 Hello everybody. This is episode number four of Patterson in Pursuit. I am your host Steve Patterson and I'm joined today by Dr. Brian Kaplan, who is a professor of economics at George Mason University and is also the author of several very successful books. We covered a lot of awesome ground in our conversation. We're talking about democracy and voting, how law and order might be produced by entrepreneurs instead of governments. And we also talked about Dr. Kaplan's upcoming book, The Case Against Education, where he challenges this idea that school is all about learning and getting practical skills. Instead, as he puts it, it might just be a signaling mechanism to future employers like getting a shiny badge on your chest or a nice shiny sticker on your forehead. For all the relevant links and information to his books and his website, check out the show notes page at steve-patterson.com slash four. It's a great conversation and you'll notice that a few minutes into it, the audio quality changes rather abruptly. And that's because there was a lawnmower that started just outside the window right after we began our interview. So we had to move to another room that didn't have quite as good audio quality. But you know, that's just part of the fun of getting these interviews in the field. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. So first of all, thank you very much, Dr. Brian Kaplan, for sitting down and speaking with me today. My pleasure to be here. I'm a big fan of your work. And I really like to that you are kind of an unabashed nerd. You've embraced your nerdiness and openly nerdy man. Yes, I think we're beginning to see kind of a renaissance of more confident nerds out there that I'm a nerd and they're proud of it. Yeah, renaissance. I mean, that makes it sound like a renaissance means rebirth. I say it's the first time. It's the dawn of nerd. Yeah. Yeah. So I appreciate that. Also, you have a few kind of contrarian positions that you hold, which I want to dive into. There are many to choose from, but your work that you're probably most well known for, you wrote a book called The Myth of the Rational Voter. I think the subtitle is Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Right. Very excellent and provocative title. And so I kind of wanted to pick your brain a little bit on that in America at least and probably Western civilization in general were taught that democracy is this wonderful thing. It's above criticism that it's almost heretical to think that democracies could do something wrong or that maybe there's a better way of having a society structured than around democracy. What is your position on this? What is the myth of the rational voter? Right. So in layman's terms, I say the myth of rational voter is the idea that if most people think something or both voters think something is a good idea, then it is a good idea and that we should do it. So I would say that there's sort of two versions of this. So there's the popular version where politician just says America wants this and then no one is going to say, yeah, well, America's wrong. America has made some mistakes. Let me explain how America's wrong. So in popular terms, that is what I think of as the myth of rational voter. And then among academics, they have taken this general idea and they have refined it into something that seems more technically defensible. So among a lot of academics in economics, in political science, there's the idea that sure, voters make mistakes, but voters' mistakes are right on our true or voters' beliefs, rather, are still true on average. So voters may go too high on some questions, too low on some questions, but these errors balance out. So some voters will be too high, some will be too low and leaving the typical voter, making the typical voter correct. And so when politicians go and compete for voters' favor, the fact that a lot of people don't know what they're doing is actually not a problem. So if some people think that free trade is worse than it really is, others will think it's better than it really is, and the average view will still be correct. So this is, again, a more technical sense in which a lot of social scientists believe in rational voters or rely upon the idea of rational voters. And what I just say is that both the popular and the academic version of this view are wrong. We can go and test this in a lot of different ways. We can just go and measure public opinion against the facts and see that the voters are often very wrong in, you know, even on very narrowly defined objectively, objective questions. And you can actually see that often voters, the average voters' views are very far from the truth. So it's not just that some are too high and some are too low, but there are systematic patterns. And then on top of it, there's also the fact that the way people especially think about politics, economics, policy, is just so far from what a reasonable person would do just in the way that people are so emotional about it, the way that they'll form strong opinions without having studied the facts, the way that they'll make claims that they don't want to bet on, which again is a sign, oh, yeah, to me, to my mind, you know, is a smoking gun that while on some level they may think they've got it figured out on a deeper level, they realize they don't know what they're talking about. So can we get some specifics maybe about what are the policies that the result of the democratic voting process is just totally wrong? Right. So one that economists have been talking about a long time is free trade versus protectionism. Almost everyone who can explain economists' argument for free trade believes it, but hardly anyone can explain it. Out of people who have never heard it, almost everyone is a