to look for cognitive biases right when we're trying to explain things as as i said before reaching for malevolence even though i'm perfectly willing to reach for malevolence when i think it's there so let's let's move back to no safety if you don't think it's malevolent what do you think is the is the justifiable reason for taking down shakespeare at an english department well that that that might be envy and resentment that could well be i mean i talked to somebody interesting recently paul rossi who is the new york teacher who stood up against the political correct incursion into the private school at grace church i it was and he talked about the attraction that post-modern theory held for him when he was an undergraduate and he said he really wanted to be a creative writer but he really didn't have the talent for it and so it was kind of annoying for him in some sense to be exposed to all these great authors because it represented the pinnacle that he couldn't scale and then when he was introduced to postmodern theory which critiqued all of these great authors as perhaps not great at all let's say it satisfied some vengeful and resentful resentful element of him i mean he grew out of that and was able to talk about it but i think that that's i think he made us a fair case and as i said i'm willing to identify malevolence but for me it's a last it's a last reach you know i look for cognitive biases and that sort of thing first and i mean i think too you look at so many people that are attracted to radical left ideas for example they're predominantly young people not only but predominantly and you know they're looking for a causal myth let's say they're looking for a myth and a causal explanation and it's fed to them it's not a surprise that they devour it some of that's malevolence because it gives them a target for their resentment and their anger but some of it's just ignorance they haven't been taught a more comprehensive viewpoint i mean you're trying to do that at least to some degree on prageru and you're having some success with young people as well which is quite interesting right i don't i don't charge the young people with malevolence i charge the the people teaching them with malevolence people who teach the 1612 narrative are malevolent they loathe the united states and this is their way of of uh destroying our society by by teaching young people that it was founded in order to preserve slavery it's a gargantuan lie and again i i just need to say this again uh i uh to the dismay of many of my fellow conservatives because i read comments on my pieces on the internet i'm interested in comments and uh many think i'm a fool or no they don't say naive for distinguishing between liberals and leftists but it's a huge distinction and the only way for the salvation of the west is to teach liberals that the left is their enemy and not the right that is that is the key task of all of us liberalism has nothing in common with leftism and it has everything in common with conservatism so what do you what do you think that liberalism and conservatism have in common where's the common ground speech let's begin with free speech the subject of this i i also think uh in intellectual honesty you know a couple of guys in this town who i know who are i wouldn't call them leftists but i call them democrats um and probably progressive who are also um liberal in a true sense are bill maher and attorney mark gargos uh they're both vote democrat but when subjects come up they're intellectually honest and you end up agreeing on quite a few things with these folks just because they're they're having intellectual honesty so you know they they they may be on the left when it comes to some social issues or maybe some border issues but they do understand governmental overreach and tyranny and oppression and things like that especially as it pertains to covet and they have an intellectual honesty a perfect intellectual honesty subject is israel versus palestine if you're on the left you have to side with palestine if you're liberal you can vote democrat be liberal and intellectually understand that israel's not the problem in that region and that's a pretty good yardstick i would say to measure liberal versus leftists um israel okay so dennis you're drawing the distinction between liberals and leftists in that sense the leftist that you're having the trouble with so here's a question for you so if the liberals and the conservatives uh have common ground um and they have the right behind them so to speak i mean the correct let's say the honesty and the whole weight of i wouldn't just say western civilization but the central civilizational tendency because i think it's a mistake to identify this reflexively with the west but in any case why is the why has the left become so attractive what are the liberals and conservatives doing wrong with regards to their the education of young people or to the marketing of their ideas i mean what's going on what's happened here all right you're right that's a very fair question uh i i did a research on the five embassies that showed that the black lives matter uh banner uh the u.s embassies around the world five that i that were identified one of them was the united kingdom the largest u.s embassy in the world and i looked up in each case to who the ambassador was i was curious who would put up what i consider a hate a hate uh group banner in front of the uh american embassy and it turns out fascinatingly that the uh uk uh we don't have an ambassador to the uk we have a charge a duffer the head of the embassy in the uk is a woman and in the wikipedia entry it noted in passing that her mother uh is on the board of the new york civil liberties union and i mentioned that on my radio show and i said you know leftists really do tend to uh perpetuate themselves better than we do the number of conservative parents with kids are on the left is far greater than the number of leftist parents with kids on the right but the reason is obvious the reason is they have everything they have kindergarten they have elementary school high school college university postgraduate the media sports late night television there is nothing that we have except independent voices like the three of us here and thank god others in addition to us that's the reason if the schools were all conservative then the leftist parents would have a very difficult time keeping their kids a leftist it's this is not funny you know when i talk to to left-leaning people in the united states they feel that they're on the defensive they feel that the right has more power they point more to state governments for example and it does seem to me as an outsider because i'm an outsider told of this that one of the things that does characterize the united states maybe more than any other country in the entire west perhaps not because there are there are there are countries that might be an exception is that there is a reasonably decent balance of power between the right and the left if you if you consider the totality of the system i mean you have democrat power federally but at a i'll make with all of the people who say that to you the following deal we'll give you state governments you give us elementary schools high schools and and graduate schools and universities and uh we'll make that let's make that you get we'll take the new york times make it conservative you can have all the state governments you want i think it's such a they live in in a deluded image of themselves and the world if that's what they believe oh you have state governments we have the new york times and cnn and the washington post and colombia and yale and harvard and stanford but you have state governments please so okay so that's interesting i mean you you believe that these educational institutions well you also included the new york times and i'm not going to dignify the new york times by calling it an educational institute but you believe that the educational institutions from kindergarten all the way up through the universities have the signal power in in in in the american culture you think that's a reasonable claim i'm not disputing it i'm asking you if that's what you believe how could it not be that's where your kids spend most of their waking hours well i mean it's you know go ahead asking sorry i think jordan's asking is it a foregone conclusion that all the universities and high schools and junior highs are left leaning 99 yet yeah well i i'd like i mean it's certainly it's it's certainly been something that's very disturbing to me i think the objective evidence supports the supposition that they're overwhelmingly left-leaning and it certainly seems to me that these critical ideas the idea sent especially that the the structure of the west is predicated on the arbitrary expression of power i think that's the most fundamental pathological claim that emanates from the west is that power is the fundamental human motivation and that our functional institutions are essentially predicated on the arbitrary expression of power i always think that people who say that are confessing more than they are accusing because most of the people i've seen who claim that seem to be perfectly willing to use power as their predominant mode of operation in the world i guess i would also ask you why is it that the story that power is the fundamental animating spirit of civilization let's say but we'll say western civilization just to keep it narrower why do you think that story has such resonance especially given well let's leave it at that i mean i have thoughts that also uh pertain to the schools because to me and then i'll i'll answer your question but i i'm i'm curious if what are the origins of of schools and and why or why to the left and not toward the right so if you've got a group and we've all done it where they go we want you to speak to a group of commercial property builders you know these guys do tenant improvement work and they do commercial work and they're real estate developers and engineers and architects and builders um you'd know who you were talking to i mean you know what their politics were just a small example uh in my spare time i like to race cars all the guys who show up to the track they basically have the same politics and the reason they have the same politics is because they live in a world where they have to prepare their car then they have to go out and execute it and they have to drive their car and it's a real meritocracy because someone's going to get the checkered flag and someone's going to come in last and they have a sort of collective mindset just like you know most people who run a small business have a sort of mindset they want less regulation and lower taxes and breaks and they tend to be republicans so what are we finding on school campuses well school who who is attracted to be a professor who's attracted to be a school teacher it really is a little slice of socialism here in the united states we're basically saying you get