It's offering people this idea that they can completely eliminate risks for their children

for themselves, giving them that control, the illusion of control.

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Stephen Templeton, professor of immunology at Indiana

School of Medicine, an author of the new book, Fear of a Microbial Planet, how a germaphobic

safety culture makes us less safe.

Could our fear and excessive avoidance of germs and microbes actually be backfiring?

And how will the rise of what Templeton calls a safety culture impact future generations?

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kelleck.

Steve Templeton, it's such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Great to be back.

I guess it must be about a year and a half or so since we sat down for the first time.

I remember it very well.

You're this quiet voice of reason amidst pandemic madness.

And you've now written a book, and I've taken a long time to read it.

And I think it's one of the books that I've been waiting to read, actually.

But why don't we start with the microbes?

We've kind of come to believe that microbes are somehow bad and should be eliminated.

But you argue in this book that this type of mentality is actually part of the problem

of what got us here.

Yeah, absolutely.

And it wasn't that we've started thinking a certain way, because I think a lot of the

thoughts about our relationship for microbes had been shifting in the decades leading up

...