perfectionist. So when you look at public opinion data, you'll see that, especially out of people who have just never studied economics, there's very strong support for the idea of just keeping out foreign products in order to enrich ourselves. And in a way, the economist's argument, the simplest way of putting it is, look, suppose that everyone else on earth worked for us for free, just gave us free stuff, would that be bad? No, then how could it be bad if they give us cheap stuff? The best thing would be if everyone else on earth just gave us whatever we asked for for free. So the second best thing is they give it to us for cheap. So keeping out foreign products is just a way of impoverishing a country. And yet, despite this, there's no country on earth that really has free trade. There are some that have more protectionism than others. And it's the kind of policy that economists have just been scratching their heads and saying, why is this stuff so popular? And my story is that it really comes down to people like blaming foreigners for whatever problems they have. They have a distrust of foreigners that might have been functional 10,000 years ago when you're living on the savannah and a new tribe shows up. And in that case, you maybe should be afraid of them. But when I told you the other dealership sets up in your area, there's no reason to be scared of it. And yet, in some way, people still are. So is there any superior alternatives if we're not letting these kind of economic policies be driven by popular opinion? What should they be driven by? Yes. So the simplest thing I talk about is there are many areas where you could just not have policy. So the United States Constitution, the US does not have a religious policy. We have a official non-policy of religious toleration. And there are many areas where people feel like it's just better for government to do something and or the government has to do something. And really, when you think about it, it's like, well, why can't government just do nothing about this? So why can't there be a policy of government just doesn't have a say over this area? Some other things I talk about. So in terms of the least radical thing you do, I'm a big fan of just stopping and encouraging a voting to stop all the social pressure to vote. There is good evidence that people who that's out there in general, more educated and better informed people will like to vote. And the effect of get out the vote campaigns is to reduce the average quality that people are voting. So I'd say really be better to send the message of if you haven't carefully studied all the following areas, please, as a civic service, do not vote. So that will get you thrown out of polite company to say such a thing isn't kind of what you're saying. To the extent that we have a democracy, it would be better for less educated people to be ruled by their more educated neighbors. Yes, so the simple thing is just to refrain voluntarily in the same way that if there's a an operating room, we don't say it doesn't matter where you make the incision, just make an incision somewhere. Instead, we say, look, only someone who knows what he's doing really should be involved here. Other people would be irresponsible for other people to participate when they don't know what they're doing. So yes, it would be better if people would defer to people who have actually studied the issues and know what they're doing. Now, the main concern that people have here is usually the idea that people vote selfishly. So this will just lead poor uneducated people to not participate. And then there'll be a bunch of policies that are only good for rich people. There's actually a lot of public opinion on this too, showing that in fact, self interest is very little effect on how people vote. People generally are voting for the policies they think are best for their society. And the only question is really what is the quality of your thinking about what's best for society? And people who know more do actually choose policies that make more sense. So is your preferred solution in the ideal to have a governing system where you have educated people making the decisions? Or is your ideal system that there's none of the democratic voting stuff at all? Yeah, so it was a question of democracy versus dictatorship. Then, yeah, dictatorship is a whole bunch of problems. And when I criticize democracy, it is not to praise dictatorship by any means. What I would say is that democracy would work better if people who didn't know what they were doing just didn't participate. And would it be better if they were not allowed to participate? Yeah, I think that too, although probably the better way of handling it, the lighter way of handling it would just be to give extra votes to people who know more. I also have a proposal which is more moderate than this. And it just says, look, every year, there is a test of political knowledge. And if you take it and get a good score, you get some money. The end. All right. Now, what's the point of this? So there's two points. So one of them is to encourage people to learn more about politics. And the other one, though, is to encourage people to maintain their knowledge. That's why the test is given every year. And you can repeat it as often as you want. Because not only do we see that public schools are not very good at teaching, teaching knowledge of politics in history-related areas, but also we see that when people do learn stuff, they generally quickly forget. So this proposal for an annual national test with monetary rewards for good performance is designed to solve both problems at once. To solve a problem of there are better ways of learning this stuff than the way that we generally currently do it. And two, to solve a problem