 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Book Show on this Friday evening. Not a usual time for us to do shows. But October is going to be like this. I'm just going to do shows when I can. Because when I can is going to be infrequent. And whenever I can, I'm just going to stick in a show. So I figured I do want tonight. Tomorrow I travel to California. That'll take the whole day, or most of the whole day. I'll try to do a show from California on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Tuesday afternoon I'm going to see. I'm going to go visit a Leonard pick-off. And then Thursday, Friday, I travel. And then I'll try to do a show Saturday. And Sunday, Sunday I'm actually going to Leonard's birthday party. Leonard pick-off will be 90 years old, 90 on Sunday. Wow, that's quite something. And then Monday I fly to Europe. But I'm hoping to do Monday morning a show. So anyway, and then in Europe, who knows? Who knows when I'll be able to do shows and when I won't. But I'll try to do as many shows as I can. I'll probably focus on the new shows, because that seems to be what people really get excited about these days. Not trying to be doing any interviews until I get back in Puerto Rico in early November. I think the first interview on November 2nd is with Scott, who's second name escapes me, because that's my memories, just toast. Anyway, we're going to be talking about China. He's a China expert, world-class expert. And we'll talk about China. Everything China, China philosophy, military, US policy towards China, where China's heading, Taiwan, invasion of Taiwan, all of that we'll talk about. I'm really, really, really looking forward to that. It should be really interesting. Thank you to all the superchatters from yesterday. We broke the record yesterday in terms of supercharging an interview. So thank you to all of you. I guess I should have a interview week. I mean, god, I'll get rich that way. But that was terrific. So thank you. It was a great interview. Have you was fantastic. All right, what else do I want to say before we get started? Yes, it's ARI is a sponsor. The Iron Man Institute is a sponsor. They are now running their Atlas Shocked Essay Contest. The deadline is November 6th. You can win $10,000. That's the first prize. It's for 12th grade students, college students, graduate students, students generally, can apply $10,000 first prize. All you have to do is write an 800 to 1600 word essay on a philosophical theme from the novel. You can also get a free copy of Atlas Shocked. So go to ironman.org slash start here. Please go, even if you're not interested in the essay contest, look at the page. There are other things there that you can probably enjoy, like other stuff that the Institute's doing, like signing up for Iron Man University or Ocon or other things like that. All right, let's see. What else do we want to talk about? We'll get to the Christendom in a minute. I want to remind those of you who want to do a public speaking seminar with me to send me an email. You're on at youronbookshow.com. I am making a list of names of people who are interested. But particularly October 18th, we're doing one in London. It'll be small, five people maybe. So it's a great opportunity. You'll get a lot of one-on-one, $750 or pounds. Just let me know if you'd like to participate, if you can't participate. And you can do that by sending me an email to that effect. All right, where will we? Yes. All right, so I promised you a review of the book Christendom, The Triumph of a Religion. And that's what we're going to talk about today. It's a book by Peter Heather. Peter Heather is the, I had it here, he's the chair of Medieval History at King's College London. He is a real historian, and you can tell. This is a 700 page, 700 page book with 30 page of ed notes and 50 pages listing 2,000 book length bibliographic sources. I mean, this is like a real academic scholarly book. Although I have to admit, now maybe it's because I'm a geek and I love history. I found the book, I listened to it. I found the book very readable, really interesting. It just flowed for me. I think I mentioned while I was listening to it how interesting it was and how engaged it was and how involved it was. So I found it super interesting. And so I recommend it. If you're interested at all in Christianity, in history, in the rise of Christianity, then this is probably the book. It is focused on 300 AD, in other words, Constantine making Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire, to 1300 AD. So really the consolidation of power by the Pope, at least for about 200 years before the, what do you call it, reformation, where Christianity fragments again. But 1300 is like the peak, 13 to 1500 peak power for the Popes, the consolidation of Pope power, the consolidation of a dogma, of one religious dogma, and an institution of one, one version of Christianity as one that's dominant. And we'll talk about that in a few minutes in terms of what happened, what was before that, how did we get there. So let me just say, I found the book really fascinating, really good, really interesting. Heather is clearly secular and is really viewing this not as an attempt to kind of glorify Christianity or justify Christianity or make Christianity look good or look bad. He's just an historian. He's telling a story about, from an historical perspective, he's telling a social, cultural, political, religious story. Well documented, as I said, gazillions of end notes and references and bibliographic sources and the whole thing. So this is really scholarly, even though it's not written like a scholarly article, it's written for the common person. And I think it reads really, really well. At least I thought so. I'd be curious what other people think in terms of this. So I would definitely recommend this book if you're interested in history and if you're interested, partially, if you're interested in the rise of Western civilization, I think this is an important book. If you're interested in the fall of Rome and kind of the rise, even though it doesn't get directly with the fall of Rome, a lot of interesting things, things that I just didn't know because I guess I'm ignorant of that part of history, but just interesting things like the barbarians who sacked Rome were Christians. I thought they were barbarians. I thought Christians were the most civilized, turns out now. That's not true. Okay, so in that sense, the Dark Ages were just in a sense a continuation of barbaric Christians. It wasn't that different, but it was, it did signify the fall of sophisticated, cultured Christian Rome and with all the technology and civilization and law and everything else that there was involved in. All right, God, how do we do this book review? So how do we wanna do it? I think there are a few themes that the book illustrates that are quite important. And then there's some just interesting things that every time I read about Christianity, I find them fascinating. I read earlier this year, I read a book about the Reformation, also really, really detailed, hundreds of pages. I gave up on it at some point just because it was too detailed. Too much going on and I got the point, I think. I got what I wanted to get out of the book and I was primarily interested in the beginning of the Reformation and kind of how it got established. I was less interested in all the infighting that followed. Although I might go back to the book because I am interested in things like the 30 Year War and things like that. So anyway, it's, so I'm interested in Christianity. I'm interested in its history because I'm interested in the history of the West, in the history of Western civilization and the role Christianity played in it or in subverting it or in undermining it or in repressing it, however you want to view it, but clearly a big part of Western civilization is, I think, ultimately. The struggle of Aristotelian philosophy to break out of, first of all, to be recognized in the West and then to break from Christianity to be free of kind of the scholastics, to be free of its kind of anchoring in Christianity which Aquinas did and then scholastics reinforced, I think, and it's that Aristotelian, those Aristotelian ideas that ultimately break free from Christianity that constitute Western civilization and constitute what we call the West. You know, this whole history, and I'm not, we'll get to the book in a minute, the whole history is really a history of, the whole history of the West is really a history of the reassertion of Greek primarily Aristotelian ideas, the reassertion of Aristotelian ideas or the, yeah, the reassertion of Aristotelian ideas in the West and ultimately a rejection of Christianity. Christianity's anti-West and at its core and it's not until the West can shrug Christianity off but replace it with something. And in the Enlightenment, it's replaced with what I would consider real Aristotelian ideas with respect for the individual and with respect for reason. It's not until the West can do that that it becomes the West, that it becomes unique, that it becomes civilization at its heights. Of course, Plato plays a big role in the rise of Christianity although this book doesn't really deal with the philosophical roots of Christianity. For that I would recommend The Cave in the Light which is a grand book with the scope of all of history. The Cave in the Light, I've talked about it before in the show, it's about the battle between Aristotle and Plato for primacy and the influence that they have throughout the history of Western, of Europe really and Rome and then Western Europe in different eras who is on top, if you will. So Cave in the Light is a must read, must, must, must read. The monks of Ireland did not save the West so let's just get that