Ada Palmer on Viking Metaphysics, Contingent Moments, and Censorship

26:36He's more interested in sexuality as a thing which is very natural and yet very taboo. In the 18th century, he's very interested in this question of, are we to guide ourselves by laws of nature that we deduce from observing nature, the way John Locke and Thomas Hobbes recommended? If so, doesn't nature tell us that section sexual reproduction is one of the biggest parts of life. Why is it silenced by our culture? Is our culture irrational in its behavior toward this? The sex is a tool for getting a question of what is natural or unnatural rather than the end, if that makes sense. A deeterose fascination with sex as a social phenomenon, and you are, how does that tie the two of you together as thinkers?

27:18I mean, I think both of us are very interested in not just sexuality, but also gender, and how an enormous amount that is artificial, a known amount that is culturally contingent or culturally invented, and an enormous amount that's even performative, surround performances of sexuality and performances of gender. In Terra, I canota for example, there's people who are living in a largely genderless future in which only gender -neutral language is used, and people are not intended to publicly acknowledge gender. Nonetheless, are sexually excited by gender because of its taboonus, not because I'm presenting gender as something that is biologically great or any, but because our society has spent literal thousands of years developing complex ways to perform gender in not only language, but in clothing, in physicality, and comportment, in patterns of inflection, in how we walk, which are performed differently in different societies.

28:18And the adoption of genderless language isn't by itself going to mean that people abandoned this ancient vocabulary of performance. It's fascinating to look at the redeployment of transformation over time of so sophisticated a cultural construction as gender. And I think both Diderot and I are interested in that in as much as it gets to the edges of what is biology versus what is culture and how 90 % of it is culture. Dessad, where does that come from? What are the influences on Dessad as a writer? Thomas Aquinas, not lots and lots of things, but he's very interested in the large philosophical milieu in the period.

29:00Remember that the 18th century is a moment when the clandestine bookshop is a major thing. And if anyone enjoys and is interested in the history of censorship and clandestine publishing, I can't recommend enough the work of Robert Darnton, a brilliant historian of clandestine literature. But the same underground bookshops sell all underground materials, which means an underground bookshops, sells pornography, and it also sells Voltaire and Rousseau, and it also sells diatribe criticizing the king, and it also sells radical jensenist theological pamphlets about whether the Holy Spirit derives from the Father and Son equal ear from the Father alone.

29:43The same kinds of people frequent these shops and the same kinds of people buy things. So think Think about how when you go into a Barnes & Noble, the science fiction and fantasy section is one section, even though science fiction and fantasy are different things, but they have a lot of overlap, both in the overlap of readership and in overlap in books that have both science fiction and fantasy elements. It was perfectly natural in the same way for a clandestine bookshops to generate these works that are pornography and radical philosophy at the same time. They're printed by the same printers, sold to the same audiences, and circulate in the same places.

30:20Decide uses his extreme pornography to get at questions of morality, ethics, and artificiality. What are the ethics of hurting each other? Why do we feel that way about hurting each other? What are so -called natural impulses as John Locke and Hobbes were very dominant at the time? Or Dickhart, who is differently dominant at the time in rivalry with them? They make claims about the natural human impulses or the natural character of a human being. what does extreme sexuality show us about how that character might be broader than it is. And I mean it when I say Thomas Aquinas, right? So one of Thomas Aquinas's traditional proofs of the existence of God is that everything he sees around him in nature, this also is one that Aristotle uses but Aquinas articulates it in the most famous way for the Sods period, that when we look around us, it's clear that everything is designed to work.

31:12Forest animals have forest camouflage, desert animals have desert camouflage. Woodpeckers that he grubs have a beak shaped correctly to be able to get grubs. Clearly, therefor, an intelligence designed everything to fit where it needs to fit, so that carnivores have carnivore teeth and herbivores have herbivore teeth. Yes, says Thomas Hobbes, quoting all this and says, and furthervar the penis is round. And the anus is round. So clearly God designed the penis to fit into the anus and not into the vagina, which is a long thin shape. He's playing with the question of why we believe these century or in that case millennium old arguments about what is and isn't natural and inviting us to re -examine questions like well what that a Woodpecker needs does it have what that a Woodpecker needs does it not have because it doesn't have fingers which to disentangle its legs from a thread if it gets tangled up.

