 All right. Hi everybody. Welcome to your own book show on this Sunday afternoon. I hope you're all having a great weekend. Let me just change the camera angle. There we go. Um, yeah, let's see. Lots. I guess we've got quite a bit to talk about. I'm not feeling great. So I'm tired. I'm not sleeping well. So today might be a short show. We'll see. I'll keep you updated. As you know, I'm in London. And it is, it's a time, it's eight o'clock here at night, but I'm exhausted as if it was much later than that. It is, this is not vodka, by the way. It is water. And then thirsty. That's part of, part of where we are. All right. Um, today I want to talk about a panel I did this afternoon here at the Battle of Ideas. I've been participating in the Battle of Ideas. This is, I think, my third time that I've been at the Battle of Ideas. Battle of Ideas, basically, is a very large event with lots of panels. They typically run, I think, six or seven panels, concurrently, on a variety of different topics. Yesterday I did one on the US midterm elections. I told you about that yesterday. Today, we talked about woke education or the problem of woke education and what to do about it. That was an interesting panel. We'll talk about that in a little while. You know, generally, being here in, I have to say that being here in London right now is a little depressing. It's a little depressing because, you know, because the government is screwed it up so badly. And I think it's screwed it up not only for itself, for this particular government, but basically it's screwed it up, I think, for any government that wants to propose free market ideas in the UK in the next few decades. It's going to be, in the next few years, it's going to be very, very difficult given the failure of Liz Truss's government not only to make a coherent proposal, but then to actually communicate that proposal. So the fact that her government is failing the way it is is quite depressing. It kind of reverses a lot of the optimism I had with regard to the UK and with regard to the direction this country was heading in. Now I fear that it's heading in very much the wrong direction. So, yeah, it's an interesting time. It's a very interesting time to be here in the United Kingdom. Let me just see. There is something I wanted to get here. There it is. Right. So what I want to talk about today is is what's going on with walk education the focus of the panel. I was on today was on the fact that parents during COVID 2020 suddenly discovered what was going on in their schools. They suddenly discovered the extent to which woke ideology, critical race theory, trans activism, LGBTQ plus had entered the school system was part of the curriculum. And I think a lot of people, a lot of parents which really surprised at this, they, I don't think they, they knew I don't think they expected. I think that most parents assumed that schools taught taught content taught kids how to think. And that the social issues, the political issues were kind of left out of the school system. And it was a real, it was a real shock. I think that many parents. We saw the political manifestations of this and in the school board elections in San Francisco, or the recalls where they recalled a number of the board members over what was being taught in the schools we saw it in the Virginia elections where Governor Yonkins, one, to a large extent because of the attitude of the Democrats towards schools and the, and the attitude that, well, I mean, the school that the children and their education is responsible with the state parents shouldn't intervene. And that was something the American American voters would not accept and they voted. They clearly voted against it. So, but more than that, we've seen it in the United States at least in in the, in a significant growth, I think to homeschooling movement. And in, in, you know, in a lot of people pulling the kids out of school and looking for alternatives, looking for alternatives, whether those are certain private schools, whether it's educational pods, whether it's homeschooling, a whole wide variety of options have opened up post COVID. Now whether that'll stick, whether they'll sustain it, whether they'll maintain it is hard to tell. But I think there's really been an awakening among American parents to the quality and the politicization of American education. And of course, what is interesting is the extent to which this movement, this phenomena, this movement in this phenomena, the extent to which this, you know, was exported, America is good at exporting its ideas, was exported to, to the United Kingdom. It seems like, based on the panel that I attended today, it seems like these woke ideas and are dominating in UK schools. It seems like this is true both in the state schools and in the private schools. I'd say, from my experience, at least, just like in America, the better the school, the more likely it is to be woke. That is, it seems like the private schools, the schools that cater to the very wealthy in particular, the schools that are particularly involved in educating the kids of the wealthy, are more woke than the other schools. And the reason for that is that there's a sense, there's a greater sense of guilt there. There's a greater sense that the kids are privileged. There's a greater sense that we need to kind of, in a sense, knock them down, you know, put them in their place. And, and I think that that's so there's a, the recollection between, in a sense, the amount of money parents spend on the school and how crazy it is. But that's only partially true because it's also true that this is all over public education in, in, in the UK, they don't call it public education, but it's all over the government schools in the UK. And woke is, is dominant anywhere from, from sessions that segregate white male or white male children, and, and encourages them to feel guilty and to, to, to describe their privilege and, and, and relate what they're going to do in order to mitigate that privilege to the way they study history to, to, you know, the whole identity politics, everything about identity politics. And, and, you know, which I think is harmful to everybody, kids of any color skin, it doesn't really matter. And this is dominating our schools and it's, it's, it's dominating schools here in England. And in some senses, I think there's been a bigger backlash to it in the United States and in the UK, the Conservative Party basically capitulated to most of this and enrolled with it and didn't present any opposition. In the United States, there's at least some opposition to it, opposition from organized parents, but also political opposition from many within the Republican Party, sometimes that opposition is appropriate, some of it, sometimes it, it's trying to use the state in inappropriate ways in order to oppose these trends. So, you know, you've got a, you've got a situation today where across the educational spectrum in both the United States and in, and in the UK, you have woke ism dominating. Now, arguably, this is a bit in retreat. Again, I would mention, I would mention Virginia and I would mention San Francisco. But it might be in retreat in some areas, it might be, but it's under the surface everywhere and it's suddenly to a large extent in many school districts dictating much of the curriculum and it seems to be very much alive and well here in the UK. Although, again, you know, I've been speaking at a lot of schools at high schools over the last five, six, seven years in the UK in particular. I've talked to a lot of students and suddenly issues of race and issue of sexual orientation are ones that seem to be particularly sensitive, overly sensitive and in dangerously so as a result of all this walk in us. But they let me speak and they let me present an alternative point of view to these kids and the kids sometimes are the ones rebelling against it. But they are open at least alternative point of views and they're allowing me into the classrooms. They're allowing me in front of these students. I'll give them, I give them a lot of credit, give them a lot of credit for that. Anyway, the panel today had how many were five panelists and it was it was quite interesting. So the first panelist was an American parent. I think I think a parent who is probably traditionally liberal center left who discovered what was being taught and was horrified and became very active within their kind of parents movement to to argue against. The are you against walkers in in schools in America. So she became a real activist in the United States. And she argued for kind of the, you know, parental involvement in education. The second panelist was a teacher, a really interesting guy, a teacher who clearly opposes a lot of this nonsense and who I think has a. I'd say from the from from what he said, what I understood from what he said, a quite a rational view of the role of education, the purpose of education, but his view is, this is something that teachers have to handle. This is something that teachers are going to have to settle internally among themselves. That what needs to be that the woke needs to be something that the whole issue of what should be taught and the curriculum is not something parents should get involved in. It should be to a large extent something that that, you know, teachers should engage in and and that the problem part of the problem is that there's no proper educational philosophy that there's no clear idea of what education is for and that he is trying to convince people, you know, to go to basics to in terms of what is education, what's the purpose and and and built from there, if you will, kind of a a an opposition to the entry of woke and CRT into the school districts and I have to say, much of what he said was was quite good. Although I think he like many, I think teachers and many people in call the positions of power within the educational establishment don't think much of parents involvement and one this left to the experts. I spoke next I'll get to what I said in a minute but to my left was a was a British parent who sends her kid to a private what they call here independent school, one of the top schools in the UK, very high on academics and she is, you know, so obviously she can afford to send a kid there. And she again, I think echoed the idea that parents need to be involved that she was shocked by what that what was being taught that she has gotten involved in the schools that she is putting pressure. And she described the many difficulties in trying to reach the teachers trying to reach the administrators trying to get any changes instituted in the schools and her point was this is not just a public school thing this is in all schools including the private schools. And, and that that this is a real problem and parents better wake up and parents better get involved. I don't think there is real homeschooling in in the UK so I don't think homeschooling is a real alternative here. And then the the fifth panelist was a woman, a woman of color I guess I can't say what color, you know, very dark skin but from Malaysia originally from Malaysia, but could be easily mistaken for somebody who was who was from Africa. I