straight. Did not happen. All right, so how did Christianity get to be the dominant religion of Europe? How did a little sect, really an insignificant small sect become the dominant intellectual religious force in Europe? In Europe, that is really the story of Christendom. It starts with probably the most monumental event in Christian history, I mean, apart from Jesus' stuff but it starts with the most monumental event in Christian history which I think ultimately has to be Constantine's conversion to Christianity and making Christianity the religion of the realm of the Roman Empire. And it really ends in 1300 where Christianity now is dominant, it's everywhere. It basically controls all of Europe with exception maybe of certain parts of Southern Europe where the Ottomans are now challenging Christianity but it basically dominates all of Europe. Now during this period, what's interesting which is so easy to forget and even I have never really considered this and this book really made me consider it, even I forgot in a sense that the entire Middle East and Northern Africa was Christian when the Muslims showed up. So we'll talk about Islam in a minute. So there was a period at least where Christianity dominated the Middle East and dominated North Africa. It didn't last very long once Islam rose to power. All right, let's be clear about the status of Christianity in the year 300. Christianity was and Peter Heather in the book makes this argument. Christianity was a minor religion. It was probably held by maybe 1% of the population. It was a religion of the cities. It was religion primarily of the poor in the cities but it had already made some inroads into some Roman aristocracy. You one could argue and there was some evidence to suggest that Constantine was in a sense, I think his mother was sympathetic to Christianity and was probably a Christian well before he could so-called converted to Christianity. He needed to be emperor before he could reveal that he was Christian. He might have been Christian even before that. So it's probably 1% of the population. Primarily again, poor. It was primarily North Africa and in the Middle East. It was one among many religions but clearly the dominant religion of the time was paganism, various forms of paganism but primarily kind of the Roman Greek idea of pagan gods. A Judaism was still fairly strong particularly in the Middle East but also in North Africa. So the Jews were still a powerful force in 300 AD around the Roman Empire. They had been kicked out of the holy land out of Palestine but they had settled all over Southern Europe and North Africa and the Middle East. And really what took Christianity in a sense out of this small, very divided, lots of conflicts. Even in those first 300 years huge divisions within the Catholic, within the Christian church about the meaning of Christianity, about the meaning of the passages, about whether Jesus was God or not. We'll get to that in a minute. About substance of Christianity. What is the content of Christianity? Massive divisions and disagreements throughout Christianity. And it is Constantine by not only converting to Christianity but also turning Christianity into a political religion that is not only did he convert to Christianity but he claimed, and this is a claim emperors will make over and over and over again throughout history all the way I think till the 19th century. He claimed God was on his side. The reason he could convert is he convinced pagans. He convinced others that Christianity, the Christian God had led to his victory. The Christian God had chosen him as emperor. The Christian God in a sense had defeated the pagan gods. So there's a famous story about him getting a message from God before his great victory and it is that victory that leads him to convert. So in 306 AD Constantine rises to power in the Roman Empire and in 313 he issues the edict of Milan which basically grants Christians religious freedom in the Roman Empire and ends all persecution. Everybody makes a lot about the Roman persecution of the Christians but it was pretty minimal. If you actually look at what happened the persecution itself was pretty minimal. It lasted very few years. It was no way as extensive as one would be led to believe by the movies, right? That historical source of the movies. Somebody said Christianity had lots of schisms and he can't even call it schisms because the schism is often when there is a dominant ideology and then people disagree about some implication and splinter off of it but for the first 300 years of Christianity there was no dominant ideology. There were just splinter groups. There were all kinds of groups who believed all kinds of things. There was no one authoritarian dogma. There was no one perspective. One of the things that's stunning when you read this book and when you read the book about the Reformation and when you read other books about Christianity is how seriously Christians take like ridiculous and what seemed to us secularists as insignificant features of the religion. So for example, the big controversy during Constantine's life was, was Christ God? Was he man? Was he a man who became God? Was he a God-like man, man-like God? What was he? And then given that there's a trinity, God, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, is the trinity three different gods? One God, three aspects of the same God and it's, you can't believe the kind of rationalistic detached from reality you know, contortions that these people to this day I think make in order to justify one thing or the other is when you take the wafer in your mouth during communion is that Jesus' flesh, well it's not Jesus' flesh before you put it in your mouth, does it literally convert into Jesus' flesh when you put it in your mouth? Or is it just a metaphor for Jesus' flesh when you put it in your mouth? I mean, this is a big reason why there was a reformation. Transubstantiation, I mean it's even a word that's unpronounceable. And the wine that you drink, is it literally become Jesus' blood once you drink it? Or is it just a metaphor for Jesus? I mean this is, on this millions of people have died, slaughtered, killed, on this schisms throughout the ages, yeah, eek is disgusting, absolutely. I mean, but that's Christianity. I mean, if you're Catholic, you believe that literally once you put that wafer in your mouth, it becomes the flesh of Christ and the drinking of the blood is of wine, it becomes the blood of Christ and you are one with Christ. I mean, there's certain cannibalistic element there, granted, but that's Catholic dogma and part of what the Protestants do is they reject some of that, right, and that creates a tizzy. During Constantine's life, because Constantine was eager to make Christianity the religion of Rome, he was not happy with the fact that there was so much disagreement within the church, that there were all these sects, that there were all these bishops and preachers and they all kind of were preaching and arguing different things. There wasn't one consistent dogma. And so they clear this up and to be able to make it the religion of Rome, so it's one religion that everybody's followed, he ordered the Council of Nicaea in 325. And in the Council of Nicaea, basically they were supposed to agree on some of these issues, primarily whether Jesus was God or not. And they did, they did through really the egging on or the twisting of arms, the insistence, if you will, of Constantine who needed a unified religion. So from the beginning, what you get in Christianity is this constant tension between power, Constantine and religion. And at least for the first thousand years, I'd say up until at least 1080 for the first millennium, the power is wielded by the secular forces. The power, and then Christianity is used in order to expand that power, solidify that power. But the movers and shakers in the Christian church, and this was new to me, were secular rulers, Roman empires, later on people like Charlemagne, his heirs, the Holy Roman Empire. And it's only around a thousand as Charlemagne's heirs are splintered and there's a lot of struggles within Europe about who should rule it. Just slowly the church, what do you call it? Bishop of Rome, the Pope really take control of the religion and establish religious dogma. Religious dogma is basically determined by politics, determined by power struggles between empires in Rome, barbarian tribes that have become Christian to the north of Italy and sometimes to the south of Italy. It's barbarian tribes that travel through Spain, crossover and settle in what was Carthage against Tunisia or Algeria of today. And really establish the own Christian domains in those territories and not until the Muslims do they get, does that change? So you get Christianity growing, Christianity expanding, but it's expanding through this idea of political power. And Christianity serves as a unifier, as an ideology, but God is viewed often as, why should he become a Christian? Because God wins you battles, God wins you battles. And if you believe in God, you're more likely to be able to own power. And of course, Christianity was very flexible, very adaptive, dogma constantly changed. For example, Christianity first came to England. This is after the Romans had left and there were some Christians in Southern England, but most of England was dominated by old pagan religion, old pagan religions that had come over with the, I guess with the, I think the Saxons from Northern Europe. And when Christian missionaries came, they dealt with a very fragmented country with 20-something kings and knights and very violent, very, very violent culture. And one of the things that Christianity did was instead of trying to pacify the violence of all the knights of this medieval knight-based