So our guest tonight probably needs very little introduction to all of you judge Andrew Napolitano You all know him as a Fox News legal superstar Very prolific author writes a syndicated column weekly also has written about nine books is a former judge a former attorney and perhaps most importantly for our purposes tonight is on the cusp of publishing a lengthy treatise on natural law Heavily footnoted and cited from what I'm told and from what I'm told it contains a lot of references to Murray Rothbard in his work Which is one thing that sets the judge apart in that he is In addition to being a legal scholar also very much an historian and a Rothbardian so a warm round of applause for him, please Thank You Jeff. Thank you for the warm welcome So when Pat Barnett said how do you want to title? What do you want to call? The hour that you will spend with all the students on Monday night I Suggested the title of a very famous book that a lot of us who believe that our rights come from our humanity has read called taking rights seriously and If we do take rights Seriously, I'm gonna start this lecture with what I will say at the end if we take rights seriously We know that they are not privileges We know that they are not permission slips We know that they are claims They're claims against everyone and everything including the government So the concept of the natural law Explores, where do these rights come from? Forgive my back, but this is natural law theory nlt with an underline and This is its opposite positivism P in a circle So natural law theory argues that our rights come from our humanity positivism the definition of which with respect to law is a Law that is written down and ratified has no moral bearing to it whatsoever Whatever the law giver says the law is if the law giver followed its own rules in promulgating the law that under positivism that is the law So beginning with natural law, we have the three amigos. It's very easy to remember all their names start with a Aristotle Augustine Aquinas So Aristotle argued that we can tell right from wrong by our Experiences and we can tell right and wrong from our senses. We know that fire burns We know that ice is too cold. We can tell good and evil when we look at it Augustine argued we can tell right and wrong from revelation Because Jesus came into the world and revealed himself as God and was willing to suffer and die on the cross We can tell what is right and wrong by following his words Augustine the pagan Excuse me God of mercy on me Aristotle the pagan Augustine the Catholic Aquinas Says you're both wrong the essence of the understanding the natural law is reason it is not experience It is not revelation. It is reason We have the ability to reason what is right and what is wrong and in order to reason We need to be able to exercise certain freedoms like thought speech publication travel privacy Those are natural rights Which couldn't exist if we didn't have the natural law So Aquinas notwithstanding saint Thomas Aquinas Notwithstanding his position in the hierarchy of the saints as the angelic doctor Amongst those born of mortal parents. He's second only to the Blessed Virgin Mary Nevertheless, rejects the argument of revelation and makes the argument of reason. It's very important To understand the concept of the natural law to understand reason it is the key and most significant word So I was teaching a course on the basic course on the Constitution It's a hundred and seventy-five Supreme Court opinions that every lawyer Theoretically knows and needs to know to pass the bar exam if you're taking my class here We're going to address about 25 or 30 of them just those that pertain to congressional regulation of the economy The commerce clause the contracts clause the taxing power and the spending power but after giving this course Student came up to me and said I enjoyed the course. I liked it But I'm afraid to take your course on legal theory, which is an advanced course I said why he said well, I went to a Catholic High school at a Catholic college and I'm sick and tired of Catholicism being shoved down my throat You don't have to be Catholic you don't have to be Jewish because much of the of this is Judeo-Christianity In order to accept the natural law because of this because of reason rejecting revelation Arguing that any human being Acknowledging the existence of God the Father or not Can reason his or her way to discern? What is right and what is wrong? What is good and what is evil? this conversation I have with the student who got an A in the basic course and Eventually took the advanced course and got an A plus profoundly moved me and I have labored mightily To do my best to explain natural law theory from a secular Perspective even though its principle Progenitor in all of history is a Roman Catholic saint This is no revelation on my part Mary Rothbard himself wrote in Explaining the origins of natural law theory as I have he wasn't as snarky as I am by calling them the three amigos And he certainly didn't confuse Augustine for Aristotle as I just did but he did emphasize the significance of Reason so I'm going to put an R next to Aquinas I'm going to put an R V for revelation next to Augustine. I'm going to put a K e for knowledge and experience against Next to Aristotle now you understand the origins of the natural law Aristotle knowledge and experience Augustine revelation Aquinas reason It's opposite of course is positivism not always the opposite because a law that is written down and ratified Can also be a law consistent with natural law theory natural law theory Basically prohibits you from using force or fraud to interfere with somebody else's rights What does that sound like? That sounds like this That is not me. That is not Napolitano That is the non-aggression principle, which is Mary Rothbard So if we're going to draw a line the non-aggression principle is on the same side as natural law theory below Aquinas we have many European scholars who refined the natural law and they used one of Aquinas's What the heck is that that's an onion Aquinas himself said the natural law is like an onion You just keep peeling it and you find more things on the inside that you couldn't see from the outside So as the onion was peeled By Suarez and de las casas and grossius Suarez Spelled phonetically de las casas grossius euro t i us by by Blackstone They began to discover more and more natural rights The origin of natural rights our ability to reason When John Locke Who's down here? Because he's after these European thinkers who are following Aquinas on reason Decides to articulate that the only legitimate purpose of government is to protect Individual rights. He was forced to articulate. What is the origin of individual rights and his argument is the same as NLT our humanity so Locke articulates That you're right to think as you wish to say what you think to publish what you say You're right to develop your personality as you as you see fit When Bill O'Reilly was at Fox I used to say to him you should be grateful that that's a natural light right look at what you did with your personality nevertheless Your right to self-defense does not the right to shoot deer It's the right to shoot someone who's about to kill you or shoot at a tire and it was taken over the government Your right to keep the government off your property your right to be left alone all of these rights come from our humanity So How do we know this? Dear friend of mine whose name is Jay Initial J. Who's your shoes ski was a philosopher at the University of Texas Has written a fascinating book called listen to this title What we can't not know What we can't not know think of it. There are some things that we can't not know We must know that they exist like I'm alive I'm not a figment of my imagination. I can doubt that I exist This is dickheart But in order to doubt I have to think and in order to think I have to exist so I know I'm alive. I hope I Hope for a better life. I hope for more Freedom I See right and wrong. I know wrong when I see it I know right when I see it if I put a cup of coffee here a hot cup of coffee and leave it alone It's going to cool off. It will always cool off if it's let alone. How do I know that? The leaves fall the sun rises in the east that sets in the west These are simple basic examples of things that we all know from where comes the knowledge Our ability to reason Our friend in the middle would say we got these this knowledge from revelation, and I'm obviously not Critical of revelation. It's an important part of salvation But we're talking about a secular understanding of the natural law our friend for knowledge and experience would say yes We know from knowledge and experience From our ability to perceive with our senses that there are certain things that we can't not know if You accept the argument that all humans can reason if you accept the argument that there are things that we can't not know Then you accept the argument that our rights come from our humanity if our rights come from our humanity They do not come from the government. They are not susceptible to Diminution by the government. They can't be taken away by legislation or by executive command That could only be taken away If we waive our rights by violating someone else's natural rights Somewhere in here. I mentioned his name before I'll write it down to Dutch Dutch names as an art gross us argues on The basis of reason there must be a hierarchy of human rights so Jean Valjean steals a pie because his children are starving and Javier chases him to the ends of the earth To arrest him for stealing the pie This is limit a rob under natural law theory Because the right to live is a higher right than the right to own a pie The right to take the pie if absolutely necessary to preserve human life is a higher right than the right to retain the pie so gross us argues from this there must be a category of rights Some higher and some lower. It doesn't mean that they're not all natural rights It just means that at times one might be sacrificed for another