mean very dark skin. And she just railed against critical race theory railed against prefer all this race based identity politics. I mean she was really good. I mean really excellent. You know, echoed the ideas of, I guess, ultimately model of the king of color blindness and and and that all these preferential treatments ultimately are hoarding people of color so she was excellent on the whole racial issues and and and why CRT is fundamentally wrong and needs to be abolished and and what was interesting that there was nobody on the panel trying to defend woke there was nobody on the panel trying to defend trying to defend CRT nobody on the panel trying to defend any kind of explicitly leftist ideas although they you know they probably some in the audience. But one of the things I like about what I find interesting about the battle of ideas is that it's put on by the Academy for ideas in the Academy is old left. And so they are much more likely to be old line Marxist interested in class interested in economic socialism and much more tend to be on the side of rejecting the new left rejecting identity politics rejecting woke rejecting very very very pro free speech and Claire Fox who heads up the Academy and runs a battle of ideas is a huge advocate for free speech. And I've had a I think she participated in my discussion with. Oh God. My my my aversion to remembering names is just kicked in again I remember his face. The British conservative who was written about Islam and immigration. Douglas Murray. No. Yes Douglas Murray. She was on the panel with Douglas Murray and myself. One of the events that there's a video of out there. Anyway she's very post free speech but she's left on on on economics but she is on on culture she was pro Brexit. She is quite nationalist. She is pro free speech. She is anti woken anti CRT so this weird modern mixture of where I think most of the middle is forming and most of the political consensus seems to be around. Which is conservative and social issues. Anti crazy left on social issues pro free speech and but but left on on anything to do with economics. And I think that's pretty much the political consensus both in the US and now in the UK and probably in most of you in most of Europe. I think that is the consensus. So what's great about the battle of ideas is you got a wide spectrum of people but it's kind of interesting. You'd expect to have kind of the wacky left better represented but they're really not they're not there. So you have a wide variety of points of view but but the wacky left is not quite there. So it was interesting all the comments were really interesting and all the comments were ones that I you know didn't. I mean there were points that I disagreed with but not not not much of the spirit of it that I disagree with. But I made the point. I made the point that you know while much of this much of the issue here is really a philosophical issues about the nature of education and about the world of education. What education should be about and whether it should get involved in politics and in in cultivating a particular morality or particular political point of view. None of that was going to change the real and the real problem the real problem I believe is the the politicization of education and I said that it was inevitable. There was no way to avoid politicizing education as long as education was basically run by the state and in particular in the UK curriculum is determined by the higher ups. Now they don't dictate CRT and they don't dictate woke but they dictate much of the curriculum and they and they and they define kind of the the the process of education and they said exams and and very much the same as the United States. And there's a constant constant there's a constant war of ideas going on over education. So for example in the United States we have had the battle of creationism versus evolution for years in various conservative school districts and that battle I think is ongoing. We now have battles over CRT. We have battles over a million different cultural issues. On the other hand pretty uniformly. This is another example of the fact that everybody accepts leftist economics. There's basically basically an acceptance a complete acceptance and no real opposition to the fact that the dominant history textbook that is taught in American schools high schools. It was written by a Marxist how it's in and that portrays America in a in a very kind of Marxist perspective particularly the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. And the entire perspective that kids learn about economics through history which is a very very important perspective with regard to economics you learn economic history is a Marxist perspective and that's in American schools. And again everybody studies from the same textbook and everything standardized at least at the school board level but even even then everybody is is is teaching to the standardized tests and everything is standardized from above. And when when you theories of how to teach math how to teach reading how to teach something else is taught by the colleges. Everybody teaches it because everything is standardized and everything the same and and public education dominates and even though we have private schools in the UK and we have private schools in the US. They are not a factor and there's no real competition. The public schools dominate and the public schools at the end of the day set the agenda for what all curriculum will be because standardized tests apply to everybody including the private schools. So my point was that to really deal with all these issues including woke and CRT and so on what we really need is to privatize education. What we really need is to get government out of education and what we really need is to get parents much more involved in the educational process. I you know and I used as an example. I think I've used this on a show in the past. The example that Steve Jobs gave in an interview that he did in the 1990s where he basically said. Parents spend significantly more time on choosing what shoes to wear than on choosing what school their kid will go to. Choosing what kind of education their kid will get. There is lots of marketing to try to educate us with regard to shoes automobiles a million different different things institutions and products and values were constantly bombarded with advertising and marketing to try to educate them. The possibilities about the the array of products available to us. But the one area where you really don't see where you really don't see competition and you really don't see marketing and you really don't see advertising is education. You don't see billboards saying hey come to my school. We teach. You know our kids go to Stanford. Our kids go to whatever. You don't see that because there's no robust competitive educational system in America. What's interesting. What's interesting is that what's interesting is that even though I went I went through it I think I was in the middle of the debate. It turned out that this point about privatizing education and role of parents and the significance of parents getting involved and making choices and getting involved in the education of the kids and taking responsibility for the kids. Really to the logic then became the talking point of the whole event and many of the audience comments and audience questions were related to it and it's interesting that when you go into a panel like this and you make some bold statement about a bold solution to a problem. Even though people might disagree with you. You tend to shape the the tenor and the content of the actual debate that goes on afterwards and people will remember what you say. I found that this happened yesterday as well on the midterms in the United States. I found it because my statements were unequivocal. They were bold. They were they were controversial. They were radical. People paid attention and people might have disagreed and might be upset and might be and you could tell that. But they paid attention and they listened and they had questions and they wanted to comment and they want to engage. And isn't that what we're supposed to do? Isn't that the purpose of going on these panels? You're not going to convince anybody of anything. What you want is to engage them and make them curious and make them make them think and make them challenge and question their beliefs. And if I say so myself, I think I did that on both panels both yesterday and today. And I do think that probably the most important question in education today is not what is being taught this ideology or that ideology. Because as we'll see, I don't I think the schools are not as powerful as you think they are the culture that matters. But what's really important about education, the real education to pay should be about privatizing education. It's interesting that the national conservatives and many conservatives of anti school choice, they're anti anti privatizing education. They want the state involved. They want the tool that the leftist had for so many years they wanted in their own hands. They want the power to control what is in the minds of our kids. It is really, really interesting if you read, and I think I pointed this out when we read the principles of national conservatism, that they want to be able to dictate curriculum for kids. They want to be able to inculcate Christian ethics into our educational system. They want to do what CRT and Woke have done. They want to do it from their side. They want the same opportunity. They want public schools because they want to be able to control the minds of kids. The only way to eliminate politics from education is to privatize it and to privatize it fully. Now, as I've said, I am willing to consider the idea of some form of vouchers, particularly in the form of education saving accounts, where if you will, the state is paying for education. As long as the state doesn't limit what kind of education it's paying for. But it's paying for education, but the parents get to choose. The parents get to decide. The parents can homeschool. They can send them to religious school. They can send them to secular school. They can send them to a Woke school. They can send them to a national conservative school. They can send them to any school they want, but that there is real competition between these schools. And I think most parents don't want to send their kids to Woke schools. I don't think most parents don't want to send their kids to national conservative schools. I think most parents want to send their kids to schools that teach reading, writing, math, science. science. They teach the content, teach the kids how to think. I think that's the focus that most parents care about. Most parents couldn't articulate it. They couldn't talk about it. But that's partially because they have become brain dead to it because they've just outsourced the responsibility for educating their kids to the government, to the state. And there's nothing worse than giving the state that responsibility. Often ask parents, you wouldn't use the state to send an important letter across country. You use FedEx or UPS. I just realized I didn't