culture, what Christianity basically did is it adapted. It said, okay, we'll accept the violence, violence is okay. And we'll accept the fact that you might be sleeping with more than one woman, that's okay. We'll accept it in this case. Our demands are very small, and on the other hand, if you convert to Christianity, what we promised you is an afterlife, a much more peaceful and much more committed afterlife than what you get from kind of the pagan mythologies. And look, we're winning in what today is France. We've won in Italy, we won the Middle East. Come convert over to us with a winning ideology. So Christianity was very flexible. It wasn't like to another cheek, love the enemy. Sometimes, and sometimes it was slaughter left and right, and gods on your side said, don't worry, kill whoever you need to kill, God is with you. You know, they tell you that Islam converted thousands and millions of people by the sword. What do you think Christianity did to a large extent? Christianity converted people by the sword, which is also fascinating. I mean, Charlemagne kills what? 45,000 people in one go when they refused to convert to Christianity. So characteristic number one of Christianity, it's flexible. It is willing to do the bidding of power. It is willing to adapt to the needs of the people in power, of the emperors, the kings, the knights, the local fiefdoms. So you get a Christianity that's not one belief, but it will change, adapt. It becomes much more coalesced, much more one set of beliefs, starting in about 1080 and on into kind of up until the Protestant era, and then it fragments again into 1,000 different beliefs. And today, again, I mean, evangelicals, what are they? Are they Christians? What kind of Christianity? It's a completely fragmentation. All right, so one is Christianity is super adaptable. I mean, you can see this in the holidays. Christmas, it's not exactly a Christian holiday. It's a pagan holiday adapted by the Christians. Easter, every one of these, the dates coincide with pagan holidays, the traditions coincide with pagan traditions. They co-opted everything. They adapted to everything. In that sense, there's no, again, particularly early on, no one dogma, complete flexibility. Second, Constantine established a pattern for the early spread of Christianity, but the spread really of Christianity into various parts of Europe. Once Constantine became Christian, and Christianity in a sense became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it suddenly became, in a sense, cool to be Christian. But cool in the important sense of, if you wanted to be in a circle, if you wanted to get the juicy contracts, if you wanted to be treated as part of, you know, the Roman Empire's, the Roman Emperor's buddies, if you were an aristocrat who wanted to maintain your position and maintain your influence and maintain your power, then you had to become a Christian. And whether you had to, or whether they just thought they had to, it slowly spread, and slowly what you saw is the aristocrats converting to Christianity, building little churches next to their estates or inside their estates, so they could practice their Christianity. It still was true well into the fourth, fifth, sixth centuries that most of the rural population was not Christian. The aristocrats, the rich, the powerful, the people with political connections were the first ones to convert. They were the first ones to convert because Christianity bought them power, bought them connection, bought them an inside track with the emperor and later with the king which is really, really interesting. And then what you see is that when the Muslims take over the same parts of the world, the Middle East, Northern Africa, and suddenly now to be in, to get the contracts, to be associated with power, to be in with the caliph, now it requires you to be Muslim. Guess what happens to almost all of those aristocrats who went from paganism to Christianity? They converted like this to Islam because they could tell where the power lay, what was needed to survive, or more important, what was needed for them to thrive if they wanted to be close to power, if they wanted to get the goodies, they needed to become Muslim. And this was true in England. Once you converted, I mean, the priests who came to England to work on converting, you know, started out converting, I think it was the king of Kent. And then there was two crafts around him converted and then another king. And then once they won a few wars, that was attributed to the conversion and contributed God. And now it started expanding because you wanted to win. And of course, if you lost the war, then it was blamed on your sins. You weren't a good enough Christian. So they had it all worked out. They had it all worked out. So Christianity converted the elites as a primate because the elites had something to gain by converting to it. And those same elites, and this was what was really interesting to me. And I, you know, it's kind of obvious when it's said, but until I read about it, I didn't know. I mean, maybe you guys knew, but I didn't know. And that is the same pattern that happened with Islam. Islam, it was not true that Islam primarily converted by the sword. Islam, just like Christianity, initially converted through taking control of an area. Islam did it by force because they had to kick the Byzantines, the Romans out, primarily the Byzantines. And then all the different Christian forces that were in the Northern Africa, the different Christian kingdoms in Northern Africa. And the same pattern happened. And then how did they convert the countryside? So that's how they converted the elites power, closeness to power is important. How did they convert the common folk? Well, there, ultimately, the way they did it was by making paganism kind of illegal. They basically destroyed the temples. And one of the greatest sins of Christianity of all time, one of the greatest sins of any movement in all of human history, is the extent of the destruction that the Christians committed against the great artworks of the ancient world. The sculptures that they crushed and melted, the bronze that they melted, the temples that they destroyed, just the amazing cultural, you know, the Alexandria Library, the destruction of that library, but that was not the only library, many libraries were destroyed, preserved by the Muslims. If anybody saved Western civilization, it was Islam by interesting and crazy coincidence. So it was basically the outlawing of other religions, whether explicitly or implicitly, and the destruction of their worship places that basically, in a sense, forced the peasants, forced the majority of people living in these territories to ultimately adopt Christianity. Now, you know, I'm not gonna get into this. So that I found, all of that I found super interesting. You know, I found just some of the historical stuff interesting, the idea that it was some of the barbaric tribes from Central Europe or from even Eastern Europe from the Ukrainian plains that settled North Africa, it's interesting, the genetic makeup of North Africans is this mixture of African, Middle Eastern, but a lot of European DNA, because they came down both from Rome, but also from Spain and these tribes from Central Europe that ultimately start in Asia came down and occupied much of Northern Africa, and they were the ones who ultimately turned Muslim. So it's all just fascinating, I find it fascinating, the movements of people, the genetic makeup, more proof that race is really meaningless. You know, fascinating, fascinating stuff. Let's see, what else do I wanna talk about here? I mean, Charlemagne plays an important role, but again, Charlemagne is, you know, he's king and he dominates Christianity. That is, he uses Christianity, he is crowned, he orchestrates the crowning of himself as emperor, he wants to resurrect the Roman emperor, and he wants, and he uses the church that way, Charles Martel before Charlemagne. I mean, they're all kings who are using Christianity for their own political ambitions, and Charlemagne, I think, is the peak of that in that he really gets the pope to crown him as emperor, and after Charlemagne, you have the holy Christian empire, holy Roman empire, emperor who unites this church with political power, and it's only once that gets fragmented in the 10th and 11th centuries, and once Islam is on the rise and presents a real threat, is occupying Spain, occupies all of Spain, basically, and it is threatening, and the Byzantine empire is about to, is crumbling and destructive. It's only then do you start getting an assertive pope, an assertive Catholic church that is starting to concentrate power, starting to concentrate dogma, but even then, a lot of it is coming out of, in the late Middle Ages, you get the establishment of places like the University of Paris, the University of Bologna, which is, I think, the first university in Paris, they are getting Greek writings coming out of captured libraries in Spain, captured from the Muslims, and they're really reading Aristotle, Veronaise, not a Veronaise, I forget the name of the guy. Anyway, they're reading Aristotle already in the library of Paris even before Aquinas, so there's a lot going on, and in a sense Aquinas is, he doesn't really talk about Aquinas in the book much, but if you think about it, Aquinas is, represents kind of the solidification of the church. Oh, yeah, I did wanna mention this. The Crusades are a big deal. They're a big deal in again establishing the papacy as a central power in Europe and as the central power of Christianity. What happens is that the first Crusade to go take Jerusalem is, you could argue miraculously, but really insanely through massive amounts of luck and just insanity, the first Crusade is