a job you don't get paid that much but you can never get fired you'll get tenure it'll be an easy life you'll never really have to hang your neck out or your shingle out there's no chance you're going to go bankrupt there's no chance you're going to be at the top and there's no chance you're going to be at the bottom you'll just sort of have a job forever so those are the people who are attracted to the profession nobody i know who's an entrepreneur is attracted to be a school teacher maybe later on after they've sold their third company and have you know more money than they can then they can count they want to go back in and teach them business classes or something like that but you're attracting people who have a little bit of a socialist bent or leaning just from the beginning versus folks who want to go into the military or folks who want to start their own small business now how long would it take for those people to start indoctrinating your kids i don't want to use a word that's that strong but it's essentially getting them to sort of think the way you think i use this example what if all teachers were vegetarians they said vegetarian how long before your kid came home for thanksgiving and said meat was murder it would be impossible for them not to sort of have that through osmosis or or beyond sort of push that agenda to your kids so it's gonna go this way it has to go this way because the campuses are inhabited with people who naturally lean toward that and lean away from the entrepreneurial spirit then once the kids graduate they end up at the new york times and now the new york times is the new york times so this shall continue in my in my opinion because it's at its fiber that's what it's based on i was talking to a group of canadian dissident academics yesterday and one of them janice fiamingo she's a former feminist former english professor and who uh abandoned her leftist ideology a number of years ago and has become a very vocal and articulate critic of leftist activism in academia she pointed out something quite interesting that's a bit different in terms of its causal pathway let's say in the universities you know back in the 60s women's studies was established and women's studies putatively was about women but perhaps it was mostly about critique of male dominance and so then perhaps it was particularly about critique of dominance and that idea got a toe hold in the universities and started out with women's studies but spread to the whole grievance studies industry and that's more or less taken over the administration and you know pushed its tentacles out into the rest of the faculties as well literature english literature in particular the humanities more generally the social sciences to some degree and now increasingly biology and physics it's not so much a temperamental argument you know as a structural argument that we we we set up an institution that was based on what would you say resentment and hatred at least to some degree and then that generalized across the disciplines well yes i agree fully with that i just want to go back to the question you posed about power you made you offered a throwaway line which i thought was uh utterly correct and insightful that when the left talks about power it's confession uh rather than accusation alone that is and here is a massive disadvantage to people who are conservative uh i'll use myself as an example only because i speak for many in this way i have been asked to run for office all of my public life and i actually once did file to run for senator of california and then i woke up uh a sober and and i don't even drink uh but it was uh it was a moment of non-sobriety in any event uh i've always said on the radio i am infinitely more interested in influence than power i have no interest in having power how distinguished them how to distinguish them yeah yes because i can't i can only influencing you is not the same as having power over you i cannot tell you uh uh that you uh must keep your your store closed and go out of business because of a virus i have i have no desire to have that power and i resent those who do and if you used your influence how would that did differ from the expression of power well power is coercive influence is not everybody well let's expound on that a little bit because this does get to this question see i'm staggered by the idea that a very large minority of the population now appears to believe that the guiding spirit of human civilization is the arbitrary expression of power rather than something like influence or or cooperation or negotiations the left cannot influence that's why they don't debate us i have had the number of leftists who have accepted invitations to my radio show in 35 years can be counted on the digits of your hands and feet i i even had howard zinn came on to my show i i have i've extended to i have said i will pay a thousand dollars to any new york times columnist other than brett stevens who comes on anyway uh to come on to my to come on to my show that i will travel anywhere to to debate them uh but it doesn't happen i'll pay ten thousand dollars to have any black leader debate larry elder they'll never do it they don't debate they because they're crappy at influence they're great at power and that's what they know power and so they would say you know they would say well you call it influence because that suits your moral that puts you in the moral high ground but you're a privileged person you're white you have a huge uh you have access to a huge media empire you can say what you want and you can talk to millions of people you call that influence but we call it power and part of it is because you didn't deserve what you have and that's a consequence of your privilege and i mean this isn't something i believe but so how do you explain oprah winfrey uh i i'm sorry did i are we still on well because jordan had to switch between the person that was trying to punch holes in your point and then back to himself so i don't think jordan knew how to reply in terms of should i reply as myself or the naysayer that it's uh well i could yeah i couldn't come up with an argument from the perspective i was trying to you know put forward i mean i think oprah winfrey was successful because she's credible and and remarkable that's that's my hypothesis but okay so so she's a token how about that she's a token yes she's a token so uh it's the the the number of black influencers in our societies don lemon the token i i mean it's it becomes an absurdity after a certain period of time anyway that's it's a non-sequitur whether or not i i have an advantage being white is a non-sequitur to the to the issue of i don't want power over other people we conservatives want to be left alone the left does not want to be left alone and they don't want to leave you alone i want to leave you alone except for the most obvious things you can't murder you can't steal etc but by and large we want to leave others alone i know they will raise abortion but if they don't acknowledge that abortion is at least a moral issue and and there is an issue whether it should be banned i fully acknowledge that but there is no issue about whether it is a moral issue they deny that it's even a moral issue that that the human fetus is uh is is worth less literally worth less than a hamster there are laws protecting hamsters there are no laws protecting the human fetus i mean it's so but but other than that they can't come up we don't we don't want to intervene in your life like they want to intervene in ours that is why the masks issue became one a political you would think it's just science by the way if we did follow the science the new england journal of medicine last year which nobody bothers quoting did say that they were essentially worthless outdoors and they weren't worth much indoors either then they went and said oh of course we weren't saying people shouldn't do it but they didn't take away their original case they want the mask issue is in large measure what conservatives think it is power not science well i think we fortunately in a in a bizarre way uh just lived through this experiment called covid19 you pretty much could divide the country into red states and blue states so if you just sort of looked at it as a as an experiment let's just see if we can remove the politics of sorts from it and even the disease itself or any knowledge we have of it of personal people who died or people got it or whatever it is if you it's if you just sort of looked at it more as a metaphor you take the country you take the blue states and how they reacted dennis and i are in california or you could have gretchen whitmer in michigan um she was telling the blue states were telling you don't go boating uh california arrested a guy who was paddle boarding alone in the pacific ocean i mean the footage is breathtaking it's literally a guy on a surfboard with a paddle standing alone nobody within yards maybe miles of him and a boat pulls up and they literally arrest the guy on the beach which obviously is much more dangerous than whatever it is he was doing alone but if you just said let's just do a little mine let's have a little experiment this disease showed up how did the how did the right leaning states act and how did the left-leaning states act well that's all you need to know i mean it doesn't need to be a virus it's the left snapped into action and started doing what they wanted to do which is control california's gavin newsom and mayor garcetti and all they all jumped into control because that's what they wanted to do it's almost like we all had those friends do you guys know if there's any data on death rates between red and left and red and blue states any reliable data because that'd be quite interesting yeah there is reliable data and uh you may recall that when texas dropped all of its uh mandates uh the president of the united states said it was neanderthal thinking and there was absolutely no spike in cases or deaths in texas nobody talks about it now because the president said something incredibly stupid but typically of the left they dismissed all uh all freedom-loving policies with regard to this particular disease we should have followed what sweden did i never thought in my life that i would use sweden as my moral model in western society but the world is not fully predictable but i think we have our answer as to which side wants more control because the outcome ended up being the same or in in many cases better for the for the red states so it had really nothing to do with science and it really didn't have anything to do with data it's just the left saw it as an opportunity to do what they want to do what they're inclined to do which is control and the right is dennis the argument that dennis made tried some things but they were trying to refrain from the sort of totalitarianity of of of what the left was doing which is which is total control so it was a little experiment we just went through it we got the results and i