Financier and philanthropist Michael Milken discusses his childhood realization that adults frequently rely on hearsay rather than verifying facts through primary research.
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“A lot of times you find in education, that your teachers aren't necessarily current on facts, and so you can surprise them, and you know, at a very young age, I had concluded that adults had strong opinions, but very few of them ever did research, and if you asked them, where did you hear that, they would tell you someone else told them, and then someone else, but you couldn't find anyone that actually did research, and that's one of the reasons why rumor start or misinformation occurs, and so I use these evenings. Yes, I discovered very early that not every adult could tell me every state or every capital or the highest mountain, but what I discovered is they had a lot of opinions based on facts that were not accurate, and so my conclusion was if we could do research and understand facts, we'd have a real opportunity to change things by presenting those facts.”
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