use this example today in my talk. I should have. And yet you're willing to drop your kids off at the post office to have them educated by the postman every single day. Now, that's not an insult to teachers. It's just the fact that when you are a government employee, the incentives, the motivations, the structures are going to be different. And of course, if you had private education, you wouldn't have a teacher's union as powerful, as strong, as influential, as dominating as it is in the United States. So in my view, the most important issue in education today is privatizing education, getting rid of the government, involving education. In that sense, the best thing happening in education today is the education saving account bill that was passed in Arizona. And let's hope it will survive this coming election and will stay the law in Arizona. So I'm not so much for vouchers. I am much more in support of an education saving account. That's at least the US solution. I don't know how it would apply in the UK, but I'm sure there's a way to apply it in the United Kingdom as well. That is the real issue. And I think that's the only way to get rid of woke education today, woke education in the future, the next iteration of woke, the future woke, the future politicization, whether it comes again from the left or the right, get politics out of education, let parents actually choose. If parents are Christians and they want to send their kids to school, it doesn't teach evolution too bad for the kids, but let them do it. If parents are woke and they want to send their kids to a woke school, let them do it. But let's have real choice and real competition, real innovation in the educational space. I think we have video of the panel. So I'm hoping, I think you can see it on AFC UK. I'll also probably put it up on my channel. If the video is good enough, I'll put it up on my channel as well so you'll be able to see it in the days to come. I think it was a good panel. What I found interesting was the extent to which woke is being taught in the schools and to the extent to which it is impacting kids. And how prevalent it is in the UK. I've known how prevalent it is in the US, but it's all over the UK. And again, it's both. I think the most woke school I've ever spoken at in the UK is Westminster. And Westminster academically might be the best school in the UK. Again, better the school, the more woke it is. Somebody actually asked, we never actually answered this question. Somebody asked, what would you prefer? Great academics, woke, not so great academics, not woke. I would go to not so great academics, not woke, because you can deal with better academics. The woke stuff becomes a part of the culture, becomes a part of everything. And it's very different to output as a parent. But it's a horrible choice to have to make. Anyway, I was reading something just before the show that kind of struck me as really interesting. So this is a survey of 57,000 American undergraduates at 159 top universities. And they basically asked them whether they identify as LGBT or non binary. And they documented how many of them and who identified as such. And then connected it to what their education was before. Now, you would expect that students who went to public schools or students who went to private schools where a lot of this woke stuff and a lot of this trans stuff and LGBT stuff was being taught would be much more likely to identify as LGBT than let's say homeschooled kids or kids who went to religious schools. But that is actually not the reality. And this is a little shocking and a little surprising. But this is the data, right? And, you know, I leave it to you to think about this. Okay. So I'm reading this is from from the from a sub stack from David French, David French is a Christian, Christian conservative, an anti Trump Christian conservative. This is not not got anything to do with Trump. This is just he's reporting. He was reporting on the study of 57,000 American undergraduates at 159 top universities, found that homeschooled and parochial schooled undergraduates are as or more likely to identify as LGBT or non binary as those from public or private school backgrounds. Here's the data. Those who attended parochial schools and I'm reading from the article or were homeschooled were at least as likely in 2021 and more likely in 2022 to identify as LGBT. In 2022, for instance, female students from a parochial school background were 11 points more likely. And those from a homeschool background, three points more likely to identify as non heterosexual compared to those for public or private school backgrounds. Non binary and other forms of unconventional gender identity were also higher among homeschooled and parochial schooled undergraduates. Now I think that's fascinating and really, really interesting. By the way, I read both Barry Weiss and David French. I read the whole spectrum out there. Even some of conservatives were big Trump supporters. I read them all, including the liberal right. So isn't that interesting that maybe what happens is if you go to public school and you get exposed to a lot of this identity stuff and you get exposed to this, it's kind of no big deal and you are what you are. And it doesn't really have an impact on your self identification. But if you go to parochial school or your homeschooled, then when you go to college, you rebel against that. And therefore you're more likely to self identify as one of these things, whether you are, you're not because it's a form of rebellion. And it's a form of the fact that you haven't fitted in in the past because you've been in these exclusive conservative religious environments. And now you're trying to fit in. And maybe the self identification has to do with rebellion. Or maybe it's an indication of the fact that the culture is more powerful than the schools. And that is that the culture is promoting LGBTQ LGBT. I mean, I believe that some people at least, particularly young people, LGBT and certainly trans as a consequence of the culture, not as a consequence of how they really feel as a consequence of attempt to rebel as a consequence of fitting in a lot of other things other than other than how they really feel. I mean, there is a statistics about the fact that within the trans community, it is now almost 10 to one, something like that girls who want to become men versus men who want to become girls, many would want to become women. And that's the flip side of how it was historically. And a lot of that has to do with the video and sound not synchronized for you guys. Anyway. So there is a lot of social pressure. It's like an in thing. It's a click. It's cool. And look, the only way to combat all of this, the only way to deal with all of this, I think, is a, I do believe in competition and education, I think that would be good, but that is not going to solve the more fundamental issues of sex and gender and or the bigger issues of kids getting to know who they really are and identifying as who they really are or and, you know, not being influenced by social pressure. And just general the quality of education that ultimately there has to be in addition to competition, in addition to to privatization, education, there has to be a philosophical revolution. We have to change the way people think about everything. And that includes a renewed respect for reason, teaching kids how to think, teaching kids about, you know, the facts of history, of nature, of biology, of evolution, which but more importantly, using all those facts to get kids to use their mind to think logically, rewarding logic, penalizing illogic, penalizing emotionalism, penalizing the inability to reason. What we need people to get is to think, to integrate. And until we do that, I think we're gonna have, we have a really, really hard time dealing with, again, whatever wokeism of the moment is, whether it comes from the left or the right. You know, and this is primarily true in the context of morality. The whole woke critical race theory intersectionality is at the end of the day made possible, made possible by altruism. This idea of guilt, this idea of so-called privilege, this idea of you should feel guilty for your success, this idea of egalitarianism. All of that is a consequence and a form of, it comes from, altruism. This idea that you should, you know, that you shouldn't live for yourself, that you shouldn't be proud of your achievements, that you shouldn't strive to make your life the best life that can be for you. The whole notion that the focus should be on the other, and that you should be humble, and that you should depicate yourself, and that the standard of virtue, by the way, is suffering. So the standard of virtue is oppression. The more oppressed a particular individual is, or the more he belongs to a particular group that might have been oppressed historically, or is oppressed today, the more virtuous that individual is. That's all straight altruism. So we're not gonna make progress against woke. We're not gonna make progress against any of that without making progress for against altruism. Now, while woke is primarily a left thing, woke is made possible by Christianity, inherently by Christianity. Christianity is the philosophy of original sin, which woke thrives on, woke utilizes, capitalizes on. Christianity is the idea, in a sense, that you're born certain for. Well, certainly if you're white, according to white fragility, that is true. You know, it is Christianity that builds into morality and makes morality equal altruism, and makes altruism and morality the same, and therefore makes suffering and oppression a standard by which you should measure people's morality. That is, again, intersectionality to the T. Without Christianity, none of this is possible. And without undoing the damage Christianity has done, without challenging the beliefs of Christianity primarily on the ethics, primarily on the altruism, you will never get rid of some crazy kind of left. So what needs to be addressed, what needs to be challenged is the philosophy that unites the left and the right. And that is the philosophy of altruism, the philosophy of, let's call it anti reason, the philosophy of collectivism that unites left and right. I mean, I think Leonard Peacock makes this point that Marxism is to a large extent, is to a large extent a secularization of Christianity, replacing the proletarian with God, replacing the dictatorship for the pope or the church, the church in capital C, and, you know, communing with the spirits and applying the same kind of platonic philosophy to Christianity has been applied to the proletarian. So our battle is a huge one. Because it is not just a battle against woke. If you defeat woke, something else will arise instead of it, somebody else, something else will arise to replace it. And if you defeat woke and allow the right to win, then the right will replace woke with their religious teachings. With their religious indoctrination, which again, is directly in the doctrine of national conservatism. It's not about defeating this or defeating that. It is about winning on our terms. It is about winning the philosophical battles, about winning the