 Let's jump into Michael Knorr's discussion of architecture. And here, we'll get to see whether Michael Knorr's is an Ayn Rand fan. If there's anything Michael Knorr's thinks is positive about Ayn Rand, because Scott said, oh, you can be religious in an Ayn Rand fan. Well, let's see. Is Michael Knorr's really an Ayn Rand fan? And how many of these people really are Ayn Rand fans? Well, maybe we can extrapolate for Michael Knorr's. Oops, muted. Our whole civilization is shrinking. It's smaller than it used to be. Our view of art. You walk into a cathedral in Europe. Our view of art, he uses a cathedral in Europe. I've talked about cathedrals before. Or even in America, you walk into St. Pat's Cathedral in New York. This is big. This is grand. This is huge. This is beautiful. Why is big beautiful? In particular, why is big beautiful when it's of no use? When the space is just there for what? Primarily to make you look small. You walk in a cathedral in Europe. Massive cathedrals. Anywhere, the Vatican, Notre Dame, or any of these cathedrals. Massively tall ceilings in the better places, like the Vatican, beautiful art everywhere. But architecturally, it's just there to make you look small. And the space is mostly wasted. And when you think about how these cathedrals were built, the human suffering, the kind of labor, the taxes that had to be accumulated in order to build these cathedrals. I mean, it really is pretty disgusting. It's like the pyramids, equivalent of slave labor to build these cathedrals. And this is what they consider the great expression of Christian art. Not Michelangelo, not Raphael, not Leonardo, who was probably an atheist. Certainly nothing in the 19th century or even in the 18th century. Not Titia, not any of the great Renaissance, or Baroque, or romantic artists. They immediately go, they immediately go to cathedrals. All they have, because indeed the only achievement, in quotes, the only achievement of Christian culture in the dark and middle ages was work cathedrals built on the back of peasants who died building them, built on the basis of taxes that drained money from people who were already unbelievably poor. You look at modern architecture, it's small. Modern architecture is small, really? You look at more traditional architecture. Look at football stadiums. Look at baseball stadiums. They're big, and many of them are beautiful. And they serve a purpose. The bigness serves a purpose. Look at skyscrapers. Scribe breakers are big. They're taller than cathedrals. And they serve a purpose. And whose purpose do they serve? A human purpose. The cathedrals serve God. Skyscrapers, the real cathedral, cathedrals of Iran. Skyscrapers serve human purposes. Modern architecture is small. What are you talking about? Have you seen Apple's headquarters? You might not like the building. But small, this massive round shape, it's huge. It's on a big scale. It's ambitious. It doesn't count, though, because it actually serves a human purpose. It actually serves production. It actually serves man's needs. Sydney Opera House. Good one, Christopher. Absolutely. Beautiful, magnificent. Modern. Serves a purpose. There's no shortage of bigness. Have you been to some of the big malls, Mall of America in Minneapolis? You've been to there's a beautiful, beautiful mall in Las Vegas. It's not huge. But it's big, cathedral-like. Massive, tall ceilings, beautiful modern architecture, sweeping floor plan. Doesn't count because it serves a human purpose. What's good in art is not subjective. It's not whatever I feel like, what Iran feels like. There are objective standards for that. And we might disagree about taste. Probably don't disagree very much about greatness. Frank says, didn't Iran compare Victor to go to a cathedral? Yes, to the grandeur, to the vastness of a cathedral. But not to literally a cathedral. To the religious sense that you get. What's the word, the religious word? The reverence that Christians get in a cathedral. I don't get in a cathedral. I mean, she would say, you read Victor who go, you get the reverence that a Christian would get in a cathedral. That would be my interpretation. It's not because she liked cathedrals. It's not because she admired cathedrals. That would be, in my view, a bizarre reading of that statement. It's about what who go means to me versus what a cathedral means to the common man. Cathedrals are sad. I find cathedrals sad because of all that human effort, all that human labor that went to glorifying what? A fantasy. A fantasy that's done a lot of harm to the world. Dedicated, again, and on the backs of whom. But anyway, let's go back to Michael Knowles' view of architecture. So modern architecture is small, which is complete nonsense. Architecture, it's ornamented. There's a lot to it. There are a lot of details to take in. We've seen a fancloid-like home. It's ornamented. But ornamented, again, properly. It's ornamented in accordance with the function, in accordance with its organic nature. Modern architecture, you look at the new homes that people are building. There's hideous, like black and white, sometimes cube, now occasionally more angular monstrosities. They look like prisons. Really? You ever seen a fancloid-like home? You ever seen a Neutra home? I mean, you ever seen a good, nice, beautiful, modern home? What are you talking about? They look like the kind of place you get sent if you send memes out on Twitter supporting Donald Trump, you know? They're just small and ugly. You see this in the knob? You've just seen some of these modern homes here in Puerto Rico. A massive 20,000 square foot homes, 30,000 square foot homes. Modern, beautiful, magnificent. He's, I mean, this is the thing. That for these religious conservatives, their mind cannot comprehend