i think it's it's it's pretty self-evident at this point it is all right so let's go back to the movie if you don't mind we we took a large detour and it was worthwhile but you you tell us about tell us about no safe spaces first and then tell us about you know your your attempts to get it distributed or the attempts to get it distributed well i'll i'll start with the the movie and then dennis will go on to the uh attempts to be distributed um oh i actually wanted it to reverse okay well that's fine either way uh you know dennis and i are very different we have very different backgrounds but we do have common sense in common and i have found more and more and i'm assuming you guys feel the same way which is just finding someone with common sense seems to trump all the other characteristics that we're constantly talking about about you know where what region you're born in or who your team is or what color your skin is uh dennis and i always had common sense in common and we struck up a great friendship we've done many speaking engagements we've always had a great time in each other's company and so when the producers came to us with this idea uh i immediately jumped at it just because it selfishly seemed like we could spend a lot of time together talking about a subject that we're both pretty passionate about which is free speech and since the time we made this movie i i i i feel like things have gotten much worse i think the movie was a bit ahead of its time in terms of what it is the subject matter and now i feel like in just the three or four years since we started this free speech issue has gone into overdrive go ahead dennis yeah a word on the movie and then a word on the distribution i i've said from the beginning and i um i i'm neither arrogant nor humble i i i i just pretty much try to see myself in life objectively uh and i so i have said uh this is a great movie and it's not a great movie because i'm in it might be a great movie because adam is in it but the truth is it's a great movie and adam and i happen to be the quote-unquote stars but that's not the point of the movie uh i have watched this about five times i have the attention span of a child and so for something to keep me riveted five times uh speaks immensely about it it is it is it truly is an important movie it's more important today even than when it was made about free speech and it's gotten movies within the movies and anyway people should see it i'd like to point out too just just as an advertisement of sorts there's a canadian equivalent to that movie called better left unsaid that has faced the same sort of distribution problems that you guys have faced and it focuses on issues that are more germane to canada although also relevant to the us and so um well they deserve a note they did they deserve to mention so i'm glad you pointed out i happen to think that things are worse in canada than in the us uh but uh that's an interesting discussion for either another time or later on uh today so what was your impetus for making i'm in the movement of everything you spoke about the distribution yes yes netflix refused to distribute it uh uh to to stream it which is incredible given how popular the movie is okay so make a case for that like why okay so netflix should have been incentivized as as far as you're concerned by the fact that the movie was economically successful and there are other streaming agencies too online that are fairly powerful so amazon etc have you had any interest from any of the streaming agencies yes well it's interesting i don't know the i'll look up the amazon question i know that the walmart doesn't sell it in its stores they they have the same thing uh all you need really in in at netflix or walmart or any of these is one or two people who are awoke uh to tell uh you know we can't do this we're gonna get a bad name uh and and then you know what what is it to netflix not to listen to somebody says oh dennis prager we know we know for a fact that it was my name that was the trigger which is an interesting thing which i one day would be fascinating to discuss because whenever my name is is raised as this bugaboo i always say well can you say anything in 35 years of broadcasting 10 books literally 1 000 columns on the internet plus tens of thousands of hours of of the radio recorded say one thing that i have ever said that strikes you as extreme and so there's never an example this literally never the new york times did a piece on me they couldn't find one sentence they made up something in fact they said prager suggested and i always tell people if they don't say said don't believe the line suggested is the new york times not what i said and then they had no quotes but anyway i've had the same experience dennis you know i know of course you have i know that i can't find a thing you've ever said that is an ennobling i i love your work i wrote the prep i wrote the introduction to your biography i had uh i had this experience as well and then i have another thought which is uh i got into a lot of trouble and i got out of favor with critics because um it was widely said that adam corolla said women weren't funny now this is perfect and you guys have experienced a version of this i did an interview years ago and the person said at the end who's funnier men or women and i said well i think men are i think it's based on them trying to have sex essentially so they had to exercise that muscle a little bit but i know many female comedians that are funnier than anybody any guy ever went to high school with that then turned into adam carlos said women weren't funny and then they just ran with it and that's up there with that well look it's it's pretty credible what you say because my sense is is that there's been a couple of things i've said that have been blown up in the press you know and they were exaggerations of the sort that you're describing taken out of context i think that in the current climate if you've ever said anything reprehensible on public record that you will be slaughtered for it and so if you haven't been slaughtered for it the probability that you haven't said anything reprehensible is pretty damn high because people are combing over the the utterances of people like you trying to find a smoking pistol i don't know if you can comb over things to find a smoking pistol but i i will tell you another institution that's sort of been ruined and i think jordan was sort of getting to it and it sort of gets back to the oboe or the cello player for the new york philharmonic how do you say that one film is definitely definitively better than the other film you know it is subjective and or objective and and or subjective sorry but you are you know so a lot of the answers is sort of make a better film and you'll get in you'll get onto netflix or make a better film and you'll get into the sundance film festival so i've had five films all turned down from the from the sundance film festival now jordan the way jordan's mind is working is you're thinking well how but how do you know i mean they couldn't no i'm thinking why don't you organize your own damn conservatives but the the the the academic in you is thinking how do we define that and and as we spoke about earlier when the guy hits 40 home runs in a season that's definable and uh when the guy drains 14 three-pointers in a playoff game that's pretty definable but how do we do it with documentaries and there's a well you could you could make the case with your film that i mean it it had a reasonable success i i hope i've got this right it had reasonable success at the box office i mean it had enough success at the box office so it should have been economically interesting for a place like netflix or walmart uh agreed so another system that's sort of been corrupted is you used to be able to go on to the website rotten tomatoes and literally check the score of the film and it's not an exact science but you your film gets a score and my film gets a score and here it's pretty good it's a score and it's pretty good now if you look at no safe spaces uh the critics have it under 50 somewhere 46 and the audience has it at 99 and i would argue we now must remove the critics from the equation because the critics are so left and so woke that there's nothing you know dennis prager could make gone with the wind tomorrow and it would get under 50 on rotten tomatoes so they've screwed up their own they've corrupted their own system or sort of polluted their own system you must now go with the audience because there's two scores there's the critic score and then there's what the people thought and we now have to throw out the critics and by the way it's a two-way street one of the you know films that would be an oscar-nominated film that started starting a young gay black man who was struggling with his sexuality that'll be 96 with the critics and 65 with the people well you know that's a testable hypothesis you could rank order films by discrepancy between critics and audience and then rate them according to their political uh affiliation and you'd have the answer right there you could probably you know a good status tradition could do that in a day be a very interesting thing to do because you might be right in a date yeah yeah that's right you're right that's a great point jordan yeah it's very simple it's very simple it's it's not only what the theme of the film is it's does it have dennis prager's name on it take a look at the arc of clint eastwood directed films and watch how they shrank in the eyes of the critics over the years since he spoke to the um famously spoke to the bar the empty bar stool at the at the convention i know his film about the that featured the car and and the asian family next door which i really liked i mean that's got slammed for racism yeah gran torino even by some of the actors that were in it who i thought were extremely ungrateful that my personal opinion i thought that was a remarkably non-racist film i mean eastwood was played a character who was you know a standard conservative of the archie bunker type essentially but as he got to know his neighbors he placed his allegiance to them over that of his own family who he saw as becoming morally corrupt how in the world that's a racist film is absolutely beyond me but jordan i think you're not factoring in you're there's two factors there is what is the film and then who directed the film yes yes yes if that film was directed by mark ruffalo there would be no no issues he's a progressive actor dennis i know you don't know any actors you pick the actor that's on you know george clooney if george clooney directed gran torino it'd be 15 points higher percentage points higher with the critics that's that's my assertion mm-hmm and i think it'd be fun to do the statistical analysis maybe somebody listening could whip that up because a good graduate student in psychology could do that very quickly maybe i'll have my one of my people do that that would be fun so why were you motivated you guys