32:12In that way, SAD is using pornography to open the questions that Darwin will later answer. If Descartes had truly let loose, what would we have received? Oh, if he hadn't been scared off by the Galileo condemnation, I think we would have received a much more deist version of what ends up being a very Catholic set of ideas about ontology and physics. So Descartes was in the middle of publishing one of his big treatises when he heard news of the Galaileo trials conclusion and of the Galaileo condemnation and he actually withdrew that text from his publisher and then spent several years revising it to be more carefully orthodox.

32:55And I think it would have been a much more deist, It's still theist, but much more deist. We can't know things with certainty except what we do from nature. Kind of text. Greater in alignment, therefore, with what we see in our enlightenment figures like Voltaire and Russo. And for that reason, I think that if Descartes, who becomes dominant in France, bit before the rise of Voltaire and Russo, had been more expressly deist, we would have seen less It's association between deism and Newtonian physics. But we get deism associated with Newtonian physics during the Enlightenment because it's the same people who are a data source sympathetic to importing Bacon's scientific method and Newtonian physics into France.

33:45A simplified version of that answer, therefore, BA, the impact of Descartes' treatise being more deist would have been an enlightenment in which France didn't split into the France being more interested in logic, and this new imported perceived as foreign and British thing being more interested in empiricism and the scientific method, and the two would have been seen as more compatible with each other. Probably we would have therefore seen even more scientific laboratories develop in France in that period as opposed to the centers of material of experimental science settling in England, Scotland and Italy.

34:27Was there an Irish enlightenment? Yes, definitely, but to a lesser extent simply because Ireland was being so smashed and damaged by the warfare and so on with England, especially recovering from wars of the 17th century as well as what was happening in the 18th. And whenever a the polity is in extremists, it has a bit less of a robust opportunity to raise the intellectuals that are necessary to have a leading position. So, if you're partly you've swiffed a bit later, you've Burke. That's pretty impressive for what's a fairly small country. It is. I would say that a part of that is, those are excellent figures and they were embraced by it, our famous and the Angelfun scientific tradition.

35:16But there are certainly two dozen equally innovative and important people from Spain or Italy in the same moment, if not more. Who aren't famous in the Anglophone histories of science because we center the Nationalistically celebrated British Isles area more? That makes sense. Yes, sir. Who actually made the censorship decisions during the French Enlightenment? And fresh out of college English majors. Because bureaucracy, it's the ruler, it's the clergy. What's the actual mechanism? Whose decision is it? So there are two levels. Because France and the King of France by the Enlightenment is sufficiently powerful.

35:59That even though this is a Catholic country and technically the last word in censorship is the Inquisition and Pope. Pope. France manages to get Italy to agree for France to have this be delegated to a bureaucracy under the king. And that bureaucracy is obliged to enforce any rule that the Pope and the central Roman inquisition make, but it hires its own staff and they are genuinely more concerned with questions like whether things are criticizing the king than they are with questions of theology. Many of them, this is a first job at a college for a lit major. And many of them, this is well documented in the work of Robert Darnton.

36:39Many of them are themselves aspiring authors and aspiring professors. We have letters from French censors back and forth. Oh, Jacques, I got your book to censor. Don't worry, I'll do a really good job. And they therefore actually very sympathetic to the radical ideas that are circulating because they are fresh out of college intelligentsia and we're also excited by these new ideas. They tend to let through a lot of things. Now often later Rome will examine the materials of the materials we come famous and will ban them then. This is why, for example, Ditoroso and Dolomarza and Cyclopedi is approved by the French censors but banned by the Pope as of volume.

37:19said then I think it is blood or H and you know at that point Rome catches up with France and says you must ban this thing we command it and under this command the copies that are public in Paris are confiscated Paris is required to hold a public burning of the encyclopedia they marched the copy up to the pot spot they then said it aside and don't burn it instead to burn Jensen is treatises about the nature of the Trinity which is what France actually is afraid of at the time. So there's a lot of layers and permeability. And while the Pope had ultimate authority in some ways to say no you may not have this, that is only several years slower than the short term bureaucracy which is run by lit majors overseen by people who answer to the king much more concerned about political and local questions than about abstract scientific or theological ones and also happy to let people smuggle things through which is why even after the banning of the Encyclopedia.

38:18If you're in Geneva and you're printing something really bad, like D 'Assad, or Janssen is treatises about the nature of the Trinity, you smuggle them into France by wrapping them in copies of the Encyclopedia. Because if you're intercepted at the border, they open up the secret trunk under your wagon and say, oh, it's just the Encyclopedia. Pay me a small bribe and I'll let it through. And you pay a small bribe and they let it through. The banned book providing cover for an even more banned book. What do you take to have been the actual goals of the Spanish Inquisition? The Spanish Inquisition is a very separate thing from the other Inquisitions that I work on in other regions.