ideological battles, by changing the whole perspective on how to look at these issues. As I've said many times, I think wokeism to a large extent is peaking. It's still got a runway. It's still got a lot of energy behind it, but the American people are not behind woke and they reject woke. I think the British people are not behind woke and they reject woke. I think it's seeing its peak. Now, I don't think it's going to become bigger than it is today. It's already huge, but I don't think it's going to be bigger than it is today. I mean, you're seeing on every front, you're seeing ESG challenged, you're seeing at every front, you're seeing real challenges. Again, I remind you of the Virginia elections and the in the San Francisco recall, and there's lots of other minor examples of this all over the place. There is a real there is a real uprising against kind of the wacky left agenda. And I don't think the wacky left agenda will survive. As I've always said, in the end, wackiness will survive. Wackiness will survive because wackiness is based on the particular wackiness, altruism will survive, collectivism will survive, statesism will survive, authoritarianism will survive, whether it comes from the left and right matters less than the fact that it will survive and it will have an impact on all of our lives. That's what we need to fight. We need to fight the whole cabuto. That's what makes it on. And that's why the best solution is to privatize the schools. If you privatize the schools, you go after woke and you go after the Christian conservatives, you go after a whole bunch of them. I find it interesting, the national conservatives while seemingly primarily an American movement, run by an Israeli, funnily enough, Yom Khazoni, they're all over the UK. So at Durham University, a kid stood up after my talk and said, well, I'm a national conservatives. I'm a big fan of Yom Khazoni and, you know, started arguing with me. And during the panel yesterday about the election, there were a number of people who expressed clearly ideas that are based on the principles of national conservatism. This is a suddenly an Anglo-Saxon world, a growing movement and I think a powerful movement and a very, very, very dangerous movement as dangerous as anything the left has to propose to us and more palatable to the American and the British people than what the left has to paddle. All right. Robin says, evil is impotent, only sanction of the good gives it power. And I think that's right. And in the case of education, the sanction is given by the parents. The sanction is primarily given by the parents' silence, by the parents' acquiescence, by the parents' non-challenging the evil that is being taught in the schools. Now, there's some limit to the ability to do that, but most of it is just laziness and apathy and fear. And again, private education forces parents, forces, parents actually get involved to actually make a choice, to actually go and choose, to actually do the research, to actually be there. So that is interesting. But it is good to see as on this panel, we had two parents, a British one and an American one, both challenging their respective schools, both engaged in the battle, both very active and very passionate about this. All right. Let's see. We've got a bunch of super chat questions. We're still quite a bit behind where we need to be, but I'm sure some of you will step in and remedy that situation in the minutes that we still have. You can ask questions or you can just support the show. You can choose how you want to do it. Let me just see what we have here. Okay. Okay. I'm looking for questions that relate. Wow. Okay. Okay. Nothing on the topic, at least not in the $20 and above question. So let's go with the $50 buck question. We've got a few of those. Well, halfway, halfway to $650. Thank you guys. All right. Let's start with who had the first $50 question. I think it was James. Let's see. Here's James. All right. James says, animals take the least risk possible to secure their existence, the least risk. Humans only achieve eudaimonia by pushing their comfort zone. Must this happen when a species evolves to the point where the purpose of life has shifted from survival to finding meaning? Yeah. I think that's right. I think it is necessary, but I think it's not the finding meaning that gives it that necessity. I think what gives it that necessity is cognition, is free will. The shift from animal to human being is not the need for meaning, although the need for meaning is there. It's the shift to a being that can choose to think or not to think. In a sense, it's a shift to a being that can choose living death or literal death. They can choose not to pursue its survival or certainly can choose not to pursue its thriving. It's cognition and it's the nature of human cognition, the nature of human reason, the fact that it's dependent on switching it on, the need to think, the need to use free will. That makes us different than animals and therefore makes it possible for us and makes it harder for us to achieve our survival qua us. To survive as a human being is not just to survive at the material level, it's to survive as a human being as a rational being, as a fully cognitive being. That requires cognition and that requires turning it on and that requires effort and that requires a choice. Animals don't have that choice and that's what is the fundamental difference. Thanks, James. Great question. Let me just say just because there's a comment in the chat about me being detached from young people is quite amazing to me given how much I spend, how much time I spend with young people and how much time any of you would be my guess, spend with young people. You probably spend a lot of time reading articles by conservative thinkers about young people, reading articles about what people tell you happens in school, but I actually spend time at schools. I actually spend time with young people. I spend time at universities and at high schools. On Friday, as I think I told you yesterday, I was at all girls high school here in the UK and all those girls high school that I'm sure is very woke in its teaching. You could tell when I said people have a right to discriminate, even if it's irrational, even if it's immoral, even if it's evil. The shock that was expressed by the kids was quite palatable, but it created an amazing exchange and a healthy exchange and nobody shut me down. The teachers there were a little taken aback, but they didn't shut me down. I don't think anybody knows more about what's going on in schools within our world than I do because I'm there. I engage with the students. I talk with the students. I answer student questions. I ask them questions. Not to mention that I also read about what's going on in schools and I do all the research and all of that, but I'm actually there. The other thing that happened, I have to say at the battle of ideas, which was a lot of fun. Let me just say I also talk to the teachers and the teachers invite me in and I talk to the other teachers and I see the other teachers responding to my talks. I'm very much engaged with both the teachers and the students in ways that I think very few people are. But the other thing that happened in the battle of ideas is I'm walking the corridors and a number of people walked up to me and said, Hey, you're on book. And I was like, Yeah. They said, Oh, I listened to your podcast. Oh, you know, I discovered you a few months ago, a few years ago, and I listened to all these things and thank you. Thank you for so much fun to meet so many of you. And particularly, I mean, it's one thing to meet those of you already objectivist and established and a part of the movements and, you know, I'm part of that movement, but people don't consider themselves part of the movement. A number of people said, Well, I don't know if I agree with everything or I haven't read on rent yet, or I've read on rent. I don't know if I agree with her, but I listened to your show. I mean, that was so much fun and so cool. So thank you for all of you who came up. Those of you didn't come up, please do so in the future. You don't know how much it means to me means the world to me to know that, you know, because otherwise, it's just numbers 2000 people watch the show 2000 people listen to it on podcast. But those are just numbers. It doesn't mean anything. And I don't know who you are and what you are. And I know the people in the chat here and most of you I love and serve you, not so much. But actually, people actually people coming up and talking to me is is so refreshing and so valuable. And and and and makes my day. So thank you for all of you for doing that. I really, really appreciate it. All right, Adam Campbell. Hi, Ron. What is the best way you found to introduce objectivism to someone that ain't overly political, religious activist, but has bought into altruism knowingly or not? Great show. Thanks. Thanks, Adam. Look, the best way, you know, we've talked about this, I think the best way is to have them read the fountainhead or to have them read out the shrug depending on their inclination probably fountainhead given that they're not overly political. Fountainhead is better. I can't think of anything better than the fountainhead. It's a great book. It's a great story. It's engaging. It's stimulating. And yet it has basically the essentials of the of the objectives philosophy concretized into a work of art concretized really into a character, how it would work. It's inspiring. It'll get people motivated to get people excited about what the set of ideas that can create such a novel is. So I can't think of a better way to do it than excite them about about the fountainhead. And if they won't read the fountainhead, then the next best thing to do is to engage with them, not in religion, not in politics, not in activism, but on ethics on the purpose of life. And why are they altruists? What purpose does altruism serve? How many lives do they think they have? You know, just asking them the question of why? Why sacrifice? Why live for others? Why care about others more than you care about yourself? What about you? What about your life? Isn't it valuable? Is it less valuable? So delving into the issues relating to altruism and why altruism doesn't make any sense and why altruism is what's the point? Challenging that because they've never altruism has never been challenged in their minds. Altruism is not challenged in the culture. Nobody challenges altruism. It's just accepted as well, of course. What else is there? There's only altruism when it comes to morality. There's immorality and there's altruism. So challenging the kids or whoever this is to question their altruism, pushing them on the why is super important. All right, let's see. The real Mr. Meatball. All right, the real Mr. Meatball, not the fake Mr. Meatball, the real one, asks for $50. How can objectives communicate with people who are voluntarily evasive about reality and the truth? You can't. If somebody's voluntarily evasive about reality and the truth, if that's really what it is, they're evading reality and evading the truth, there is no way to communicate with them. You have to give up on them. It's