Since the right to live is the highest and greatest right that there is In the 20th century our dear friend Murray Rothbard makes this very easy for us to understand By articulating the non-aggression principle Which is that all aggression which he defines as and there are many many theories about what is aggression What is not and there are many Supreme Court opinions on what is aggression and what is not But we'll accept Murray's theory because it's easy to get a handle on for our purposes aggression is force or fraud So all force or fraud Against the person or the property of the individual is illicit emphasis all Force or fraud that means not only from my neighbor that means from the government as well Murray used to like to tell this story or at home one night You're not watching television if you're going to the University of Chicago you're reading at home one night There's a knock on the door You open the door there's a guy there with a gun the guy says give me your money. I Want to give it away in your name the heck is this all about I better call the police. He is the police He's a tax collector There to take your money and give it away in your name. Does that violate the non-aggression principle? Of course it does. It's using both force and fraud to deprive you of something That is absolutely and naturally yours which is Your possessions and when I say on air at Fox that taxation is theft I mean aside from some of the things I've said about the one in the Oval Office Nothing has caused me more grief than this Even my fellow libertarian at Fox that he's not there anymore wonderful human being that many of you know does a lot of lectures like this for young people John Stossel would say would you please stop saying? Taxation is theft. I said why it is theft you agree with that doing you go Yeah, but I can't say it are my people want to know why do you say it and I don't say it When when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence DC for declaration He used iconic language That we endow our rights from our creator and that our rights are inalienable Well, that's back to this That they are inalienable and they come from the creator Again, you don't have to believe that they come from a creator You can believe that because human beings are the highest corporeal rational beings on the planet and that we couldn't Rationalize and use our bodies in a rational way without the freedom to do so That our rights come from within us But by using the word inalienable he actually wrote unalienable which doesn't exist anymore the modern word is inalienable He's wetting the country at its birth to the idea that our rights come from our humanity This is very important because it is the essence of natural law theory If our rights come from our humanity then the government can't take them away If our rights come from our humanity then taxation is theft if our rights come from our humanity Then every benefit of every doubt to use the modern technology the default Position is in favor of human freedom and not in favor of the government I was trying cases Criminal cases in the spear quarter in New Jersey and hack and sack New Jersey seems like a hundred years ago, and I would say to prosecutors. Well, why is this the law? Well, it's the law because the legislature wrote it Positivism written down and ratified. That's all that's necessary for positivism written down and ratified It could say the tax rate is 80% if it's written down and ratified under positivism. It's the law There's no moral tie to law in positivism the the attraction of positivism is That the government that the people get the government that they deserve and they can vote any Government in or any government out and and vote in any type of legislation that they want But because it is not tied to any moral belief like our rights come from our humanity I mean Hitler was popularly elected. That's the most egregious example of all of this But there's no there's no backstop on the government when everything is positivism Lasak called Yackowski great post-philosopher and another great book if you really want to get into this cult is God happy I won't tell you the answer Argued that the natural law should be a beast use the word beast on the throat of The legislature to restrain him from writing any law and regulating any behavior and taxing any event and transferring any wealth So Murray wasn't born yet, of course, but we we promulgated the declaration of independence We won the revolution. We wrote a constitution and then We wrote The Bill of Rights So everybody knows this phrase Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech Question, which is the most important word in that phrase? I'll repeat the phrase for you. It's a trick question Cut ten words Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech Madison argued for hours over one word in that sense the the freedom of speech Demonstrated Indisputably the belief of the framers that it pre-existed the government well if the freedom of speech Pre-existed the government it didn't come from the government if Madison were here We would say where did it come from and he would say well look at what my neighbor wrote when he wrote the Declaration of Independence It's one of those inalienable rights that he talked about so little Jimmy as they called him He was all of four foot eight I would love someday maybe in heaven. I'm not gonna bodies in heaven I don't know the resurrection of the dead of the body To stand next to little Jimmy Because I would look like Shaquille O'Neal standing next to him So little Jimmy You protected all these expressive rights think as you wish Develop your personalities you see fit O'Reilly Say what you think publish what you say assemble or not assemble worship We're not worship petition the government or not petition it the right to keep him bare arms the right to self-defense The right to keep the government out of your property in wartime no matter how badly they need the property the quintessential American right the right to be left alone. I'm going down the bill of rights Okay, little Jimmy. What did you do about natural rights the ninth amendment? You cannot understand natural law and its place in American history without understanding the ninth amendment Which Madison argued over and love Madison even though he had this bad phase in his Life when he was a big government federalist and he pulled a lot of shenanigans to get the Constitution adopted but then he got in the government and realized how awful it was and how the government had to be shrunk But the ninth amendment basically says all those rights that we listed in number one through eight That's not all the rights. There are There are many other rights that human beings have that the government shall not disparage About as strong a language as you can see in anything in the Constitution It is the ninth amendment that is the manifestation of natural rights as the basis for the Protection for all the rights in the previous eight another trick question if Congress proposed a ratificate a repeal of the first amendment Congress proposes by two-thirds votes of each house the president has nothing to do with the amendment process The states ratify the repeal. There is no first amendment. Do we still have the freedom of speech? Answer under positivism we do not Because the law has written down has removed it under natural law theory Because it comes from our humanity. Of course. We have the freedom of speech. It's integral to our existence Irrespective of what positivism says When nlt and positivism meet that's good law That is such a tiny Fraction of a fraction of a percentage of the laws that exist How many federal criminal laws are there? 4,400 Federal criminal laws there isn't a human being in the world who has read and Understands all of them, but the very very few that are consistent with natural law theory Are the areas in which positivism does the right thing? Question if the legislature of the state of Alabama repealed laws against murder and Anton shot me dead Can he be prosecuted for murder? Under positivism no because there is no law against murder in this crazy theory that I've just proposed In the state of Alabama under natural law theory, of course He can because he has violated the greatest right. I have which is the right to stay alive the Criticism of natural law theory is that it is the opposite of positivism one of the two requirements of positivism Written down and ratified the natural law is not written down anywhere Why because we can't not know it because we know it from our hearts. You can read Aquinas until you're booing the face This is the secular side of Aquinas. This is the reason side of Aquinas This is his taking everything that existed up to the time that he wrote and codifying it and it's still not enough because the natural law is an onion Because we keep peeling it and finding more things in there Before we leave I'm going to give you a modern-day example of the use of natural law which Aquinas as a Roman Catholic Monk and saint would be repelled by but which is absolutely Consistent with the natural law because as life becomes more complex and people live closer to each other And they have more interaction with each other. There's more of a need to ascertain what our what are our rights? so oh I had an Experience with Justice Scalia once a great experience of my life was to be a good friend of his the last 10 years of his life a real real character I was Interrogating him before 2500 people at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This is not a Fox Production of there would have been all kinds of bells and whistles this this was a Brooklyn law school production I was a professor on the faculty there at the time and we invited him to come We got so many people that wanted to come we moved it from the law school to the Brooklyn Academy of music and he Looked at me and said You're a freak for the natural law I'm not obliged to follow the natural law. I'm only obliged to follow the Constitution What about the ninth