to do no safe spaces and what exactly is it examining it's examining free speech which alone i mean first of all uh everybody involved in it all the directors the writers the producers were fantastic people people i i really admire and uh and adore and originally uh it was with me and then very early on they said would you like to do with adam corolla and uh i i don't know if your uh viewers are able to perceive this but we uh we really do adore each other and um uh respect each other and so the thought of doing this with adam was uh i was excited and it turned out that i had every reason to be excited it's a great chemistry that we have just to hear adam describe how different our backgrounds is is worth the price of admission which he does at most of the time when we go public adam why don't you give a brief review of how different our backgrounds are well first our similarities were both over six foot and that's where it ends uh dennis is you know a new york he's an east coast guy i grew up in north hollywood california dennis's scholar i was put on academic probation at a junior college um dennis likes uh symphonies i like prague rock uh he likes gefilte fish i like philly cheese steaks uh where does it end dennis uh well what about about the religious difference oh yes he's uh a very religious jew i'm essentially atheist slash pagan so there's uh again but you know the thing the thing i always find about uh dennis is an intellectual honesty and a pursuit of truth and again he's not interested in converting people he's interested in having a dialogue with people and and i don't know what i don't know what happened to that process it feels well i know what happened to it i mean let's let's examine that for a minute or two okay so first of all to have a dialogue you have to assume there are two people involved at minimum right dialogue and that there's a logos involved that there's a logic there that operates within each individual and between them and that they are of the sort that can be brought to a different standpoint a different understanding by the mutual exchange of verbal information and so you have to believe that there's an individual on both sides who has something unique to contribute and who can learn as a consequence of rational negotiation and that that dialogical process is the means to that and if you don't believe that there's an individual you believe that there's group identity and you don't believe that there's negotiation and good will in in that verbal exchange you only believe there's an exchange of power there's no dialogue and so that's why at least normally why the leftists that you describe the radicals won't debate with you i mean there's no debate you see it isn't the people on the liberals and the conservatives think that free speech exists the radical critics don't it isn't about whether or not there should be that free speech should be allowed it's deeper than that it's whether or not there is such a thing as free speech like you know when the when the critical race theorists and so forth say that this is a that they're offering a fundamental critique of western civilization i think the idea that it's western as i said is is somewhat an error but that it's a fundamental critique they mean that they mean all the way to the bottom and so one of the ideas that's being criticized is the idea of individuals the idea that we can have dialogue that there is logic that there is a logos that operates between people that's all on the table and that's why there's no reason for debate besides you don't have anything to say adam you're just an expression of your group and if you don't know that that's just your ignorance or perhaps your malevolence or your self-serving power something like that i mean this really is a fundamental critique yeah adam is a representative of construction workers that's right i'm a hard hat yeah i you're right you know i think there is a circling back to israel and the trials and tribulations i think we sort of make a mistake in in and we've run into this abroad with a lot of foreign policy is we assume they want what we want you know what i mean like everyone wants to live in peace everyone wants freedom everyone wants harmony and all we have to do is string together the right words in the right order and we could express that to them so we sort of treat it as if you're having an argument with your wife and she just doesn't understand that you really care about her and love her and so you will put that down on a greeting card and we will somehow write this ship or repair this but if she wants you dead then what is it that you could say to her that would ever remedy that well we could we could we could modify that slightly because i think you could say that it might be the case that the values that are put forward as central in the west explicitly are the most essential human values and that that's universal but that a dedicated minority in any place can put the boots to that pretty damn rapidly and so you know when when the foreign policy idea is well there is a desire for freedom that's part and parcel of the human spirit fair enough but how much opposition does that have to run into before it's impossible and the answer might be and i think it could well be that it doesn't have to run into that much opposition to be in jeopardy like a committed minority in a committed small minority can have a disproportionate effect i think there's evidence supporting that proposition i may have want to comment on as you did on what uh what adam said i was a student at the two institutes at the school of international affairs in graduate school at columbia the russian institute and the middle east institute i did hebrew arabic and russian so i want you to know that adam's analysis of the middle east was more cogent than all of my professors in the middle east institute at columbia he hit it the bullseye the staggering error of the naive that everybody wants the same thing and that's that's why for example uh i was taught the nonsense and i i talked about this on fox news two weeks ago and it sort of went viral uh that that the battle in the middle east i always knew was not about land if israel were the size of manhattan they would want to destroy it's not about land that art no no but every single professor at columbia said it was land the new york times says it's land they all say it's land you know it i know it and adam knows it it's that one side wants the other side dead that's it and that's because of religion because for uh for traditional islam there is no room for jewish or christian for that matter hegemony in the middle of the middle east period end of issue they want israel dead there is nothing israel israel withdrew from gaza and all they got was hamas let me ask you a quick question about that do you see any hope i mean israel has been negotiating somewhat more successfully with many countries in the middle east now than say 15 years ago is that true or not yes in large measure thanks to the man that is reviled by the left donald trump okay so you do think it's true why would you attribute it to trump because trump said i don't give a hoot about the palestinian radicals they are not the central issue in the middle east and as soon as the rest of the arab country saw that america was strong and not bowing to the most radical elements of islamic life they said you know what there's nothing israel is not all that bad frankly and we would like to do business with it okay so i'm going to ask a meta question here why do you guys think that that conflict got dragged into this conversation i mean the reason i'm asking that is because in that conflict everyone in the world their their their eyes are focused on it in a way that isn't true of any other conflict and it's certainly not a consequence of the number of people who are involved there's something magical about that conflict and that pertains to your statement that it's not about land it's about religion and maybe it's about even more than religion who knows or perhaps not but you know what what was that what was you think that called forth that conflict into this conversation he raised it when he was talking about the gulf between liberal and left he gave he to his credit raised the middle east as an example liberals were always pro-israel the left was always anti-israel and and and that's if you can't see the moral clarity of the middle east issue hamas primitives versus a modern liberal democracy called israel there's something wrong with your moral compass so why do you think the radical left is pro-palestine particularly why did they pick that i don't know anything about the region but i do sort of know what animates people um my feeling is and as as someone who grew up with a mother who was sort of this way and a grandmother who dabbled in communism a little bit um they want to push back against everything that is so it's it's more of an anarchist approach than it is here's my plan and they always no one can really say that out loud but it's it's more it's sort of like defunding so it's part of part of an revolution and revolution it's basically one house has a well-groomed lawn and a white picket fence and the other one has a sofa rotting on the lawn and a guy smoking weed standing on the porch and i only have one molotov cocktail what direction do i throw it it's always going to go toward the house with the white picket fence if these people are lighting them all yeah well one of one of the things i have noticed about when in my discussion with well-meaning people who tilt more to the left say than you guys is that they are genuine generally relatively unwilling to consider the role of dark emotions in political motivation right they tend to think things like well the people on the radical left their hearts in the right place but they're you know their means are wrong but what they're trying to do is to stand up for the oppressed however badly they're doing it and i think well i had this experience you can tell me what you think of this but it really it really i just re-encountered it i was looking at the discussion i had with slavo zizek a few years ago about marxism punitively that isn't really what the conversation ended up being about but i offered a 15-minute critique of the communist manifesto at the beginning and at one point i described it to the audience as a call to bloody violent revolution uh which is what it was and there were a lot of people in the audience disproportionate number for my audiences um who had come to see zizek kicked the slats out from underneath me and so there were a lot of people who were very far left in the audience and when i said call to bloody violent revolution a good fifth fifth of the audience cheered and laughed and i it stopped me in my tracks because it was quite chilling you know i heard the i heard the mob in that moment and you know it was a freudian moment freud noted that people often laughed at things that had deep psychological