Dennis Prager and Michael Shermer debate whether objective morality requires God, with Prager arguing divine revelation is essential to condemn evil while Shermer cites evolutionary biology proving innate human fairness. They discuss how secularism impacts Western stability, the validity of anti-Semitism claims against Donald Trump, and the role of alternative media in fostering free speech. Ultimately, despite their opposing views on religion's necessity for limited government versus rational progress, both agree that respectful dialogue across ideological lines is vital for societal survival. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, we're doing something a little different on the Rubin Report today.
For the past two years we've sat down one on one to interview interesting, relevant people, finding out what they think and why they think it.
Every week I also try to share with you what's on my mind, with an explanation as to why discussing the ideas of the week is so important.
One of the things we promised you when we launched on Patreon last year was that when we hit the $30k a month mark, we'd start expanding the show in new ways, such as hosting debates and doing more livestreams.
Just last week we did three livestreams with Carl Benjamin aka Sargon of Akkad, Tim Pool and Majid Nawaz.
This week we're going to host our first debate.
We aren't quite at that 30k mark yet, but we wanted to offer this up as a tease of what's to come and show you that our commitment to bringing you new, engaging content is as strong as ever.
So, joining me today are two former guests of the Rubin Report, and more importantly, two people I'm proud to call my friends.
Dennis Prager is a conservative radio host and author of several best selling books.
Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine and also the author of several best selling books.
I find both of them to be engaging, interesting, and unafraid to share their personal and political views.
About three months ago, Dennis did a video for his YouTube channel PragerU in which he made the case that without God, there is no objective truth to tell us murder isn't wrong.
A few days later, Michael made a follow up video on why he believes that you can indeed have morality without God.
Michael's response to Dennis was respectful and thoughtful, and I thought that it opened a door for us to have a conversation about one of the most fundamental issues about what it means to be human and to live a good life.
So, without further ado, I present you our first Rubin Report conversation, not debate,
but conversation, with two guests who hold deeply held opposing beliefs, but who I know
will be honest, decent and respectful at the same time.
Here we go.
Alright guys, I'm thrilled to be doing this today because I'm sitting here between two
men that I totally respect, but more importantly I consider friends, that I have broken bread
that I have just spent time in the green room chatting with.
So first, let's do some intros.
Here is Dennis Prager to my right.
Michael Shermer to my left, and we're gonna do something a little different today, a little different than I normally do.
I've had both of you on the show before.
We've talked about your ideas and let you say what you think about things, and today we're gonna have a discussion on something that you guys feel very differently about, but I think can do it in a respectful, honest, and decent way.
We're gonna be talking about morality and God, something that both of you have written a lot about.
You did a PragerU video about three months ago, and that's what sort of kicked off the idea for this conversation.
And before we do anything, even about the video, and even putting morality and God aside for a second, I thought we should start first by just three people sitting in a room that are okay disagreeing on some stuff.
Has become incredibly rare.
The idea that you guys have a totally different view on something that's really one of the most existential questions that there is.
But we were all just hanging out out there and your wife's here and my parents are out there and we were all everyone was chatting and laughing and have a good time.
And this has become almost an endangered species of an idea.
Yeah, but what do you think has happened to conversation?
I know both of you guys, by the way, you do actually do this.
You debate people in a respectful way.
I'm considering this more of a conversation than a debate.
I'm not scoring this thing at the end.
I'm not announcing a winner.
But what do you think has happened to that?
Because even debates these days with people that are pretty well known and, you know, big authors and things, have sort of devolved into, I think, what Dennis is talking about, where it's more personal.
So it just kind of caught on as an idea that's kind of a political movement idea that then got absorbed by the left.
So the left's argument is that, okay, so if words matter, words can hurt, then all of a sudden words are violence and therefore it's okay to commit violence against somebody who uses words.
No, no, I don't think it is, because I have debated atheists, like at Oxford, many years ago, and it's in print and it's on the internet, so one could see it.
The professor, Jonathan Glover, who's an atheist, and a professor of moral, I think, moral philosophy, then at Oxford, now at another British university, the first thing he said when we debated was, I agree with Mr. Prager, if there is no God, ethics are subjective.
So, and there are people who believe in God who agree with Michael that it's whether or not there's a God is important, obviously, but still ethics are subjective no matter what.