amendment the rights not? Articulated but retained by the people Shall not be disparaged. Well, how do I know what those rights are took my iPhone out? I said this is an iPhone. That's I know you're gonna go to privacy, right? Yeah, I'm gonna go to privacy Well, that's the fourth amendment. Yes, we all know that your honor That's the fourth amendment the fourth or I'm a protects person's houses papers and effects and nothing more Nino Inside this iPhone is a computer chip isn't that an effect Didn't Madison mentioned that type of thing Positivism written down right to be left alone natural right joining each other at the ninth amendment And he looked at me and said Or better not answer that one Because it might wake its make its way to the court it has not made its way to the court yet. I Took a lot of heat for opposing the confirmation of justice Brett Gavin a Kavanaugh Because in his opinion The government does not need a search warrant to get into your iPhone In his opinion, there is no right to privacy. It's not a natural right. He claims he does accept certain natural rights And I believe him when he says that But he doesn't believe that the right to privacy What a justice brand has called the right to be left alone? Is is among them so the the ninth amendment Very Rothbard loved the ninth amendment Those of us who believe that our rights derive from our humanity Love the ninth amendment and we love Madison For having written it so it's the war of 1812 Nobody really knows how it started either the British came back here to take us back or we invaded Canada And they came back here to get us the heck out of Canada but there's there's fighting going on all over the country and In upper Marlboro, Maryland in 1812 shortly before the war is over, but nobody knew it was going to end at that point a platoon of British soldiers marches into upper Marlboro and kidnaps five militia five males Takes their guns from them and announces unless the town surrenders are going to be hanged at dawn the mayor of the town Orchestrates the kidnapping of five drunken British soldiers in the middle of the night and announces that they're going to be hanged He then unarmed and unaccompanied walks into the headquarters of the captain of the Platoon and says I'll make you a deal your five for our five Captain shakes hands the militia guys are freed the British soldiers are freed two months later The war is over. There's a tumultuous celebration. The mayor John Hodges is the grand marshal at the celebration Everybody's there government officials are there farmers are there workers are there bankers are there and He gives a tremendous speech with a tumultuous Reception by the gathering now I hope what happened to him doesn't happen to me when I finished this talk tonight or in my lectures this week Because he steps down from the podium and two strangers approach him and one of them hands him a piece of paper and it's an indictment And the other puts his hands in shackles The mayor was indicted for treason We're providing aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime by returning the enemy's soldiers So two weeks later. There's a trial the mayor's tried The judge was the guy who introduced the mayor at the parade The jurors were all at the parade the prosecutor was at the parade the fence council was at the parade The prosecutor stands up and says, you know, we this indictment came from Washington We all think the mayor is a great guy, but let's face it. He did do What the indictment says he did he did provide aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime, which is the definition of treason by the way the other definition of treason is waging war on them The them are the states of the United States Something Abraham Lincoln did the them is not the federal government another story for another time Tom DeLorenzo who's in this room is the world's foremost authority on on all of this Defense council stands up and says the mayor is a hero. He saved human life. How can you possibly convict him? The judge says I never said this to a jury Because they were all males gentlemen We've reserved a room in the tavern across the street After you finish the meal the tavern keeper is prepared and after you finish his best barrel of ale a barrel of ale You will deliberate the mayor's fate Four person raises and I said we don't have to deliberate. We'll take the ale, but we don't have to deliberate What's the verdict the verdict is? Not guilty This is the first example and the first published opinion of jury nullification in American history a bunch of farmers in upper Marlboro, Maryland saying to the federal government Stay the hell away. This is positivism run amok That's the good side. Here's the bad side of this story the Justice Department has a rule that every prosecution for treason there have only been seven Successful treason prosecutions in all of American history. There have been many prosecutions only seven convictions Every prosecution for treason has to be personally signed off on off by the president of the United States What left-wing Pingo big-government creep was the president of the United States in 1812 Little Jimmy who wrote the Constitution Who insisted on the word thought in the First Amendment and whose pride and joy was the ninth? so the world Obviously looks different on the outside of power looking in Then it does on the inside of power Looking out and that is it might not be a good example for this because he does He moves around a lot. I mean he starts out as a radical He then becomes a federalist, which is the big government crowd the Alexander Hamilton and and John Adams and George Washington crowd He then becomes an anti-federalist and is back with his buddy Jefferson But in the war of 1812, I don't know what the heck he was thinking when he authorized the prosecution of of John Hodges Lou Rockwell has argued and argued magnificently that almost everybody in the government suffers from libido domanandi Not that kind of libido the lust to dominate People like Ron Paul are rare rare exceptions in the government who have a lust to liberate Rather than a lust to dominate. It is a character flaw They want to go back to our friend Augustine not not Aristotle Augustine He would say it's because of original sin that we all have this lust to dominate I don't know where the hell it came from or why we have it But the the do-gooders and busy bodies of the world get themselves elected to government so they can tell the rest of us how to live one of my colleagues was interrogating the governor of New Jersey and Said to him, where do you get the authority to nullify the Bill of Rights? You have made it illegal to travel and illegal to assemble and Illegal to engage in commercial intercourse. These rights are protected by the Constitution Murphy said to the Bill of Rights That's above my pay grade So what what once were liberties guaranteed Are now liberties mocked the very very dangerous situation for us to be in when a governor Can assume to himself in case of Michigan herself powers given to the legislature Cuomo says well the legislature enacted emergency legislation right before the pandemic started because we're smart in New York and we saw it coming and They told me that I could regulate private behavior and I've done so with my executive orders Well the Constitution This is a G and that's a C has the guarantee clause The guarantee clause guarantees that the state shall have Republican lowercase R form of government What does that mean that means only a popularly elected representative body can enact laws And it means that there's the separation of powers meaning the entity that Enacts the law can't be the same entity that enforces the law This is constitutional law 101 that the governors have violated and very very few courts have had the intestinal fortitude personal intestinal fortitude or Fidelity to the Constitution to invalidate No matter how well Intentioned these governors may be no matter how sound is their medical advice and there's medical advice all over the place you can get an expert to say almost anything you want in fact when you go to an expert to say You know I need you to come in the witness stand and we'll say this and he'll say here's what it's going to cost you or Exactly. What is it you want me to say? because For the governor to write a law and then enforce it is no law at all and one principle of LT is an unjust law is No law at all and commands no Allegiance whatsoever. We all know when a law is unjust it demeans the human being It violates the natural order. It claims that good is evil or evil is good That's where we're all existing through now in these dark days Where governors on their own in the name of public health have crushed our liberties well if our liberties are natural if they come from our humanity if They're inalienable as Jefferson called them if a right is not a permission slip if a right is a human claim against every other person and thing Then a governor can't take them away and a legislature can't take them away We can only they can only leave us if we have given them away if I rob a bank I have violated the natural rights of the depositors of that bank and have forfeited my own freedom That is the only way that I can lose my natural rights not because the governor says it's for the common good if the common good Could Trump natural rights Trump lowercase t and I want to get involved with him in this conversation By the way, call me the other day, but I'll tell that story later. I had to do with Italian food You think you'd have other things in his mind, but nevertheless if the common good Could Trump natural rights, then they wouldn't be rights They would just be a permission slip Susceptible to this which is whatever the government wants as long as it is written down and as long as it is ratified What will the government write down and ratify? Whatever it wants Whatever it thinks will keep it in power Whether it needs the support of a popular majority or whether it just needs the support of a radical minority I Sometimes