of retention. So what if the spectrum that we're talking about isn't between a democracy and a dictator, but rather a democracy and just no government? Is that, do you have a position on that? Yeah. So my general view is democracies, and you'll wind up messing up so many things. And there really is this catch 22 where to convince people that they shouldn't participate, you'd have to actually show them to their own satisfaction that they're wrong. So I think that there are many areas where it would be much better if a democracy simply didn't get involved at all. So if there were constitutional amendments saying that the United States will have free trade and we just don't have a discussion about whether we do it anymore. Well, what about even a more radical position? Because in that framework, you still have the political document of this constitution. What if we pushed it even farther and say how about none at all? No, just pure anarchism. Yeah, yeah. So anarcho-capitalism, so I don't talk about anarcho-capitalism in this direction of order because I wanted to build on areas where there was a much more of a consensus. Right. But yeah, so are we assuming your readers know what anarcho-capitalism is? Well, no, it doesn't have to be labeled anything. It's just in your, not necessarily about your book, but your own political philosophy. Yeah, my own political philosophy, yes. So I am an anarcho-capitalist, not the crazy kind, as I like to say, not someone who thinks that if we just pushed a button today and got rid of government, the things would improve. I think any radical change like that generally ends up as a bloodbath. But the idea of a world where the most basic functions, what we think of as the most basic functions of government are actually just governed by supply and demand. I think that would be a big improvement over what we have or least improvements, although I realize this sounds crazy and this is the kind of thing you'd have to really talk about it for hours just to get over the impression that is insane. Yeah, I mean this is something that I'm certainly going to be talking to a lot of people about and in my own work I cover a bit. For you, I wonder do you have a short, maybe an economic explanation for how in that kind of society you would have the production of something law and order, which most people object to. They say, well I understand democracy is five, but you have to have the constitution or some kind of legal framework in order to work. Yeah, so when I talk about this I usually just like to start with some facts about the world today and then just picture moving in a further direction. So right now it is not true that government has a monopoly over police, not true that government has a monopoly over courts, and not true that government has a monopoly over law. There are already, these are already areas where the private sector does a lot, so for police there are more security guards than police in this country. Again for courts, private arbitration is a huge deal. If you have a problem in your credit card statements or with a company, you don't go and take them to court, you go and call up your credit card company and they have a system where they resolve it all on their own. And then similarly, so laws as well, there are all sorts of private organizations that have their own rules. The way that including, say if you want to, if you want to be able to use credit cards with a visa corporation, you have to agree to a bunch of the rules in order to participate. So, and these things are all, these are not just small little weird anomalies, these are actually, these are large areas where the private sector is already doing a lot of this. So really the way that I like to think about it is just imagine that we just start moving further in that direction. So imagine that security guards, the police do less than security guards do more. Imagine that the private courts have more authority than they currently do right now. Right now a big limit on private courts is that you cannot really, truly sign a binding arbitration clause. Yes, you can sign it but ultimately you can always go and complain to a public court and get them to, and they will, and they will in many circumstances just say, well yeah, you signed a binding arbitration clause but this is contrary to public policy. So an obvious way to greatly expand the role of private courts is just to have a blanket policy of look, if you signed a binding arbitration clause then tough luck, whatever it says you have to live with, next time you better go and take a closer look at what the contract says. So this is, there's a reason why government doesn't want to allow this, which is that if there were private courts, people could have, could actually get, they could work their way around most regulations. So for example, the minimum wage, you could have a minimum wage law in the books but if part of your conditional employment is if there's ever a dispute about your wages, it's handled by an arbitrator who happens to be the brother-in-law of your boss, this way you could eviscerate almost any regulation of labor markets to be doing a freedom of contract, which in my view, since the regulations are a bad idea, this would be a good thing. So in that, and when we're talking about law, there's generally two areas where people get hung up on, one is contract law and one is criminal law. So how do we resolve contracts? And I think what I have heard is that when you're talking about international trade, you also have these massive private trade organizations that are the arbitrators that dispute, no, contract disputes. Some public, some private. When you have criminal law, this is the thing that every, the axe murderer, how could you, number one, how