 the book review, book discussion show. This week, the book is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. He wrote this book in 1931. He published it in 1932. And I had trouble with this book. I really had trouble. It's the first time in our series where I read a book and I had nothing. I had no reactions. I had no opinions. I had no emotions. There wasn't a line in it or an idea in it that I thought, oh, I really want to talk about this. I was just completely empty. I think perhaps one problem is that maybe I was too familiar with the book. I think I read it before. Maybe the ideas are so omnipresent with us that perhaps that's toward my appreciation. Also, there's a whole realm of literature where I have nothing on just initial reading or just on its own. So for example, I respect and admire the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, but if I was just to pick up the big book of AA and read it, it would do nothing for me. And the Bible, I respect and admire and appreciate the Bible. But if I just pick up and read the Bible, it doesn't do anything for me unless I have my frame of mind right. And I was just watching some videos on health, and I was just drifting off to sleep. And I don't think it was because of the inherent nature of the videos. And I don't think it was just because I had had a big lunch. I think there are certain topics that they just start to deaden me. And also with Shakespeare Shakespeare is a literature that if I just read Shakespeare, I've got nothing. I could not do a show on Shakespeare unless I started consulting a bunch of commentary. So what I had to do to finally come up with something to say on this show is that I just put into YouTube Brave New World Analysis. And I put into Google Brave New World Analysis. And I got the opinions of a lot of other people. And then that stimulated me. And then I was able to come up with some thoughts. But Richard, was this your first time through this book? How was your experience? It was my first time through the book. I don't know why I hadn't read it sooner. I went to school in Ohio and the director of the school there was a private school. And the director of the school there was friends with Aldous Huxley. So I kind of have I sort of have almost like a, you know, six degrees of separation with him. So I sort of felt a kinship. And I was reading that because I was, you know, he and this this guy, Franklin Lacey was his name. He was the director of the Happy Valley School in Ohio, where I went during my high school years. And, you know, he talked a little bit like Aldous Huxley. So I was, you know, it was kind of bringing back some, some, some pleasant memories as far as that goes. But the book itself is deeply disturbing. I just found it like, he writes it in this kind of satiric tone. I think you're right to pick that up. It's, I think the word you chose mocking and satiric, and kind of, there's almost a malevolence about, about the, the happiness, you know, it's like happy with it with an evil glint in the eye. And he writes from that standpoint. Now, I imagine that's, that's very much a literary choice is he wants to make the people characters in the books seem like the world is wonderful. And it's great. But I was sort of left with, does he really believe that that's a terrible world? Or is that the world he would like to see? And I, based on reading the book, and some of his subsequent comments, I am not sure I can take I can, I'm not sure I can see a definitive position. I think he lived in the paradox of that. Alright, so as I researched the book, it became clear that Huxley was essentially satirizing the type of world that he longed for, in a sense. So he was not a big proponent of organized religion. He did not believe in democracy. He did not think democracy was up to the challenges facing it. So he liked the idea of some kind of total solution. He did not trust the masses. He has tremendous contempt for popular culture for the masses. He has contempt for the daily newspaper, like other intellectuals, he has contempt for popular magazines for the talkies and the feelies for radio and for movies and for television. And he has particular contempt for congregational singing or group singing. And so he very much wants a world run by experts. He he certainly flirted with eugenics. He had a stage in his life where he thought maybe the state should be in charge of reproduction. So I think what what gives the book it's enduring power is that many of the the technological and social advancements in this brave new world he has flirted with he he is thought maybe this would be a good idea. But at the same time he is astute enough to see the downside for many of the things that he likes because he is not coming to this book from a traditional religious perspective. He is someone who's who's flirted for quite some time with many of the technological, social, real by experts developments that are portrayed in brave new world. But it's not clear that this this book is either utopia or dystopia. You can he can make arguments either way because there's virtually no crime in this book. And in this world, there's very little suffering. There's apparently no hunger. There's abundant sexual satisfaction. And that doesn't seem to be horrible, you know, people with awful defects walking around that don't seem to be homeless. They don't seem to be ranting crazy people making streets dangerous. So it seems to be an even mixture between utopia and dystopia. And I think he's he's wise enough to see the downsides of some of the things that he'd like to play with. Any reactions, Richard? Well, I want to read a quote from all this Huxley. They was a CBS did a like an hour long program was kind of a condensate kind of like a reader's digest version of Brave New World, which he narrated. And this was the opening narration. Brave New World is a fantastic parallel about the dehumanization of human beings in the negative utopia described in my story. Man has been subordinated to his own inventions, science, technology, social organization. These things have ceased to serve man. They've become his masters. A quarter of a century has passed since the book was published. In that time, our world has taken so many steps in the wrong direction that if I were writing today, I would date my story not 600 years in the future, but at the most 200. And then he he actually has the quote, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I believe he's credited with that quote. That's very interesting, because on the one hand, you know, he sees he sees an ideal society. On the other hand, he sees it as destructive. And that's what I really couldn't get a read on it. It's like, it's almost like he's he's portraying both sides and not necessarily taking sides. Although, although I think he has a very strong comment at the end of the book, but I'll hold off on that until we get a little deeper into this. Okay, so that that quote, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. It actually goes back to 1809, a book called The Life of Major General James Jackson. So the quote's been around for a long time, over 200 years. It's also, I think the quote of the Anti-Defamation League, it's kind of a tiring quote, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I think the founders of the United States also, Benjamin Franklin said something very much like that. So it's not a it's not a new idea. But he certainly popularized it in the 20th century. Okay, so you made some notes, you said how how dehumanized are we today? So I don't think that we're any more dehumanized than 100 years ago, 500 years ago, or 5000 years ago. I mean, human beings do long for utopia, we do long for a world that's free of suffering, and maybe even reduce the struggle would be nice. So everyone, I see, I don't recognize today in Brave New World. Brave New World seems to me a parable and an intellectual exercise. I don't feel like we are living in Brave New World. But let me just throw your question back to you. How how dehumanized are we today? And what does dehumanized even mean? I guess we have to really wrestle with what we mean by dehumanized. And in order to do that, you have to go, what does it mean to be human? And I think that's that is really one of the key and core ideas of this book. Do human beings just want to, you know, have pleasure, have all their needs met, be safe from danger? Is that all they want? Or is there more? Is there that that drive for individualism for creativity? How much of a part of human beings is that really? And is taking that away? Is removing that dehumanizing? Also, I'll share another Huxley quote, this is from Brave New World revisited. And I think this gives some insight into what he thinks. The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be the most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal, not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word. They are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people living without fuss in a society to which if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted. Wait, who's that quote from? That's that's from Aldous Huxley. Okay, so we you posed a question