significance and also that you could express your true feelings when you were hidden in the crowd well the true feelings were well the communist manifesto who the hell cares about its rationality and its justification it's like it's a call for a violent revolution and ha ha hooray let's do it and i thought yeah you bastards you revealed yourself in that laugh and that chilling awful uh uh unconscious willfully blind malevolent glee at the notion of the picket fence burning down and the question is well what's generating that malevolence and the surface story is well you got that through ill-got means and so we're the right thing to do is to take it back and that goes along with the claim that power is the fundamental motivation what i can't understand is how the hell those of us who don't believe that have been so weak let's say that we allowed the educational institutions to be overtaken by people who are propounding that preposterous doctrine it's like what the hell's wrong with us conservatives and liberals alike i don't they know what did we do wrong well they know what they're doing in that they know everyone's achilles heel is a claim of power especially power that's ill-gotten you know your dad's rich now you're rich yeah yeah and then your grandfather was a landowner right and then race right so why do you think they weave race into every single subject it gets the other side to shut it up and you don't have to prove your point you just call everyone a racist and we can we can well yeah you put them on your heels right away right because if you're yelling about systemic racism and i object to it i'm instantly a racist it's so convenient but that still doesn't excuse our weakness in the face of that now dennis you put your finger on something you know you said the thing about conservatives is they like to be left alone well so maybe that makes conservatives particularly weak in the faces right in the face you see we we have fulfilled lives outside of power i am fulfilled uh in so many arenas having nothing to do with political power or running the board of education in my local district i am fulfilled by my religion i as you heard i'm religious i am fulfilled i i love america i love my judaism uh i love my family i love my friends i i have synagogue every week one that i i helped found i mean my life is so rich not to mention my music but theirs isn't their richness derives from political activism that is their raison d'etre and as and as adam pointed out that the term i use is chaos okay so let me let me bug you about that for a minute so i i have some sympathy with your argument i think there's empirical data if i remember correctly showing that the most unhappy people are left-leaning men right okay so but we'll leave leave that to the side really not left-leaning i think it's a tie so i can't remember the data well enough to cite it with perfect accuracy so but look so there's young people they go off to university and they're looking for this sense of involvement that you just described okay now the leftist propagandists who are teaching them let's say are appealing to that and offering them a kind of romantic adventure now that that matches their developmental need at that point that should be the point at which they're richly encultured by an intact myth something like that well the fact that that isn't being provided in a credible manner is what lays young people open to this kind of propaganda so it still takes me back to the failure of liberalism and right forgive me adam i i for just speaking again i i just i i just need to say i have warned about this i began lecturing at the age of 21 i have a very odd life and i remember telling audiences in my 20s you speaking to the my parents generation the world war ii generation you your motto was let's give the next generation everything we didn't have and specifically material a wealth of education and and and peace and uh the problem is you didn't give us what you did have i knew this in my 20s the my parents did give it to me it's not my parents but the the world war ii generation did not give their children americanism or christianity in any coherent manner and we are living the consequences okay so so justify that why why would you point to christianity for example dominant look i'm a jew but it's a dominant religion of the west and certainly of the united states if christianity look christianity failed in europe and we got nazism fascism and communism what's going to happen in america when christianity fails yeah well you know i've been talking to some of the people associated with the rational atheist movement and what i'm seeing there is some realization that whatever comes up to replace the religion that they decried is going to be a hell of a lot worse than the religion that they decried that's right and that it makes me think too you know go ahead and what we get is wearing mass outdoors and copious amounts of hand sanitizing uh even when it's unnecessary i mean that is right covert has taught us that this is the new religion it transcends science in in many cases uh guys i've got to jump off because i have to begin my podcast but um i thank you so much for having me jordan you had to make a pleasure talking to you and i i hope we can have you on my show is uh sooner than later because i always enjoy speaking to you and i'll leave it in the very capable hands of dennis prager now i'd i'd like that so let's arrange that okay i'd like to do that okay okay adam all right thanks adam thanks so let's go down the religious route a little bit and we still you know we still haven't talked about that the censorship that no safe spaces has faced i mean we touched on it a little bit with netflix and walmart well well that's the that's the dominant arena and obviously it's completely uh it's completely ignored by the mainstream media which review nonsense and this is not a nonsense film look i th the most important answer to all of this is for your copious number of viewers to actually watch it it's available online at so many vehicles no safe spaces just you know salem now i know my syndicator has it salemnow.com or nosafespaces.com or it's easy to find uh we have to there are conservative films that i watch uh out of out of duty uh this one is not out of duty this is out out of uh out of pleasure it it it is it is quite powerful so the the the only answer is to succeed without them but that what they have done to the film uh is not economically uh or certainly not morally justifiable and uh it gives you an idea although i i think you you have an idea of what of what we're living through uh today well it's funny that a free movie about free speech is having a hard time in fact you could probably you could hardly hope for a better outcome in some very you know uh perverse sense um just out of curiosity have you just what what would happen if you just placed it on youtube what would happen if we just that's an interesting i don't know the answer i would have to ask the the producers i i i only know the content more than more than that uh you mean just free just free free well it wouldn't just be free because you could monetize it through ads now that's not a tremendous way of generating revenue but it might be a way of it would also be interesting to see what would happen well look the truth is i mean they have to they're very honorable these guys i haven't gotten a penny just for the record i didn't do this for money to begin with i would have been happy to make money i'm not anti-money but i didn't do it for money i did it because i believe so strongly in the message and the greatness of the film uh but the their first thing was to repay the people who did invest in the film and and that's uh that's one economic constraint that can't be shaken so easily that's right it was an expensive it as people will see it is really well done but uh we're living uh uh i mean jordan we're just living in in in a different world i'll give you a great example you'll find this fascinating i was on bill maher's program uh i know you've been i was on uh a year and a half ago right before the lockdowns i never say by the way covert i always say lockdown uh and uh i was on on it october actually the lockdowns began in february or march so uh he was talking about how much donald trump lies and i and i said you know as much as you think he lies it doesn't compare to left-wing lies says really like what and this is by the way you could see this anyone could see this on youtube uh of my appearance on on his show so uh i said well for example that america's systemically racist that is one of the greatest lies in the history of the world in fact in my view i think it's not a lie i think it's an anti-truth because lies just slip by right an anti-truth is a lie that's so egregious that it's the opposite of what's true i love it i will cite you and i will always cite you i will never claim that i made it made up that term that's great so in fact you were like that what i have said and written uh i i taught jewish history at brooklyn college and i've written books on jewish history uh so i uh i have said that this is the greatest national lie libel since the bloodline the medieval blood libel for those of your viewers who don't know is uh when christians accused jews the middle ages of killing christian children to use their blood to bake matzah for passover which was equally evil and absurd massive numbers of jews were tortured to death as a result and the entire all of the jews of england were expelled from the whole country as a result of that libel the second greatest national libel in my opinion is that america is systemically racist america is the greatest attempt at non-racial uh multi-ethnic multi-racial country in the history of the world and one of them but you don't deny the existence of racism or prejudice obviously okay so why why do you have such trouble with the term systemic because systemic is is sort of like when barack obama said it's in the dna system right means that the system is geared to hurting blacks the system is not right so it's the central tendency the claim is systemic means central tendency yes exactly it's built in it's it's just that that's an anti-truth to use your term so okay so let me ask you a question from the side here for a sec okay i was looking at your work on the torah i've been thinking about this idea so the idea of systemic racism is the idea that the central animating principle of the united states is prejudicial and racist to the point of of enslavement that's the claim and it's it's an it's an analog of the claim that power is the fundamental motivation for human interaction at least at least under capitalist conditions let's say but i think it's even deeper than that and so now you've studied the torah in depths and i've i've been thinking and you also claim that the torah was was is the word of god i've got that right yes okay now is the ultimate author yes okay so i'm thinking of the the bible is actually a set