Or you can't have objective ethics without God.
So the fact that he's not a believer and I am a believer is not fully dispositive here.
Well, I was raised in a religious Jewish home, an Orthodox Jewish home.
I didn't stay Orthodox, but I stayed religious.
But, ironically, and I do write about this elsewhere, again on the internet, How I Found God at Columbia, the truth is, this will sound odd, but the biggest single factor in moving me to believe in God has been the secular foolishness that has permeated our society.
I was taught at Columbia, it's a prestigious place, by very bright, secular, often non-believers, and I was taught mostly nonsense.
And I remember I went crazy thinking, why is there so much nonsense being taught at an Ivy League University by bright people?
Then, a phrase from the Bible came into my brain in Hebrew, and it's very well known to people who've studied the Bible, you will know the phrase certainly, and that is, wisdom begins with fear of God.
And then I realized, wow, no God, no wisdom.
And that has permeated my life.
In other words, it is the anti-God crowd that has made me realize how important God is.
God didn't appear to me.
The religious have not convinced me.
The irreligious have convinced me of the centrality of God to the world.
I actually mentioned a few weeks ago on the show, I did hike Mount Sinai myself, and I was ready.
I mean, I was about 21, and I was ready to see a burning bush, and I hiked at the wrong time of day, so I was, you know, dripping with sweat, and I had eaten some bad pigeon in Egypt, so I was having some stomach problems on the holiest mountain on Earth.
And, you know, when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, that wasn't a thing.
Like, you know, what's your religious position?
Are you an atheist?
You know, atheism wasn't even a thing.
Really to be so but when I went to high school and then in college You know the born-again movement was kind of taking off so I became a born-again and in high school in 1971 I went to Pepperdine University which a Church of Christ school a very conservative at the time and And I was pretty serious about it I mean I took all the Bible classes the Old Testament the New Testament the life of Christ the writings of CS Lewis I've read everything he's written and so forth and And I even went door-to-door, because if you're an evangelical, by definition, you're supposed to evangelize.
That's what you do.
So, you know, Amway with Bibles.
I did it, and I liked doing it.
And then when I became, when I kind of gave that up, I wasn't really a militant atheist, because again, that wasn't really a thing in the late 70s and early 80s, when I sort of dropped my religious beliefs.
That brings us to this point that atheism isn't really a thing to be.
It's just a lack of belief, full stop.
So what do you believe?
Science and reason and civil liberties and civil rights and equal treatment under the law, all these kind of enlightenment values that we might call enlightenment humanism or whatever, classical liberalism.
Those are the things I believe in.
I don't believe in atheism because it isn't a worldview.
I don't believe in God, full stop.
Now what?
So then it becomes, okay, so are those values that you believe in, equal treatment under the law, women's rights, gay rights, civil liberties, right and wrong, is killing, is murder wrong?
Yes, I believe they're real, and you believe they're real.
Why not listen to me and why not have you on my show?
So I say, I now say, and I've written on this, the question I most want an answer to, most curious to get an answer to from an atheist, do you hope you're right or do you hope you're wrong?
If God is an idiot, or God is cruel, or God doesn't give a damn about his creation, then there's no afterlife.
But I make only two leaps of faith.
It's all I make.
That God exists, that God is the Creator and God is good.
And if that's the case, then there's an afterlife, that's all.
You can't have a good God and this totally unjust world be the only existence.
That would be a cruel God.
That's all.
And the only reason, by the way, I ask it is because, and I'm happy you did that, because I respect you, as you know, and I'm always puzzled If an atheist doesn't answer, well, of course it would be nice, or of course I'd like it.
It doesn't undermine your position in the least.
I think it gives you credibility.
That, in other words, against your desire, nevertheless, your mind has reasoned out there is no God, which is fine.
Which makes that completely consistent, though, with the things you believe, because it's sort of that you have a curious mind, so if you found out at the end That it was a little different than perhaps you thought.
So when a physicist like Lawrence Krauss talks about nothing, he doesn't mean it in the same way, say, a theologian might say nothing.
Because there is no nothing in physics.
There's always some energy field, a quantum foam field, something like this, that things pop out of.
Like photons of light don't exist, and they pop out of nothing in atoms.
This is Lawrence's argument.
So when he says nothing, he means something different.
that all physicists agree that's how light is formed.