successful. They actually take Jerusalem. It doesn't make any sense. It's a rag tag army of nobodies. It doesn't have real leadership and they succeed. And the Crusade itself was called by Pope Urban II, and it's a success. They take Jerusalem, and that is really the first real big, in a sense, moment for the papacy, for papacy. That's 1095, right? Then you start getting real consolidation by 11, and part of it is educational institutions founded, Oxford is founded in 1096. You get Peter Lombard published as the four books of sentences, which standardized theology, theological textbooks in 1150. That is adopted throughout the Christian world. There's a second Crusade in 1147. There's a third Crusade in 1189. None of them are as successful. There's a fourth Crusade in 1202. One of the things that happens with these Crusades is now they're expanding. Now some of the Crusades are taking over Eastern Europe. Some of the Crusades are taking over Spain. They're not just focused on Jerusalem and fighting Islam. They're focused on expansion of Christianity. By 1300, basically all of Europe is Christian. There's still parts of Spain that are held by the Muslims. There's still parts again of Southern, South Eastern Europe that are held by the Ottomans. But Christianity has won by 1300, and a lot of it has to do with the energy that the Crusades produce. And again, a lot of stuff, the Christianization of Scandinavia and the Baltics and parts of Hungary and Poland and all that kind of area, all deemed part of various Crusades. All right, what else do we want? I mean, there's so much history here. But I think I got the main points I wanted, which was the way in which Christianity spread, its flexibility, its association and link to power, this idea of to seize on, to seize on, to guard on, to guard. That's just not true. Caesar and God joined at the hip throughout much of this period. Politica power and religious power are the same. They united Christianity throughout its history, has insisted on kind of political power. It's only with the fragmentation of the Reformation, of Protestantism. And Protestantism, of course, is not one view of Christianity. It's a thousand different views. It's only with that that I think Christianity loses its power. It has no means to assert political power because which Christianity and every country, particularly in Northern Europe and certainly in the United States, there are so many different forms of Christianity that are involved. Anyway, if you're interested in all this, I highly recommend you can find it. I listened to it. I thought the audiobook was excellent. You can find it on Amazon. It's called Christendom. The triumph of religion, of a religion, 300 to 1300. One of the points he makes is the Christianity did not have to win. And certainly this version of Christianity did not have to win. There were competing versions of Christianity that had significant political power at different points in history. Christianity was not anywhere near dominance or much more important than Christianity. It was a majority in 300, 300 and something when Constantine made it the religion of the empire. It is Constantine who is responsible for the ongoing growth of Christianity after that. It is the Roman Empire that makes Christianity what it is. It is political force that unifies Christianity around one set of ideologies, around one dogma, left to its own devices, it fragments. One of the things you learn is that Reformation was preceded pretty much every century. There was a splinter group that declared itself a reform movement that decried the corruption of the main Catholic church. But they were all crushed, destroyed, slotted. In a way that the Catholic church couldn't do, I think with Martin Luther, because of how big Martin Luther became and how quickly Martin Luther became and how fragment European politics was at that point in time. There wasn't, I mean the Holy Roman Empire at that point was too weak, too small, too insignificant to crush the Reformation whereas in the past, Charlemagne and his heirs easily crushed opposition, opposition to the dogma. Christianity was super flexible. It allowed for expansion, it allowed very much for conversion by the sword. It allowed for all kinds of pagan beliefs with Christianity side by side. The Christians were very much in that sense, pragmatic. They didn't insist on you have to do the dogma. I'm trying to think what else. Yeah, those are the interesting aspects. I wish when I read books like this, I could just memorize everything, but I don't. I take certain things from it and I move on. I integrate these books into the rest of my knowledge but I don't retain details, dates, stuff like that. That's not how my memory or my mind works. It allows me to integrate big picture. It allows me to hold a big picture perspective on history. So I found it interesting. Again, Peter Heather, H-E-A-T-H-E-R. You can find the book on Amazon. You can get it on Kindle. You can get an audio book. I listened to it on audio book. It was excellent. Highly recommended. If you're interested in this kind of stuff. All right, let us look at some questions. Just a reminder for everybody to use the Super Chat to ask questions. While we did very, very well with the Super Chat last night, we need to do well every night. So we're not quite halfway to our goal in spite of James Taylor really helping out and getting us very close. We're still about $400 short of our goal. So Michael has asked like $25 questions. So there are a lot of $5 questions down there. So what I'm gonna ask is, if you'd considered doing $20 questions, if those of you who still wanna ask questions considered doing $20 questions, let's build up a little bit of not so much volume of questions as volume of dollars so that we can make this a decently profitable night. Not a lot of people live right now. Partially it's a Friday night and partially I'm sure the topic, if I'd done something on Jordan Peterson, which I was considering doing or if I'd done something on politics, I'm sure we would have a lot more people. But hopefully some of you are able and willing to support the show. You can also just don't mind to use stickers to support the show without asking questions. So everybody pitching in with five bucks and we get to where we need to be pretty easily and pretty quickly. All right, James. James says, after World War II, intellectuals began to speak a lot about human rights. Unfortunately, many use the phrase for welfare. But is there something positive about people identifying that there is a certain level of dignity that comes with being a human being which requires rights? I mean, yes. There is something positive about that of identifying humans and identifying the uniqueness of humans and associating being a human being with having certain rights and associating that with the freedom to live by your own mind, by your own pursuit of your own values. There's certainly a kind of a general fuzzy undefined, unfortunately, recognition of that, which came about. Unfortunately, it also involved, I think, a certain collectivization of rights. In a sense, it went from individual rights, the rights of you as an individual to human rights, you as a member of a group. You know, the most general sentimentation of that is you as a member of the human group. But I think it also opened up the door to all kinds of rights that are associated with particular groups rather with individuals. I mean, the proper term is individual rights. The rights of man. The rights of every man, qua man, of every individual qua individual, of every human being, qua human being. But human rights has become, and partially it's because the United Nations felt the need to define human rights and then Europe has a list of human rights, 322, I think. And it, in a sense, what do you call it, cheapened the concept, made it more ambiguous, divorced it further from its origins as individual rights. And dignity replaced the idea of dignity, which is, I think, important, but much more important is this idea that the founding fathers articulated, I think, I mean, this is the thing the founders got in 1776, you needed better definition. I ain't got that, but why don't people refer when they talk about rights to the founders? Why do they need to replace rights with human rights? Why do they need to talk about dignity rather than the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? And then articulate what that means. It seems like it need to be reinvented for a collectivist world, that the conception of rights that the founders has were too individualistic, too oriented towards reason, too oriented towards the individual's ability and therefore right to use his own mind in pursuit of his own values with his own happiness as his moral end. I mean, that's what individual rights mean in the founding fathers context. That's what individual rights mean in the context of the Enlightenment. I'm not clear to me that that's what human rights mean in the post-World War II era. It meant more like Jews are human and they shouldn't have been slaughtered in mass. Yeah, okay, that's all true and right. But to really get us the way we need to go, we need a proper concept of individual rights, individual rights. How many says what is dignity in the West is different than what is dignity in the Middle East? Sure, but there's a right conception of dignity and a wrong conception of dignity. There's even a moral conception of dignity and an immoral conception of dignity. And the conception of dignity in the Middle East is an immoral conception because it's an anti-life, anti-individual, anti-mind conception. It based on life. Human flourishing is the standard of good. That which is good for human life as an individual, individual human life is the