a few minutes ago. What does it mean to be human? And if I understood you correctly, you argued that what it means to be human is to struggle and to suffer. Essentially, the, the, the punishment or the consequence that God gave to Adam and Eve when they left the Garden of Eden. Is that what you're saying? Well, let's put it this way. Creativity, the thing that seems to make us most human solving, solving difficult problems, together, collaboratively, is what actually makes us the most human. And that is usually done in the face of hardships. Okay, what that usually does is when when let's take the United States, World War, World War Two, this country pulled together in a way they probably never had before or since to overcome something that was deeply threatening to to our way of life and to the world as a whole. And that, you know, what was a juggernaut of all kinds of innovation and power and all sorts of other things which we look at is like, that's what it means to be fully exhilarated, fully human, fully alive. You know, the people portrayed in brave new world that basically they're just, you know, they're just living in comfort and drugged out. They're not, they're not really experiencing life to its fullest. They're experiencing life in such a narrow range of what, what is possible. And I think that's the dehumanization that Huxley is getting at. I think that is dehumanizing. And I think that goes to why you have, for example, you know, they do, they do fairly regular studies on, on employee satisfaction and on employee engagement. And what they find is two out of three people hate their job. They just, they just, you know, they basically go to work and check out. That's two thirds of the world. And that's in the United States. In Europe, it's even worse. It's 87% of the people are disengaged at work, which is another nice, which is a nice way of pleasantly is saying they hate their job and they rather not be doing it. So is that dehumanizing? I would argue it probably is. I'm thinking about there was this Christian street preacher street street pastor who during the LA riots, he heard that there was massive looting going on at this shopping complex. And so he went outside, while the looting was going down, and he held up a placard that said thou shalt not steal. And he got beaten up, put into a coma and he died. So he was very human. He was he was taking a stand. He was he was taking a stand. He was trying to make the world a better place. He was confronting a problem. And he was he was mercilessly beaten down and and and murdered. My mother, she she caught cancer when she was about 35 for the second time. And this time it killed her. So it took her down to about 60 pounds. She was five foot to 60 pounds before she finally died at age 39. So so the world we live in, in many, many respects is a horror show compared to brave new world. So I mean, is to live is to suffer. I mean, is this, I don't know, I'm just that's, that's the hard question in this book. Look, I hear and you're and I think that's, he doesn't give you a real answer to that. And the truth is, I think, you know, the answers are are or the comments on that are as unique as the individuals making them, because it's what we confront as being human. You know, it's like, on the one hand, we want to make a utopia. We want to make a society that's free from suffering, free from all these, all these things like brave new world. And yet, you know, attempts to do that, you know, Marxist attempts to do that, Greek city states, you know, Jones, Johnstown, you know, the love, the love children in the 60s, you know, the hippies in the 60s trying to make a utopia, they all failed. They all failed because they don't take into account two things. One, the nature of the world we live in is one that is hostile and cruel and harsh to human beings. It's a scary place. It's a dangerous place. And human beings at the core have the capacity for malevolence that unchecked will run rampant. Yeah, so one thing we can agree on is that the human being is fundamentally a dangerous animal. Is that fair? I would say, yeah, some people would say they're the most dangerous animal on the planet. And you can certainly make the case. On the other hand, they're, they're capable of just the opposite. They're capable of being compassionate, loving and caring in a way that no other animals are either. And I think we would agree that that reducing human suffering is generally speaking a good thing. For example, I'm just thinking of gunshot technology that police departments use in certain dangerous parts of town, they're able to triangulate whenever a gunshot goes off. And so they can arrive at the scene much more quickly. We also have advanced in ER medicine. So a lot of people who were used to die after getting shot or stabbed, then they're now surviving. So we've had until till recently, steadily increasing life expectancy, all other things being equal, I think we'd agree that these are good developments. I would say they are in response to that. Here's the thing. And you know, I noticed in your notes, you mentioned so and DH Lawrence and that the people who romanticize the savage, which is the opposite of what Huxley does in this, he basically looks at the savage reservation as something really horrible and very undesirable. And, you know, everything that's wrong with humanity exists in those kinds in that context. And that the solution of the brave new world is to overcome those things. But here, but you have to remember, this is this is a fiction, and this is all speculation. We have to somehow or other come to the real world. And in the real world, when when we don't exercise, you know, if you don't exercise your body, what happens to your muscles? They get flabby. That's right. And I and I think the capacity for healthy relationships, which is ultimately a moral issue. Morality, you know, we think morality means being a good person. I think that heart of morality is the Jewish idea of righteousness, which is being right and doing right by other people. That's very different than oh, I'm just a good person. That's like, you know, whatever it takes for me to have the right relationships with the people around me, that's what I'm going to do. That's what religion does. And that is a muscle that has to be exercised. And if you don't exercise that muscle, means something goes wrong, everything falls apart. If you had a society of people who had no capacity to deal with with difficulties, and something happened, you know, you had a solar flare fry the grid and nothing worked anymore. What would those people do? They would be completely unprepared for dealing with each other. And for dealing with, you know, those kind of hardships, which, you know, sooner or later, something like that is going to come along. Because I, I, again, I come back to, you know, the world is harsh, and it's cruel. And while there are wonderful things and great beauty, there's also that same grave, inescapable hostility and danger that in a sense is always lurking around the corner, just around the corner. Tough times make for tough people sometimes make for soft people, but we wouldn't. We would generally want to make life tougher and harsher than than is necessary just to to breed tougher people. Or would we? No, absolutely not. But here's here's here's an argument that I that I'm making. I'm making in the book I'm writing that we are in a morally challenging time of incredible scale. We're being confronted with all sorts of, of, you know, difficult problems. We have, you know, climate change, and I don't know where you stand with that. But I mean, it's clear that there's something going on there that's going to require that we collaborate as, as, as a species to come to a better understanding and a better balance with the world around us. We're going to have to do that. And we're going to have to work with each other in order to do that. And if we don't, there are consequences to that. You know, we have the problems of living in big cities. You know, you put more people together, you get more of the malevolence that human beings are capable of, but that has to be managed. So like like you were saying, you have a system, you know, you have policemen getting better at responding to to that malevolence to that crime to that dark side of humanity. But we have to do that as a society, because if you know, I'll go on to go biblical for a second. I think that in Genesis, when, when it describes God creating man, he making men in his image, what he did is it be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. And when you really take that and take it apart for what, for what the people at that time would have understood about those things. And for what the image of God means, in those two, in those two contexts, God creates order out of nothing out of chaos. And so he made human beings in the image of one who does that. And he also made us, we're designed to collaborate, we're designed to create civilization, we create narratives that are the basis for civilization and for collaborative enterprises of every scale. And that's, that's what we are. You know, ants build and hills bees build hives, we