Okay, so why can't a universe, this is Lawrence's argument.
So when he says nothing, he means something different.
And I think at some point, we kind of hit an epistemological wall
when we talk about things like nothing, eternity, As finite beings that are in a three-dimensional world, or four-dimensional world, we can't really know what those words mean on some, say, cosmic sense.
Do you think that could be just the great existential question of being a human, that we simply, you know, we're gonna do, we'll do this, we can go for hours if you want, we can have you guys clear out your evenings and do dinner here too, but we're, you know what I mean, like a certain amount, there's a certain amount of people in between, right, that may go, you know, Prager's making a little sense and it'll move me that way, or Shermer's making a little sense and it'll move me that way, but that most people, at a certain point in life, you can't get them to move too far.
Right, that's why I just, I fully admit I don't quite understand seeing the universe and concluding that on rational grounds, just rational, logical grounds, this all came from nothing and that all the design I see implies no designer.
I debated the head of American Atheists.
They were a wonderful group, by the way.
And I always say they gave me the check that day, which a lot of religious groups do not do.
He knows better than I, because he knows more science than I. You cannot possibly, ever, it's not possible for us to have contact or prove another universe.
So, it's a statement made that has less argument for it than the belief in God.
Well, okay, so the derivative of complex ideas from simpler ideas and from big brains, from smaller brains, we can see the gradation in evolution.
So the chimp can't do Bach.
The dog can't do Bach.
Or morality, for that matter.
So the reason we're different than, say, lions killing something, and why we would call it murder and the lion wouldn't, is because we have brains big enough capable of conceiving of morality, music, mathematics, logic, So, we've done about 20 minutes and we haven't really mentioned morality or what the purpose of your original video was and your category.
Now, I watched them both again this morning because I really wanted to have them fresh In my mind.
And I kind of struggled with how exactly I was going to frame this because I thought well maybe if I just go off your video that would be the right way because you did the counter video.
Then I thought maybe I need to bounce back and forth between a few things.
So I'm going to bounce around.
I have a feeling that I've got...
Two people of intellect that can follow me here.
So one of the things that you talked about, so let's shift this into morality, God, and murder.
So you talk about scientific facts versus moral facts.
And I think people can probably figure out what that means, but can you just explain that concept again?
I'm not saying this in a condescending way that if you don't agree with me, you're not on my level of understanding, but I think it's axiomatic that you can't learn morality from nature.
Nature, especially if you believe in the survival of the fittest, if that's your guideline, and that was a guideline for people like Hitler, he actually did say that, but even dropping any reference to a given mass murderer, science doesn't tell me to be honorable, science doesn't tell me to Do anything against my self-interest.
A selfish gene written by an atheist.
We are composed of selfish genes.
You need...
You need a mind, and you need, I believe, an outside source to say, this is what is right, this is what is wrong, because science doesn't tell you that.
That's all.
It's not a... I don't even think that's debatable.
How do I know not to steal because of atoms or biology?
One, Well, first of all, if you say that, well, it's God that told us that it's wrong.
Alright, so first of all, did God have reasons for why murder is wrong, or is He just randomly declaring this and that wrong or right?
My guess is you'd say He had reasons.
And so, the question is, what are those reasons, and why not skip the divine middleman and just base our moral reasoning on those reasons that we too can come up with.
I think moral values actually have a factual basis that are like the glass.
A little more complicated, but based on our human nature.
So you mentioned the selfish gene.
We do have our inner demons that cause us to want to be selfish and greedy and avarice and so forth.
But we also have our better angels.
That is, it pays to be cooperative, nice, altruistic, and caring and loving for other human beings, particularly those in your tribe.
And it benefits your selfish genes to be nice to other people.
Now, immediately in your immediate family, extended family, and your community, and studies show this does pay off.
Now, unfortunately, we're very tribal to other people.
Who may be threatening our empathetic notions about our fellow beings.
But that's an evolved characteristic.
We can see it in primates, in children, and so on.
There's a deep sense from the moment you're born of there's a right and a wrong.
And that comes from this evolved propensity to survive in a social community.
You can't survive by murdering, cheating, lying, and so forth.
And so that's where it comes from.
And I consider that to be transcendent of you and me.
It's not my opinion.
It's not your opinion.
It belongs to the species.
We're born that way.
Lions don't have that.