think the only reason we have liberty in this country is because we have radical minorities willing to agitate for personal freedom willing to make great sacrifices in Order that liberty might prevail Because without that check on the government, they will reject Inalienable rights they will reject Those that are not mentioned above are retained by the people and shall not be disparaged by the government They will reject that we can know right and wrong from reason and we need the freedom in order to ascertain Reason in order to exercise reason in order to get to find out What is right and what is wrong? I don't know where all of this is going to lead us But I fear for dark days to come Now I've been doing these lectures and saying this Stuff on television for a long time. Sometimes you get in trouble when your bosses don't like it What are you gonna do? That's why we have contracts Well, although although these these the governors cannot believe they could abrogate contract They can abrogate the sanctity of a voluntary agreement And Jefferson argued that the that the only enforceable contract is one that is bilaterally voluntary So taxes are theft Unless you're crazy enough to want to enter into an agreement with the government whereby you will give them what they want The government will always take what it can The government will always steal what it can get its hands on The government doesn't care about this because this if properly exercised leads to truth. I I want to save a little time for some Q and a I think some of you have Texted your questions to some goo goo in the skies Who's going to read the questions and then I'll be happy to respond to them. I expect that When the end of my days come that I will die in my bed Surrounded by people that love me Faithful to first principles But not all of you will have that luxury Some of you may die Surrounded by people who hate you faithful to first principles in a government prison and Some of you may die faithful to first principles in a government town square To the sound of the government's Trumpets blaring when the time comes to make these awful decisions You will know what to do because freedom lies in the human heart and While it lies there no army no threat no positivism nonsense can take it away But it must do more than Just lie there. All right time for questions And For those who are taking my course you're gonna get a little you're gonna get eight more dosages of this Place feel free to send your questions to the Mises Institute account on either Instagram or Twitter through direct message But if anyone wants to start off you can tell me your question. I'll repeat it for the mic If you need freedom to reason, how do you get to? freedom in the first place You threw it through a three reason in the first place well because We are born With the with natural rights. We're born with with the freedom Government doesn't grant freedom government is this is a Mises definition This is one of the greatest of his of his one-liners government is essentially the negation of freedom Government is nothing but the negation of freedom only government can negate freedom Now you can fail to protect it yourself It's a great argument. Can you sell yourself into slavery if you do so voluntarily? Ruthbard would say no Walter Block would say yes, but this is another dispute that I'm not gonna get involved in this is an hypothetical argument But without the government you have freedom I have a question The natural law as you describe it as you describe it codifies moral insights We are supposed to share yet How can it help us at a time like this when even basic moral insights appear not to be shared among a highly Fractionist and divided people, you know I have a one of my best friends is on the New Jersey Supreme Court and he agrees with almost everything We say he's a lefty, but he agrees in believes in natural rights And I said to him when is the last time someone made a natural law argument These were my former these weren't my bosses when I was a trial judge in New Jersey This is the highest court in the state When is the last time somebody made a natural law argument in Supreme Court of New Jersey looked at me goes? That's easy never people don't make these arguments Which is why I teach it here so that you can understand it And maybe I can tease you into wanting to really get into it by taking advanced courses on it and Using your ability as a professor yourself to to teach it to others But if people reject the lesson of the Declaration of Independence our rights are inalienable and Reject the lesson of the Ninth Amendment There are rights that we never gave away that the government can't disparage then there is that then then there's little hope for natural rights If Phil Murphy the governor of New Jersey Can say openly and on national television the bill of rights is above my pay grade So when you become governor of New Jersey, you take two oaths One is to uphold the Constitution and laws of the state of New Jersey and a second oath To preserve protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, which includes the bill of rights It's not called a bill of safety. It's called the bill of rights Did you have any reaction when Democratic governors started making states rights arguments when Donald Trump was talking about how he has total Authority to open up state governments. I was hoping that California would secede from the union Well the foremost authority in the country on secession is here Professor Tom Woods who's written a masterpiece on it and even though we joke about it Tom and I believe in the history it supports his argument if California wants to go let them go I promise to tell you about this a little bit more about about the onion so When I had that funny one liner, but Scalia said you're a freak for the natural rights natural law It had to do with a the following case A guy is sitting in his apartment in Colorado All of a sudden a bullet comes through the floor and lodges in his ceiling Now the police Come to his apartment not the guy downstairs the shot the gun they come to his apartment. Are you okay? Yeah, I'm okay Can we come in? Yeah, you can come in can we look around and find the bullet? Yeah I think you can find it, but it's right there. Well one of the cops sees the bullet another cop is going like this Hmm Lenovo kind of expensive my right down the serial number. Ah, the Lenovo was stolen So this poor bastard who almost got his leg blown off by a bullet coming through the floor Two weeks later finds himself in jail for possessing a stolen computer in his apartment Convicted all the way up through the Colorado system the case comes to the Supreme Court Four liberals and Scalia vote to overturn the conviction Scalia writing the Constitution sometimes protects the criminality of a few in order to preserve the Privacy of us all which is what brought on my argument. Where does privacy come from privacy is a Fundamental liberty he said So this is a point. I want to make to you When the government says fundamental, that's the same thing as natural When the government says it's a substantive right, that's the same thing as natural Justice Scalia Why are you saying substantive? Why are you saying fundamental? Why don't you want to say? natural every It sounds too Catholic, but it means the same thing so the right of a human being To choose a mate is a fundamental liberty Justice Kennedy a Substantive liberty Justice Kennedy and a majority of the court Therefore it's a natural right This is really peeling the onion. This is taking us a long way from these two guys who are Catholic saints to this is the same origin of Your right to speak freely is your right to choose a mate and That right exists in your humanity the government didn't give it to you What should our tactic be for combating those that think reason is a product of white supremacy? Lord Read Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail. It's one of the greatest defenses of natural rights that I've been so good It's hard to believe you wrote it in the jail. Maybe refined it after you got out But it's one of the we studied us in the advanced constitutional theory courses, even though he wasn't a lawyer It's one of the most brilliant Defenses of natural rights.  In an environment like the coronavirus Well, the only legitimate purpose of government is to preserve our rights To protect our natural rights Government can't deliver the mail It can't fill potholes. It can't stop robocalls.  Ah People that are afraid Fear is a great motivator Why were people afraid to come out of their houses for two months in New York City? Not because of Andrew Cuomo the police couldn't possibly just a 10 million people in New York is 38,000 police Do the math because the government had scared the daylights out of them because we have a government of Fear and when people are fearful they will sacrifice Liberty to obtain safety and what happens when they do that they end up with neither Uh, what is your argument against the social contract theory? My argument is not against the social contract theory but my argument is that for the The the the lynchpin of democratic government is the consent of the governed that means the consent of everybody and if some idea You know anybody that's consented to the Constitution. I don't have been asking this question since I was your age What are you about 15? 