38:59I like to avoid using the word Inquisition ever in the singular because it creates the illusion that there was an actual unify—or it doesn't create. It perpetrates the intentional illusion that there was a central unified decision making. The Catholic the church wanted to see more unified than it was. But in periods when it took six months or more for a message to get to Rome from one of the Spanish colonies in the New World, for example, these are local authorities making local decisions in the name of Rome and Rome struggling to catch up to the degree that Rome even printed a manual to guide inquisitors on how to respond if people came to them talking about books that have been banned in Spain that they've never heard of being banned elsewhere and had to sort of fake it and pretend that yes, Rome totally knew that you're bad this.

39:47Yes, it was a very good idea to ban it. So the Inquisition is a blunt instrument and usually a tool of local power. It isn't a government. We often think of the Inquisition as the government, but it's more a non -government body that reaches internationally. Think about UNICEF or doctors without borders and it has the infrastructure to go from place to place. Now think about that operating locally and having agents that are good at crossing borders but depend on the local government for collaboration and economic support in the case of the Inquisition. It doesn't own local authority want to persecute.

40:35That's what the Inquisition will end up persecuting. In Ferdinand, Isabella, Spain and that of their successors, they were incredibly anxious about the imagined treacherous fifth column of descendants of converted Jews and converted Muslims. And so they lavished money on their Inquisition to encourage their Inquisition to advance the mass persecution of what they perceived as a local threat to their crown. This had nothing to do with the practices of the acquisition that were going on at the same time in Italy or in France or in even Spanish controlled territory or Portuguese controlled territories.

41:14So for example in Goa on the west coast of India, in the 17th century the orders given by the Inquisition were to destroy all texts and indigenous languages and try to wipe out indigenous languages and indigenous knowledge. At the same time, the Inquisition in what is now Mexico City was ferociously devoted itself to developing indigenous dictionaries and translating materials into indigenous languages because it decided that the best way to proselytize was through translation. These are the decisions being made by local authorities to try to seek power. Zooming out, however, the biggest pattern in all of them is that the most common form of censorship is self -sensorship, but the majority of self -sensorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power.

42:02The Inquisition more broadly, especially the Roman Inquisition, spends a lot more of its time trying to scare people into not writing books than it does trying to destroy books that are actually there. If you think about the goal being to silence Galileo, the way to silence Galileo is not to make Galileo world famous by having a giant splashy trial of Galileo. The way to make Galileo silent is to quietly poison Galileo, right? This is Renaissance Italy. We are very good at quietly poisoning people. This is a solved problem. If you want to silence a man, you silence a man. You do not put him on a big show trial.

42:39But what they want to do is silence day card and dozens of others who who saw what happened to Galileo were scared and therefore never wrote the treatises that they otherwise would have. Censorship intends to cause and stimulate self -censorship. And that's a pattern we see broadly whether in the Inquisition, whether in the Middle Ages before there was an Inquisition or whether today in China would be extremely intentionally unpredictable enforcement of when they arrest a blocker, for example, which they do with very little pattern to make it harder to predict whether you are in danger, to make people more scared they might be in danger to again incurred self -sensorship.

43:18Why is it politically dangerous to sensor pornography? It's politically dangerous to sensor pornography because censorship is a very blunt instrument. And we must always imagine how a tool we set up to sensor something will be used in the future by bad actors we disagree with. If you create a tool capable of censoring something, it will still exist and still be there later when people want to censor something different. Hornography is usually where major battles over censorship are fought these days because people don't want to defend it. It's icky and gross and a lot of people don't want it or do want it but don't want to publicly say so.

44:00Don't want to be associated with it. So a lot of people are willing to say, okay, fine, censor this, but then you create the apparatus to censor this and the next stage is someone saying, oh, well, you know, this other book, clearly this is basically the same as pornography because it depicts a same sex couple. Now let's censor that using the same infrastructure you've just created. Almost all censorship isn't carried out by creating a new institution to do it, but by repurposing an old institution that's already there. And new things will be censored using old tools so that when talkies came in, people were very anxious that they could suddenly be bad words in movies.