good. That which is harmful, bad for individual human life is evil. Not that hard. They're living over there, that's not life. Women having to cover their entire bodies and faces, that's not life. That's a slow death. It's a living death. Life requires freedom. Life requires the ability to use your own mind in pursuit of your own values. Human flourishing is not vague. Human flourishing is obvious and you can see it around you. Human flourishing is the ability of human beings to pursue happiness based on their own standards. You can't tell me the women in the Middle East are free to pursue their happiness, they're not. So in order to flourish, human beings must be free. In order to flourish, human beings must be able to use their minds to choose their values. Religion, authoritarianism, authority, dictatorships of any kind, do not lead to human flourishing. You don't need support structures that's, that is a complete utter BS, cop out. What you need is to produce. What you need is to be productive and then trade for the things that you need. You are not an island, but you are independent. You are not an island, but you can produce the things that you need by producing what you produce and trading with others. That doesn't make you dependent on others. That doesn't make those others your structure based on what? Based on human nature, based on human reason, based on human ability. Yeah, ants live in other forms. Yes, lions have a different means of survival, they have a different way of living. Human beings, because they are beings that require reason, because the basic means of survival is reason, must be free to exercise their reason. The sole purpose in life is not to produce, but your central purpose in life is to produce. And as a producer, you can then trade. If you don't produce, you die. You die. Slavery, it's pretty funny. That is funny. The whole point is you produce for yourself. That's not slavery. It's slavery not to produce and then you're dependent on other people. You're dependent on their charity. You're dependent on them being nice. I don't know where Frankie D. comes from, but God, enlightenment destroys man's soul and I'll understand that now. No, nobody understands that now. People who are ignorant think that. The enlightenment liberates man's soul. The enlightenment frees man's soul. The enlightenment makes man's soul meaningful. Pre-enlightenment was the destruction of man's soul and the return to pre-enlightenment mentality of the modern mind is destructive to man's soul. Man can only have a soul when he's free to make his soul. Man can only have a soul when he's free to construct it and you can only construct it through choice. You can only construct it by the choices that you make. You as an individual, by the values that you as an individual choose. All right, let's see. I thank you, James. James, that was $100 question. So thank you. That got us a long way to our goal. Yeah, I need another $300 or $400 questions and we'll be where we need to be. All right, Liam. Oh, no, Harper Kaynbull first, $50. We could also do a few $50 questions, that'll work too. You mentioned that in our society, only rappers can get away with having gold dollar signs and chains while singing about, only caring about making money. But those characters strike me more as ignoring thugs than proud achievers with self-esteem. Oh, I agree. It's a pseudo self-esteem. It's not a real self-esteem. It's a narcissism, not an egoism, which is what they project. They project a narcissism, a shallowness, so I was not complimenting them. What I was saying is that for a variety of reasons, maybe because narcissism is the only way you can get away with it, you know, rappers are the only ones out there who get away with splashing their material wealth all over the place. Look at Trump, Trump is the same way, right? Another narcissist who gets away in his admired force, splashing his name over everything and, you know, making a big deal, bragging constantly about his wealth. That kind of bragging is something that most people, it's found upon. But certain types of narcissists, people look up to when it comes to these things. And that is interesting. And the ones who strike me as the most, in this sense, are the rappers. And one has to think about why that is. Partially, it's about because they're black, we can't criticize them because it's an oppressed culture, we can't say anything negative about it because we come across as supposedly racist if we do. Partially because part of what they are doing is, what would you call it? It's protest music, you could argue. It's sticking it to the man, in a sense. So it's acceptable in that context. But no, I'm not arguing that rappers have achieved self-esteem or that rappers, they're ignorant thugs for the most part. And the music is horrible. It's not real music. It is primitive and barbaric. And it's not elevating man's spirit. It's not elevating man's soul. It's dragging him down into the pit. Oh, I believe man has a soul. I think some men have souls, not everybody. But I think soul is something that you create. Soul is your consciousness as you have structured it through the values that you have chosen and the choices you have made. I am not denying the existence of a soul or spirit. You know, I'm not saying it's mystical. I'm not saying it comes from some other dimension. It doesn't. I'm not saying it's delinked from a material reality. It's not. But I am saying that it is through our choices that we make that soul. And if you don't make the right choices, you build an ugly soul, I think most people, or you don't build a soul at all. And then your so-called soul, it's not even a soul then, your consciousness is just a mishmash of whatever you happen to encounter in your life and are stuck with. It's not anything, it's not a soul. It's not an integrated whole, which is what I think a soul is. It's an integrated whole of your values, your choices, your character, that's what a soul is. You know, it's too bad the religion has kind of monopolized these terms as if you can't have a soul and you can't believe in a soul. You don't think human beings have a soul unless you think there's a God. There is no God, but there is a soul. Dave Dean says, appreciate the topic. Thanks so much for the intellectual exchange of value. Hopefully a secondary consequence is the movement towards protecting individual rights, freedom, et cetera. I hope so. I think we're not gonna be able to make a change in the world. We're not gonna make a dent in the world unless we understand history. We understand the world out there. We understand the ideas that we are opposed to, that we are fighting. You know, to really change the world which we must know the world. And I'm a huge advocate of knowing history and studying history and understanding history. So Dave, I'm really glad you enjoyed the topic and or you value the topic and thank you for the $50. We really appreciate that. All right, we have made real progress with the super chat. So we're now $300 short. So that's, you know, $15, $20 questions but also it could be $650 questions or $300 questions, it's very doable. So I encourage people to ask questions about anything. You can take the conversation in any direction you want. That's the beauty of this. So please consider doing that. But please, if you're gonna ask a question, make it $20 or more. I've got a lot of $2 and $5 questions here at some point we're gonna have to wrap it up. All right, Liam says, these are the $20 questions. When I lived in Germany, I didn't get the sense that most of the population could turn into genocidal mystics. But it did seem like a very second-handed society that follows rules even if they make no sense. I think that's right. And it takes a certain confluence of events, of characters, of sequence of events to get that second-handed mentality to the point of being able to do the kind of atrocities that were committed in World War II. But it's doable. I mean, look at what's happening in Ukraine. Look at how Russia's used the Nazi methodology, if you will, in order to dehumanize or subhumanize Ukrainians so that Russian troops can go into villages, rape and pillage and murder without any compunction, without any problem. And they do that and they follow kind of the Nazi methodology. You first dehumanize them, make them into non-human in Russia's case. Call them Nazis and by calling them Nazis, even though you're more like the Nazis, by calling the Nazis, you're basically eliciting the whole context of the rats, the subhuman that the Nazis used and Nazis are evil. So anything can be done. Anything can be done to them because they're not human anymore. They're, quote, Nazis. And any enemy you have, call them a Nazi and they're not human anymore. Anything can be done, they're subhuman, right? Because the real Nazis, arguably, subhuman. Let's see, Richard, how much for a session of personal financial advice? Is half an hour sufficient to get general guidance on where I should be putting my money? I just started a job and need to figure out a strategy for maximizing my taxes in New York City. Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to do that. My rate is $500 for a half an hour session like that. Happy to do an hour for $1,000. Probably get a lot done in half an hour. I'm not gonna give you specific advice on which stocks to buy, but I'll give you general advice in half an hour and then beyond that, you can figure if you want more of my time and you can hire more of my time that way. But yes, I'm happy to give personal financial advice, $500 for half an hour. Start with half an hour and see where we go. Again, anybody interested in anything like that? You're on at youronbookshow.com. You're on at your onbookshow. Yeah, it's the kind of advice that needs to happen one-on-one. Depends on your context, depending on what you're doing, how much money you make, how much money you need, all of those kind of things. So, feel free to hire me, if you will, to provide that kind of advice, you know, one-on-one kind of context. All right, let's see. Yeah, we're doing well. Slowly, you know, slowly achieving our goals here. All right, Andrew says, what if any aspect of Christianity's history are relevant to spreading objectivism? I mean, not much, not much, for a number of reasons. Christianity is very much a religion that's spread from the top down, but not from the top down in the modern sense for intellectuals to the culture. But really Christianity spread from political leaders down, from political elites down. Christianity was a tool that political elites wielded, but then it was also a way in which to convert the populace, to align the populace, particularly other political elites, other people associated with political elites to your agenda, to your goals. Christianity uses force and coercion when the pagans were too influential with the populace. Pagan temples were destroyed, you know, and being pagan became very expensive, very painful, so people converted to Christianity because it was the easier thing to do. And all you're doing, you know, and then they converted to Islam, and all you're doing is replacing one mystical framework with another mystical framework. It's all, you know, it's all relatively easy, it doesn't challenge your fundamental beliefs. What differences did it really make between converting from Christianity to Islam? Same God, almost the same prophets. Yeah, Jesus is no longer God, now he's just one of the prophets. Big deal, nobody really understands what means to say Jesus is God anyway. So you just switch your lines from one to the other, and in that sense, there's very little to learn from Christianity. I mean, objectivism, to dominate the world, has to convince, can't use force. It's true that it has to come from the top, but the top, not from the political top, it doesn't matter if an objectivist is president, he can become president unless a lot of people believe in these ideas. It has to come from the intellectual top, which is very different. It's intellectuals who dominate. You know, and again, objectivism has to be chosen. Objectivism has to be understood, at least by a committed minority. Christianity, I mean, it always needed a set of intellectuals, it needed Augustine and people like that, but the way it spread was to a large extent, politics influence force. So not a lot. I mean, I'm curious if other people think otherwise, but I don't see a lot of ways in which we can learn from the spread of Christianity about the spread of objectivism, the potential spread of objectivism. Oh God, Adam is stretching my knowledge of history and the history of religion. I don't know the answers to these questions, Adam. Please comment on the relative importance of Copernicus's ruling as canon of the church, approving the separation of church and state in Lithuania, and the defeat of the military forces of the church north of the Italy at Grinwald. I mean, this is already, of course, later, Copernicus is later than 1300, and this is already setting in motion, things are starting to set in motion, the ultimately the fragmentation of the church and the destruction of the centralized power that the papacy becomes. And huge importance to the separation of the church and state and church in Lithuania. And I'm trying to, what year was that? Let me just look that up quickly. What year Copernicus's ruling was. Yeah, I mean, that's already the 15th century. So this is the beginning of the end of centralized authority. Once you start separating church from state, even at the fringes, no, it's 15th century, 14th something. And I don't know about the defeat of military forces of the church north of Italy and Grinwald, but the church starts losing power, and certainly by the Renaissance. So it achieves peak power in 1300 and then is in descent afterwards. It has power, but it loses wars. The pope is a general, but not a very successful one. Generally, Europe for 1300 until the Enlightenment is an unbelievably fragmented place where political alliances and politics and political is constantly shifting and constantly moving. And nobody dominates, nobody dominates. You could argue that that allows that fragmentation and that lack of dominance and lack of centrality. The church is the central authority vis-a-vis Christianity, but a lot of people are not taking Christianity that seriously anymore. And you could argue that is that fragmentation, that lack of centralized authority, that allows in the seams, it allows the rise of the Renaissance. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment. So without the church even knowing what it's doing, it helps the Michelangelo's and Leonardo's and the Raphaels ultimately move the church away from the centralized authority of it. And you get the Netherlands, you get the riches of the Netherlands and the trade and the both of capitalism, arguably in the Netherlands. You get all that during the late Renaissance and into the Baroque and then the Enlightenment. All of that is at a time of complete and utter fragmentation and no authority and no ability to crush dissent and no ability to control everything. There's all kinds of attempts during this entire period to have censorship, burn books, burn heretics. And it's done, but it's not done on a big enough scale. And it can be done on a big enough scale because there's not enough centralized authority to do it on a big enough scale, to crush the growth of these values of independence and independent thought and science and art and individual emotions and individual spirits. It just cannot be done because of the fragmentation. Andrew says, regarding your view of rights as the greatest future threat, of the rights, sorry, of the right, as the greatest future threat, does the growing nihilism of the right lead you to question if it will be able to form the political cohesion needed to establish religious racist government? Yeah, but it won't, see, what happens is that people will get sick of the nihilism and therefore they'll unite around something that is not seemingly nihilistic. That is a, let me pick up, called a misintegration. That is a wrong religion, right? So what happens in the end is this nihilism gets driven out of the right in the name of patriotism, in the name of the flag and in the name of Jesus, in the name of religion. And maybe in the name of environmentalism, that's my thesis of the unity that brings about authoritarianism in America. So Trump is not the authoritarian leader of the future. Trump is the agent of chaos, of nihilism that will bring us the future dictator leader that will integrate it all. And he will, that leader will be much more influenced by the Patrick DeNines, the Sahaba Maris, the Integrationalists, the Catholics, or the National Conservatives, much more influenced by them that he will be influenced by the make and make a great again nihilistic, just let's burn it all down Trumpist kind of attitude. So again, Trump is the bringer of chaos. And chaos will only go away. And the left is the bringer of chaos. And that's the options we're left with, right? Trump or the left, both bringers of chaos. And that chaos will result in a strong man. A strong man. Trump would love to be that strong man, but he's too incompetent to be the strong man. He's too much of an agent of chaos to be the strong man. Richard, wow, Richard, another $50, another $100 here. That's great. Richard said, awesome, thanks, Iran. I'm still interested in the public speaking course too. Yeah, I've got it down. I don't know when I'll hold that. I haven't got, there's not enough interest in it. That's a reality. I mean, I need, because I know not everybody will be able to come on any particular date. So I need like 20 people interested. So maybe I can get 10, eight. And there's just not enough interest. It's a handful, it's five, six people. And to get them all in the same time, in the same place, very difficult. So again, if you guys are interested in a public speaking seminar and joining a public speaking seminar live with me, somewhere in the United States, write to me. Iran at youronbookshow.com. Just expressing interest, no commitment or anything. It'll cost something about $750 for a day. But I need at least 20, I need 10 to 20 people interested so that I can go ahead and do it. I know your schedule will be hectic for a while while traveling. Yeah. And again, I won't do it until I have enough people. So if you want to do it, if you have friends who want to do it, just send me an email. Just say, hey, I'm interested. Put me on a mailing list or whatever. I've got a list of people who are interested. We've got it somewhere. I wrote it down. So in Richard, I'm pretty sure your name is on there. Let me just, I'm opening up the list just to check to see if your name is on the list. Yeah, your name is on there. So a bunch of people interested, but not enough to motivate me to really start organizing something. Okay, Richard, I was asked, it's remarkable how much the Nazis, religious fervor is whitewashed. Hitler called himself the savior of Christian civilization and so on. I suspect that this is because of the US religiosity and the religiousness of historians. Yeah, and it's also true that the Nazis were a unique kind of Christian and many of them, maybe not all of them, but many of them did reject Christianity. Many of them were Nietzscheans. God is dead. God is irrelevant. So the Nazis were this combination of Christianity, but also strong Nietzschean anti-Christian elements combined. And I think what has dominated the understanding of the Nazis