of stories that was told across a very long period of time and they were looped together for for reasons that we don't exactly understand i'm not speaking as a religious person here precisely but there's a there's a voice there that's part of the central tendency of civilization and that's and it's not a voice that speaks of power that's right okay what does it speak of as far as you're concerned good and evil it's it speaks about a just god who wants us to be good it is it's it's almost to the point of sounding corny every every profound truth is corny you know i mean oh that's dull i'll live with that that's right that's what that's why okay so what does good what does what is the good that's represented in that book how would you define it because you wouldn't define it as power seeking no of course not in fact it's it's almost anti-power uh remember if i know you know this but god did not want the israelites to have a king that ironically that was the gift of theocracy i'm not for theocracy in the modern age but to be intellectually honest the idea that god is the ruler means that no man is the ruler yes well that's that's a very interesting freedom and less power well that's a very interesting issue too because i've been thinking a lot about that psychologically is that one of the advantages to parsing off the idea of ultimate sovereignty into an abstract domain which is what a religious claim does especially when it's attributed to a god that's even outside of nature is that the central core of sovereignty can no longer ever be identified with a single individual that's right but we have no idea how nasa i've been thinking about the analogy there with uh with a parliamentary or with a with a constitutional monarchy you know because the queen of canada the queen of england etc she bears a tremendous amount of symbolic weight and your president also bears that weight and that's actually a problem with the system i think because because the president has to bear the symbolic weight there's a tendency for him to become elevated beyond other mortals i mean you saw that sort of thing happening in rome with the deification of the of the emperors and if you it seems to me if you don't parse off the idea of ultimate sovereignty into an abstract domain you risk confusing it with proximal leaders or perhaps proximal ideas well you don't you you know me somewhat but you i don't expect you to know me well and i can just tell you i have often said on my radio show which is now more than 35 years that the overriding message of all 35 years has been to teach people the consequences of secularism the the deleterious consequences of secularism secularism is good for government and it stinks for everything else and what you just raised was one of an not infinite but an extremely large number of examples we are living now through leftism is a product of secularism and uh there was moral chaos dostoyevsky was right i mean it's just a fact you know where there is no god all is permitted we are we are living through it now when you have tens of thousands of medical people saying that if you if you demonstrate against racism it's healthy after telling us to wear masks when we walk with our dog outdoors i mean the corruption of every of every institution in the society has resulted when there is no god there is not only no good and evil but there is no math that even i didn't predict the oregon education department has announced there will no longer be only one right answer in math did you did you know that about that jordan i've seen that sort of thing you know percolating i didn't know it had become yes it is specific all the roed oregon education department has announced this that that is the policy here from here to four or not here to four from here on yeah you know there's a reason that christ was a carpenter you know he got his measurements right uh-huh that's cute yeah well it's more than cute right because to build a house you have to tell the truth otherwise it falls down and you need to build it on a firm foundation also well we don't have the foundation is being eroded oh yeah so i was telling you about the bill maher show so uh he he said so uh he said all the lies the lies the lies i said doesn't compare to the left-wing lies that amer that's when we got sidetracked which is on on america being systemically racist and i'll tell you i'll tell you another one bill uh that uh men menstruate and you've got to watch this it's actually as i said it's on youtube and he started laughing at me and so did the whole audience that i would make up something so preposterous and ascribe it to the left this is october of 2019 that leftists his audience and he were laughing at the idea that anybody would say men menstruate now if you deny men menstruate you are a hater and you will be removed from public life i have another question for you about your religious writing i'm going to talk to a number of islamic intellectuals in the next month it's something i've been thinking about doing for a long time but i've been hesitant too for a variety of reasons not least my ignorance of islam you write about the torah as the revealed word of god and so you know i have a tremendous amount of respect for biblical writings and i've done my best to approach them in a humble and open attitude trying to understand what's there assuming that there is something there or the stories wouldn't have lasted as long as they have lasted and guided the development of our entire civilization but there are plenty of claims to reveal truth and so there's obviously tension and conflict between islam and christianity and judaism and they're all predicated on the idea of revealed truth and i mean when you make a claim for revealed truth how do you distinguish it from other claims of revealed truth and or how do you adjudicate between the claims because the way we adjudicate between the claims is through war and that that's not all that helpful at all in time you would adjudicate in this regard i think you would adjudicate uh using uh using common sense you would uh by their fruit you you shall know uh that that's from the new testament and i i'm a big a fan of that the phrase and that verse uh so the torah and and i and i do isolate the first five books as is the traditional jewish view is that those are primus enter paris they're the first among equals and uh that is what gave us everything let's put it this way no torah uh no bible no christianity no islam so in a sense i got a i got a better case for the torah's divinity than anything else because everything else is predicated on the divinity of the torah okay so then you you make a case in some sense i would say an implicit case that anti-semitism for example is a marker of deviation from the path of the torah but the path that runs what from the torah through christianity and through islam as well i mean because your point is it's it's the fundamental text out of which these other other systems grew anti-semitism is ultimately the hatred of the jews for bringing a judging god into the world people don't want to be judged well that's understandable you know that people although the problem is is if you dispense with judgment you also dispense with value and you dispense with it right it's a big problem yeah it's a big problem it is i've been very i tell my christian friends and you don't get a more pro-christian non-christian than me in in contemporary life but i i tell them you you blew it with just talking about god as love it's it's not yeah well you know carl jung said something interesting about that you know because the christ that's presented in the gospels is a figure i suppose particularly characterized for his mercy but in the book of revelation he comes back as a judge and virtually everyone fails the judgment and jung's comment was any ideal is a judge and so if you don't tell the whole story of the so the question is do we need ideals and you know i would say to some degree part of the critique of the radical left is that ideals themselves are discriminatory and there's actually truth in that that ideals are discriminatory the question is whether they're arbitrarily discriminatory and if you say yes then well what do you strive for and i guess the answer is for everyone to be equal all right so that's so that's their discriminatory ideal it means it discriminates against excellence listen uh the same crackpot the head of the classical music at the new york times made a list this is years and you this is like 20 15 years ago and and uh only because i follow music do i even know this he made a list of the 10 greatest composers and he didn't have uh he didn't have handle in it the who of course composed the messiah he didn't have haydn in it the father of the symphony and the string quartet and he didn't have schubert in it and he said oh well you know why he said but he did have bartok uh in it and he had debussy in it who were fine but they're not in the top ten uh i don't think anybody could rationally argue that they are uh but in any event uh he said why he said i i just can't have that many austrian germans on the list so it wasn't the list of the best composers that's what all of this is and it's anti-standards that's well look there's an attack on a meritocracy on the idea of meritocracy right so i mean i've wondered well is that actually an attack on the idea of merit and i would say yes it is in fact attack on the idea of merit i never really look you know you said something it was a throwaway line you caught me on one of mine and i'll catch you in one of yours that anti-semitism is rooted in people's irritation at the idea of a judgmental god being brought into existence i mean that that's a hell of a claim so i mean it do you do you believe that that that that is the fundamental explanation yes uh there are a lot of non-jewish uh uh analysts edward flannery a major catholic writer and ernest vondenheig one of the greatest clearest thinkers of of the last century uh they they wrote about this the jews introduced uh uh this god into history and they've never been forgiven for it also uh this i'll tell you another reason for anti-semitism is is people believe the jews are chosen see this is a very everybody acknowledges that jewish chosenness is a reason for anti-semitism however as i pointed out jews are two tenths of one percent of the world who gives a damn if two-tenths of one percent of the world thinks they're chosen the chinese think they're the center of the world well chosen chosen and successful might be thank you that's correct that's exactly right so deep down people don't laugh when jews say they're chosen they don't believe that japan gets the sun before the rest of humanity even though they are the land of the rising sun and as the sun is on their flag but nobody cares if the japanese think they get the son first but they do care if the jews think they're chosen so there's been a tremendous amount of resentment of of the fact that maybe they are but of