a waste of time. Just walk away, share your energy for people who are mistaken, people who are consciously and purposefully evading the truth. What are you talking to them for? So yes, I mean, figuring out when somebody's evading and when somebody's is not easy. But if you know somebody's clearly evading, if you know no argument with help, because they're just going to evade that argument, then why present them with the argument? Somebody says, I'm feeling fired up. I don't feel fired up. I still feel shitty. But hopefully, I feel better tomorrow. I have to fly to tomorrow. I'm going to be in Edinburgh. So I'm giving a talk at Edinburgh about why Scotland should not become independent. Then I'll be in Berlin on Tuesday, giving a talk on capitalism, I think. Then I'm giving a talk in Lugano. So I'm flying into Milan and giving a talk in Lugano in Switzerland, all to students at universities. And in some of these places, I would be meeting professors. And in some of the places, I'll be debating. But I'm completely remote and detached from what is going on in the world. So yes, so Berlin, I don't love Berlin. I don't like Berlin at all. But I will be in Berlin. Berlin, Lugano, then Oslo. I'll be giving a talk there on the purpose of government. Then Paris. Paris. Well, to students, be talking to students in Paris. Then Lisbon. And finally, I'll be joined by, by Nikos in Madrid. And we'll be talking at Universitat Francisco Maracuin, at a very non-woke university at, this is a university in Guatemala that has a Madrid branch. And we'll be talking to the Madrid branch. So that should be a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to that. All right, let's see. Yeah, I don't like Berlin. It's too, I hate to say it, but it's, you know, sounds a little collectivistic. But it is too German. All right, Alexis. First, Alexis, sorry, we didn't get together this trip. It's been a bit of a whirlwind. I've been, this is a trip where I haven't really got over my jet lag and haven't been sleeping. So everything's kind of a moist. So I'm sorry we didn't get some coffee. We usually get coffee when I'm in town. I will try to make it up to you next time I am in London. So all right, Alexis says if Ben Bernanke can get an economic Nobel Prize, maybe Vladimir Putin, be hopefully to get a peace one. Yeah, I think that is the logic of sound there given that Ben Bernanke, I think, made the financial crisis for which he got his research on his performance during the financial crisis, made the financial crisis much worse. And, you know, I think was devastating in many respects to the banking system. And then he gets a Nobel Prize for his research into bank crises. Now, his research is impressive. His historical research into the Great Depression and what happened and what was caused is impressive. Some of the conclusions in the research are even true. He did not, I mean, Thomas Sowell deserves a Nobel Prize for economics over Ben Bernanke, certainly. Israel Kurtzner, the great, great Austrian economist, deserves a Nobel Prize over Ben Bernanke. But, you know, this is a mainstream economics prize. And I guess Ben Bernanke and the other two people who wrote articles about, I mean, what's his name, Calamares, I forget his first name, Calamares, I think, has written more insightful and more meaningful stuff on bank crises than Ben Bernanke. But of course, he's a free marketer. So he was not considered for the Nobel Prize. It's very rare the true free market academics since Hayek and Friedman got the Nobel Prize. I mean, a few others have, a few others have, but so do the statists. So the Nobel Prize in economics is very mixed. It goes back and forth. Sometimes it's pretty good, or at least reasonable. Sometimes it's terrible. Sometimes it's really good. It's very, very, just like the economics profession is. God, Charles, but can you compare Putin with coffee megs? They're both thugs. They're both. I think there's a, there's a both a mysticism of muscle to both, or reliance on muscle and mysticism. I am going to copy this question over. Sorry, Charles, but and I'm going to get back to you with a better answer because my mind is not working at its best right now in terms of the collection and getting right. I owe Charles about a bunch of different stuff. We'll add this to the list. All right, James Taylor asks, Is there such a thing as matter? What we have called matter is energy whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceivable to the sent as to be perceivable to the sent. Matter is just energy reduced to the point of visibility. I don't think that's true. But I'm not in position to really argue with you. The philosophy of science and certainly the philosophy of physics is way beyond my pay grade. Even if it's true that matter can be reduced to energy, matter still exists. That is, there is some energy that because let's accept your premises, there is some energy that whose vibrations make it have certain qualities and characteristics that are different than other forms of energy that have different qualities and characteristics. That is just because there is a deeper cause doesn't mean that the thing itself doesn't exist. This table that I'm tapping right now, I think you can hear that. This table doesn't exist because all the table is is just atoms. The atoms are just subatomical atoms, subatomical particles. That doesn't change the fact that this is a table and I can understand the characteristic of the table as being XYZ. But the table is a table and the atom is an atom, even though the atom could be broken down to components and attributes associated with it. And the same is true if the way you're describing matter and energy are right. That is, even if it's true that matter is energy at a certain level of vibration, well, that certain level of vibration is different than another form of energy at a different level of vibration. And therefore you can differentiate this energy from that energy. This energy we're going to call matter, that energy we're going to call something else. Now again, I'm not going to get into the physics. Physics is really, really difficult, particularly when you get into the subatomic particles. I can manage barely with Newtonian physics. I used to be able to do some more advanced physics, but that's a long, long time ago. I haven't studied it. I'm not that interested in it. And the philosophy of all of that is, again, beyond the scope of my knowledge. So I don't know. There's something you don't hear intellectuals often say. Hiram asks, if it's not too personal of a question, Hiram, what movement of Judaism were you a part of before you became an atheist? I feel you're not wrong just because you don't believe there's a God. I'll struggle to understand that. But so I don't know what, what, you know, in Israel, there's no reformed Judaism. So there's Orthodox Judaism. I guess we went to an Orthodox synagogue, but I wouldn't call my parents Orthodox Jews. They're pretty secular Jews, although they believe in God, and they go through all the motions of tradition. When I became an atheist, and I became an atheist at the age six or seven, actually here in England, it just outside of Hackney, I forget the exact name of the suburb, but at a Jewish day school here, the school itself was quite Orthodox. It was, it was not quite ultra Orthodox, but it was, it was significantly Orthodox. I wore Yami Kedah school. I wore Titiot, which is something you wear under the shirt. We prayed, we did all the stuff at school, and that's when I became an atheist. I became an atheist while I was going to pretty religious institution. But my parents would never, I wouldn't know how to categorize them in terms of the different forms of Judaism, conservative, Orthodox, I don't know. You know, I don't know. They believe in God, but I don't know what that even means to them. Okay, Dan Wilson, you're on so sorry I couldn't get to see you this time in London, but next time for sure, you're the voice of reason and the craziness. So thank you. Have a good year or two. Thank you, Dan. Really appreciate that. James, what are your thoughts? What are your thoughts on Nordic country's culture, capitalism, immigration, and outlook on the world stage? I know Norway has the best sovereign fund. Therefore, some things they do very well. The Russian war impacts them. No, I mean, Norway's sovereign fund is just theft on a grand scale. I mean, Norway, I think sovereign fund is a disaster. I mean, it doesn't feel like a disaster in Norway because the capital GDP is very, very high. But that's all the consequence of the fact that Norway has oil. It has vast quantities of oil. It's made a lot of money off that oil. And Norway, as compared to many other countries, a little bit like Saudi Arabia, has put a lot of that money aside. It hasn't spent it. It goes into the sovereign fund. It's one of the largest, if not the largest institutional investor in the world. It invests in stock markets and various other financial instruments globally. And it also provides, if you will, a safety net for the Norwegians. I don't think that's what should be done. I think the oil fields in Norway should have been privatized. And I think one of the consequences of the fact that Norway chose to nationalize its oil fields or to keep them in the national sense and put it into a sovereign fund is that I think there's less innovation, there's less new technology. And ultimately, I think Norway is going to suffer from a depletion of those oil reserves, and they don't pump as much oil and they don't get as much gas, which Europe is suffering from now because of Norway had more gas, they'd be less reliant on Russia as a consequence. So I think in the future, the fact that there's no private investment in the Norwegian oil and gas fields is going to cost them. Look, I think generally, and here I speak, I mean, I know Denmark probably the best of all the Scandinavian countries. I know something about Norway, something about Sweden, Finland. Finland is not technically a Scandinavian country, but in many respects it is. So they have a very mixed culture. On the one hand, particularly Swedes and Danes are quite entrepreneurial. Sweden has very poor entrepreneurship laws that promote entrepreneurship and that that encourage entrepreneurship. And it's of all the European countries, Sweden has one of the most entrepreneurial cultures, I think they the most startups for capital in Sweden than anywhere else in Europe, maybe with the exception of the UK, I'm not sure. Sweden has a tolerance for failure that a lot of Europe doesn't have, certainly the Germanic countries do not have, France doesn't have. But Sweden has a robust, has had since the late 19th century, a very robust private sector, a very gay, a very productive private sector, a very ambitious private sector. And the Sweden economy has done very well as a consequence. And that's part of why they can afford to redistribute as much as they do because they're actually quite productive. And I think everything I said about Sweden is probably us a true of Norway, Norway has produced quite a number of successful entrepreneurs. Many of those entrepreneurs have left Denmark primarily because