was the Nietzschean element. Many within a cult, but Christians can be into their cult as well. I mean, many Christians have been in world for a very long time. All right, we have a lot of like five to five dollar questions. So all questions now on $20, please. We've only got $130 to go to reach our goal, which would be fantastic if we could reach our goal today. That would really set us in a good position as we start October and October is gonna be a rough month. So really appreciate it. We've got, you know, 65 people watching, that's only $2 a person. So value for value, remember that. All right, let's jump in with these shorter five and $2 questions. Michael says, has Christianity been the greatest force for repressing emotions in history? Probably. I can't think of a greater force than Christianity. Repressing certain emotions, right? Repressing primarily sex, you know, positive, a lot of positive emotions. Think about original sin. You don't want positive emotions. So very much repressing positive emotions, yes. Michael, what is the difference between rich and wealthy? Huh, I don't know. I don't think there is really a difference between, I think they're both expressing the same thing. You have a lot of money, you have a lot of assets. That's what's being captured by whether you're rich or you're wealthy. Richard says for another 50 bucks, get you run over the hurdle, guys. Value for value, we're gaining a ton. So buy YB and Americano. Thank you, Richard, really appreciate it. All right, Michael says, who were the positivists? Are they Kantian? Yes, they were very much influenced by Kant. You know, that would have been a good question for Harry in terms of, but why don't you ask that question of one of our philosophers when they come on who can give you more on the history of philosophy and the place the positivists have in that history. I am not as familiar with modern philosophy as I probably should be. Michael says, what are you going to do with the life you have left? Oh, thank you. I've a long life left. This is what I'm going to do. I'm gonna continue doing what I'm doing. I'm gonna continue trying to be a leader and a public intellectual, a voice for sanity in the world out there. I intend to continue speaking and arguing and debating and podcasting and YouTube-ing and tweeting and whatever. You know, my ideas, Rand's ideas, subjectivism to the best of my understanding of it here and all over the world. So that is my intention of what I intend to do and at the same time having fun and enjoying myself and seeing the world and surrounding myself with beauty and visiting beautiful places. So there's still places I want to see in the world that I haven't seen yet and there's still things I want to do that I haven't done yet. So life, I think I've still got 30 years. We're gonna keep going and keep changing the world, one mind at a time. If you had to live in Europe, where would it be? I mean, Spain, maybe, Portugal, Lisbon, maybe. So I'd say Spain and Portugal primarily for the weather, the ease of living, the friendliness of the people. Maybe Italy strikes me as a little rougher, a little more difficult. I find Spain, for a variety of reasons, I'm not sure why exactly, but easier. Yeah, I think Spain, Portugal, you know, if I, I'd love to spend more time in London, I'd love to spend more time in Paris. I love Denmark, I love Copenhagen. But the problem with those places is they're too cold. They're too cold. They have to be the southern coast of Italy, somewhere between Barcelona and Gibraltar. And up the Atlantic coast, up through Portugal. Northern Spain is too cold in the winter. England is too cold, too rainy. Certainly Copenhagen is insane in winter. So I wouldn't mind spending time in Copenhagen in the summer. Michael says, a smart man learns from his mistakes, a wise man learns from the mistakes of others. Yeah, but it's wrong to assume you're not gonna make mistakes. So no matter what happens, you're gonna make mistakes. So the real thing is to, is to both learn from your own mistakes and learn from others' mistakes. No, we're not, there's no streaming of Leonard's birthday. It's a private, it's a private event. It's at his home in Southern California. Clark, if statism is the cause of war and expansionism, how come heavily status Scandinavian countries are peaceful and have small militaries? Well, because they're not that statist. They're not that statist. Statist is authoritarian. It's centralized power and authority. It's the subservience of the individual to the state. Scandinavia is relatively free. It's relatively individualistic, relatively speaking, certainly relative to history and certainly relative to other countries around the world. I mean, Denmark and Sweden and Norway are fairly entrepreneurial and fairly individualistic. They have expansive welfare states, which is unfortunate, but I wouldn't call them the epitome of statism. The epitome of statism is Russia. The epitome of statism is China. And I think many, even many countries in Europe are more statist than Scandinavia. Scandinavia gets a wrong rap in that it's nowhere near as homogeneous and collectivistic as you would think it is. It's much more energized and again, more individualistic than you would expect. Dave says, what is your prime intellectual goal, values? Question, I mean, I mean, my main intellectual goal is to expand my reach as a public intellectual and to do more to pass on my knowledge, my understanding to future generations. So I'm gonna be doing a lot more teaching at the INRAN University. I'm starting a new course with Ankar Ghatay. We're teaching it together on Monday. It's a course on understanding current events. We're gonna be reading, during the course, we're gonna be reading a lot of INRAN's essays, analyzing political events in the 60s and 70s and then trying to draw out the principles and the way she approached things and trying to understand the world as it is today based on those principles and how she thought about the world and how we can think about the world. And then in January, I'll be teaching a course with Ilan Giorno on foreign policy and objectives to approach the foreign policy, the principles, the ideas. Oh, stop it, Scott, you're so ignorant and sometimes just stupid. So we'll be discussing foreign policy and an objective approach to foreign policy. We think of it as an objective approach to foreign policy. And then I'll be teaching public speaking at ARU for the advanced students, for kind of the senior people, more senior people in the graduate students in the spring and then I'll be teaching in the summer. So I'd say, you know, I'm parting my knowledge in the world and in terms of, at the same time, I wanna learn more, I wanna know more, I wanna understand more. So I love history, I'll keep reading history and trying to integrate history into my understanding and knowledge. What are my goals and what we'll see? I mean, as you know, we've kind of, growth of the Iran book channel has been slow recently in terms of subscribers. One of my goals is to get that back up, is to accelerate that growth and to get it back to be substantial. I would still love to get to 100,000 subscribers. You know, I think a million is probably out of my reach in my lifetime, but to get into the six figures would be cool. And I'm thinking of different ways to do that and thinking of different approaches and how I can do that. We'll see, we'll see. Is there a market for what I do? I don't know. So far there is, but it's limited in size. It's not limited in your generosity. It's pretty amazing how generous you guys are, but it's certainly limited in size. So can we break through is the question, right? We'll keep, I'll keep trying. I'll keep trying to figure out what it's gonna take to break through. Michael says, would you say Reagan was our first anti-intellectual president? No, no, no, Kennedy. I mean, Eisenhower, Eisenhower maybe was an anti-intellectual, but he was a zero. Eisenhower was a nothing. I think Kennedy was the first anti-intellectual president. Nixon, certainly anti-intellectual. Yeah, so no, I don't think Reagan was the first anti-intellectual. Michael says, do you think James Cameron is a better director than Steven Spielberg? No, not necessarily. And I think Spielberg is far more prolific. I do think James Cameron is more philosophical than Spielberg. And I mean, and that has hurt his more recent movies. So anything from Titanic on has been dreadful because his philosophy is caught up with him. But his early movies are some of the best movies of the last 30, 40, 50 years. So Aliens, second Alien movie, Abyss and Terminator one and two are four of the best movies of, since the, I don't know, 1970s. So the last 40, 50 years. Michael says, has Venezuela dialed back to the socialism. What it's really done is Venezuela's become just more of a kleptocracy. It's become more of just a pragmatic, survive somehow, barely, but somehow. And less about socialism and redistribution and more about survival mode. So in that sense, it's dialed back to socialism. But not ideologically, just from a pragmatic perspective. They don't want to starve. Michael says, how many people's lives do you think you've saved? Oh, I don't know. I don't know what that means. By helping them discover objectivism, I don't know. Hundreds, maybe thousands, certainly hundreds. Of the liars in the world, the worst are our own fears. I'm not trying to stand or agree. Frankie says, missing a huge section of the Christian story, which is the Orthodox Christian Church represented by Constantinople. Everyone loves to demonize Christians by focusing on our seas while ignoring the Orthodox Christian. Not missing a huge section, just focusing on the Western church. That's what the book was about. It was a book