build, we build cities and civilizations, that's what we do. And, and, and I think that's inherent in our design. So the problem of civilization, and let's, let's, you know, brave new world is, is a metaphor for, you know, what one possible solution for the problems we have in civilization. You know, you mentioned, and I, and I think it's hard to escape that some of the solutions in there make a lot of sense. Some of them seem very attractive. And I think they, they probably, in the real world, need to be considered in a very thoughtful way, recognizing that they're not simple solutions, that they're, they're complex constellations of ideas and activities that, that we may not have complete control over. In fact, probably won't. But we can come to some understanding and some, in some kind of balance, come into some kind of balance with them. So one of the benefits in brave new world is that there's virtually no crime. And so I would be willing to give up quite a bit of liberty so that I could live in a world with virtually no crime. So I'm willing to sacrifice quite a bit to, to be able to walk around at night without fear to have have no fear of my car being broken into or my home being broken into or being hit over the head or stabbed or shot when I walked out the street at night. So anything we can do almost to reduce, reduce crime. So for example, if there was a shot, if there was a shot that everybody could take, that would reduce criminal tendencies. And there weren't, there weren't, you know, huge side effects, like, I'd be down with that. I mean, I don't care if that's that's scarce. Some people is like, Oh, the jab, I don't want the government jabbing me. But if there's a shot that would, that would stop infants being born with horrible diseases. If there was a shot that people could get that would prevent children from getting cancer or with children being born disabled. I'd be, I'd be for it. Like I, I believe in vaccines. I, I got the COVID vaccine as quickly as possible. I believe in getting vaccinated for everything that the government health authorities recommends measles, polios, smallpox, etc. I believe in fluoridating water. I believe in public health advances that we've made over the past 120 years, we've doubled lifespans. And I don't have a problem off the top of my head with anything that we've done to double lifespans over the past 120 years. So On that point, I wholeheartedly agree. I was talking with with some friends of mine. I said, you know, 200 years ago, they used to have these things called chamber pots. You know, you don't have a chamber pot. Yes. And you know, how did they dispose of the contents of that chamber pot, which is what you fill during the middle of the night when you had to get up and use, you know, leave yourself? What did they do with it? They threw it in the street. They just threw it out the window. And 200 years ago, that was normal practice. Well, we don't do that anymore. Thank God because we've learned some things. And, you know, the fact that we as a species can share information the way we do and learn from and have the capacity to actually learn from our mistakes and course correct, I think we've done a lot of good things. I again, I the argument I make is that, you know, human beings are here to create civilization. That's what we do. However you think we arrived at whether that's a completely, you know, evolutionary process by, you know, random natural processes or whether you subscribe to an intelligent design for that. Either way, that's what you have. And that's what we do. And that's something that as both as individuals and corporately as, you know, neighborhoods, cities, countries, etc. have to come to terms with. And I think in a way I think this book gets at some of those issues in a very, in a very interesting, although somewhat disturbing at times, very, you know, but it gets at the issues. And I think for me, at least it kind of opened up a lot of thinking about that. And, you know, I Yeah, now that you say that, I realize I did have emotions reading or possibly I was rereading this book, I did feel repelled, disgusted, disturbed, I think disturbed was the strongest emotion that I had, particularly that the lack of family, the lack of marriage, the lack of monogamy, the lack of parents and children, father and a mother, the romantic love being accompanied by sexual monogamy, lack of religion, the lack of history, lack of art, I found all these things incredibly disturbing. What were the things that you found most disturbing? And yet, and yet, and here's here's why it's so disturbing. Why it's so disturbing is because, in spite of all of that, the appeal of not having to suffer, of not having to deal with, you know, the indignities of life, for example, not having to date, but just being able to have any woman you want, any time you want. You know, what I thought about that, and there was there's this one scene early in the book where the director of hatcheries and predestination, Taps Lenina, one of the main characters of the book, pats her ass, basically, and says, hey, let's let's make let's let's get together tonight and, you know, make some time here. You know, and I looked at that and that was that was normal in that society. That was considered a social norm. In fact, it was one that was enforced, and everybody belongs to everybody else. So you can sleep with whoever you darn well, please. And that's wonderful. That's that's what makes a healthy society, because you no longer have to have this, well, I'm loyal to this one person. And if I do something, and if I don't do that, then I'm this terrible person who should be have shame heat on them. And in the worst case scenario, taken out in stone by the community, you know, you know. But here's the thing about that. You know, on the surface, it sounds good. Of course, you look at it today, and you have the me to movement. And I wonder how, you know, any of those women would look at that they would, I don't think they would feel very good about that to tell you the truth. I think they would, you know, be up in arms about that. Going, you know, how dare they, you know, because that seems like a that seems like a very similar men would be more interested in women, I think. Yes. I love to see some studies done about that. Just, you know, what do you think about that? What would what if we live in that kind of world and see where the preferences fall? My my my suspicion is they fall on the male side very strongly and on the female side, not so much at all. Now, a lot of people I know feel like they're living in a dystopia right now. I even had a friend talk to me yesterday about how with vaccine passports will be like living in Nazi Germany. And I don't share any of those sentiments, but you feel like you feel like American 2021 is a dystopia? No, actually, I don't. And I think and I think the people who think so have a very distorted view of of what life has been in the last, you know, 6,000 years of human history, you know, because we live in the most privileged, comfortable, interesting, creative and and rife with potential society that's ever existed in the history of mankind. And if that's dystopia, it's it I think that dystopia is happening on the inside of the person, not so much on the outside. But, you know, that's where those things live, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And and say with regard to COVID, I I'm sure government officials, politicians and bureaucrats and medical and public health authorities made some mistakes in their responses to COVID. But I see people in authority doing the best they can. I see them as as flawed and fallible as I am. I see them making mistakes. I see them responding to incentives, sometimes perversely to incentives, but there's nothing in our quote unquote overlords that I don't recognize in my own soul. How about you? What was your your COVID experience? Did you feel like, you know, our overlords were just being as punitive as possible? Or did you recognize in their efforts that they were fallible human beings? Very much like yourself trying to do the best they could with a difficult situation. The latter by far. And I think, you know, I, I, I say this sparingly because it's a dangerous thing to say. But I think when somebody opens their mouth, there's only one person they're talking about. And that's themselves. So when somebody projects that onto leadership, I think they're telling you something about who they are and how they operate and what what they dread and what they try to control and how they would control if they were given that opportunity. I think they tell you, I think it tells you a lot about what's really going on inside of that person. Now, I'm obviously there are exceptions to that. You can't just make that a general rule, which is why I say I use that very sparingly. But I think, you know, the way that that human beings construct our understanding of the world is, is ultimately a subjective process. The challenge is to have that subjectivity aligned appropriately with, with the objective or the, you know, the greater world around us. Then that's that's, to me, that's an art form. And in fact, that's kind