18 all right, all right. I'm sorry. Yeah, youthful face. It's a good thing to have. I don't have it. I never had one The social contract theory makes sense if everybody consents But nobody is consented to the government. Oh, we walk on the government sidewalks. We vote in the government elections Okay, did the Jews and Berlin in 1933? Consent to the government because they voted against that monster or walked in his sidewalks Of course not that's not consent. That's fear Who are the people asking these questions? I don't like these anonymous questions or Are they students in my class? Did Tom Woods write some of these questions This kind of touches on that When so so that taxationist stuff because unless you make a contract with the government Well, do you give up that right when you when you fill out a w4 form? Or any sort of the government taxation forms? No, because when you fill out those forms You're doing so under compulsion if you don't fill out the form They'll eventually find you and take your property and maybe even take your body Since you opposed taxation should that mean that we did not pay politicians well, I mean in my world Which would be Lou Rockwell's world Ron Paul's world Walter Bloch's world the government would be a miniscule Fraction of what it is now and you would pay the government for services, which is almost almost what we had in the era 1776 to 1789 and that's what Jefferson argued you want to service from the government you pay for it You don't want to service from the government. You don't owe us anything Since we know that the courts are politicized Do you have any any suggestions for tactics on getting the right to buy into eliminating qualified immunity? Well qualified immunity isn't is an absolute monstrosity, but the qualified immunity has its origins in legislation So when the Supreme Court has given wild and weird Interpretations of qualified immunity that's on the basis of legislation qualified immunity Is what police have they qualify for it by being a cop on a legitimate? Police-oriented mission mission that admission mission That gives them immunity from the consequences of it So when the cop in Minneapolis choked that poor fellow to death for eight and a half minutes He knew that he could not be personally sued for it because he had qualified immunity. I mean Those of us Who have been involved with law enforcement on the libertarian side of an arguing against qualifying immunity? for generations It's a it's a monstrosity because it unleashes the police. There's a lot of problems with the police. They're over militarized They mimic what the feds do And now they have the same immunity that the feds have What advice would you give to the mayor of Portland or some of these cities that have had Riots going on in recent months Well, the government's only legitimate duty is to protect natural rights Which in the case of Portland or Oregon would mean to protect property So if the police followed the natural law They would be disobeying a Supreme Court case because the Supreme Court has said the police have no obligation To protect property or preserve life. Well, what are we paying them for if they have no obligation to protect property or or preserve life? In the real world my neighbors and I would have our own insurance company and the insurance company would hire people to protect us and those People would work for us and they wouldn't impair our property. They would protect it But this is not the real world.  That's what happened last week. I Think last question if our natural rights come from reason in our humanity Should we sure why would we trust government to defend those rights? Well, you would trust a government a small limited government to which you consented because of the impracticality of defending your rights yourself But if you didn't consent You'd have every right to protect your natural rights on your own because of the second amendment which according to Justice Scalia in Heller and Justice Alito in McDonald allows you to use the same level of sophistication to protect yourself That the government has Can you put a tank in your garage? I don't know the answer to that But I do know that you can use the same level of sophistication to preserve your life and the life of your loved ones and your property As the government's agents will use to attack it. God love you if you're in my class I'll see you tomorrow if you're not say hello


Santa knows where to find all the best and hottest smartphones just in time to make this Christmas better and bigger than ever! Better service, bigger savings, that's today's Appalachian Wireless! Ho, ho, ho! Every Halloween, first responders in Pikeville host a haunted trail in the hopes of scaring all of those who enter. The reason, however, is to bring a smile to children's faces later in the year. Money raised from the cut-through mountain hauler adventure benefits Pikeville First Responders annual Christmas with a First Responder event. The event is hosted by the Pikeville Police and Fire Departments and the 911 Center. We provide clothing, which is essentially for some of the children, as well as the day of the event, McDonald's, my beach from Kentucky apartment with us. We provide a meal, we have fun and games, as well as the gifts, and then they have a food basket that they take home, that way they have food for Christmas dinner. Saturday, 32 children and 17 families were able to participate in the event. There's a lot of fun and it's emotional, too, just to see their reactions and how they respond to you. Then, overall, it's always a lot of fun, I enjoy it. For decades, it was hosted by the Pikeville Police Department. This is the fifth year all three departments have worked together to host the event. We found the meeting sponsors, both business and private, so we couldn't make this event happen. And, of course, the departments are already gearing up for next year's event. In Pikeville, Shelby Porter, EKB News.


I've been a long time user and advocate for social annotation, primarily because I love the way it services students reading practices, so making visible how they're reading the text. And I've also been an advocate for hypothesis because I love it as an open educational process. I love the mission of annotate the web. We started piloting the Canvas plugin this year, and I was actually one of the first people to pilot it. We have a small group of early adopters who are trying it out. I know some of them are here this morning, so shout out. Lisa Holleran is one of the people I saw, who's also been using it in her class. So we got the Canvas plugin. I also, for the first time, taught a class for our new doctoral program in higher education and leadership, teaching a class on introduction to digital learning environments. So I thought it would be great. We'll try hypothesis out as an example of a digital learning environment. And we started in January. For the assignment that I did, I forked an assignment created by Karen Aker at Hunter College and shared by Jeremy on the hypothesis website for doing scholarly article annotation. And one thing I know about doing annotation, for me, I find it's much better to give students very specific directions on how I want them to approach the annotation assignment instead of just saying, go annotate this text. So the directions that I actually came up with are because we were reading some scholarly articles that had a good bit of theory in them. And I wanted to see if they could understand the theory by seeing if they could apply it. So I asked them to, is there anything you're reading, annotate it if you make some connection to it? If you can see how it applies in your own experience. So sort of connecting theory to practice. I also asked them to do the thing of, if there's something you read or do you want to understand, try to figure out what it is, go find resources online, link them back into the text so that you can better understand it. And then finally, I wanted them to reply to somebody else. So I gave them those specific directions. As I said, I did it in my class that started in January. I was one of the first people. So we did discover a few pitfalls. One thing we learned is you can't copy hypothesis assignments. So for our grad programs, we build our courses in a development course and copy them into the production course. That didn't work. But once we figured that out, after having all of my students not be able to get into the reading, there was this way annotating, it actually worked great. I was just blown away. And it was great to see them engaging actively with the text. One of the unexpected outcomes I saw is it was the first week of class. This was one of their early assignments. And I actually felt like I got to know my students better by asking them how they personally connected to the text we were reading than by the getting to know your discussion we had done earlier. And this is a class that was fully online. And so seeing all the different perspectives they brought to the text was really fantastic. Another unexpected or maybe sort of expected outcome is that I had one of my students say, I have always hated reading digitally, but I love this. I had no idea that you could annotate the text. You could write in the margins. You could highlight. And I think that was what Jeremy was speaking to. They have these habits that they used to imprint reading and they haven't been able to figure out how to do that digitally. So that was also a big takeaway. And that aspect of digital reading has been very important for us because we've been trying to build capacity in digital reading at St. Edward's for a number of reasons. For one, we've been trying to advocate for open educational resources so that students can, we can reduce textbook costs for our students. We also were and are launching a number of undergraduate general education courses online this summer. But we knew if we were doing online courses for undergrads that we needed to help them be able to read digitally. And also 95% of our library collections are digital. So digital reading is something that our students have to do but there are also barriers for our students when they're reading digitally. Normally, if they're used to reading social media or news sites online, they tend to get distracted while they're reading. In fact, all of us when we're reading digitally, we are conditioned to skim through text, to link out, to follow trails and not stay focused and engaged in a text. And what we know is that if we can actively get our students engaged, they can help focus their attention on the text. And social annotation is one of the things that can help them do that. So I was happy to have that confirmed in my own class.