course chosen never meant better never by the way one other thing that this is yeah well you've got to ask yourself do you really want to be chosen by god well as tevye in in uh fiddler on the roof said wanted to choose somebody else once yeah yeah those have not benefited from chosen this uh give it given well you know you might say they benefited and and suffered disproportionately all right that's fair yes yeah and i don't know for sure if that's a fate that people would choose if they had the option that is exactly correct then okay so let's go back to this revelation thing because i'm i'm i'm gonna have these discussions and i need some guidance and so we we've got now you made a claim you know that the torah is the source of these of christianity and islam and judaism obviously as well and so because it's the source well then what what should be the attitude of other people of the book towards jews and towards the torah uh among christians there's a schizophrenic view uh for for many in the church and until moderate the modern period the jews were a living rebuke uh as one uh i don't remember which christian thinker said that the the jews crucify christ ev in every generation just by their continued existence uh so there's been there's been an animosity in christian christendom because the jews rejected their own jesus was jewish the apostles were jewish the claims were made on the basis of the jewish people do you do you think that's distinct from a sort of intrinsic tribalism do you think there's more to it than i mean we're tribal in in in a very deep sense this this transcended tribalism because uh it certainly wasn't ethnic uh it was ideological it was theological the the jew jesus comes to the jews and the very people that he came to are the ones who said he's not he's not god and he's not messiah so this this was this this created a fair amount of resentment uh american christians were an anomaly and and i loved them for it american christians said they were the second chosen people the jews were the first and we americans are the second on which i believe by the way uh okay so let me ask you another question this is some one this is a horrible question and i've been dying to to think it through for a long time so there's a line of christian thinking i would say and and northrop frye i think a canadian critic who wrote some great books on the bible you might be familiar with fry he wrote words with power and there's a second volume which i can't bring to mind at the moment but he thought about the the torah as the the story of the sequential rise and failure of the state and that the new testament was a consequence of the emergence of the idea that salvation was to be found through the individual and not through the state and that seemed to me to be uh parallel with the tension in the old testament between the prof between dogma and the prophets so so is it is it the case is there a difference between in between judaism and christianity with regards to the degree to which the state as seen as a as the primary mode of redemption and is that tangled up with the conflict in israel well there are a lot of issues that that are tangled in one first of all you should know that salvation plays a minimal role in judaism and and i know biblical hebrew very well and i cannot think of even the term salvation uh second it seems to be more like the promised land well judaism is earthbound there's a belief a tremendous belief in the afterlife but it plays minimal role in the torah because as soon as you start focusing on the afterlife the fear is that you won't focus on this life and and judaism is extremely this life focused secondly this is a very important point it is actually my biggest single reason for my adoration of the torah and judaism it's the only religion that divides the world between good and evil and not between believer and non-believer so right right so that's that's that seems to me from a psychological perspective as a as a move towards a further abstraction well it's not a psychological issue it's a moral issue that's fine in our view god does not divide the world between jew and non-jew or believer and non-believer but between good people and bad people the god sends good good non-jews to heaven and bad jews to hell that's why jews uh jews welcome converts but never sought them because you don't have to be a jew to be saved but you do have to be a muslim and you do have to be a christian okay so okay so so that's one that's one example of i think that's one example of of the operation of the idea of salvation the implicit idea of salvation anyways that there's a reward for proper moral behavior at the individual level that's right okay what about my way to heaven okay what do you think about my other proposition is that one of the things that distinguishes christianity from judaism is the relative role the relative importance of the role of the state now you describe judaism as earthbound and i actually think that's one of its great advantages because judaism does celebrate life in a quite in a rich and quite remarkable way and and and glorifies earthly life and and there's certainly strains of christianity where that wasn't the case at all but then there is this emphasis there seems to be a continued emphasis on the idea of the land and the state and and then i said there's fry's notion that you know the torah is a sequential story of the rise and failure of the state as as the entity of salvation or redemption and then the emergence of the ideal it's foreshadowed in some sense by the prophetic tradition and you know christians read that of course as christ being first and foremost among the prophets i mean obviously also the son of god but a continuation of that prophetic tradition but the transformation seems to be something like a more radical or explicit emphasis on the individual as the local of the redemptive battle i mean i might be wrong about this get that's why i'm asking the state this there is no state uh so to speak there is the there are the prophets and there are the priests that that's where power resided one had moral power one had one had uh cult power if you occultic i don't mean called in a bad sense but the cultic concept and and that that was pretty much it that's why as i said the the the king arose against god's wishes so it's it's not exactly a big state-centered religion if you don't even want a king uh you there you know moses says that you shall appoint the policemen and uh and judges uh in in exodus that's a that's important you have to have a it is judaism is not state centered it's law centered that's the issue all right well let's look at exodus though i mean and so exodus moses leads the jews out of tyranny and then into this interregnum which is a very interesting uh development i think because the escape from tyranny isn't followed by redemption or salvation it's followed by an even more chaotic state that's even more dismal in some sense which i think is unbelievably brilliant right because we tend to think a state of tyranny will dissolve and everything will be happy as a consequence but the exodus story says no no matter how bad the tyranny there's going to be an interregnum in the desert where everyone loses faith and then there's a journey toward the promised land so that structures the narrative and it's the promised it's the it's this idea of the promised land that that well that i'm trying to focus on and understand i mean you you characterize judaism just now as as as law partly law and partly the the cultic tradition the priestly tradition but there is this i mean the story of exodus as you well know is an absolutely central biblical narrative and it's a stunningly powerful story but it does involve it frames life as a journey towards the promised land and that in that story that being an actual land and it seems to me that part of the christian transformation i do think it has its roots in the jewish prophetic tradition is this change in emphasis i mean i was convinced by fry's arguments which weren't anti-semitic by the way in any great old scene they don't sound it to me at all like that it's not a way in which jews understood themselves let me put it to you that way the promised land is where the the law will be put to use and a holy land with a holy people this will be god's locus i view the jews as god's third attempt at making a good world the first was conscience that didn't work the second was noah and giving him basic laws that didn't work and then picking a people and giving them the role to be a model and uh that hasn't worked out too well either listen uh i would love to continue can you give me five minute break and i will continue absolutely okay fine all right [Music] so um i wanted to ask you further so i'm hosting these discussions as i mentioned with a more liberal muslim scholar and a more conservative muslim scholar and i'm woefully unprepared for it because what the hell do i know but it seems to me that to whatever degree it's possible that all of branches might be offered when they can be and so that's partly why i was curious about the this issue of revealed truth i mean what do we do when we have complete competing claims to revealed truth and and apart from war because war in some sense is about axioms that can't be given up and and with that war is just not an option for us in a sense not an option like it was because the con the possibility of a gated cap i have thought about this a great deal so i have a i have a quick answer but it's it took me decades to develop and that is my criterion is not is your religion true or mine true uh my criterion i have two one is what type of people do you produce uh nothing else interests me uh if if atheists produced uh kind and wise people i would give atheism much more seriousness than i now do uh but the so my my criterion is one what type of people do you produce and two do you bring people to the the god of the ten commandments that's it if your religion affirms that god gave the ten commandments uh i am a fan of your religion if your religion does not affirm that then it may be beautiful i have i don't disqualify that possibility but it is not it is not divine revelation given that remember when we say divine we're talking about the god the jews introduced to the world you can't hijack our term and so you can make up your own god but the god that was brought into the world is the god of the old testament specifically the god of the torah specifically the god of creation exodus and ten commandments if you affirm those then you are a kindred religion to mine and have an essential truth to it i don't believe in jesus christ but i do believe that christians who bring the world to the god of the torah and the to the ten commandments are he doing god's work so okay so then that that begs a broader question i mean we're not currently there's no current major religious dispute that's worldwide between christians and buddhists let's say and so where does that leave