of what recovery is all about is learning how to do that. I have to limit my consumption of material like Brave New World because it's disturbing. Now, I can look it in the face. I can read the book. It doesn't cause me to act out and violate my sobriety. But it's it's something that I'm going to limit. I'm not going to consume a whole bunch of material like Brave New World. I'm not going to consume a whole bunch of disturbing material. When I walk down the street, and I see dog poo on the sidewalk, I'm going to avoid it. And I'm not going to spend time looking at it or smelling it. What's your, what's your ability to, to consume disturbing material like Brave New World? It's the first time I've read a book like that. So I don't think I've come to terms with that, although, you know, there's so many things I want to read. I have to be selective. So it has to make sense to what I'm, to what I might be working on or to what is really actually important to me. In the case of Brave New World, the conversation about how we manage our greater society and what the problems in pitfalls are is of actually interesting to me. The negative side of it, you know, I think you, I think at least for myself, you know, I can read things that I disagree with, and I'm secure enough in, in, in my own beliefs and in my own, you know, at home in my own skin enough that, you know, that's not going to throw me in a bad direction or have an undue influence on me. That being said, I wouldn't make that, you know, I wouldn't have a predominance of books like that in my reading list by any means. And I just, I just don't see any value in that. So at that part, at that part I agree with you. I think it's just a matter of, you know, whether you could do two and I could do four. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Somebody is kind of along those lines. It's like, yeah, I might have a little more of an appetite for that. So long as they, you know, really pose questions that are actually useful or questions that are relevant or questions that, that stimulate discussion that, that ultimately is useful, which I think this book does. At least it does. It just did for me. To what extent are we living in Brave New World? Well, I would say a pretty good amount. You know, the way he described, I mean, we're not, we certainly don't have decanting of, of embryos and, and that kind of genetic engineering and control. We certainly don't have that. Although I'm sure there are people who would like to do that. We certainly don't have that. However, you know, the, the, the preoccupation with, with pleasure and play and, you know, what he calls the feelies, which is another way of saying movies, although they were more, somewhat more sophisticated because they included olfactory characteristics as well as visual things and incorporated a lot of things, which by the way, at that time was certainly being explored. There were artists who were going on movies should have sight and sound and smell and, and, you know, the chair should shake. And of course they're, they're, they're exploring that now in virtual reality. And we're going to come into that. We're going to see more and more of that. Whereas, you know, you, you detach yourself. The whole purpose of those is to detach yourself from, from the deeper drives and survival instincts, the basic instincts that allow us to operate in a hostile world by removing it. And then we medicate that. And then they were medicating it even further. I think we're doing a pretty good percentage of that now. And I think, you know, and I think legalizing marijuana is definitely a step towards Soma. But, you know, that you, you draw the line that well, you know, it's toward the end of the book when, when the savage goes out and he's trying to tell these people in the fertilization laboratory, you've got to be free. You've got to be free. And then they come along with Soma spray, you know, and they literally spray the dog with Soma so everybody goes under. Well, we are quite there yet. But, you know, people more and more are choosing to be medicated, detached and numbed from the realities of life. So, do you think that the massive use of psychiatric medication from, I don't know, lithium to whatever is hip now, volume, I, I don't see it on turtle as clearly negative. You can make, I think certainly there are some people who are on too much or probably shouldn't be on it at all. I think there are plenty of people for whom it's had a negative effect. But that's, for example, take the opioid crisis, the overwhelming number of people who die from opioids are taking illegal opioids. They're not taking that which is prescribed by their doctor. They're taking illegal fentanyl and illegal drugs that they're buying on the streets. It's not coming from prescriptions. So, we definitely have an opioid crisis, but it's primarily a crisis from the illegal manufacturer. My life was completely transformed. I went from bed ridden to approximately normal by taking a psychiatric medication called Nardil in late 1993. So, I also, I was on lithium for about five years and it had a beneficial calming effect on me when I needed it. So, I see a lot of people out there whose lives are improved by psychiatric medication. I suspect that there's a large number of people who, for whom the net effect of psychiatric medication is negative. But to me, it's not at all clear that the net effect of psychiatric medication in the United States today is clearly negative. Any thoughts? Well, there's, you know, I've never had the opportunity to take those. So, I don't have that personal experience. So, I'd be reticent to comment on that basis. And I think that there's two parts that I think, I think the value of medication is to calm down symptoms so that you can deal with the underlying causes. And if you deal with the underlying causes, I think they can be remarkably beneficial. You know, when you're in pain, you know, there's nothing wrong with, you know, pain medication. It's there to mitigate the pain. And it's useful in that capacity. But like so many things in the world, the way that it is, things exist within a very narrow range that's healthy and outside of that on either level becomes destructive. So that's... But is it overall, is it clear to you that overall psychiatric medication is playing a overall negative role in American life? I think people depend on it more than they ought to. And for that, and, you know, one of the things I would quote is Johann Hari's book, Lost Connection. He was a, you know, he had, was depressed and he suffered from clinical depression. And he took medication for years and it did nothing but harm. And when he started pursuing relationships, and he started getting healthy in that way, all of those, all of those issues disappeared. Now, you know, he makes a case based on his own experience. Now I don't have experience with those kind of medications. I do have experience, you know, with drugs and, and medicating, you know, the pain of life by a substance. So I do know something about that. And I do know that ultimately the road out of that is, you know, is being properly aligned is having a healthy psychology is, is having healthy attitudes. That's ultimately the way out of that. So I think that what is happening, probably more often than not, is that, you know, practitioners, healthcare practitioners, psychologists, psychiatrists, they'll prescribe drugs because it's an easy way out. And they won't really deal with the underlying issues. And I think that, that trend, I believe is increasing. I don't have any statistics to back it up. So let's just call that, you know, Richard's gut instinct. But, but, but I read enough of the news and I read enough of, you know, I talked to enough people to go to have formed that opinion. And, and, you know, when I, when I was working for Sprint, I also formed the opinion about two out of three people hated their jobs. And then, you know, statistically that was borne out. So those instincts may have some veracity, but I wouldn't depend on them. So I noticed almost all rabbis, which I'm aware of telling people get vaccinated. What about Christian clergy that you know? Um, I would say the ones I know are in favor of it. The most notable who isn't would be a guy like John MacArthur. And he's very much been in the news. And, and, you know, it's interesting that, you know, we didn't have massive deaths and breakout in at his church. In fact, you know, our church where we got back where, you know, people, you know, wore masks and did all that. We actually had more per capita loss from COVID than he did. That's just, that's just, that's a fact I can report. So, you know, but for myself, I, I've decided to get vaccinated. I've been vaccinated many times in my life. I've never found it to be a problem. I haven't so far found it to be a problem. And I think the, the over abundance of agenda driven information and disinformation and misinformation being circulated makes it very difficult to know what is actually true. Now, I was reading, I wanted to understand the different ways that the American right responded to COVID. And one academic paper I read said that conservatives have much