Chimps don't quite have that like we have it.
And so there's a scale of this.
So one of my favorite videos from Franz Duval is the two little capuchin monkeys that are each taught to swap a pebble for a grape or a cucumber slice.
So pebbles are like money.
So you see this video where the experimenter gives the one a pebble, he gives it back and he gets a cucumber slice, he eats it, he's happy.
Then the other one does the same thing and he gets a grape.
Now they like grapes better than cucumbers, because who doesn't?
And so the other one, the first one, sees that.
He goes, oh boy, I'm going to get a grape.
And he runs and gets his pebble, and he puts the pebble in the experimenter, gives him a cucumber slice.
And you see him, and he throws it at the experimenter.
He's pounding on the cage.
He's rattling the cage wall.
He is pissed, because that guy got something I didn't get.
That was not right.
I did the same amount of work that he did, and he got something.
Ever since the Enlightenment, we've been changing the conditions of society, politics, economics, and social systems to emphasize the better angels and sort of attenuate the inner demons.
Well, I do think this is an interesting point because when I had you on just a couple months ago and you were arguing for morality through a Judeo-Christian value, a lot of people were saying to me he's actually just arguing for Enlightenment values, which I thought was... I think that's the case.
Having been raised in my specific case, which is truly irrelevant to the point, but in my specific case, I assure you, I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish milieu.
Half the day Hebrew studies in Hebrew of the Bible and the Talmud and so on, and half the day secular studies.
If I would have said to one of my rabbis from Eastern Europe, So, the French Enlightenment, he would have looked around and, you know, was that the name of a new, I don't know, not rock group, he didn't follow rock groups, but anyway, he would have thought maybe it was a food, French Enlightenment.
So first, I just want to jump back to the monkey example here for a second.
Because do you think it's possible that if they kept doing that experiment over time, the monkey, who was seeing his friend be wronged, would eventually start protesting on behalf of the monkey?
Because I think that would strengthen that argument.
I don't know that they... Okay, so Frans de Waal's research shows that you can nudge it in that direction.
Not very far.
He does research with elephants and other mammals, and you can see that they start to care for the other individual if they're being harmed, like they're getting electric shocks if they do something that sacrifices themselves to stop the electric shock.
All right, so how much of this, then, to you is the micro versus the macro?
Because I sense you're actually conceding a little bit of ground in that you don't think that Michael is going to murder anyone, but that you think that for society as a whole, so that his atheism... That's right, because... His atheism is okay, but for society as a whole, there is... What is the legal statement?
Bad cases or exceptional cases make bad law, whatever it is.
I, of course there will be individuals, look, my favorite analogy, seatbelts save lives.
Is that a generalization?
It is true.
Is it true in every single case?
Of course not.
Sometimes you die because you wore a seatbelt, it choked you, you couldn't get out of a burning car or whatever.
So, if there are two people, one, they're both moral.
Michael Shermer's moral, this guy's moral.
The guy who thinks God will judge him for his behavior, I trust in the final analysis more than the person who only has to answer to his own conscience.
No, I don't want to saddle you with the ISIS thing.
I'm just saying, if we had an imam here, and he said, well, we believe in revelation also, and ours came in the 7th century, and you know... Yeah, that's fine.
Okay, but so that though, how then do you square the people, I mean remove the three monotheistic religions, and I'm not talking about the guy that believes in a turtle with 12 heads, but just other religions, just other polytheistic religions that have existed for a long time that do have a basis in morality.
Because I know you pretty well and I'm pretty sure this thing's not going to end with you murdering the two of us.
But I do think there's some legitimacy to the argument that on a societal whole, if everyone just starts listening to the thing in there, people are are kind of wacky and are gonna do crazy things.
And we have evidence because we've already just mentioned ISIS and all kinds of other things.
So what do you think about that?
It's the small, you know, the individual versus the collective.
So you and I are both fans of the founding fathers and the constitution and so on.
And we were just talking about the Hamilton biography and what a genius this guy was, Jefferson, so on.
I don't think they were channeling Moses or Jesus They were channeling Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Aristotle, all the great philosophers who came before that thought, what's the best way to structure a society that we attenuate the inner demons and accentuate the better angels?
All right, we need three structures, three judicial branches of government.
We need a Supreme Court, we need a local court, we need a rule of law, we need a police, military.