non-where does that leave religious believers who who aren't allied with the central book of the west broadly speaking i don't have an issue uh remember since i believe god judges people by their ethics uh i don't care if you're buddhist if you're if buddhism is created in you a good person and and giving you wisdom i see so you're using adherence to the to the ten commandments as a as a as an explicit description of what constitutes ethical good essentially yes it is but i admit i i fully acknowledge buddhists are not teaching the ten commandments as such i i understand that certainly you know not a sabbath day by the way not all christians are teaching the sabbath day either uh 50 of the of the catholic priests and protestant ministers i've i've asked do you believe christians are duty-bound to the observe the sabbath have said no so what do you think about christ was asked in in this is outlined in the new testament which of the commandments he thought was first and foremost which is an interesting question right because it presumes it posits that there's a central ethic that manifests itself across the ten rules that's still implicit and christ had an answer to that right love god yes which is you know quite an answer and what was the what was the comment and no one dared ask him any more questions after that which i think is quite comical um and and it's one of those little markers that makes you think that something was really going on um it's because the story is so interesting but i mean in in in in buddhism is there an implicit array of is there an implicit ethic that matches the ethic that's implicit in the in the ten commandments and of course there are many more commandments than ten i happen to have studied buddhism in england under a buddhist professor trevor ling and my take and i'm not an expert in any way but i have some understanding i think of buddhism this is not its question its question is ultimately uh how to avoid suffering uh in this world and uh to reach uh the light or or whatever nirvana would be uh would be translated whichever term you use sanskrit or otherwise so for example uh he said and by the way it changed my life uh when he said it in class it was in england he said uh the buddhism teaches that all pain in life comes from what is it desires and expectations that are not fulfilled or even not not not fulfilled just from desires and expectations it changed my life because from that day to this and i've written a book on happiness and i wrote a chapter on this i have no expectations and it is one of the reasons i'm happy everything therefore if i wake up tomorrow without an aneurysm i think i'm the luckiest guy in the world so uh i adopted the do you think that's equivalent in some sense to like subverting your will to the will of god is that the same idea no no no nothing to do with god zero to do with god as far as i'm concerned pure luck if i'm hit by a a drunk driver tomorrow uh or not is it sorry sorry that is sorry that isn't what i meant and as i must have phrased the question improperly is the id the buddhist idea that desire expectation is the cause of suffering is that analogous to the idea that in judaism and christianity that people give up their own egotistical will and follow the will of god it's a it's an interesting uh read i i don't know because let's see uh i'll tell you why at least for judaism i can't speak for christians in and this was the second part which i rejected i accepted dropping expectations it was it was to me brilliant i utterly rejected dropping desires i desire a family i desire a cure for cancer i the the list of desires i have is endless and and certainly judaism would never want me to drop desires well in buddha i mean buddha reached nirvana but then in some sense came back to bring the population along with him i mean he had desires so i wonder if it's more a matter of like desires that are ego predicated or desires that are an expression of arbitrary power let's say well that's a great question to ask a buddhist i i will tell you this i had a i did i was blessed my first 10 years of radio one of my shows was was as the moderator of a of three clergy uh a priest minister rabbi different ones each week and after five years i did it for ten years i invited buddhists and muslims and mormons and every religion on earth i asked a buddhist one night so it do i want to understand if i have a correct read of of buddhism and its ideal he was a monk so i knew i couldn't ask him about a wife or children but so i said if your brother died would the ideal buddhist response be no sadness and he said that is correct the ideal buddhist response would be things live and things die and that that detachment yes and then that begs the question well do you remain inactive in the face of suffering and you would seem to me that that you do right but then that begs the question of why buddha didn't just stay in nirvana when he had the opportunity it's an excellent question so listen uh uh i'm uh i'm i'm okay with inconsistency yeah yeah look fair enough and we're not gonna iron all this out but so let's if you don't mind maybe we could go back to this islamic issue so um what do you see as a pathway i know you don't know the answer to this but no one does but you thought about these things a lot and you know you're a profoundly religious person and like what's the proper attitude towards peace if i'm having a dialogue with these islamic scholars i mean i have lots of people who view my youtube videos and read my books in the islamic world and i'm happy about that i'm pleased about that and you know many of them were annoyed for example when i talked to ayan herzeali and they said well you should talk to some other muslims i thought well i know that and so i've decided to go ahead and do that i mean what what what needs to change do you think within each of us perhaps in order for these the conflict that keeps raging centered in the middle east to start to moderate itself how do we open the door to that i gave my answer earlier the the the day look here's here's a rhetorical question if the israelis announced we are disarming no more army no more weapons uh what would happen the next day and if the palestinians said we are disarming no more fighting no more terror no more rockets nothing what would happen the next day in the first case there would be the genocide of the jews of israel in the second case there would be peace uh so why don't you ask that question of these people uh uh that what would happen if if both sides announced that they are completely disarming what would happen the next day uh uh do do they really believe that there was genocide against the palestinians i think there were eight times as many palestinians today as when israel was founded this is the worst attempted genocide in the history of genocide i mean it is it is as ludicrous as it is evil to charge israel with genocide uh uh it would be the first time in history as i said at my my oxford union debate on this very issue of hamas in israel i i said it'd be the first time in history that in in a battle between a uh a dictatorship or a tyranny and a free state the free state was the one that wanted war and and the tyranny wanted peace i mean we're expected to to believe nonsense uh and and i i'm so do you believe do you believe that this is baked into this islamic faith yes if so yes and i'll yes i think it is uh okay so what is it that's baked in i'll tell you i've been called in the greatest arab writer who ever lived i think was the 14th century uh in the ma the introduction to history he he wrote and he is again he's considered the greatest writer not only the greatest arab writer in history according to aj always is the great uh ajp taylor the great the british historian he was the greatest historian who ever lived and that was uh that was taylor's uh that take that's a little romantic but it doesn't matter he's got a great reputation and he wrote in in the mukha the the introduction to history that unlike jews and christians the superiority of islam can be seen in the fact that they were prepared to kill people to convert that's baked in well so then where where exactly does this leave us let's say on the road to peace so if i said i'm going to talk to these guys and i don't know what'll come out of that uh maybe we could have a conversation with you and them i would love it i've dialogued with muslims i know i know i'm not a question and and listen the bigger question to me is not is it baked in is it is islam reformable uh and uh th this uh lord was it the lord acton no no another another uh may been lord acton uh the british viceroy in egypt in the 19th century said islam reformed is islam no longer that's see that's not true with christianity which obviously did go through a reformation and uh state state christian although i don't know if catholics would fully agree with that but nevertheless uh that yes well but we don't we also don't know if that meant the dissolution of christianity over the long run that's correct that that is that is a very fair question uh uh i i don't have an answer i i it may well be that the christian that christianity really does survive it will be african christians who make it possible well or you know or chinese christians since it's growing faster there is an ancient rome yes it's very peculiar so who knows right but all right well look dennis i think that's a probably a reasonable place to stop um i just can i just make a plug for uh two things no safe spaces the movie that we began with and my rational bible which is written uh with atheists in mind as i write it it is complete it is a use of reason to explain the five books of the torah the first five books of the bible and uh deuteronomy the third volume is coming out this year but genesis and exodus are out and uh maybe we could maybe we could have a discussion at some point just about exodus i would like that that uh that would be nirvana to me all right well let's schedule it in and we'll do that because i i need the preparation i like i said i want to do a lecture series on exodus in the fall right so all right well anything else dennis people should only know how much uh i admire you i i know you're you're self-conscious about that you don't have to say a word but uh i cite you often uh as one of the the the handful of truth and goodness seekers i know thank you that's a that's a weak thank you for that compliment so much appreciated it's right thank you until we meet again thanks again be well all right [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 370,260

Rating: 4.8547711 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations, adam carolla, no safe spaces, adam carolla show, no safe spaces adam carolla, no safe spaces netflix, no safe spaces clip, prageru jordan peterson, Prageru, dennis prager, dennis prager show, dennis prager no safe spaces, religion

Id: dHXxtyUVTGU

Length: 124min 37sec (7477 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021