greater belief in the power of free will and the power of your choices to, to shape your outcomes while people who are left to center believe much more in the power of randomness to, to affect you. So I assume you're a big believer in free will. And I assume that you're, you're a big believer that we have tremendous power to shape the outcomes of our life. Well, I think we have agency in that. Yeah, I don't think we have final power, you know, everything that, that I, that I learned in program is I'm powerless over, over many things in life. But I'm not powerless over my response to that. And so, yeah, that has a lot to do with it. Now, let's get back to two out of three people hating their jobs. Is that Gallup does a poll twice a year called the employee engagement survey. And they've done that for almost 25 years. And, and consistently, the statistics are, you have 30 percent of the people who are engaged in their jobs, who like their job, who go show up to work and are excited to be there or happy to be there and love, love their job, love the business, you know, all that stuff. Then you have 70%. I mean, and the percentages will vary year year over year. They do twice a year and it'll vary somewhat. But it really kind of settles down in about 70 30, that 70% hate their jobs. And what they call them is they're disengaged. And it means, you know, they basically go to work, hold their nose, collect a page, I can go home. That's, that's, that's a sweeping generalization of what's happening. But I observed that I was inside of many, many, many businesses when I was an account manager for Sprint of all sizes. And I could see that just anecdotally, I could see that happen. It was very apparent. Okay, so there's there's the other part of that is there's somewhere between 50 and 20 percent who are water termed actively disengaged. That means not only do they not like their job, they're going to go out of their way to sabotage the company, their fellow employees, or the efforts of that company or their customers in one way or another. And that is estimated to cost the US economy somewhere in the range of about $550 billion a year. And so I think that's that's accurate. And I don't really know what it means. I would expect that for most people, work is going to be onerous. So, so hate may be a little stronger than I would prefer to see people experience. But it does not surprise me that most people would find their work onerous and unpleasant and be glad to be done with it. And I think that's pretty much inherent in the human condition. But what what do you what do you take away from that? Is this is this a crisis? Is this a spiritual crisis? Is social crisis an economic crisis? What is it? That's a really good question. I'm going to come I'm going to come back. I'm going to come to that through Brave New World, through what they did and this their solution to that problem, because they did propose one. And their solution was to precondition individuals within certain classes, so that they would want to do the job they were doing. And and and actually here here's a quote from the director of hatcheries and predestination directly from the book. Now here's where we actually predestined and conditioned nothing is so unstabilizing to society as unhappy people. We avoid all that by preconditioning embryos. That is a secret of happiness and virtue, liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that making people like their inescapable social destiny. That's their solution to that. But that's a very real problem. Now that that's almost that's a caricature. I mean, because I the likelihood that that will ever actually happen. I think where we're human beings are still something that we recognize as human beings is probably not likely. It's possible, of course. And that's that's what Huxley was getting at. He was warning us that it could get there and he's right, it could get there. If we if we go that far. But. You know, the role of religion is to. Train. The human being to respond to life in a positive way. I think the trend we see in our society of people not liking their jobs and people not liking life in general is related to the fact that they don't do that work that they don't. They don't really pursue cultivating the capacity for resilience, the capacity to live life as it is. Not as they rather have it be, but literally in program terms, you know, take life on life's terms and find it satisfying and find it and be grateful for what they have, not like as some mindless exercise like I'm grateful for my broken leg, which is, you know, the height of stupidity, in my opinion. But, you know, I'm grateful that, you know, when I have a broken leg that I have a doctor I can go to and people who will help me and, you know, I can learn more about myself and I can learn more and I'm grateful for the lessons that I've learned as a result of that. I'm not grateful for the broken leg, but I'm grateful for work for the things that I learned from that. And I think those kinds of things come as someone really engages in a spiritual life. What's so disturbing about Brave New World is there's not a single thing spiritual about it. Everything is mechanized, everything is automated, everything is programmed. People really have no free will. So Brave New World has a strong caste system and this does not afford me. I prefer the American openness, but I also see tremendous advantages to a caste system and that people know who they are. And so one problem with a wide open society like America is that a lot of people don't know who they are. So at least in a caste system, people know who they are. And as long as the contributions of each group are on it, I mean, there are workplaces where let's say the boss is earning $200,000 and he works damn hard and he he spends, you know, let's say he spends $100,000 a month to to market his product to keep the pipeline flowing. So he's putting things on the line to an extent that his employees are not. And then let's say the boss then has three managers earning around $100,000 and they implement his vision and then their whole string of other employees who are earning between 30 and $70,000 who have their comparatively easier jobs than those who are earning six figures. They don't have to worry about anything and it can suit them fine. So I am familiar with a lot of workplaces where they're stratified, where the boss may be bringing in say multiples of hundreds of thousands of dollars, there may be other employees earning six figures. And then there are a bunch of employees, you know, earning 40,000, 50,000 a year, but they have much easier jobs. So social stratification, a class system and a caste system does not appall me. It's not my ideal. I like the American way, but it doesn't evoke a feeling of horror for me. How about for you? Well, you know, it's not a simple question. It's I think it's a very complex issue and you and there's. I think you're right in that there are some clear advantages for knowing, you know, what your role in society is. However, the what you described in the workplace is we don't have anything like in India, they have a caste system. You're born into and you're born if you're a Brahmin, you're going to be like in in in great news like here in Alpha Plus. It's like all the doors are open to you. You have you have a greater level of responsibility, more is expected of you, but you're also privileged to compensate for that. And and and you're always going to be that you're never not going to be that whereas if you're you're an Epsilon or a Gemma, like you, you know, working a mine or, you know, something like that, you'll never, ever have any opportunity to to change that or to do something different. Now, that's very different than what we have in the United States. That's very different than having different roles at a company because, you know, you could you could be you could be the assistant to, you know, to the manager of a company in one setting, but you could go to another company and you could be the manager. You could leave that company and start your own business in which you're the boss. That's the advantage of our system so that we don't have anything like that kind of a caste system. And if we did, capitalism wouldn't work. And if capitalism didn't work, the world would be would be worse off for it. So how much of your life have you lived in California? All of it. OK, so I've lived 80 percent of my life in California and I love life in California. Compared to other states, particularly on the East Coast, I noticed the Californians have much weaker ties in general to family, to tradition, to ethnic group and to religion. I remember spending three weeks in New York City on the Upper West Side and I felt the importance there of where you go to school. I felt the importance there of ethnic ties to an intensity that I did not know in California. I felt the intensity of commitment to religion in New York that I rarely saw in California. I felt kind of the oh, just the solidity of tradition, the way it limits limits you. I felt, you know, much less free in New York. I felt like there were far fewer options. So I I love California, but I also recognize