He can't introduce people as great speakers. It's too intimidating. It's like sets the bow way too high. It's scary. So America is a truly unique country. It's unique in history. It's unique in its formation. It's unique in its ideas. It's unique in its evolution. It is why to talk about tribalism in America is so upsetting and disappointing. Really, whether you live in America or not. What makes America unique? What makes America special? Why is America viewed by much of the world or has been viewed in history? By much of the world, there's a shining city on a hill to use a Reagan description. America was founded, and it was the first country, and in some respects, the only country to be founded on the basis of an idea and not on the basis of a tribe. If you think about your own countries, most of your countries, most of the reason your countries exist is because the people within that country share some kind of common heritage, belong to the same tribe, and justify their existence in terms of that tribe. America was a country that had no tribal origin. It was a product of that period that Ankar described, a product of the period of individualism. It was a product of men who had a vision for what a country should be like, for what the role of the state, the role of government, should be. And that role was limited to the protection of the individual recognizing, recognizing that individuals have the right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, have a right to their own life, have a right to live for themselves, have a right to pursue their own happiness, and that the state was there to protect them, to make it possible for them to pursue the rational values necessary for that pursuit of happiness. It was a country that was founded with the recognition that it did not want to be tribal and established institutions to try to prevent it from being tribal. Indeed, the founding fathers talk a lot about we shouldn't even have political parties, because that might create an element of tribalism. We should run as individuals, not as Republicans or Democrats. Didn't last very long. The tribes formed very quickly, unfortunately. But they understood the danger, and they created institutions to try to protect from it. And it's why the United States was such a hospitable, at least in theory, at least, place for immigrants. The idea was anybody can come here, from any tribe, from any country, from any culture, from any background. And what we expect from you when you come to this country is to think for yourself, to work for yourself, to act for yourself, to be an individual. We don't care where you come from. Now, again, the caveats, unfortunately, because at the same time, as this was such a positive force, they maintained the racism that was so prevalent of that period. They maintained slavery and even post-Civil War that racism sustained itself. And there was always this tension in America between that collectivism of racism and the ideas of the founding. And the ideas of the founding, or what necessitated a civil war to end slavery. It was the ideas of the founding that ultimately manifested themselves in the civil rights movement to end institutionalized racism. But there was always this tension, but in spite of that, it was this amazing place that expected you to be an individualism that called out to you to come to it if you were inclined towards individualism. And even last night, I was talking to people, and they were saying, some people were saying, yeah, my goal is to get to America. And of course, I'm an immigrant, so I know exactly what you mean. My feeling was, from reading Atlas Shrugged On, was, I have to find a way to get to America. A land that will respect me as an individual, not as a member of a tribe. I come from a very tribal culture. Those of you from Israel know what I'm talking about, a very tribal culture. I wanted to escape that culture. I mean, my motivation of moving away from Israel was primarily to escape the tribalism, that you are a cog that serves the tribe. America was always the inspiration for individuals to go and pursue their own life as individuals. And it was a system that kind of reinforced that. If you failed, you failed. Nobody bailed you out. It was hard. And if you succeeded, you got to keep it. It was yours. So people who were willing to fail, risk takers, people who were willing to stand on their own two feet, were attracted to this amazing country. Now, unfortunately, much of that has decayed. And it's decayed for the reasons Ankar gave this morning. It's decayed because of the philosophical attack on reason. And a philosophical attack on reason is a philosophical attack on the individual because it is the individual who reasons. It leaves the individual naked, ignorant, incapable of understanding the world around them, as Ankar described it. And at the end of the day, that brings about fear. It's scary. The world is scary if you can't use your mind to understand it. And therefore, you gravitate towards groups. And of course, it was attacked by the collectivists, those who have always claimed that the group is more important than anything else. But that attack, while it was there, and it was prevalent, and it kept intensifying. I'd say it really started with a progressive movement in the late 19th century. And it continues through American history, and it's why America turns and becomes a welfare state. But it never really embraces the welfare state. It kind of does it in spite of itself. It's saying America has always been a reluctant welfare state as compared to Europe, which has committed welfare state. But the welfare state itself creates the cycle of zero sum. You're getting something that's coming at my expense, which creates a group over here of those who receive and knows whose wealth is taken away from, and special interest groups, and cronyism. And that gets worse and worse and worse because it's not being challenged. The only challenge, the only moral challenge, the only real challenge to the welfare state, the only real challenge to the slow growth of collectivism in America was Inrant. Wasn't the conservatives? Wasn't anybody on the right or anybody on the left? Slow erosion. And what we've seen in the last few decades is a culmination of that erosion into what I consider full blown tribalism in America. And I moved to America in 1987. And I've seen the change and the difference just over the last 32 years. Sad, tragic. I mean, much of it comes from the left. You see it on American campuses. I know there's going to be discussion of multiculturalism tomorrow, but the multiculturalist movement, which morphed into the identity politics movement, identity politics is what? It's the idea that your identity comes from the group you belong to. Identity politics, it's all about your identity. It's not yours. It's not you don't shape your character. It's the color of your skin. It's the ethnic group you belong to. It's your gender. And what, 98 genders now? So the 98 different groups. All of those things determine who you are. It's how oppressed you've been. And on campuses today, this idea of intersectionality, intersectionality, yeah. I mean, intersectionality is the idea of a morality that says that the needy, the suffering, the persecuted are the ones we should all be sacrificing to. It's an extension of this conventional morality taking it kind of to its logical extreme and combining it with tribalism. Because now the idea is we have a hierarchy of oppression. Who's the most oppressed group? Who's the least oppressed group? And clearly, altruism, the idea that we should live for others, demand that we sacrifice the least oppressed group to the most oppressed group. And you have all kinds of, I mean, it's complicated, right? If you're a white male, it's easy.  But you're male, so you're an oppressor. And this goes on and on and on. And of course, all of it is based on some truth. There's always some element of truth. If you're black, you have been oppressed. If you're a woman, you have been oppressed. If you're gay, you were oppressed. All these things are based on some element of truth. And what they've done is they've taken that oppression, used the fear that the negation of reason has made possible to now lump you into a group, and the group will protect you.  