Basically all that was sort of a science or technology of social structure.
How can we do this?
Because people will act on their own best self-interest.
That's why we need checks and balances and so on.
And that didn't happen in very many places in the world, and historically only a couple of times has that happened.
So it's a unique experiment, and in a way the social contract, let's call it that, is a transcendent, objective form of moral, legal, Social system by which we're going to live so that we all flourish and survive and flourish and have a more moral lives and And it works pretty well even though like in your seatbelt example doesn't always work But it works better than all the other systems and to me it to me it feels transcended in the sense It's not my opinion.
It's not your opinion You know, these guys set this up.
It's been tweaked and tweaked and tweaked.
It's like an experiment.
You know, that's why Jefferson called what we're doing an experiment.
A lot.
He said, we're running the experiment.
Tweak the variables, have another election.
Tweak the variables, the Supreme Court says, no, we're going to do this.
Let's change that.
That, to me, feels objective in the sense of it's outside of me and you.
I don't know why it feels objective, because they were opinions.
They were great opinions.
We both adore these people, but they were opinions.
I just have to take issue, though, and this one is not, contrary to everything else we spoke about, this is not an opinion issue.
This is a factual question.
And I just factually disagree.
Every single one of the founders, except for Thomas Paine, Was a God-centered person who believed that without God the American experiment would not work
Washington said it in his famous inaugural address, or his farewell address, I should say, where, I'm paraphrasing, he is a fool who thinks that we can have a moral society without religion.
Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, we are endowed by our Creator.
Because if the Creator doesn't endow us with inalienable rights, there are inalienable rights.
Well, of course, as you know, Jefferson was a deist, not really a... No, but wait, deist in those days is not what deist... Deist today means you believed in a creator in that end of the issue.
They all believed in a providential God who interfered in human events.
Benjamin Franklin, in his autobiography, wrote, I believe in a God who works in history and who judges all people.
And in the hereafter.
Franklin and I have the same exact theology.
He wasn't an Orthodox Christian.
Most of them were not.
That's true.
But they were all God-centered, and the God was the God of the Bible.
Actually, one of my favorite moments in the Hamilton biography is where he's later asked, how come you didn't put God in the Federalist Papers and the Constitution?
And he said, I forgot.
And then it turned out, the biographer goes, this from a man who never forgot anything, he didn't forget it.
Because it's not an argument.
You can't make an argument to your fellow politicians or whatever you're trying to campaign.
It was the supposition of the founders that people would believe that rights came from religion and that the Bible would be the moral, educative tool of their children.
Lincoln rarely went to church, had a Bible on his nightstand, and everyone says he read it every day.
I think it's language they put in just to kind of reinforce the point, like putting in God we trust on the money, which was done in the 50s to counter the atheism of communism.
And I think also, to your point, I think there was a sense in the Founding Fathers that we can't police everybody.
All right, you know what, let's hold that to the end, because I think that's where we can all sort of come around and tie this nicely together.
But just circling back, because I'm glad you brought it to the political part of this, when I see all these people on the right that often talk about God publicly, you know, politicians, let's say Ted Cruz or something, He'll also say, you know, I'm a constitutional conservative and I'm an absolutist.
Now, I believe that the Constitution is probably the greatest political document ever made.
I wish we could be governed by those three branches of government that we're supposed to be.
You know, I'll never forget, it made a big impact on me.
Before I got married at 32, so my whole twenties I was a bachelor, and I knew nothing about marriage, because nobody knows anything about marriage until you get married.
And so I talked to married men.
I had a friend who was a married guy.
So he's a good-looking guy, he was an ex-marine, he was an intelligent guy.
So I said to him one day, I said, Bob, I'm just curious, you were close enough, did you ever cheat on your wife?
And he said, you know what, then it's funny you should ask, because obviously I gotta know, you know, I'm tempted, I travel a lot, it's tempting.
And he said, you know, I'm not at all religious, you know, I never go to church or synagogue, but I gotta tell you...
I know this is going to sound funny, you're going to laugh at me, but I really do believe God is watching and He said do not commit adultery.
I think that between, forgive me for being as crass as it sounds, between the penis and the conscience, the penis will usually win.
And having God say control your organ is more powerful.