44:42And all over the place, New Zealand, Australia, the US, methods were set up for censoring movies to make sure bad words weren't used. Well, those are the same methods that were then used to censor discussions of communism during the Red Scare, and that were used to persecute free thinking and socialist authors, the same apparatus that got created for the censorship of a bad word. Once we make it, it exists, and it's very hard to dismantle it. So don't let the fact that we don't care about pornography, enable people to create tools they will use to censor other things in the future. Do you agree with the common claim, which seems supported by some poll evidence, that American women are less supportive of free speech than American men?

45:27Huh. I'm not familiar with that question, although I am familiar with the fact that internationally when we look at things like the movements for women getting the vote in some of the theocratic Arab countries when women got the vote, they disproportionately voted for the very religious and conservative parties so that I think that there is a slight preponderance of women who end up supporting religious fringe movements. But there's also a whole lot of other ways in which women tend liberal, especially within the US. So I think that's a very complex question that and thought about my ship. If we think about why so few of the great books discuss menstruation, is that censorship or do we understand that some other way?

46:18It's taboo which is in some ways a kind of censorship. It's people being uncomfortable discussing a topic. I always make a point of breaking up menstruation when it's relevant in my classroom when I'm describing to students what it was like experiencing the fall of the Roman Empire and that suddenly there's no one keeping peace on the roads and their bandits on the streets and it means that you can't get imported high quality non -each -e wool and you can't get good olive oil, you can only get local olive oil and you can't get fish sauce. I always mention it and you can't get sponges, the sea sponges, which are what women would use as maxi pads.

46:57In the period, now you can't get maxi pads and you just have to shove a bunch of rags up there. And it's always delightful to see the sort of stunned look on the face of most of the voice in the class and the sort of delighted look on the face of many of the girls in the class of, yeah, people that have been straighted too. This is a real legitimate thing. But I would say it is a taboo and a taboo is a kind of censorship because censorship isn't exclusively state actors or organized actors. There's a lot of bottom -up grassroots censorship as well. And taboos are part of Why do we think of velvet as the cloth of the Renaissance?

47:36I think more of brocade as the cloth of the Renaissance, but certainly there were major technological advances in velvet production and a number of other very high -end fabric production in the Renaissance. It's actually quite clear from recent examinations of sketches of machines like those of Brunelleschi that they pretty much did figure out how to make industrial mass production looms. They could have switched over to making cheap cloth at enormous volume the way we did in the 19th century But that was what the Renaissance did or wanted the Renaissance wanted super high -end cloth and when you compare the actual costs of fabric Buying a suit of very nice clothes.

48:22They made out of good quality the Florentine Brookhaed with velvet trim, cost as much as buying a luxury sports car. And you have one outfit or two outfits, you have your Sunday outfit and your regular one, and you wear them all year, and then you get the next year's fashions and a huge part of the purpose of it is to display social status by showing the high end things. So we associate with Renaissance affluence and the Renaissance's biggest industry, the one that's the equivalent of the auto industry, the development of these extremely high -end luxury things that you then show off on your person every day.

49:04What is it about renaissance annotations of Lucretius that's more interesting than Lucretius himself? What do they add? They tell us what the The moment of first contact was like between people in the Renaissance who had vague and often over -the -top mythologized ideas of what ancient Rome was like and then the real ideas of Epicurianism preserved from antiquity. In the Middle Ages they had very little knowledge of Epicurianism, though they knew that it was something. It was mentioned by medieval authorities like Lactantius. It was discussed in bits of Cicero that they had, but they didn't actually have a Koreanism.

49:48They just knew there had to be in this philosophical movement that said that happiness was the highest good and that the world was made of atoms. So they have high and exciting expectations of this work. And then they finally get a hold of it and as they make comments in the margin, we see their moment of first contact. We see which pieces in a long and complicated text stood out to them in which pieces didn't. We see how they respond when a claim like that there is no afterlife is made. And they write things in the margin like, opinion, no one, Christiana, which is written in two of the copies that I have looked at.

50:25And we also see which parts of a very long book that covers lots of topics they find exciting. It lets us see what it was like for that world to encounter a different world. It's sort serve live for us in the margins of a book. Have you ever thought of annotating a classic out of copyright book and selling the finished product as your annotations of the book? No, although I have a copy of Lucretius into which I've not only put my own annotations, but I have also transcribed the annotations from 36 Renaissance copies, color coded and different shades of ink. So it is probably the most heavily annotated Lucretius that has ever existed and it preserves the annotations not only of me but of two dozen Renaissance figures who annotated including Machiavelli and when you page through it you can see a portrait of the whole periods encounter with Lucretius.

