Gahey, humans. Welcome to the safe space of dangerous ideas. And sometimes I speak with someone

for an hour and I think, how has this been an hour and how do I, have, have I covered so little

of what we could potentially talk about? Because this person is so interesting and they know so much

more than I do about all of the important things that there is to know about, that there is to know about,

that there is to know about, that there are to know about. It's a plural Zeps. Susan Naiman is a philosopher,

not just a philosopher, arguably one of the world's most influential living philosophers.

She's an American. She went to Harvard and she studied under John Rawls, who is one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.

And I wanted to talk to her now because she's a leading expert on the Enlightenment and on Enlightenment values.

And that may sound a little bit stuffy, but in a nutshell, it's probably the thing that we're at most risk of losing in the current culture wars.

Both Trumpy conservatives who have a disregard for institutions, you know, we hear a lot about this.

Like, oh, what about the norms and institutions that are being subverted by, you know, alt-right parties or far-right parties or by Trump trying to overturn

the election? And norms and institutions feels a bit stale to me, as does the word the

enlightenment. But on both right and the woke left,

there's a current fever pitch hysteria that strikes me as

uncondusive to calm, thoughtful, reasoned scientific analysis

of the situations that we're in and therefore

uncondusive to finding resolutions to some of the big challenges that our planet faces,

be they social and political ones or environmental ones like climate chaos.

We're just not doing a very good job of having the big conversations that we need to have

in the kinds of ways that very smart people would want to have them. And Susan is someone who

understands why, because she understands how culture shifted from being a world in which we were

just tribes arguing with one another to a world in which reason were just tribes arguing with one another,

...