anything that they, you know, that the Middle Ages, 1220, didn't perceive as good. They can't think beyond the constraints of Middle Ages Christianity. Their whole conception of beauty was set in, you know, in the Middle Ages and has not evolved and has not developed. I mean, think about how much Iron Man explains in the Fountainhead, the idea of form-following function and what beauty means in architecture and how architecture should function in Isovianity. But we'll get in a minute to Iron Man. Novel the Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, her slightly lesser-read novel to- Let me go back. Or Angular monstrosities. They look like prisons. They look like the kind of place you get sent if you send memes out on Twitter supporting Donald Trump, you know? They don't, they're just small and ugly. You see this in the novel The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, her slightly lesser-read novel to Atlas Shrugged and slightly smaller but equally bad. Equally bad. He just said equally bad. He didn't say, yeah, there's some good things and bad things, equally bad. So let's just be clear on Michael Knowles' view of Ayn Rand and view of her novels, you know? In other places in front of other people when there were people there that he didn't want to, I don't know, they didn't want to seem off when he was reviewing a book. He might have said some positive things. He didn't mean it. He was lying. You just got the actual truth. You just got what he actually thinks because he's not trying to please anybody here. He's just, this is his show. He can say what he wants. He said exactly what he thinks. The Fountainhead is a novel about Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism which is an atheist materialist ideology but it's also about architecture. And what's so funny about the book is Ayn Rand is wrong about 97% of things. So Ayn Rand is wrong about 97% of things. So again, 97% of things. Now that's not in terms of aesthetic views. Not in terms of artistic views. 97% of things covers everything. And just to be clear that it's not just about aesthetic points, here's what he also says. She actually gets to some interesting truths about human nature, about 3% of the time. But it's just totally covered up in a bunch of muck and false anthropology and theology. Muck and false anthropology and theology. This is the guy you think we have something in common of because we're all in the same tent. We're all allies for some greater cause. Maybe if you believe in God, not if you don't. But the most striking thing about the novel which is about architecture is that she's wrong about architecture. Now notice his explanation for why she's wrong about architecture. Why is she wrong about architecture? The protagonist of the novel makes a church. She's supposed to make a cathedral basically. And it's this small, tiny, ugly, crappy modern place. He makes a magnificent temple that is beautiful and stunning and has a magnificent sculpture in the middle of it. And the kind of place that the Greeks would love the start of a temple. But of course, a Christian would hate. The Greeks would love it not because it's Greek architecturally, but because Greeks would adapt to modern architecture because they'd realized the potential of modern materials. And the Greeks have a real perspective on beauty, Christianity is frozen. I mean, Michael knows, I mean, what's stunning about people like knows is they truly are stuck in the Middle Ages. Like Christianity had this amazing period in which it actually recognized beauty and modernity in the art of Michelangelo and Raphael and Leonardo and the rest of the Renaissance and into the Baroque and Bernini. And they embraced art and they, and this was at the time, modern art, revolutionary modern art, and they used it. This is what he really believes. Yes, when he interviewed, puts the guy about the font in it, he said nine things about Iron Rand because he's interviewing somebody about Iron Rand. He can't be hostile. This is why these people are double-faced liars. Here's what he really thinks. 97% wrong, 3% right, and completely wrong about architecture. All right, let me see. There's a little bit left. The vision that the protagonist of the story pursues so doggedly without getting any advice from anybody, including the people who are paying for his plans. His artistic vision is ugly. It's just modernist, unhuman, small stuff. It's ugly. And so it's no surprise that everything's shrinking. That's enough. Yes, so this is modern conservatism. This is the right. This is our enemy. These are people who think how it would walk is pursuing ugliness for the sake of ugliness. This is not just aesthetic opinion. This is much more fundamental. This is much deeper. This is about who Michael knows is, what his values are, what he thinks goodness is, what he thinks beauty is, but what he thinks goodness is. And it's connected directly to his rejection of me, me, me, or me, mine, something, and his embrace of family, nation, and God. Now my ally can't fight with this guy in the trenches. Don't trust him for one minute, for one second. He is the enemy. Yeah, we unfortunately have many enemies. Those of us who stand for individualism, those of us who stand for life, those of us who stand for reason, reason. We have a lot of enemies. And to try to pretend otherwise, to try to water down objectivism, so it sounds friendly to these nutcases, is a massive mistake, a massive mistake. Yeah, it means the fight is tougher. We have to fight on both flanks. No question about that. But that is the reality. And you wanna live in a world of delusion. You wanna live in a world of detachment from the truth. That will lead to both failure politically and failure in your own life.