So we see this on campuses in America. And now I think it's sped, identity politics is sped to at least the UK and my guess is to other places around Europe. We've seen this grow and intensify for decades. We've been talking about multiculturalism and the danger of it and the danger of this racist, tribalist mentality that the left has been preaching. What I think is not completely new, but new in its visibility and new in its scope is the tribalism on the right. Now it's always been there to some extent. There's always been, as we said from the beginning, there's always been racism in America. But it's gained traction and become relevant again and become something that people are not embarrassed by. It was a long time in which it was embarrassing. And now it's not. So you're seeing the kind of actions that Charlottesville that Ankar described, the chance of we will not take Jews, we will not let the Jews take over or take our stuff. And the whole idea of America being a white nation.  I mean, America is the land of the individual. America is the land of opportunity for each one of us as individuals. That's the ideal, that's the dream. But now it's America is white nation. And people say this, who don't consider themselves racist, they just say it factually and should stay a white nation.  And it was, I didn't know what to do because it was so shocking. And so it's like other than calling him a racist, which I did. Weird and interesting. But you're seeing that more and more in the United States just taking for granted, taking just being accepted. This implied racism just factually being described. And again, a president who at the very least doesn't speak out against it and the very worst actually condones it. And you're seeing it that reflected in things like, I know this is a controversial topic, but things like immigration. Again, America was founded on the idea of individuals come, come benefit from the freedom, make the most of your life. We are here to protect your rights. And now it's about immigration is a threat because again, we've created a tribe. And the tribe now is the tribe of America. So there's this idea of America and you're not an American if you come in as an immigrant. And there's concern about the fact that the immigrants, and again, this isn't a minor concern. It's a real concern that the people coming in to America are not white because America might stop becoming a white nation. So there's a tribe within the bigger tribe of America. There's a smaller tribe of defined by the whiteness of the skin. And we just, I think Donald Trump this morning or yesterday whenever was declared a state of emergency. America is under attack because of immigration. Because immigrants are coming across the border, yes, illegally because the laws in America are so screwed up that if you want to come and enjoy still the benefits of freedom that America actually provides, the benefits of opportunity that America actually provides, you have to break the law. Big deal. I would say if I couldn't have come to America legally, I would have found a way to come anyway, right? But it's a national emergency. People are invading the country from Mexico, right?  Us, who's us? And where there's no attempt to actually use reason and data and evidence to convince us it's all, if you listen to the rhetoric, it's all about fear. It's all about misrepresentation of facts in order to induce fear. That's the tactics of tribalism. It's not about reason. It's not about thinking for yourself. I mean, I've been, because I'm pro-immigration, I've been asked to leave the country to give up my passport. I'm not a real American because I am pro-immigration in America today. You even see it in the issue which I thought was a relatively simple issue, the issue of trade. America has, it turns out, American jobs, which Americans must do. Again, this is a form of tribalism. What does that mean? America used to be the land where we wanted the best for the best price. And we didn't care where it was made. And we didn't care who produced it. We wanted the best because our focus was not on American jobs. Our focus was on our lives and how to make our lives as individuals the best lives that it could be. And in order to make my life the best life that it could be, I wanted to buy a Toyota or an Audi. Nobody cared. It didn't matter that it wasn't built in Detroit. But again, over the last 30, 40 years, you've seen the slow creeping in of you have to buy American, which I think is Harry Binswanger in a famous essay he wrote, which I recommend. He says, buy America is un-American. American means buy the best for the price. Buy what's consistent with your personal individual values. It doesn't matter where it was built. And America thrived on that idea. It succeeded economically on that idea. It's not like we have evidence to say that because we had free trade and because we had lots of immigrants coming in and because we are relatively free to make our own choices, we somehow suffered economically, quite the contrary. America has benefited enormously. Americans as individuals have benefited enormously from this kind of trade. But we're seeing more and more rhetoric around trade that is pure tribalism. My tribe built it and therefore it's good. And if your tribe builds it, it's bad. The whole notion that countries trade with one another, like America trades with China, like who's America? What did they buy exactly? I know I trade with some Chinese guy in China. I buy iPhones, always use my iPhone, which was assembled in China. And I bought it from Apple and Apple bought it from Foxcom or paid Foxcom to assemble it and bring it back. But where did America fit in here? How many countries contribute? Some of you know this. How many countries contribute to the make, companies from different countries contribute to the making of this phone? I think it's 40, 40, 60, something like that. Who cares? It's a phone. It's great. It's amazing. Everybody across the supply chain has benefited from the fact that I bought the phone. But I bought it for me. I didn't buy it because it was made in America. It's because it was beneficial to my life. So much of economic language has become tribal, collectivistic, nationalistic. And I think the reasons for all of this are what Ankar described and what Einran wrote about. I mean, everybody here, particularly those of you from the Balkans, should read global Balkanization. And the idea that she wrote this in the 70s and described exactly what would happen in the 90s and the 2000s is stunning. It's truly, it's one of those essays we read and say, no, she couldn't have written it back then, right? But she explains exactly why this has to happen given the philosophical foundations. Given the attack on reason, given the attack on individualism, the elevation of emotion and irrationalism and the elevation of the collective. So America today, I think, is in big trouble, big trouble. Not because of economics, but because of the shift towards tribalism, which is feeds on itself and makes itself worse because the left response to the right and the right response to the left and they both become more committed to their particular tribes. There's very little thinking, individual thinking, there's very little independence. There's which tribe do you belong to? Is now how people evaluate you. You can't, for example, as an objectivist be, well, I agree with the Democrats on some things and I agree with Republicans on something and mostly I disagree with both of them on pretty much everything. That, people can't even, you have to choose. It's this one or that one. There's only two choices. You can't make any other choices. And again, that's a tribal mentality. There's only this group or that group. You can't be yourself, you can't think for yourself. So America's in real trouble and everybody wants a political answer and political answer does not exist. The answer is a rebirth of individualism.  