could you provide for the actual physical protection? And two, would there be a way that you envision where you could get like restitution or would there be jails? How would those kind of difficult things work in your society that you're envisioning, the anarcho-capital society? Yes. So again, just thinking, so I think it's always better to think about what we have right now and then just imagine moving further in that direction. So once you accept the idea of contractual courts, where we've signed a contract saying that this is going to be arbitrated by a certain person and that their decision goes, then the next step is realizing that anyone who happens to, whoever is the landowner of wherever you're occupying, the most obvious thing is by default, they get to decide with who the arbitrator is for anything that happens on their land. And in this way, so if there's a criminal who happens to break onto some property and does something, then they're subject to the law, to the law and the decisions of whoever it was that was selected as the arbitrator of the owner of that land. So that's one obvious way. So like if you go to mall and you go and and and steal stuff, then the mall actually has a system where well, yeah, here you are. If you don't like it, you don't, you don't enter onto or if you don't like the way that we handle alleged pickpocketing, don't come into our mall. So you have that kind of thing. Now, so when you start thinking about more radical proposals, more general idea is that in a functioning, and this is sort of the key thing, once you imagine an anarcho capitalist society functioning, then the obvious thing to do is to have some kind of insurance company that takes care of your issues. And then, you know, there are competitors here. But once you once you think about the insurance model, what happens right now in today's society? What happens if two people get in an accident and they have different auto insurance companies? Normally, their auto insurance companies go and talk to each other and they again have a system for handling it. So they may have it have actually have an arbitrator that does it or they may have their own system they've worked out. So again, so if you can think about right now, if you get an auto accident, you call your insurance company and the other person calls his company and they work it out. Similarly, if someone is accused of a criminal offense, you call your you call your defense company or your defense insurance company, they call theirs. And again, they have worked out what the procedure is. So even though you don't have a contract with the person that's accused of the crime, you have a contract with someone who has a contract with someone who has a contract with him. Right. And in this way, you can handle that problem. I like that response. And when you were talking about the shoplifter scenario, I like that that also kind of aligns the incentives of the shoplifter and the stores because the shoplifter then has an incentive to to know the rules of the store that he's vandalizing, which then means the shops have an incentive to have sensible rules. Right. So I mean, I think people immediately start worrying that the malls are set up a kangaroo court, will you just step on the step one step in and then immediately you're accused of being a pickpocket. And then the court says you owe us your house and exchange because you took a candy bar allegedly. So these kinds of worries are theoretically amusing. But again, if you just look at the way that almost any business works, this would be suicide because business is relying reputation. If you were to treat the first person to steps in your store this way, then the word gets around and nobody's going to want to come to your store. Right. So I mean, actually the real way the way the real world works is that businesses generally enforce much less the law than they actually could because they don't want to make people feel uncomfortable when they step foot on there. So instead they rather than businesses vigorously insisting upon their legal rights, normally they bend over backwards to make people feel comfortable. So if you don't appear to be a criminal and you accidentally walk out of a store with a candy bar and they catch you, in reality, they're unlikely to actually try to put you in jail for that. Instead, as long as you appear to not be a criminal and it doesn't happen and it doesn't happen twice. Right. What I've heard as well is at least when I grew up where I grew up in upstate New York, apparently they had, Walmart had a policy where if you were shoplifting and you made it out of the store, they couldn't pursue you out of the store like into the parking lot because there might be, you might run into a car, you don't want to get tackled and they had the PR. So that was the, they had the gate there if you made it out of there. That was an interesting example. Yeah. I mean, of course, if there were fully private arbitration, then Walmart's arbitrator might say that whatever happens when you're being pursued for pick pocketing is your own fault or survivability. Right. Right. So, you know, but, but never letting the point of businesses don't try to push things up to the legal limit because they want you to come back and want you to feel comfortable in their store and they don't want bad word of mouth to get around. You know, this has always been true, but I think the internet has made it much clearer how powerful reputation really is with all the ratings and reviews and how important they are to businesses. You know, it really has given people a feeling of like businesses, you know, businesses want me to be happy. Right. They want the company, I'm the customer, they want me to be happy. Really, you know, sort of like a