California is a place that people generally come to to escape the pools and obligations of tradition, family, ethnicity and religion. And so one way I think of understanding brave New World is it's very much a satire of California. And so there's La Nina has has a funny line in here where she says, hug me till you drug me, honey. Kiss me till I'm in a conema. Hug me, honey, snuggly, bunny loves as good as Soma. So the honey there, particularly and snuggly, bunny, this is very much California talk. So this book is is a satire on California. As the essentially the least traditional state. So it's the state of all the 50 closest, perhaps, to brave New World. Any thoughts? Well, I've had the opportunity to travel around the country and doing business. So I, you know, I've been not for long periods of time, but I've experienced, you know, the way people are in other in other states in Minnesota and Texas, you know, in New York, certainly, I have family in New York, Massachusetts, you know, Florida, you know, many all all over the country. And, you know, people in Tennessee, they're very happy, by and large, with with those family ties and with all that human connection. They like it. And that's why that's why they're there. And so I think I think there's some accuracy to that. And, you know, California, especially Los Angeles, its history is really rather unique. I I. To me, Los Angeles is is the most creative city in the world. In the sense that there's so much here that can allow things to happen and it's cultural. It's it's foundational to how this this incredible metropolis, you know, emerged and evolved over a very short period of time. There's a lot of history in L.A. But it took place over, you know, over 150 years, basically. You know, you have the growth of a major metropolis in 100 years. Now, it's not unique in that there are other places where that's happening in Las Vegas. And that that's actually kind of happened there, too. It went from being, you know, a town of 300,000 people 50 years ago to being a town of three million. That's pretty significant growth. And so that that is happening other places. But Los Angeles was really the first place in the country that that happened. And there was there are many, many factors that made that possible, not the least of which was the ideal weather and just all confluence of all kinds of different things, the value of the land that people perceived. They were coming here in drugs and buying land and things were happening. You know, you had the film industry, you had the oil industry, you have all these things, which which makes so much possible that would not have been possible otherwise. And Los Angeles is not like the reality of the rest of the world. It is a unique culture. It's like no other culture. And what's possible here isn't possible anywhere else. And so. I think I think it's a fair analogy to say that that Huxley, who lived here at the time he wrote, I believe he was living here at the time he wrote, but he's no world might have certainly been influenced by that. And and, you know, our sense of other people and our place with those other people and the value of those other people is very different here than it is in New York. New York, if you make a promise to show up somewhere, you damn well better show up. And if you don't, they won't talk to you. That's true in Texas and that's true in Minnesota. It's not true here in LA. You're expected to go, yeah, I'll show up unless something better comes along. That's considered normal here. It's not considered normal elsewhere. So that is that is a cultural issue that influences relationships in a very profound way. So in some ways, I think it's a fair analogy. So I don't feel like overall, the American right had a good COVID. I saw vast segments of the American right underestimating the severity of the virus. I still see vast segments of the American right denying the efficacy of vaccines. I see large segments of the American right saying, you know, we're individuals. I I hate these restrictions on individual freedom and they're totally unnecessary. And it's just totalitarian Democrats wanting to go or communist on us. So I've seen a lot of moronic responses on the part of my end of the political spectrum to the COVID epidemic. And I think part of it comes from a stupid knee-jerk reaction by the right that government is the problem. And so certainly government is sometimes the problem. Some problems are better solved by other means. But there are other problems like COVID that come around that do demand a massive government intervention. So Huxley was writing Brave New World in the aftermath of World War One, which saw unprecedented levels of government intervention into daily life. And he was he was somewhat, I think, entranced by that, inspired by that and affected by that. And so some people over the past 18 months have tried to make the argument are we living in Brave New World or we're living in 1984 because we have these unprecedented levels of government intervention in our daily lives that all sorts of rights that people took for granted such as freedom to assemble, freedom of worship, freedom to to go to church, freedom to travel, freedom to to go to work, freedom to hug and kiss each other, freedom to socialize, have been ripped away. And to me, that's situational that there are going to be situations that call for massive government intervention. And that's not necessarily a dystopia that there will be other situations or be better solved by, say, government getting out of the way. But this knee jerk response that anything government does is a problem or the government is always the problem or that we always need less government. And if we if we don't maintain eternal vigilance on on restricting government, we're going to end up in some kind of Brave New World dystopia. I reject that. Anything there that you want to come in on? I I I agree with you actually wholeheartedly. I just I just think we have to strike a balance between the value of the individual and the value of our community and how we how we fit in the community. One of the reasons I I responded the way that I did to the COVID crisis, which I didn't have a negative experience. I had, you know, it for a variety of reasons. It was just the right thing at the right time for me to, you know, move forward in the things I wanted to move forward in. But beyond that, you know, having to wear a mask, I went, well, OK, I don't particularly like it. And I'm not certain whether it's good, but I'm going to err on the side of being considerate of other people and not putting other people in danger. That is I think that's a very healthy approach. We if we live in a society with thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of people and we all have an effect on each other and we have to take that into account. You can't simply say the individual is greater than that in all circumstances. You know, you go to Star Trek. Sometimes the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, which Spock would say. But sometimes the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many, as Kirk would say. And I think there's there's a balance between those two things. That we haven't struck in this country. And we go ahead. Let me let me just finish the other things. We live in a very complex world, a very complex world requires a very high level of collaboration. That high level of collaborations requires a certain amount of surrendering of your individual preferences and desires for the benefit of the greater good. It's necessary. The Japanese do it better than we do. They do it pretty well compared to us. I mean, I'm not idolizing them, but yeah, that's what I want to say about that. So Brave New World also satirizes Keynesian economics. And over the past 18 months, we've experienced an unprecedented level of Keynesian economic investment because the GDP, I think, went down something like 32 percent in the second quarter of 2020. And then it bounced back at about the equivalent level the next quarter, thanks to trillions and trillions of dollars of government intervention. So government told people to socially distance and made it difficult or impossible for millions, tens of millions of Americans to work. On the other hand, it did send out approximately $2,000 in stimulus checks, which I think were important. It also used a paycheck protection program that maintained millions and millions of jobs. So everything can be satirized. But I'm just thinking of how awful the past 18 months would have been without this Keynesian intervention in the economy. And I think it saved tens of millions of people from extreme, extreme suffering. And so I think government certainly made a lot of mistakes with response to COVID. But overall, I think we did pretty good. There's a lot that I'm grateful for with how our government responded to this unprecedented crisis. Any thoughts? Again, I find myself, you know, very much in agreement with you about that. You know, I have to confess I haven't really read John Maynard Keynes. I haven't done that yet. I haven't even really read Adam Smith, which I'm trying to remedy that. But you know, but I'm familiar with