of the staggering Lehigh tax rates. And that's a tragedy. But this generally, generally, there's a certain level of ambition. And in both of those cultures, I think less so in Norway, because of the oil, because of the wealth that is just in the ground. Norway is, I think of all the Scandinavian countries, the least productive productivity per capita is the lowest. But there is in all these countries, a certain level of this tension between individualism and collectivism. On one hand, there's a certain individualism. You saw that in Sweden with the response to COVID. There were no lockdowns in Sweden as a response to COVID. There was no collective kind of solutions and answers. A lot was left to individuals to make decisions about their own life with regard to COVID. On the other hand, none of these cultures particularly like people who step up and exceptional in any way. So they like entrepreneurs, but they don't like entrepreneurs buying nice cars. They don't like entrepreneurs flaunting their wealth. So entrepreneurs who are successful are known to be successful, but they live they often express it by living fairly modestly. If they stay in the country, the entrepreneurs that want to buy the nice cars, the nice homes and all of that leave. They go to Switzerland or they go to come to the UK. There is, I think fundamentally in Sweden and in Denmark, there is a respect for markets. To some extent, greater respect for markets than in the US. While they tax very highly, regulations are lower in both these countries. It's easier to hire and fire people in Denmark than it is in California. There is generally a certain on social issues. They're very good and they don't have the woke nonsense, not nowhere near like the Anglo-Saxon countries. It hasn't really reached Europe. There's much more robust debate. There's much more open debate about controversial issues. Even the nationalism, so the kind of this populist right movement that has succeeded is restrained in many ways. So there really is a classical liberal, I think, sense in Sweden and Denmark that doesn't exist maybe in the rest of Europe and doesn't exist as much in some ways. It doesn't exist in the US and in the UK. They don't suffer from the same kind of craziness on the left. It's there at the margins. Oh, well, there is one thing which Sweden suffers from and that is for a very long time, they have suffered from the inability to talk about Islam, the inability to talk about Islamic terrorism, the inability to talk about Islamic crime, and unwillingness to integrate Muslims into their culture and into their civilization, which I think to a large extent is exacerbates particularly the crime and the poverty. But there's definitely, I remember speaking at a Swedish university and I said something about Islam and the response was, you can say that. And this is a conservative group, I think, in response to us. We just don't talk about these things. Just don't talk about them. And that is the one area where kind of political correctness is big and that's partially because they have such a large Muslim immigrant population. Now that's changing because the increase in violence that is coming from that community, the Muslim community in Sweden, is causing a real debate to happen. And the debate, you know, partially part of their problem with crime in a country like Sweden is that they won't say it's coming from the Muslim community. They won't say it's coming from Muslim neighborhoods. They won't then, as a consequence, deal with it. Same thing happened in England with the, I think I've talked about this with the, with all the people who are, you know, with the kind of rape gangs that existed in England. And the police turned a blind eye to it because they were Muslims. They were Muslims primarily from Pakistan and we didn't want to discriminate against them. We didn't want to make a cultural statement. They're raping your girls. Of course, yeah, I mean, it's insanity. So a lot of the problem is multiculturalism. So multiculturalism definitely exists in the West and this is true of Sweden as well. But for example, you don't find that in Denmark and Denmark has not been tolerant to some of the bad behavior of the Islamic community. So, yeah, the Swedes have Swedes have been very good at bearing their heads in the sand. Absolutely. So there's a lot to admire about the culture, but there's a lot of problems, primarily the envy of success, the resentment, and then the high taxes. But, you know, and the problem with immigration is not allowing immigrants in. It's the fact that in these cultures, like the rest of Europe, there's no effort made to assimilate them. And it's essential to assimilate them. All right, let's see. Frank has a $50 question. Good for Frank. All right, now we're getting very close to the goal. So thank you guys. No more, less than $20 questions. So because we've got a bunch of questions still and we've already gone an hour and 20 minutes and I want to get, I need to get my rest. All right, so let's see. Frank says, is the obsession with status politics? Just another lure to prove we can be distracted from our genuine interests. Check out David Sylvain's Orpheus. Okay, I'm not familiar with David Sylvain's Orpheus. But no, I don't think it's a distraction. I don't think it's a distraction at all. I think that it is that it is genuine and it's genuine because as politics grows and influence, as politics involves itself in our lives, as we give our politicians and the political class and our political intellectuals more and more scope into our world, right, instead of limited government, unlimited government, the more people are going to get involved in politics, the more politics are going to become important because they affect everything. So you see parents getting involved in politics because of their kids' education. But if you had private schools, if the government wasn't in education, parents wouldn't get involved in politics, they'd get involved in their school. And they'd get involved in choosing a school. They wouldn't get involved in politics because politics would have no impact on the school. When we make politics involved in everything, in allocation of capital, in allocation of wages, in allocation of wealth, in allocation of educational resources, in allocation of everything, and determining everything, then the more and more and more involved we get in politics. And we have no choice. It's a survival thing. We have to do it in order to survive, in order to exist, because otherwise, you know, politics, this is the thing. Iron Man talks about this a lot. Politics is a zero sum world. When somebody else gains, we lose. If they won't get influence in politics and therefore get their agenda into the schools, we lose because our agenda's out. So we need to capture politics in order to get our agenda in the schools. There's no such thing as diversity in schools and competition in schools and all kinds of schools. There's just one kind of school. So it really behooves us to get involved in politics. We have no choice because politics gets involved with us. If abortion is a political question, then we need to get involved in politics because, if we care about abortion, if you're a young woman and you care about your right to have an abortion, you better get involved in politics. But if abortion is not a political issue, but it's left to the individual to make a decision about, yes or no, then who cares about politics? You just have an abortion or not. Or if you choose not to have it, for moral reasons or for any other reasons, it's a personal choice. The more we take away personal choice and give the authority to the philosopher kings, the more we have to monitor the philosopher kings, object to the philosopher kings, get involved in the politics. All right, quarry, 80 Australian dollars. Not worth as much as it used to be, huh? What is your view on government ads? There are a lot of them here in Australia about anti-sexual violence, a good thing, but also about man respecting women by not ogling them and saying sexual things about them in private, a tad too far in my view. I'm against government ads. Government should not be involved in culture. Government should not be involved in ideas. Government should not be involved in education at any level. Government should not be telling us to smoke or not to smoke, to eat fats and not to eat fats, to eat carbs and not to eat carbs, to ogle, ogle, ogle, ogle, women or not to ogle women. It's none of the government's business. So I believe in a complete separation of state from ideas and that would restrict the state's ability to do these things, the things that you're talking about. So absolutely against all of these kind of state interventions. And again, this is why people get involved in politics because they're getting into the business of individual relationships, not about violence. That's important. That the government is involved in. But about just how we relate to one another. What kind of language we talk to one another? Where my eyes go? I mean, it's ridiculous. Ja says off topic, I tried Rosella, it was delicious. It was great to meet Jeff. He and his staff was so gracious. Yes, I agree. Excellent. Everybody go to Rosella and meet Jeff. All right, let's see, Adam. Should objectivist education enterprises run after school and weekend schools like Asians and Jews to immunize kids against woke pragmatism. Disminding government and Christian schools, most Americans use what they can afford. I don't know. I mean, I think at the end of the day, objective schools should focus on on a proper education. And if you do education right, I don't think you need all those other things. If you do education right, I think you arm the kids. You give them the ammunition, you give them the capacity in terms of thinking ability, in terms of facts, in terms of evidence, in terms of the ability to research the facts and evidence to deal with whatever is thrown at them. And I'm not sure we need weekends and after schools in order to do that. I think that's overreach. Kids needs to play. Kids needs to have kids need to have time away from school where they can play. Play is important. So and be by themselves and pursue their own interests and do a bunch of different things. So I don't think objectivist oriented school should be running after school anti woke programs or other type of programs. I think they should just if you do a really good school day, I don't think you need the after school stuff. Alexis, thank you guys for getting really close to goal. Anything to be looking out during the CCP Congress, aside from this being the last place I'd want to be due to horrifying bureaucracy. No, I don't think there's anything new going to come out of CCP. I mean, it's it's very much a staged event. It's it's well planned and orchestrated from in advance. I read a little bit about she's the speech she gave yesterday, I think, at the conference, nothing new, reasserting and reaffirming everything we know he is about. On the one hand, he reasserts the China's a Marxist country. On the other hand, he spoke up the importance of market economics and innovation and technology and China being