very general rule in business is if you ask for something, you'll usually get it. You know, like this is the most obvious place like Costco where you can buy anything and then return it to them in an unresaleable state and they give you your money and they ask, was there anything wrong with it? No, I didn't like it. All right, fine. Here's your money back. And why would Costco do this? My dad is like, how can they stay in business? You know, Dad, I think Costco's got a pretty good business model. I think they've figured out that while this does have some cost, it does make people feel really comfortable buying from Costco. Well, speaking of business models, we have quite the contrast from the private sector in Costco to something like government where everybody's had experiences at the DMV where they don't give a rip about your satisfaction or even the court system. But also an area that I'm interested in and I know you're interested in because you have an upcoming book on the topic is the area of education and higher education. You have a book coming out that's called The Case Against Education. Right. And as I mentioned before we started the interview, I had a job a few years ago where I got to travel around and talk to professors and students. And I have to say there are a lot of students who are not pleased with the service that they're getting from colleges and higher education. So I was hoping we could talk just a little bit about that, your case against education. Yeah, so again, my book is not just about higher education, it's about education in general. Like every complaint I have against college applies at least as strongly to K-12 in my experience. So the heart of this book is what economists call the signaling model of education. The idea of this is that a lot of the reason why education pays is not that you're learning useful job skills in school, but rather you're jumping through hoops in order to get a sticker on your forehead. You're showing off in order to convince people that you are among among those that will actually finish their education or get a degree or get certain grades or get a certain major. So anyway, in the signaling model of education, from the student's point of view, it really doesn't make much difference whether the signaling model is true or not. Because all you need to know is I go and I sit there for four years and then I get a better job at graduation at the end. Who cares about why? But from the point of view of education policy makes an enormous difference. Because if education is really building skills, then you can actually have a lot of people get a lot more school and then they become more skillful and then they will have better careers. And since they've become better workers, their training actually pays for itself where people who now are able to do more things, they make more money, but they're making more money because they're producing more stuff. So if education is really about building skills, then it's a path to national prosperity. But on the other hand, if it's really just about jumping through hoops and putting stickers on your head, then an education is a path to national misery, national poverty, because everybody gets additional degrees. This doesn't mean that everybody can be the best. It just means that the standards that employers will impose in order to decide whether you're good enough to hire or go up. So one of the big things that happened in the last 50 years is credential inflation, where the education that is required to get a given job has increased a lot. And signaling model is a very good explanation for this, which is that employers don't really care whether you know Shakespeare, what they care about is, are you in the top 20% of the distribution? And the more education people get, the more you need in order to get the same jobs they had before. So that is the heart of the book. I talk about a lot of other things in the book too, but the overarching point that I make is that what you learn in school has very little effect upon your productivity as a worker, which means that to a large extent education is a zero sum game and not the skill factory that we like to imagine it is. So that seems very persuasive and it certainly seems clear when we're talking about maybe really soft sciences, like somebody that has the underwater basket we've agreed. What about the harder science? That's a great question. So here's the thing, people who have never done engineering computer science tend to think that engineering computer science are the exception that proves the rule and it's just all learning skills every minute of every class. But when you talk to anyone who's actually done the degrees, oh no, that's not how it is. So my dad was a PhD in electrical engineering, a lot of the time that he spent in class is on doing proofs, doing things that no one outside of university will ever pay you to do. And why is this? Well, it's because professors teach what they know and they teach what interests them. So if you're going to be a professor of engineering or computer science, you're a lot more interesting in engineering theory, computer science theory than you are in actual applications, at least in your more likely to be so. And what this means is even in those areas, people do waste a lot of time. A lot of it does seem to be signaling. A fun example is there are degrees in software engineering and computer science. Software engineering is much more vocational, computer science is much more theoretical, but the one that pays more is the computer science degree. And if you ask people in it, well, the computer science, that's the one for the smart people. That's the one for the hardcore, for their hardcore awesome geeks. And software engineering is a bit