So jumping from that, so you basically, because you believe that eventually we'll self-regulate ourselves into some goodness sort of, you think we could have the laws of the land that we have right now, and we simply don't need the, even if the Founding Fathers had some God-centric viewpoint.
Yeah, regardless of what the Founding Fathers, I mean, we've already been doing this for centuries.
You know, the whole structure, the whole sort of moral progress of Western civilization that I have written about, Steve Pinker has written about, and so on, comes about from this idea that we can actually set up political and economic and social systems in a way that nudges people toward being better.
So that's why I think the micro-macro thing is the most interesting part of this conversation, because again, I don't think I think that is ultimately the reason.
in and of himself and with all your friends and family live a perfectly moral life.
But do you think there is something to that?
Because we are watching Europe slowly crumble and I don't think anyone knows exactly why.
That's the wrong... No, no, first of all, I mean, when all is said and done, if I had to compare Catholic Uruguay to pre-Catholic Uruguay, I'll take Catholic Uruguay.
You have to believe there, or you know, take the Mayans.
I think you believe that in Mexico it was a step up for Mexicans to Catholicism from Mayanism.
The secular person or the non-believer needs a little bit of sort of the crazy religious stuff, in this case the Ayatollah, to actually, that makes it easier to breed some of the things that you believe, rather than Michael Shermer showing up in Tehran and going, guys, you know, let's talk about it.
unidentified
I'm not going to Tehran to proselytize or atheism.
That is why, by the way, parenthetically, I am very disappointed in the Western religious world.
There should have been a hundred thousand rabbis, priests, and ministers gathering in Washington, or London, or I don't care where, as a protest against all the evil done in God's name in the world today.
They have sat on the sidelines, intimidated by the New York Times, which would call them Islamophobic.
They have more fear of the New York Times than fear of God.
I would say that as a general assessment of most religious people, Jew and Christian, in the world today.
When that was happening I actually purposely didn't tweet about it because I saw everyone getting on board and saying it's all Trump, it's all Trump.
And I remember thinking this just seems too easy.
I want to wait a little bit and then of course you end up right.
How do we take this, how do we take the richness of this, and go, all right, we fundamentally believe something so different, but we actually still wanna live in the same society.
Because I don't think you guys are going, well, you know, even if you think that the ideas that Michael has pushed here aren't gonna be good in the long run for your society, or you think that Dennis- Yeah, but we're allies in the cause of liberty.
So liberty and freedom, freedom of speech and so on, is the fundamental.
Right that trumps all the other well trumps.
It's the basis.
It's beneath all the other stuff We're talking about and so isn't it interesting that you both can get there Yeah, absolutely and I'm encouraged by that and as well as I'm not sure what you call what you're doing alternative media to the mainstream media or I call it something different in every universe that I'm doing.
I don't know what the right word is, but I'm really encouraged with shows like yours, Joe Rogan's, Sam Harris.
These are great shows.
The most interesting conversations that I listen to are there, not on CNN or whatever.
All right, so then I have one final question for you both.
What would be your greatest sell, if someone that's listening to this, that is an atheist, they've just come to that conclusion, and if they didn't want to be not convinced, they don't want you to convince them to not believe, but they want to be convinced of wanting to live in the same society as you, what's the greatest sell?
The founders did understand that without God, a limited government won't work.
Just as you said, we seemed to, that was an area of agreement, it seemed to me, and I don't want to put any words in your mouth, God forbid, but they understood if people feel morally accountable to God, then we don't need a lot of police.
We don't need a big government.
Government rises in the West as God diminishes in the West.
And in the United States or in Europe.
Because somebody's got to police people.
Somebody's got to dictate what happens.
The government substitutes.
I don't want big government.
And the American dream was to have limited government so that we're free, but ultimately morally answerable to the God of the Ten Commandments.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
I think the origin of the bending force has been this inculcating in all of our thinking to make it our second nature.
To be good for goodness sake.
Full stop.
Now, we're a long ways from, you know, getting there, but we're better than we were half a century ago, better still than a century ago, and so on.
I do think there's, and I think that moral arc is built into the structure of society, the way we keep tweaking it.
It's like an experiment, and I think we need to keep running the experiment, and that open, free dialogue and speech is the only way to keep tweaking it in the right direction.
You both agree it took us a while to get the schedules lined up because you guys are busy, but I'm glad we did this and I hope we can do something like this again.