51:25So that's a very fun and unique object. I hope you can put it into an LLAM and have it in the public domain. I would love to. Why doesn't science fiction have higher social and literary status? It's so rich with ideas, right? So just working on an essay about this a big part of it is that science fiction as the modern genre that it is came into crystallization to be a specific type of literature as opposed to an author writes novels and two of them happened to have a a spaceship in them, but the other ones don't. Or, you know, Dickens' Christmas Carol is technically fantasy. But nobody thought of Dickens' Christmas Carol as fantasy when Dickens with a live -gust fantasy didn't exist as a genre.

52:13When science fiction originates and crystallizes and as a genre and gets in name, it is in the 1920s and 30s with the advent of pulp printing, which is the moment when we invent these very large -scale machines that can print at mass volume on a much larger, cheaper sheet of paper. So these are not printers that are printing two or four pages on one small sheet of high quality paper. They are printing 12 or 24 pages on cheap disposable magazine newsprint. Those were used to print magazines, but in the US only in not Europe, They were also used to print cheap paperbacks, which then went into racks that were sold in grocery stores and newspapers.

53:03Bookstores did not like to stock those paperbacks. Bookstores, especially in the US, exclusively preferred to stock hard covers. These they made more money on something a hard cover than they did on a paperback. So these pulp paperbacks, as we now call them, were of a different social status because they weren't sold in bookstores, which existed in elite locations like affluent cities or near universities. They were sold at hardware stores in little magazine racks where they competed with Hershey's candy bars rather than competing with fellow books for the allowance money of a kid. And since that was the birth of science fiction and the earliest people who identified and were identified as science fiction writers and readers were producing for that market, it was born for a low status commodity, a very democratizing commodity.

53:55Since, of course, those books were available to people in Hughes, while it's a USA, for example, where there were no bookstores, where towns had no bookstore, but they sure had a rack with 144 cheap paperbacks next to the grocery checkout. But say, Hammett and Chandler have been elevated to the canon, right? With time. In some ways, science fiction hasn't seen the same evolution. Well, I neither has fantasy and neither has horror, neither of Westerns, all of which were genres that crystallized in that point, although fantasy re -crystallizes in the late 1970s after the paperback publication of Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien never wanted to allow to be out in paperback, because it was most status.

54:41In Terry Ignoda, which hive would you belong to? YouTube, which is the high dedicated to exploration of the stars and the conquest of death. I think humanist for me. I nurse a little a Gwyn if you read the major baller. It should be a herch. At least in the fiction there seems to be this suggestion that the only way you can get rid of war is to really narrow or abolish or limit distinctions between men and women. Do you think that's in, you know, left -hand of darkness or dispossessed and do you agree? I don't agree except in as much as there are a lot of behavior patterns that we now culturally code female, which are artificially culturally coded female, but nonetheless which we culturally code female, which studies show are very good at crisis avoidance, consensus building, conflict management.

55:35All of these studies that show that women in political office handle crises better that men in political office in a lot of different ways. This is not a biological thing, but this is a number of behavior patterns, including types of team building and non -zero sum thinking. Our culturally coded female and women are encouraged to do it, whereas men are encouraged more to do aggressive problem solving, haggling, and zero sum thinking. In my own classroom where I often run this papal election simulation. And there's a survey that the students have to fill out to say, what kind of participation in this political simulation would you enjoy?

56:18It's always very interesting to me that, while there's a huge range of genderedness about most of the questions, the question, would you enjoy having a face -to -face opponent where one or the other of you has to fall for the other arise and there is no possibility of compromise you just have to go head on. That question is almost exclusively said yes to by men or men are enthusiastic about it. Women are more wary of it. Whereas the question, would you enjoy being on or leading a team and being in charge of helping a group of people work together to achieve a collaborative goal? Is disproportionately answered Yes, by men.

57:02This is a culture -ation thing. This is something that we learn when we're toddlers, that we learn when we're in elementary school, as different behaviors are encouraged or discouraged among both men and women. And I think that it's not that we need to eliminate the differences between men and women. It's that we need to get more of those female coded problem -solving behaviors to be welcome in positions of power in one way or another. What is the current novel you're writing? Vikings, Viking metaphysics. This one is finally easily to describe. So I really love Vikings. This is a Viking myth and history book.

