 Let's just jump in. Let's just jump in with our first topic. And the first topic is unfortunately this tragedy in Florida, this shooting where it looks like a former student who's obviously got mental problems and went in with what it looks like. I mean, I haven't read a lot about this. It's too depressing to really read too much about it with a semi-automatic weapon. And basically started gunning down people. And I mean, I think that these shootings present a real challenge to really everybody. What do you do about them? So the left's instinct is to jump on gun laws. And I have to admit, I am not opposed to thinking about particularly you know, figuring out how does somebody who's as mentally unstable as this kid supposedly was get a hand on a gun legally? And maybe it's not legal. Maybe he got it illegally. But how does one get it legally? There has to be some qualifications in terms of mental stability to be able to buy a gun. But the left just jumps on it as if people won't be able to find guns. If we somehow increase the requirements for gun registrations or anything like that, it doesn't work that way. So that's one. The right has no answer, right? It's not like terrorism. And really for all of us, it's not like terrorism. Terrorism is an enemy. Terrorism, you know, you can have kind of a strategy. It could be a good strategy, can be less good strategy. But you can see who the bad guys are. And you can go after the bad guys and destroy the bad guys. Hear who the bad guys. What is causing this? What is, how do you deal with it? It can be just drug laws. And you can't just say, well, it just, this is just reality. There's nothing we can do about it. And you don't want to turn schools into kind of reinforced little, I don't know, fortresses. So what do you do? And kind of also this, these shootings at schools go up against kind of the Stephen Pinker that I was talking about last episode, where the data shows that violent crime is down dramatically today in the US. So we live in some of the most peaceful times in human history. And in spite of the terrorism, and in spite of the school shootings and mass shootings like in Vegas, crime generally, murder generally, killings generally, are very, very low. And you could say as some people do, you know, you just have to suck it up if these things are going to happen. And the probability that you actually get hurt from something like this is close to zero. And don't let it affect your life and just go on with it. And that's not satisfying. There's something weird going on. This seems to be one of these mass shootings every few months. And again, it's not, if they were all motivated by slum, we could get it. We could understand it. We can understand the motivations. And then you can deal with it. There's an enemy out there and you deal with an enemy. And you know who to track. You know who to follow. You know who to listen to. You know whose phones to tap, right? And you monitor the mosques and you monitor the radicals and you, and you, you know, you take out the Saudis and you say, you know, there's a strategy you can put together. But what do you do when it's just random people? We still don't have no clue what happened in Vegas. And now we've got the school shooting and we've had school shootings and it just goes on and on and on. And it's horrific. So what can be done? I mean, and to do that, you first have to figure out the cause. What causes human beings to do something like this? And why is it at least seemingly, I don't have the click of data on this, this seems to be a significant increase in the last decade or so in, in these kinds of shootings. Now, I suspect that the motivation for all of these shootings is, is, is a deep rooted nihilism. And you know, nihilism meaning hatred of life, hatred of the good, hatred even deeper, a metaphysical hatred of reality, of life itself, of existence itself. It's a rebellion against existence. It's a rebellion against reality. It's an emotionalistic lashing out against everything that exists against the world as such. And you know, where does, where does something like that come from? Where does something like that come from? Now, I have to say that Jordan Peterson is very good at nihilism. So if you listen to Jordan Peterson, if you read Jordan Peterson, he's very good at describing nihilism and describing the extent to which how evil this is and its psychological roots in this deep, deep-seated hatred. Now, some of this can't be explained. Some of it is just an issue of free will. And some of it is just some kids choose to be this way. You know, there are the kids always that enjoy knocking down towers more than they enjoy building towers. And it can't be completely explained. So a certain percentage of people behaving like this, people being like this, is just always, I think, going to be the case in any society, in any environment, you're going to have some destroyers, some nihilists, some nuts. I mean, we call them nuts, but it's not that they're insane that they don't know what they're doing. They know exactly what they're doing. They're just motivated completely, completely by this hatred of existence. But you have to ask yourself, why so many? And why is it unleashing itself in such a vicious way? Now, one explanation could be, and this is kind of a feeding off of a Stephen Pinker kind of argument, would be, well, in the past, there've been lots of places for these people to go. Right? So if you really hated reality and you wanted to see blood and you wanted to kill people, you know, maybe you joined the army and armies were in constant war. Human history is full of constant war. Or you became an executioner. You became the state torturer. You became some function that was inherently violent. And there were so much violence in society that it was easy to find such a function and to find such a job or to get away with the motives you committed because there was no institutionalized way of catching you. That these kind of people have always existed and their numbers are not higher today. They just in the past were just part of the system. Right? The system was violent. So if you are a violent person, if you are a hater, if you wanted to see blood, you just joined the system. And today, this system is more pacified. It's less violent. It's less bloody. And therefore, the only way you can express yourself is by picking up a gun and shooting random strangers. And yeah, and that could be the case. But one would expect there was civilization, the number of such people would decline. And