his philosophy and, you know, here's the truth about capitalism and about economies. Money is loaned into existence. That's what makes capitalism work. And in fact, you know, for millennia of human history, before we actually started doing that, you really never had progress. You never really had any kind of significant progress or growth in terms of culture, in terms of realistically lifting people out of poverty. The last hundred years has seen more people come out of poverty on an extraordinary level, like, you know, ten times what it was, what it was in the past. And this has been this has been measured, you know, the United Nations has measured this, that they've seen that, you know, more people are out of poverty than any other time in human history by an extraordinary margin that is all based on capitalism, because capitalism creates wealth. And in order to create wealth, you have to. And so in this case, in Keynesian philosophy, government takes the risk of capitalizing the economy so the economy doesn't collapse. And, you know, that that works as long as the economy recovers and they're able to recoup that. And actually, the economy grows ultimately as a result of that. And I'm I'm not persuaded that that's wrong, especially in this case. I think I think that's I actually think it was the right call. In this case, not in every case, but in this case, I think it was. Because the government had to enforce some restrictions and you can argue whether they were necessary or not. But the truth is we don't really know. This is this is new new ground in many ways. And, you know, we're still finding our way through that. You know, we had we had a major pandemic, you know, 100 years ago with the Spanish flu. We learned something from that. We learned something from this. And we certainly learn more from the Spanish flu than they knew during the bubonic plague. So we've been making progress on this. And as as as. Inhabitants of civilization, we are getting better at doing this. And I think we have to continue to get better at doing this. And unfortunately, whether we like it or not, that is a trial and error process. And sometimes, you know, we make the right decision. And sometimes we make the wrong one. Hopefully, as a society, we can learn from the wrong decisions and, you know, double down on the good ones. So I want to read a phrase here from I'll just Huxley. God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine. I just want to take that phrase. So certainly the realm for God has considerably narrowed over the past thousand years. So it used to be that there was no separation of the church and state like we have now. There was just one one church a thousand years ago. So you didn't have these these separate spheres. Also, we we didn't have scientific medicine like we have now. So certainly the rise of science, the rise of secular education, the rise of medicine, the rise of knowledge has perhaps reduced the realm of of what we ascribe to God. All right. So it used to be we ascribed everything to the gods or to God. And now we ascribe fewer things to God than the people did in the West a thousand years ago. But I'm not sure God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine. I don't think that's true. I think you can have a highly optimized society. You can have highly industrialized society. You can have cutting edge scientific medicine. And I don't think that's going to significantly reduce belief in God. But is is God compatible or incompatible with industrialization, machinery and scientific medicine? Well, again, the argument I would make is that God made us to do those things. God, if you believe in intelligent design, then we were designed to build civilizations that would find ever improved ways to utilize the resources we found at hand. So I think God has a hand in that in a way that people's like like that was from the Mustafa Maan, the world director of the world, that section of the world. He was like, you know, like something really along the lines of a prime minister of a region. And, you know, that was his opinion. Now, obviously, you know, Huxley is stating stating an opinion, which I believe he probably held because he didn't like organized religion. And to be fair, neither did Bill W. But that doesn't mean that he didn't recognize that spirituality is very, very real. And it goes well beyond our capacity to understand it scientifically. You know, we you and I reviewed. William James, but the variety of religious experience. And he couldn't explain that stuff. And we still can't explain how all that happens. It does, but we really don't understand it fully. Science is a tautology. It can explain how things work, but it doesn't really explain what they are, why they work. But it does observe clearly how they do work. And that's very useful. So I think that's the place of science. But I I certainly subscribed to the idea that, you know, the world we live in and the surrounding, you know, cosmos was created intelligently for a purpose. I'm not going to comment on what I what those purposes might be. So I think that's beyond my pay grade. But, you know, given that given that. That assumption, I think it's it's fair to say that, you know, we operate within that. So after reading Brave New World, how then shall we live to use a New Testament phrase? And I'll answer the question first. I think reading this book should renew our gratitude for family, for commitment, for monogamy, for spirituality, for God, for religion, for history, for art, for the struggle and the challenge of life that we can we can feel new new senses of gratitude for what we have today. But if I throw the question over to you after reading Brave New World, how then Richard shall we live? Well, again, I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to have to strongly agree with you about that response to it. And I think and I think, you know, in many ways, Huxley had that in mind. I think he saw from certainly where he sat as an intellectual and in the conversations he had with the people around him and he's a member of the Algonquin Circle. So he talked to a lot of a lot of different writers and a lot of intellectuals and people who, you know, look at look at what's going on in the world around them and have ideas about it more so than the average person. So he thought about that a lot. And so his reflections are valuable just if nothing else for creating a set of distinctions that are worth looking at, that are worth examining on a much broader scale than your, you know, than an average person might might be inclined to do. So I think it's very valuable to look at those distinctions in our culture. What things, what do we want to do with the capacity to control our genetics? What do we want to do with how we deal with the family? You saw in one of your notes and I actually like it. And it's a very good question. You know, if you have to have a license to drive a car, why don't you have a license to, you know, be a parent? You know, that's a good question because, you know, there's a lot of hideous parenting going on and it creates a world of malevolence and it creates the very thing in humankind that we don't want. And so that, you know, that's a question that I think can be posed to us as a society. How do we actually deal with it? How do we actually improve our record in that area? How do we as a society produce better human beings? You know, I would subscribe to the fact that, you know, healthy parents and a healthy family structure is probably one of the best ways, one of the ideal ways to do that. The idea that you just have society as a whole, as a whole with no real connections really, you know, cuts at the heart of what relationships are all about. And if we're made for anything, we're made for relationships. The whole of creation operates on things being related to one another. You know, how hydrogen relates to oxygen gives us water. And that gives us something that's immensely useful and an intrinsic part of every living thing certainly here on this planet. So and but that has to do with a relationship. And so it really everything does come down to our capacity for relationships. And so is our relationship and as in brave new world only to our society and the experiences we have with individuals are only, you know, incidental to that. Or is there are those relationships and what that produces in us? Because, you know, when you have good relationships, you release dopamine, you release oxytocin, oxytocin, you have well-being that's produced by relationships. And and I and I don't think that what they are doing with the engineering they did in brave new world would necessarily produce that in quite the same way or would have it ultimately be quite as satisfying. But that is the question he poses, you know. So go ahead. The director says it this way. I think civilization is horrible and yet people are happy. They get what they want and they never want what they can't get. They're well off, they're safe, they're never ill, they're not afraid of death. They're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age. They're plagued with no mother or father. They got no wives or children to feel