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forward slash cosmic skeptic. Oh, So welcome back everybody to the Cosmic Skeptic podcast. Today I'm joined by

Dr Michael Sandel who is a professor of government theory at Harvard University Law School.

You may have seen his course Justice, which was the university's first course to be made freely

available online and on television and has been viewed

tens of millions of times. I'm pretty sure if you type in Harvard University

it's one of the first videos that came up I certainly remember watching it

myself and if you're a regular view of this channel you'll have seen

me recommend Dr Sandel's book justice on numerous occasions but he's got a new

book coming out as well and that book is called The Tyranny of Merit

what's become of the common good and that will be available on the

common good and that will be available on the 10th of September in the

United Kingdom and on 15th of September in the United States and

there's a link in the description right now if you go

and pre-order or purchase that book depending on when you're watching.

But Dr Sandell, thank you for joining me.

My pleasure, good to be with you, Alex.

Excellent.

So the book, I found interesting, I mean, the very thesis of the book might strike people

as strange, to say the least. We live in a world where we're told that merit is a good thing, right?

As you say in the book, politicians always talk as though this is the ideal we're striving for.

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