the leader in all of that and using the market in order to achieve that leadership, not exactly Marxist. So he talked about Marxism in theory, but not Marxism in application in any kind of aspect, as far as I can tell. So yeah, I mean, Marxism is a is a tool China uses in order to pretend that it has an intellectual philosophical framework, but it really is just a Marxist or not a Marxist, a fascist authoritarian regime that uses any tool it can in order to control its people and in order to at the same time become more powerful and to gain more wealth. The only interesting thing I think to come out of the CCP is if there's any opposition to Xi, but I think given that it's well orchestrated and predetermined, I don't think there's going to be any, I think it's predetermined that Xi will be elected to a third unprecedented third term as in a sense of being leader of the Communist Party there, which basically makes him leader for life. Nobody has been that since Mao Tung himself. I think everything about the CCP meeting in Beijing right now, CCP Congress confirms the move of China towards great authoritarianism and therefore towards, in my view, decline. But we will see. I'd be surprised if there were any surprises. Okay. Okay, we got a bunch of $5 questions and $10 questions. So please let's limit this to future questions to $20 and above. We've got $134 to go. It's becoming more and more difficult for me to talk so speak, but let's try to do this quickly. Michael asks, what do you make of the jury not giving Paul Kinshuta the death penalty? He killed 17 kids and would an additional 17. If that doesn't justify the death penalty, I don't know what. Yeah, I don't know what the reasoning was. I wasn't following the trial. I mean, I guess he is very young. So maybe that was a consideration. You know, I'm not necessarily a huge advocate for the death penalty, although in a case like this where there's no question about the fact that murder was committed on a massive scale, I think it's completely justified. I'm sure that the motor will never leave jail. Even if he didn't get the death penalty, he'll get several life sentences that will guarantee that he never sees the light of day outside of a jail. I think that's what you can do. I don't think the death sentence is a particularly deterrent. I think many people like the Paul Kinshuta are already suicidal. Michael asks, is there a link between altruism and philosophical determinism? I mean, yes and no, you can certainly be an altruist without being a philosophical determinism, but almost all philosophical determinists are altruists and they come up with interesting evolutionary explanations of why we are programmed to be altruists and how that fits. But you can be an altruist without philosophical determinism. You can be an altruist from choice. Indeed, some versions of Christianity are not deterministic, or at least came not to be deterministic. It's inconsistent, but very altruistic. Harper Campbell, is Trump afraid of DeSantis? Will he endorse and campaign for DeSantis if he becomes the nominee in 2024? No. I mean, not if DeSantis beats Trump. Trump won't campaign for him. If Trump and DeSantis run, and it looks like DeSantis is winning, it'll be very, very, very ugly. Very ugly. Trump will not go down without a fight. Is Trump afraid of DeSantis? Probably. But it's all going to depend on how the midterms go, in terms of Trump's candidates, whether Trump runs, and if he does run. You know, how does he do versus DeSantis? Liam asked, was the reason your third back surgery was successful was because you used stem cells? Is that why the first two didn't last? Well, I mean, stem cells weren't available for the first two. So it wasn't an option. The first two were much more serious than the third one. But yes, I believe I can't prove this, but it certainly there's evidence to suggest that the third was incredibly successful because of the use of stem cells. So I'm a big advocate of stem cells. They worked for me. I can't, they haven't been large studies because of the FDA. So it's so we don't have significant evidence about them. Whoops. I didn't mean to do that. All right. Let's see, Jennifer. Feel better soon, Iran. I plugged ears from a recent flight. Well, I hope you feel better too, Jennifer. Thank you. Let's see, James G asks. Did I skip a question? Yeah, this one. Michael asks, did Trump demonstrate you can begin to merge the populist left and the populist right like the Nazis did? Yeah. I mean, I don't want to compare it to the Nazis. But yes, no question. Trump moved a lot of Democrats to vote for him. A lot of working class people who typically voted a Democratic voted for him because of his general agenda, which was very much leftist in its economic orientation and very much pandered to the working class, the so-called downtrodden, the people who lost their jobs because so-called deindustrialization, all of the mythology the leftist taught us that Trump completely embraced and heightened, got him a lot of support from the left. I mean, a lot of people said that if they hadn't voted for Trump, they would have voted for Bernie Sanders. And indeed, it's not clear between Bernie and Trump who would have won. Richard asks, what gives religious and social mysticism so much mass appeal besides offering freedom from responsibility? I think it gives people an understandable, or at least seemingly understandable explanation of the world. It seemingly explains what's going on out there in simple terms. God does it. It gives them a moral code to live by, not a very good one, but a moral code. And it's been around forever. It's been tested forever. And I think that's basically appeal. It gives them a moral code. It gives them morality without requiring them to think too much, without requiring them to have too much effort, without requiring them to challenge the world around them, to challenge the world that they live in. They can just embrace what their neighbors have. So there's a lot of second-handed. There's a lot of social metaphysics involved in religion and mysticism. But it's explanation and morality. That, I think, is what religion gives people. And community, which is important. So those three things. Explanation. How does the world fight? It's like the biggest conspiracy theory ever, and people are attracted to conspiracy theories because they explain stuff. Religion is the biggest conspiracy theory ever. So it's explanation, morality, a code to live by, and community. Community. People they can relate to. People they can associate with. People they can be friends with. All right. Bishak, thank you for the support. Really appreciate it. James asked, what is the future of UK in comparison to the rest of the EU? Do you think it is possible for the UK to still be the head of finance trade and et cetera? You know, I was very positive about the future of UK relative to the EU up until Liz Truss's disaster of the last two weeks. I mean, I was very hopeful. I see a Conservative Party that is at least, whose leaders are quite good in terms of their ideas. They're very bad communicators. Oh, yeah. Richard, the other thing is, of course, an afterlife that's very appealing, particularly as you grow older. So it's, I was very positive now. But if the Conservative Party goes back to being middle of the road, nothing, if it goes back to basically appeasing the left of everything on everything important, then I'm very negative about the UK. So I still think the fate of the UK is in the UK's hand. And now that with Brexit, it certainly is up to them. You know, if they could turn England into a free trade haven, they could liberalize, they could deregulate, they could do amazing things here to really make this country great. And they have politicians who believe in that, which America doesn't. But the UK does. What they don't have is an electoral base that believes in it. And that's an issue of communication. That's inspired around the ideas of free markets, and Liz Truss cannot. Now, whether Kemi can, Kemi Badnak, can inspire around these ideas. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. But at least there's hope in the UK because they have better politicians. Scott says, very happy to see you appreciate the woke threat. That is such a disingenuous comment, Scott. It is such an evasive comment. And it's, you know, you're on the show, almost every show. And, you know, I just did a show on the medical school thing. I've done so many shows on woke. I've described the woke threat. I've done shows on white fragility. I've done, I did shows on BLM. I've done shows on woke throughout. And, you know, this argument that I don't take the woke threat seriously, because I see a threat from the right as well, is so disingenuous and borderline dishonest. It just is. And you exhibit this, or you keep repeating this nonsense, in spite of the fact that you hear and you listen to it. And here I am constantly talking about this stuff. And you choose, you choose not to hear it. You choose to hear only what you want to hear. You have a perception of what I think. And you, you blank out anything that doesn't meet that perception, except once in a while. For some reason, something hits home. And, oh, look, you are paying attention to the woke. A complete garbage. Mazhan, mazhan, from, from India. These are Indian rupees. How come we did not wake up to this woke and CRT problem much earlier in the 1990s and 2000s? Thomas Sowell's book from 1990s already talk about this. I'm shocked to learn that the some schools out of practices are from our tune. Yeah, absolutely. We didn't wake up to them. I mean, a lot of us were talking about these things back then. It was called political correctness. It was called different things. It wasn't called it was called identity politics even back then. It was all part of all this. But in people talked about it, but the fact is that as long as the left dominates our universities, the longest the left dominates the intellectual high ground, what happened is these things will continue to morph. So political correctness was laughed at was ridiculed, but no alternative was given to it. There was no alternative ideology except what the right presents, which is zero and irrational religiosity. So what you get is the left goes back, they've been defeated on political correctness, they regroup and they come up with CRT and woke. So they keep reiterating, they keep coming back to these ideas and every time they're a little nuttier. But the fact is that the culture keeps rejecting them and they keep coming back and they keep rejecting them and keep coming back. And the reason that happens is because no real integrated, coherent alternative is presented. And the real fear, and I keep saying this and people like Scott hate me for it, I guess, or resent me for it, is the real, and this is straight out of Leonard Peacock's dim hypothesis, the real fear is that the one ideology that is integrated, that can replace what the left is doing, that is, does have an appeal to the masses and doesn't have an appeal to Americans, is an ideology that wraps itself around the flag and wraps itself around a cross that is associated with religion. So basically