strongly about. So their condition that they practice, they can't help behaving as they ought to behave yet you ask them to chuck all this away for liberty. And then and then he says the John, the character, the savage says all the same. It seems quite horrible to me and then the director's responses. Of course, it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery and being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune. Happiness is never great. See, but, you know, you talk to someone like Jordan Peterson and he will go, you know, the myth of the hero, the hero's journey. He would argue that that's intrinsic to our psychology on an evolutionary basis and that that is so deeply rooted in us that that's why we'll watch a movie where you see this hero's journey. It's we're projecting who we are and what we are onto that. And I don't think you can just engineer that away, you know, with the kind of things they're talking about in Brave New World. I think those things remain. And I think that's really the warning of the book is that, you know, if you don't really recognize that the individual is just as important as society, you'll lose the individuality, which is why the character John hung himself at the end because he couldn't fit into the society they had, which he hated. I think that's the that's really one of the messages, the book. One part of the book that rang particularly false for me was the power of propaganda. I think most people dramatically overestimated. But according to the academic research, I've read propaganda rarely changes anyone's mind. It simply facilitates people who want to go in a direction. It gives them reasons for going in that direction. So this idea that the regime can come along and propagandize people in their sleep, that it can completely condition people contrary to their evolutionary biases, their intrinsic neurological and biological predispositions. That that part rang false to me. But I know it's widely believed that there's this great fear that propaganda has has the ability to essentially turn people into zombies. And I don't buy it. Any thoughts? Well, that that I I said that in more or less in a different way, but more or less the same thing is that there are certain things that are intrinsic to our neurology, to our biology and to our makeup. That that will not yield to that kind of, you know, influence that will assert themselves. At some point in time, sooner or later. You know, I I I use the I use the I share with you the example of the first Jurassic Park movie where they had all these wonderful things. You know, we have these we created these dinosaurs. We created this land. We have this fence. You have all these safeguards, you know, all this and, you know, Jeff Goldblum's character said, you're out of your mind. This is not going to work. Life will find a way to overturn this. And that was the that was the whole point of that movie. And I think that that deep, biological, genetic makeup or endowment that we have. Isn't isn't going to yield to the kind of kind of propaganda that they put in this book. So I agree with you. Yes, it rings false because what what is in us is is not even known to us to the degree that we think we know it. It's much deeper and much. Further beyond our control that I think we take into account. My favorite character in the book is the main character, Bernard Marx. He's a sleep learning specialist. He's an alpha plus. He's the very creme de la creme upper class of society. But he's also a misfit. He is unusually short for an alpha and supposedly his blood surrogate had a little too much alcohol in a system. And this has left him slightly stunted. He has an independence of mind stemming from his inferiority complex and his depressive nature, more than from any philosophical depth. Unlike his fellow utopians, Bernard is frequently angry, resentful and jealous. He's sometimes cowardly and hypocritical. His conditioning is clearly incomplete. Doesn't enjoy communal sports, solidarity services or even promiscuous sex. He doesn't even get much joy out of Soma. He is in love with Lenina, but he doesn't like her sleeping with other men, even though everyone belongs to everyone else. His triumphant return to utopian civilization, which on the savage precipitates the downfall of the director. But Bernard's triumph is short lived. He is ultimately banished to an island for his nonconformist behavior. Any particular characters in this novel speak to you? Well, I think Bernard Marx is the hero of the story. He he he's he and John are the two representatives of what we really are as human beings, juxtaposed against the kind of civilization and culture that we are attempting to create. And so I think, you know, he represents what we're really like, you know, because we all have that stuff going on. We're all we all feel like we're a misfit in one way or another. And that's what that's precisely what we have to contend with. So yeah, for me, he was definitely I could certainly identify with him. And I think I suspect that was Huxley's intention. Yeah, I kind of I kind of like the Mustafa Maan, the the world director as well. Yes. Yes. Because, you know, he was at least honest with himself. Yeah, I chose this. You know, I the truth is, I just prefer this. And he knew and he knew what he was doing. So he he he made a conscious choice to do what he did. And and, you know, when I listen to some of his arguments, you know, it's it's it's interesting. I don't agree with his assessment of the Bible and Shakespeare and literature. But, you know, there there are there are good reasons to recognize that not everybody can handle that. And we have to contend with, you know, people who don't know how to handle that. And that's very difficult. Their solution, obviously, it's it's a fiction. So it would never hold up in the real world. But at least I don't think it would not for very long anyway. But it poses some some some important questions, though the solutions themselves, like, unfortunately, like the Communist Manifesto sound good on paper, but fall apart in actual practice. And here is Wikipedia description of the Mustafa Maan, the characters, the resident world controller of Western Europe. He is sophisticated and good natured. He is an Urbain, an intelligent advocate of the world state and its ethos of community identity stability. Among the novel characters, he is uniquely aware of the precise nature of the society he oversees and what it has given up to accomplish its gains. He argues that our literature and scientific freedom must be sacrificed to secure the ultimate utilitarian goal of maximizing social happiness. He defends the caste system, behavioral conditioning and the lack of personal freedom in the world state. These he says are a price worth paying for achieving social stability, the highest social virtue because it leads to lasting happiness. OK, I think I'm about ready to wrap up this live stream. Any final thoughts, Richard? Well, I think, you know, Mustafa Maan's, you know, the argument that he makes has to be juxtaposed against the all of the individual considerations. Yes, you do have to make sacrifices for your society, but it's not an all or nothing game. It's very much more complex than that. So he's taking one side of that, but that has to be incorporated along with all the other perspectives that the books presents. I think that's that's where I that's how I come away from the book. OK, great. Thank you, Richard. I placed a link to Richard's YouTube channel. And what's the status update on your book? It's in it's an editing mode. I have people helping me with editing it and doing some rewrites. And my hope is by, you know, certainly by the end of the year, if not sooner to have to have it really out. And so I'm very excited about that. I have some friends who were all kind of got together. We all have our books, more or less in the same at the same state. You know, we're about ready to publish it, but we still have a few things to do before we before we do that. And so we're supporting each other in that, which is really exciting and really a lot of fun. And you've also you're also working on an album. So what's going on with that? You know, I actually am putting the finishing touches on that next week. I have my nephew coming. He's a cellist and he's going to. We're going to track in some cello parts for that. And then we're going to do the final mixes and master it. What I shared with you, that was the very rough mix. That's not what the final mix is going to sound like. But it gives you an idea of where it's where it's headed. That's going to be a four song EP. And I think the title EP is going to be the same as the song. The title song gave you blaze of heaven. And it's it's really it's about my spiritual journey starting from 35 years ago when I was a pagan, which the first which the first song in the EP is is a reflection of two blaze of heaven, which is kind of where I am now. And a couple of points along the way of that development, that spiritual development. Yeah, that's a great title blaze of heaven. But thanks, Richard. Thank you so much. Take care, everyone. Bye bye. As always, wonderful talking to you.