easier. So even though it's adding more value in terms of job skills, nevertheless, the signal that it sends is, well, if you're doing software engineering, you didn't think you were good enough to hack real computer science with real programming theory, which you never use on a job. But still, it's what the really, it's what the really hard for people do. Now, again, do you notice to be clear, my view is absolutely certainly not that education is 100% 100% signaling. That's a view that people put in my mouth all the time, even though I've never, I've never said it in print. I may have suggested it casually when I'm speaking, just because I'm not checking the sentences that carefully when I, although I try to. But you might, my ultimate, the ultimate view is that about 80% of the payoff for education comes from signaling about 20% is from building up skills. So sure skills teach you reading, writing and math. If you do computer science, you learn some programming, engineering, learn some engineering or architecture, really, or even if you're just doing English or history, you're learning some writing and you might need to learn how to be and might need to write on the job at some point. But still, in terms of why it is that education pays, seems to me that most of it is just this sticker on the forehead and only a small minority of it is really because you'll learn job skills in school. Now, this makes me think of a couple questions. One is, does this model apply to vocational training? So the person who goes to school to be or to get trained to be a welder, that seems that this is an exception. Yeah, so that's a really good question. And I would definitely say that there's a lot less signaling going on in vocational education. There's a question about, is it any? There is an argument that people have made suggesting that actually vocational education, although it builds more skills, sends a negative signal. Oh, you couldn't get it. You couldn't qualify. Yes. So there's a common view that there's a big stigma attached to vocational education. So who would do welding other than someone that wasn't very smart or just had a bunch of different issues. So if this stigma theory was true, this would mean that actually when you go and get some vocational education, you lower people's opinion of you at the same time that you're improving your productivity. And then the payment is basically a net payment for, you've sent a bad signal, but you've got more skills. And so on this theory, actually more than 100% of the payoff for vocational education is due to the job skills that you're getting. Now that leads right into my next question, which is what about on-the-job training as an alternative to all this? Yes. So on-the-job training is awesome. There is quite a bit of work on just the benefits of your career of having actually had a job. So anyone who's in college right now, you don't have to do some of this. Everybody knows that you need to go and get an internship. And if it's an unpaid internship, still, people will fight like mad for unpaid internships. Why on earth? Because at least a lot of it is because there's a rare chance to actually learn how to do something. So you spend all this time in school learning stuff that you're never going to need to know it again. And then finally you can get a job where you actually learn how to do something anyway. So maybe there could even be some signaling involved in internships where at least you want to show that you impress people enough that they wanted to hire you again. But yeah, so this is another great way. Now many people are, especially economists are calling to say, well, you know, like, you know, this vocational stuff may sound good or on-the-job stuff may sound good, but it's failed the market test. Clearly employers really want people with degrees. And to this I say, you know, failed the market test, there's almost a trillion dollars of government subsidies every year in favor of the status quo. So how can you say that vocational education has failed the market test or the internships are on-the-job training has failed the market test? Why don't we go and revoke the subsidies and then see what happens? So this makes me think we're sitting in this room here, you're a professor. Oh yeah. So how do you respond to people say, well, isn't this hypocritical? I'm a whistleblower. If I were not a professor, no one would believe me when I said all these things. They would just say it's a sour grapes, you're some loser, couldn't get an academic job, and now you're bitter. I hear that a lot. Yes, yeah, sorry. Unfair, but nevertheless. So yeah, I'm a full professor of Irish Mason. I give my PhD from Princeton, my undergraduate degree from Berkeley. I've got all the right stamps on my forehead, which I think puts me in a unique position to blow the whistle on this corrupt system that we have. So there are enormous subsidies of which I'm a beneficiary. And I'll say I feel a bit guilty. I think someone ought to go and tell the people their money's being wasted, and it looks like it's got to, I have to be that person because I don't see other people doing it. Now this is a great topic to kind of close on because I am trying myself to get around the barriers to entry in the market of the production of high quality ideas, especially philosophy. And I think we're at the very beginning of seeing a shift, specifically because of the internet. I don't have to go in and get the credentialing before I can write some article on the metaphysics of logic, put it up for anybody on Planet Earth to read that they have an internet connection. So do you have any intuition as to where the future of what you might call intellectual or nerdy academic work is going to be in the future with the