57:43And it looks at the question, well, it looks at a number of questions, but a big one that it looks at is if the Viking gods are real, And only the Viking gods are real. This is the cosmos that were in his the Viking cosmos, but history is real history. Why did they decide to let the worship of them die out and be displaced by other religions? Why would that be allowed to occur in a world in which they are the actual governing power? And the other thing that's really fun with it is that there's a lot of really great new recent research on Viking myth. we're getting to understand the metaphysics a lot better, we're retranslating a lot of the older candidate, we're realizing that some of the works that were kicked out of the candidate in the 19th century and believed to be spurious or not spurious, so that some of the ones we kept in are spurious that weren't.

58:35And so while there's tons of science fiction and fantasy that already draws on Viking myth, there's very little of it that draws on the very latest in Viking myth. And I'm excited to dive into a lot of that material, which I have access to just because I'm a scholar, right? This is one of the big problems with paywalls because all of this is in journals that are buying paywalls or the ridiculous oxford annotated poetic at a three volumes, $300 of volume. No wonder nobody has this book. And like it's great, it's full of wonderful materials. I wish I could give copies of it to every science fiction writer and fantasy writer that's a friend of mine who likes this stuff so that they could use it in their things.

59:16But good grief nobody can afford to spend $1 ,000 on the Oxford annotated poetic. I only have it because I did a bunch of favors for Oxford editors until they gave me store credit. You know I'm all for what you're doing and your your podcaster would say that. But what do your colleagues think if I may ask? Of the science fiction stuff they think it's great. They think it's an important way of getting the latest research and improved historiography out to where it disseminates to the public. A good way to think about it is that dissemination works as a kind of a pyramid. And at the bottom of the pyramid are a thousand PhD students doing dissertations, discovering awesome new stuff.

59:55And the next level up from that are several hundred books by somewhat more experienced scholars who are drawing on not only their own dissertations but their friends' dissertations and what they've learned from going to conferences is into baiting this to make synthesis that draw on a bunch of that research. And then above that are a couple of dozen popular history books that transform the latest in what historians are saying to each other into a form that then gets out and is accessed by the public. And then that in turn influences, actually it's not a period as far of an hour glass, several hundred television series video games and novels, which are really where we form ideas of history, right?

1:00:40Nobody gets their first glimpse of the Renaissance without already having run into the Renaissance in some form of fiction. We all encounter stories about this stuff before we encounter the scholarship. And so my colleagues have nothing but the best to say about the process of getting it out there in a way that's going to hopefully also mean that another generation of people who want to write more fiction will say, oh wow, there's a lot of new Viking stuff. Let's look at the new Viking stuff and tell even better stories. And what's the science fiction anthology you're editing and writing for? So two different things.

1:01:18I'm doing a collection of essays co -authored with Joe Walton about the subtitle is Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy. And some of it is about craft of writing, but some of it is about the history of the genre. There's a history in there of the actual physical printing of science -fiction books and how that influences what gets written. But there are also zoomed out essays about questions like what I call the protagonist problem and how it is more and more rare these days for any book to have a structure other than centering upon a core protagonist. Or we have an essay there in there about hope, punk way that says about how science fiction historically has served to combat censorship and to increase international empathy.

1:02:06So it's a collection of detailed reflections on the genre, its history, and just how powerful it is to influence the way we think as a society. I'm also co -writing with her a novel about an exoplanet terraforming mission. Great. Last question. Let's say you were organizing a two to three day event. All expenses paid and you get to choose three or four people only living people They would fly from anywhere in the world and come sit around and talk with you For these two or three days a lot people you currently know, but with whom would you choose to meet? Well, can I run my paper election simulation?

1:02:45You can do whatever you want, but who are the people? Well, if I can run my paper election simulation for them that I want a bunch of the Rising young congress people Some of the younger senators, and I also want people from the equivalent levels of power within European Union governments in a few other places, because absolutely nothing teaches you to think about power and how it works like that. And I would love to see legislation that's been shaped by the way that event makes you rethink power. Every time I run it, I have people write to me even years later saying, you know, I decided to run for office because I did this event.

1:03:30I decided to go home to Russia and work with the Democratic Resistance Movement because this event showed me that I really can't make a difference. And especially if I could bring in educational administrators, people who make decisions about what kind of education gets advanced. From some of the powers that shape the world, I would love to help them see that we can teach people better to believe that they have power. And that if we get this into the way we teach people to think, you know, we can save democracy by making people actually be confident in democracy. And the first step to that is people being confident that what they do actually makes a difference.

1:04:11Edipalmer, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm At Tyler Cowan and the show is At Cowan Convose. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.