as we tolerate this kind of mentality, the number of people would decline. Now, Jordan Peterson, going back to Peterson, has a very pessimistic view of human nature. We're all monsters. We're all monsters just waiting for that trigger. And unless we spend a significant amount of time controlling ourselves and working on controlling ourselves, we will become those monsters. See, I don't believe that. I don't believe we're all monsters. I do, I ever think that we live in a society today that in spite of all the progress that is made, that in spite of the good that exists in the world today, actually cultivates nihilists, encourages nihilists, sanctions nihilists in ways that I don't know that existed at least in America in the past. Our moral subjectivism, the idea of complete moral emptiness, there is no meaning to life. The whole postmodern philosophy and the way it's applied in our schools, the embrace of emotionalism, the idea that schools are there for kids to become more connected with their emotions, and that emotions are the primaries, not reason. We don't teach kids how to think. We don't teach kids how to deal with reality. We don't teach kids how to deal with their own emotions, because emotions are important. They're the primaries. You don't need to deal with them. You just need to experience them and act on them. Our whole moral toleration, the idea that anything goes. Our acceptance of monstrous regimes and monsters in the past, if they have just one example, a leftist ideology, but the non-judgmental nature of the world in which we live. But really, the essential is the emptiness of the moral content that we provide young people today. The fact that we do not teach kids how to think about their lives and how to think about the world. The antidote to that is Ayn Rand. The antidote to that is the idea of the purpose of life being your own flourishing, the purpose of life being your own happiness, the purpose of life is being your life and embracing that and taking that seriously and not thinking of it in terms of the emotion, but thinking of it in terms of the thinking that has to go into making your life the best life that it can be and that that thinking is what gives you purpose in life. That goal of embracing a flourishing life as a human being is what gives you purpose in life. Too many young people today have no purpose. They don't know they're supposed to have a purpose. They drift. They're not thinkers, they're promoters, they're feelers and if they're a little different, if they're a little psychologically challenged, if you know, if they've had a rough life or if they've just chosen to stay a little unfocused, then they can easily become lonely and nobody's helping them, nobody's helping them get focused, nobody's helping them use their mind and nobody's telling them what the more purpose of their life should be, what kind of purpose they should aspire to, they become lonely, they become alienated, they become angry and it's easy to see them lashing out. I mean the only moral guidance we give young people is go work in a soup kitchen, you know, be Mother Teresa, sacrifice is nobility, selflessness is the ideal and that makes no sense. It makes no sense and what I think some of these kids, some of these nihilists are rebelling against is the idea of selflessness. Hey, I'm not going to live for the other people, I don't care about other people, I'm not going to live for them, I'm not going to sacrifice myself, but what should I live for? I don't know, it seems like there's nothing to live for and I'm going to lash out at all of you who wanted me to be selfless by destroying myself and destroying all of you. This is really, you know, an act of rebellion against the establishment, the philosophical, ideological, emotion-driven, subjectivist, empty, anti-reason establishment that exists today in our world and nihilism's on the rise, I think, and nihilism is more prevalent whether it expresses itself in these shootings or whether it expresses itself in Antifa, whether it expresses itself in the alt-right, nihilism is on the rise because people have no values, they've not been taught how to seek those values and they're rebelling against an altruistic, collectivistic, empty, emotionalistic world in which they find themselves and they're seeking purpose and Antifa is seeking purpose in, I don't know, socialism or socialist-slash-anarchism or elevating the destruction above all else, alt-right is seeking purpose in the elevation of race or nation above all else. They're seeking purpose in something because human beings need purpose and if you don't have your own life as your own purpose, then what do you do? What do you do? And this is why people like Jordan Peterson say what we need is religion because religion provides an alternative purpose but religion is not a legitimate purpose and religion is not going to solve the problem, particularly for a smart young person who knows that religion is BS, knows that religion is BS and is just going to rebel against that but you need an alternative, rebel towards what and given that we have no alternative all we're left with is emptiness, all we're left is with darkness. So nihilism is the direct consequence or the rise of nihilism and I think the increase in these shootings is a direct result of our educational system, is the direct result of our philosophical system, a direct result of the emptiness that we are teaching our kids, of the valueless lives that we are encouraging them to live, of the reasonless lives that we are encouraging them to live. So you know this is another call to you to embrace ideals, to embrace a morality of self-interest, to embrace not just economics, not just economics ideals but a purpose driven life, a purpose driven life where the purpose, the fundamental purpose, the deepest purpose is your own flourishing and a career and romantic love and all these other things are the purposes that lead to that ideal of a flourishing successful life but taking that seriously not in the subjectivist emotionalistic sense but in the rational long-term self-interest sense. All right, so horrible, horrible that such people exist and horrible to some extent even more that we live in a world that has nothing to say about this, that has no way to combat this, that has nothing, that really has no philosophical ideological answer to the angst that so many young people are feeling. So you know we got to keep fighting, fighting for a philosophical revolution, fighting for the resurrection of enlightenment ideas.