internet? Do you think we're going to see a change, or do you think people are going to be more entrenched in this system? Yeah, so I have two different views on online education. First one is that it's awesome and it's just amazing to me that there is now this cornucopia of enlightenment that is available online. If you told me this when I was in high school that something like this would exist, I would just say it won't exist for a thousand years. This is like just dream on, it's fantasy, wishful thinking. So we right now, anyone on earth who wants to learn about any subject can do it essentially for free, as long as they've got an internet connection, like you said. And even people in very poor countries can still do this. So as someone who really loves learning and the quest for enlightenment, I think it's just so wonderful that online education is out there and I think this is a lot of high-quality stuff. The best lecturers will go and give away their lectures for free. So that's wonderful. But in terms of what's going to happen in the markets, what I see coming is more the same where there's a two-tier system, there's the official one in academia where we give out the official stickers that employers take seriously. And that one is going to, I think it may decline a little bit, but I don't think that any big revolution is coming. I don't see that anything's going to do to higher ed or K through 12 certainly, what the internet did to recorded music or anything like that. But anyway, so we're going to have the tier that I'm in where you get paid to do the old stodgy thing. And then there's going to be the other tier on the internet where it will continue to be essentially free. And even charging a penny for an essay on the internet would probably reduce your demand by 99%. It's just too much of a pain in the neck and there's too much great free stuff. So it seems like the free price point is very much a part of the internet. It's really hard to get people to pay anything for this in a world where there's just so many other alternatives that you can get for free. And I think this is just going to continue. So my view is that online education isn't going to compete with traditional education. It's going to compete with blogs. It's going to compete. So it's really just part of this giant smorgasbord of wonderful intellectual enlightenment that's there for free. This is bad news for someone who wants to make a living in an untraditional way as in the market for ideas, although of course it's great news for consumers. Are you more pessimistic when it comes to the quality of the ideas that are on the internet? So somebody, for example, that's really, really excited about philosophy wants to not only be a big consumer of philosophy, but wants to be a creator philosophy. Do you think that there's a way just purely intellectually to learn about and fully grasp the ideas as an autodidact? Or is there a necessary need for formal education in order to grapple with the deepest concepts? Yes. So definitely no need for formal education. I think there is generally a need to talk to other people who know what they're talking about. So I write interdisciplinary books, so I consider myself an autodidact. Luckily as a professor, I get to meet a lot of people in a lot of different areas, so I can talk about these ideas that I just read about with people who can then give me the wisdom of people who have been studying it for their whole lives, who haven't written it down. But still, before I publish anything, I reach out to people in all these different fields and say, look, I've read all this stuff, but is there something that, is there some wisdom that has been put down in words that I'm missing? Or am I somehow just not getting the point of this? So I think there is a danger in reading all by yourself in total isolation and not communicating with other people. But this can be remedied just by reaching out to people. And again, the internet is great for this. But yes, to whether you need formal education, do this. No, totally don't. So I mean, there are plenty of people who become experts in subjects where they've never taken classes in it. My former colleague, he's passed away, Gordon Tulloch. He was one of the most famous economists of the 20th century. I think he never actually even took a class in economics. But he read a lot and he talked to a lot of people who were already experts, and so he became an expert himself that way. What I would say is if I only knew what I've learned in classrooms, I would just know nothing practically. It would just be like the level that my ignorance would just be so appalling. Maybe I could still be a professor, despite that, because I could have learned just enough to go and extend in academic literature and get some publications. But in terms of knowing anything about the world, like what you're taught in classrooms is such thin gruel that you just would really know next to nothing. Well, on that note, I completely agree. And I want to thank you again for sitting down and speaking with me. This is great. Thank you. It's been a great pleasure. Good luck with your project. Thank you. So that's it. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Dr. Brian Kaplan. He's written a lot of great articles that you could read online as well. The link is in the show notes page steve-patterson.com slash four. And I highly recommend his bestselling book, The Myth of the Rational Voter. Dr. Kaplan also has many other unorthodox ideas about ethics and philosophy of mind even. So I hope that I'll be able to speak to him again sometime in the future. All right. So that's the show. Thank you for listening. Make sure to subscribe on iTunes and Stitcher. Leave a review if you can and enjoy the rest of your day.