review, after all. And how Christendom is understood in terms of its dominance of the West. The Orthodox Church had an impact. It had an influence. In many regards, the Christian Orthodox Church is more primitive and more barbaric in the sense that it modernized even less than the Catholic Church and therefore fell behind. It also didn't have a reformation. So it didn't have anybody really challenging its authority in any significant way. So yeah, there's a lot to say about the Orthodox Christian Church from its heyday in the Byzantine Empire to its expansion into Eastern Europe, South Eastern and Northeast into Russia, Ukraine and then Russia. But it didn't modernize with the West. It didn't have a reformation and then it didn't have an enlightenment. And therefore, in many respects, the Christian Orthodox Church helped hold back the East, particularly Russia. And it's responsible to a large extent for the barbarism that is Russia today. Andrew, I agree with you that objectivism is a little too long for Christianity, though I wonder about art. Was the vast amount of art produced with Christian themes an essential cause of Christianity spread to an effect of it? No, it wasn't. I mean, and this is the thing. Christianity was already the dominant force in the world when it adopted, when it embraced the world of art. Through the Roman period and the post-Roman period, the Christian Church was very suspicious of art and very resentful of art and destroyed much of the ancient world's art. And then the Christian Orthodox Church actually went through a period where they rejected all art completely and again destroyed a lot of the ancient art of the ancient world and tried to compete with Islam with regard to, oh God, what's it called? The Christian Orthodox. Anyway, with regard to a rejection of art, the Renaissance happens in spite of the Catholic Church and then the Catholic Church embraces it in an effort to hold on to power, to hold on to relevance. And look, a lot of the poops that were elected during the Renaissance were not exactly men of religion. It was a political appointment. I mean, the Medici family and the Borghese family and the other families, these were rich, wealthy families that used the papacy as a political tool. They didn't care about religion. They had orgies, they had children, they had wives that were not wives, but mistresses. I mean, part of the Reformation is a rejection of the decadence of the Catholic Church. And as part of all that, like the Medici's, they loved art. I mean, Lorenzo, the father of the Pope, of the Medici Pope ultimately, was a lover of art. And then when the Medici became Pope, he'd be like, yeah, get Michelangelo up here. When I was a kid, Michelangelo was sculpting down in Florence, bringing up here to Rome so he can paint and sculpt for me when I'm Pope. So it's not... Now, it's also true that they used the art and they tried desperately, I'd say, to channel the art towards religious themes so that the art would work to make people more religious, but it didn't work. It didn't work. It was exactly, you know, it was the exact opposite. What actually happened was that this art, even the art that it has a religious theme, was seen for the secular values that it really represented, for the potential, the human potential, for beauty, for knowledge, for human success and ability to be happy. And it's the Renaissance that made the world more secular, not more religious. It's the religious art of the Renaissance that made the world more secular. It backfired on them. I mean, it's not like multi-requiem made people more religious, it probably made more people more secular, even though it's quote a requiem. The music is so grand, who needs God? God is in the music. So you don't really get... The Renaissance, the Catholic Church is desperate at that point to try to capture its spirit for its own devices and it tries and it invests in that. But while it's doing that, it's killing itself. It's destroying itself. It's basically unleashing the human spirit in ways that it's unimaginable to them. And what's it unleashing is Greece. What it is unleashing is the Greek aesthetic, which is anti-Christian. Frank says, did the book mention the Cathars, heretics? Yes, now don't ask me how and when and why, but it does. Apollo Zeus, do you know who Arthur Jones was? The inventor of nautilus equipment, machines, opinion of him? You know, I know who he is. I know he invented the machines. I know the machines incredibly valuable. I know that they're essential for the kind of super slow, high-intensity workouts. So I'm in debt to him for the years that I use those machines. But I don't know much about him beyond that. So obviously an entrepreneur, a very successful entrepreneur who had an important impact on the science of bodybuilding and the science of health, of working out for health. Apollo Zeus says, Arthur Jones also established Jambolero, Ocala, Florida. I have no idea what that is. Frankie D asks, from your perspective, how would you deal with individuals who are born with some useful IQ, deformities, et cetera? What about the old who cannot compete with young for economic resources? God, I mean, the fallacies there. So I don't know what a sub-useful IQ is. So yes, there's certainly people who are born with real deformities or born with minds that make it impossible for them to be productive. Those people are dependent on the charity of others. Now, a welfare state provides for chaos charity, for forced charity, but it's still dependent on the charity of others. They're dependent on other people. They're dependent on other people giving them money, giving them the means by which to live. Now, I don't think there's a lot of people like that. And as we get better at genetic engineering, and there will be fewer like that, and if we don't ban abortions at all completely, then again, there'll be fewer because we'll be able to test fetuses before they're born and abort them if they have these problems. But basically what they are is completely dependent on human beings and others, and in a free, lesbic capitalist world, they'll be dependent on their family and on charity. That's, there's no other option. Or they die. What about the old who cannot compete with the young for economic resources? That assumes kind of a zero sum world. It just doesn't exist. There is a massive shortage of jobs right now. Old, young, doesn't matter. If you come out of retirement right now, you can find work because the more people work, the more the work there is. The more wealth it's created, the more work there is. The more freedom you have, more economic freedom, the more economic opportunities there are. And old people can easily out compete young people. They know more. They have more skills. And if their skills become antiquated, then they need to brush up on their skills. They need to learn. And when they're at their peak yearning years, people should save money. Just in case they want to retire, just in case. Their skills become unusable. But quite the contrary, I think that in a free market world, in a capitalist world, the old do very, very well. They do well because they save when they're younger. They do well because their skill set is valued. They do well because there's so many jobs that didn't need felling. And the more technology we have, the more jobs they are. It's pretty amazing. The more AI we all have, the more jobs there will be. Fanky D says, I do not see how enlightenment values do not fall into the mystical category. There are metaphysical claims, but there are philosophical observations. But it is not clear. There are not better values. It's very clear. I mean, true. I mean, the enlightenment has lots of problems. So rather than defend the enlightenment, I think we should defend, we should talk about Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand, who I think completes the enlightenment, who takes the enlightenment values and grounds them in a philosophy grounded in reality. And those values are not mystical. They're grounded in the nature of man and the nature of the world. Ayn Rand shows how you can derive an art from an is. And I think she does it very convincingly. And you now have a philosophy available to you by Ayn Rand that provides you with the values. The values that are necessary for human life and therefore necessary for human flourishing. The things that allow us to survive are the things that allow us to flourish. And it's not that hard to figure out what allows us to survive. It's primarily the use of our reason and everything that that implies, that's what's required for flourishing. So Ayn Rand provides us with the tying of metaphysics and understanding of reality with epistemology, how we know two ethics and therefore to and ultimately to politics. And she has an integrated philosophy that ties that all together. She takes the project, the enlightenment starts and she completes it and solidifies it. So, and the standard is life, human life, individual human life and its requirements. And I think she does a fantastic job of making all of that objective. So if you want to challenge Ayn Rand, you have to start by reading her and trying to understand her and then go ahead and try a challenge. All right, everybody, we will call it a night. God, I went longer than I wanted to. Thank you, we reached our target. I really, really appreciate that. Thank you to everybody who pitched in, particularly those of you who gave 100 and 50s. Richard, I think gave a bunch of 50s and Michael asked a lot of five and $2 questions. So thank you, Michael. Thanks, everybody. I won't know so tomorrow, but we will have a show on Ishimon Sunday. Everything works out okay. We will have a show on Sunday. So I will see you all there. Bye, everybody. Have a great weekend.