 So hi Michael, nice to meet you and thank you for welcoming us here in L.A. Welcome to California. It's beautiful. You will be one of the speakers at the next conference. Yeah. And I'm waiting for the barbarians. Could you please introduce yourself to the Dutch audience? Yes, well so I'm the publisher of Skeptic Magazine and a monthly columnist for Scientific American and I write science books related to belief, science and religion, science and pseudo-science, science and morality, science and God, science and politics, science and economics, just all different areas. But science is my thing. And I'm a college professor. I teach one class in the fall at Chapman University in Orange County on Skepticism 101, how to think. So these are freshman, 18-year-old kids right out of high school and their brains are mush. And my job is to mold them into critical thinkers. And then in the spring I usually teach whatever my next book is going to be. So as a way to write lectures that become chapters in the book. And that will be my next book after the moral arc which is going to be called Heavens on Earth. And it's about the afterlife, the belief in heaven, the belief in the perfect ability of human nature, utopias and dystopias, heaven and hell, that kind of thing. You will be on the second panel debate which is called How Civilized Are We? What according to you are the most fundamental pillars of our civilization? Well science and reason is the epistemology that we base most of our institutions on. That is you have to have evidence and logic and reason for what you believe and what you want to institute for social change, political change or whatever. I think we are the children of the enlightenment, I'm a pro-enlightenment person and I think that's the pillars of how we build our infrastructure, our social institutions. From there of course democracy, constitutional republics, some sort of basis for the rule of law and why all people should be treated equally, legally, morally and so on. And then economically, free trade markets, the way to lift people out of poverty is to allow them to improve their own lives economically. And then of course just all the social institutions that hold this together, whether that's religion in some countries like here in America, not so much in Europe. But clearly I use you guys as an example that the argument that you have to have religion to be moral, you have to have religion to have a moral society, you have to have religion to take care of people and so on. Europeans are doing very well and better on most measures in America without religion. Europeans were amongst the most religious people in the world, now they're amongst the least religious people in the world and their levels of happiness are as high as they've ever been. People are taking care of universal health care, the violence is declined, there's almost no wars. So you've done something right and the idea that I have is that we should figure out what that is and do more of it. And what would you consider the biggest threat? Fundamentalist religion, clearly ISIS is the most extreme example, but just in general that extremism of any kind, of course it could be Marxist ideologies or something like that, but that's not a big threat anymore like it was in the 70s. Now it's really Islam, extreme forms of Islam. And you have to give the disclaimer, I don't mean all Muslims, I know most Muslims are good people and so on, but we're talking about the ones that are not westernized. They don't believe in democracy, human rights, they don't think women should be treated equally and have the same rights as men and so on. That's the biggest threat to civilization, they come along in a long time. I'm confident they won't succeed, but it's not guaranteed. What does it take? I hate to say it, but sometimes it takes boots on the ground, it takes military action. I mean some people you can reason with, some people you cannot reason with, and Al Qaeda, the Islamic terrorists, Hamas, ISIS and so on, they want to return the world to a 7th century theocracy. This is not going to happen. And if it takes troops and hardware, if it takes bombs and guns, that's what it's going to take. And I fear that is what it's going to take. I'd rather it not be, I'm a man of books and literature and reason and teaching and education. If we could do it with that, that would be my preference. Unfortunately, Daniel seemed to be responding to that. Thanks, we're looking forward to hearing from you at the conference.