the only alternative you have is woke leftism in different varieties in different elements. And then from the, I remember back in the 80s, when I was in university, these issues were already coming up. So the woke stuff that keeps reiterating it and becomes, you know, and keeps changing form, but not substance. And religious conservatism, and there will be a day, I fear, because the culture keeps rejecting what the woke throws at them. What the left throws at them, I think what will happen one day is that the right and Americans will be so fed up with this ridiculous nonsense coming from the left that they will embrace authoritarianism from the right. That is the dim hypothesis in a very superficial way, right? I don't want to represent Peacock here. That's my interpretation of how the dim hypothesis plays out in a very superficial way. I'd have to do a whole show on the deeper sense of it. And that's how it plays out. Let's stop, let's attack woke, let's destroy woke, let's go after the left without aligning ourselves with the right, without aligning ourselves with religion and nationalism, because they will be the death of us literally. By the way, I think there'll be a major essay that I wrote about national conservatism, nationalism will generally coming out in a magazine soon. So as soon as it's finalized and it's accepted and it's signed off on, I just emailed the editor the article today. I'll let you know, and I hope I hope you go and you read it and you show views so that they ask me to write again for them. I wrote it with Ilan Giorno. Alexis says, the pro-Putin type of nationalists are way scarier than Wokeness. I agree. Wokeness is silly and stupid and almost everybody when they actually learn about it, repelled by it. The pro-Putin nationalists have a real appeal to people. And by the way, one of the reasons the nationalists are pro-Putin is because the left is anti-Putin. So the right is automatically anti-left. This is how stupid the right is. The right has no views of their own. They're anti-left. So if the left is pro-Ukraine, the right is pro-Russia. God, anyway. Do you have any information about the effect of the war on objective smoothing in Ukraine and the Peel of Iron Man's philosophy? I really don't. I wish I had. I will be meeting in Milan. A friend of mine, she is Ukrainian. She lives in Milan. I'll ask her because that's a good question to ask her. She's connected, I think. I don't know that she's an objectivist, but she's interested in objectivism and was involved in organizing events for me in Kiev years ago when she lived in Ukraine. So I will ask her if this is having any kind of effect, if this is having any effect. I'll be interested to know her views about the war and about objectivism and Iron Man in Ukraine. Thank you. Thank you for giving me that idea. Mr. Muffin, book recommendation on Islamic Golden Age and how it got there and why they didn't succeed. God, where did I get all that material? I mean, a lot of what I learned from about the Middle East history was from... See, you ask me these questions and I can't remember names. It's frustrating for me. All right, Mr. Muffin, if you don't mind, I'm going to copy your question over to, just like I did with Shazbats and I will address it on a future show. I think that in my course on Middle East history, I mentioned some books, don't I? So you might want to check that out. It's free on YouTube. But I will check the books. Again, I can see the cover of the book. I can't actually read the name of the author. Ah, frustrating. All right, 72 dollars away from making our goal. 72, so close. All right, Valdrin, how do we achieve the final crucial step of infiltrating the most elite education institutions and creating influence there? Will that take 100 years? I don't know how long it'll take and I don't know how necessary it is in the short run. As I said, what we need, particularly today with the internet and with the world of public intellectuals and their influences, Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris have showed us, the influence online, what we need today are 100 or 1,000 better. Alex Epstein's, Don Watkins, Ilan Juno's, Angkor Gates, and Yaron Brooks. That's what you need. You need people taking the ideas of objectivism and applying them in a wide variety of forums and bringing them to people and communicating them. And you need large numbers of intellectuals. And I think Iron Grand University is a great project to produce those intellectuals. And thank you, M. Azhan. I'll get to that in a minute. So this is, so it's going to take less than 100 years. It's going to take a few decades, but it's going to be less than 100 years. Thank you M. Azhan for reminding me. Yes, it is Bernard Lewis. So I highly encourage you to read the books of Bernard Lewis. But not only Bernard Lewis, but Bernard Lewis is a great start. Why they hate us. And he's got a number of books on the history of the Middle East. He's a real scholar. I can't remember what university he was at, maybe Princeton. I'm not sure if he's even alive anymore. I think he died a few years ago. But he was a real inspiration. He's a real scholar, real historian, did a lot of work, a lot of work that inspired me. And but then to really delve into Islamic philosophy, you need, you need to study Islamic philosophy and their books about Islamic philosophy, where you can see the influence of an Al-Ghazali and why he turns the tide against Aristotelianism and against Greek philosophy within Islam. That's, you know, those are the readings, you know, we should do. So I definitely encourage you to read Bernard Lewis. I saw it, Daniel Pipes. And but but there's a lot of material out there. I think I kept those books. I don't think those are part of the books that I gave away. Maybe they are. I don't know. I don't know if I preserved all my Islam books when I moved from California to Puerto Rico. But when I look at my Puerto Rico library, I'll find others. But Bernard Lewis is certainly a historian that you should start with. Justin asked, why do anti-Semite thinks Jews secular, sexualized women? I don't know. I've never, I haven't heard that. Is that part of anti-Semitism is to think Jews sexualized sexualized women more than others? It's not something I've heard of. But my guess is they'll just take anything. They'll just throw any insult they can at Jews. But I can't, that is not one that connects in my mind. Frank says, can you talk about what happened when you met Lyndon LaRouche protesters at your lecture? One was just seen yelling at AOC at a town hall over Ukraine. Oh, wow, they're still around. Interesting. There was a period, well, when Lyndon LaRouche protestors followed me around and protested at every one of my talks. They were in Boston. I can't remember what year this was, maybe 2005, six, seven. They were in Boston at a couple of events that I was speaking at. One of them at Tufts University, they actually got up and started singing. That was usually the MO. They would start singing in the middle of a lecture. They did that to meet a photo forum talk that I gave in Boston as well. I think that same trip and they would sing and then security would come in and escort them out. But then I gave a talk at University of California, Irvine, and there was a lot of buzz around this talk and a lot of people showed up and it was clear that the Lyndon LaRouche people were going to come. So they had a big presence there, the LaRouche people. As a consequence, the Irvine police had a significant presence there. This time, they got much more aggressive. This time, not only did they stop and start singing, and by the way, they were good. I always complimented them on their singing voices. They were good at it. But then they charged the stage. They had pieces of meat they were trying to throw at me, and they actually ran at the stage with intense violence. The police were amazing. They swooped in. They pushed all these people out. They pushed them to the ground. They handcuffed them. Several of them spent the night in jail. Basically, that was the last time I ever saw a LaRouche person. The fact that they were put in jail changed everything. The fact that the police actually responded to them, not campus security politely escorting them out of a building. But actual police force coming in there and actually putting them in jail made all the difference. I've never encountered LaRouche again. This is in the mid to late 2000s. I don't know what piece of meat, but it was raw. I can't imagine it was very expensive. But I can't imagine Linda LaRouche is still alive, and it's pretty amazing that this cult is still going. The police in Irvine were super with regard to me. It was always amazing. They would always be at our talks. Security was always at our talks. Security and the police were always the people who most liked my talks. They always would come afterwards and talk to me and tell me how much they liked the talks and how much they liked doing security for the talks because they enjoyed listening to me. All over the country, really, I found that often the security and the police resonate, particularly with my talks about foreign policy, more so than the general public. So, yeah, I've always had good experience with security. I mean, even here at the University of Bristol, when the students try to bash in the door and try to obstruct my talk, the security people are actually very friendly, very positive, and really indicated to me that if they had their way, they would have been a lot more aggressive with the protesters, a lot more aggressive with the protesters. All right, thank you, everybody. I really appreciate it. We came close to achieving our goal, which is great. Given that we have less live people on the show when I'm doing them from overseas, so it's great that we almost made the goal. Thank you. Don't forget to like the show before you leave. And those of you who watch afterwards, don't forget to like the show before you leave. It's important. It helps with the algorithms. Comments, comments are great. Comments also help with the algorithm. Even like or dislike, just put a comment in there. And yeah, share, share the contents I've said in the past. My favorite show right now for you guys to share is my show on the Iranian Revolution. I think it's a real important issue. It's ongoing. It hasn't stopped. There was a big fire yesterday in Tehran at the prison there, which caused some more demonstrations. And Taze, I'm taking zinc, I'm taking vitamin C, and I'm taking turmeric. So I'm on top of it. I'm on top of it. So hopefully this is nothing, and it'll go away soon. All right, everybody. I think it's mainly just lack of sleep, so I'm going to sleep now. Talk to you soon. Not sure when the next show is. It'll depend on the internet connection of various hotels I'm going to stay at. Maybe from Berlin, that'll be interesting. Maybe the first time I'm doing a show. No, I've done shows from Berlin before, maybe. Anyway, maybe a show from Berlin. Certainly I'll try to do a show from Milan. That's one I definitely want to try to do. I've got time in Milan, and hopefully the hotel they will have good internet. Talk to you all soon. Bye.