And individuals who have that attitude don't want to belong to a tribe. Reject the idea of tribes. And therefore reject the idea of an all-encompassing state dictating to them what they can and cannot do. So the solution to both the economic issues and the tribal issues is philosophy. It's retaking our soul back. It's retaking our lives back as individuals and rejecting this whole notion of tribalism in America, in Europe, everywhere across the world. Thank you all. So we're taking, so we're gonna take questions. We're gonna take questions over here, please. We've got a mic over here, so if you move over to that mic. We can take our first one from Vinnie here. Yeah, let me just pitch my website. You're on bookshow.com. My YouTube channel, subscribe. And what else? Follow me on social media. Of course, you've got all the Ironman Institute content is amazing, so consume it. The YouTube channel in particular right now, there's so much amazing content going up on that website. There's Ironman Lectures, there's Leonard Peekoff Lectures, and then there's a lot of the intellectuals from the Ironman Institute are represented now on the YouTube channel, so subscribe to Ironman Institute YouTube channel. Yeah. Hi, Aaron. So I know that this is a question that's kind of focused on the US, but I'm sure you can find there's an analog. It's the theme of this cause. I'm sure there's an analog in Europe as well. So you talked about the tribalism amongst the right with the white supremacists. Do you think that, I would say in about the last 10 years, the kind of ubiquitous tribalism amongst the left as well of regarding racial minorities has kind of contributed to that reaction from the right as well? Yeah, that's what I said about identity politics. So I definitely think that the left intellectually legitimized this kind of racial identification. They basically said, we're gonna identify all these minorities and that's gonna be their tribes. And then kind of in a sense, the white, some whites said, well, we can play that game, right? And now it's intellectual legit, right? So before it was views as racist and bad. But now it's being taught at universities. Now it's being presented as a theory. I mean, they took it out of context, of course, of even how the left presented. But yes, I think left legitimized this kind of racial politics. And now it's all encompassing. Now everybody's playing it. Yeah, thank you. If you, I think the best way is to just run over to the mic, just form a line there and we'll take them quickly. So quick questions, because I think there's gonna be a line. Right. I saw somebody else stay with their hand, just go. It's not that big of a deal. Yeah. Morning. So prior to 2016, it seemed like the dominant tribal element on the right in America was religion. What happened to that? And what can we expect? Is it gone or is it coming back? So, yes, I mean, we have been warning about religion for a long time, particularly on the right. Lena Peacock, of course, has spoken a lot about the threat of religion in American politics. It hasn't gone away at all. I would actually argue that much of this tribalism is reflected, I think, in Donald Trump's presidency, is a consequence of that religious mentality that has been growing and growing. Now, again, I don't wanna offend anybody, but if you've got questions about religion, I'm happy to answer them. But I think that one of the identifying factors about religion is that it is authoritarian in its epistemology and its ethics. You're supposed to do what's right because you're supposed to do what's right because it's written in an ancient book or because some preacher said so, some interpreter of the book says so. It's commandments. It's authoritarian in that sense. You don't get to choose. You don't get to understand. You don't get to reason why you should do it. And the same thing epistemologically, in the sense that truth comes from a book. Truth comes from revelation in some sort. And it instills an authoritarian mentality. And I think that that authoritarian mentality now dominates much of what you'd call the religious right.  Because Donald Trump, what was surprising in the American election in 2016 is that Ted Cruz ran a very focused campaign on evangelicals. He ran a religious campaign. He focused on them. He wanted their vote. But the guy who was the least religious candidate in all of them, at least in his life and the way he behaves, but the most authoritarian in the way he presented himself is the guy who got the evangelical vote. I mean, Donald Trump won South Carolina over Ted Cruz, over Huckabee, over people who are far more religious than he is. Because I think for them much more important than your religious affiliation is this idea that you can solve problems, you will just do it. You will get it done, which is Donald Trump's kind of shtick, right? And I think that is why the religious right voted for him. So I don't think religion is gone. I think it'll come back as explicitly. It shapes very much the thinking and I think the epistemology and the way people view the world among voters in America. Thank you. Hello, that was an excellent speech. I am not sure if I'm saying it right, but the saying goes like, I would sacrifice myself for my brother, for my four cousins or 16 second cousins. And it goes along with the fact that tribalism is somehow kind of coded into our DNA. I mean, Richard Dawkins wrote a book, Selfie Gene, that he's basically on the gene level. We want to preserve something which is closer to us. So how do we find something which is very much connected to our existence and it's very much the survival method of evolution? So I wouldn't sacrifice my life for any of my cousins. I wouldn't sacrifice my life for all of my cousins combined. You know, I just wouldn't, I like my cousins.  I would literally give my life for my wife, my children. That's where, that's the, but not my cousins. So I don't think it's coded. This is exactly what Ankar was talking about. This is conventional morality. It's coded only in the sense that it's the morality that we've all been, that's ingrained in us culturally that our preachers and our philosophers and our teachers and our mothers have told us that this is what you're supposed to do. Family is everything. No, it's not actually. I like, I love my friends much more than I love my family. I include my brothers and sisters and my parents.  If I had to help my friend, a really close friend or my parents, I would help my friend first. Because I've chosen my friend. I didn't choose my family. So the elevation of family is one of the ways in which we inculcate this tribalism. And you know, you can see that conventional morality, this idea that your life is not yours. Your life belongs to, that's where it starts. It's the most reasonable group of people that your life might belong to is your family. So you start with that sacrifice and then you expand it and expand it and expand it until it includes the whole tribe. I disagree with Dawkins. I disagree with all the kind of evolutionary psychologists. They've taken evolution in a very bad direction in terms of claiming that we don't really have free will, that we're not, don't choose our own values, that we don't choose our own ideas, that somehow there's coding that determines this. And I'm just an evolutionary freak because I happen to have different genes, I guess, than everybody else. But I think that I used to believe, I used to believe when I was young that I would jump on a grenade pretty much for anybody if they were in my tribe, the Jewish tribe, let's say. But I learned new ideas. I changed my values. And now I'm not jumping on the grenade for many people. And I used to be waiting for the grenade. I mean, literally waiting for the grenade so I could jump on it and be a hero. And it's gone because I changed my ideas. I'm not predetermined, you're not predetermined. You're not just a collection of genes. You have control over your own life. You get to make choices about the values you have. You're not predestined to just be conventional, which is that approach. Okay. Hi there. So you spoke a lot about the United States and its current shape and the trends. I do see that a lot of people in generally speaking, broadly speaking, liberty movement have a bias towards hating their own government the most. So I wonder, what's your stand? Because I'm, I think, quite typical IT startup guy who immigrated to London. And I thought about it as a point before going to States because I always was also drawn to these ideas. It has in founding, but now the question is, is it really worth it? I mean, London's also great on opportunities. So what is, except for hating your own government, your tendencies? What is the point that you think is a future for States and is it still the best place for opportunities and life of individual? I think in many respects it still is the best place, which is sad, I think, a little bit because it's deteriorated and the rest of the world has gotten better, much of the world has gotten better but not better fast enough to overtake it. I would love to be able to tell you know there's this better place, right? Yeah. But it's, the difference has shrunk. So if I were evaluating where to be and I was in London, you know, we'll see what happens March 29th, but if I was in London, you know, in ranking the countries that you could go to, a lot of it has to do with your particular profession. There's a lot of it has to do with your particular lifestyle and what you want to, you know, how you want to live. Like I'm a, I've become a huge fan of New Zealand but you can't, not everybody can go to New Zealand. It's like really far away and it's, you can't see your family and you know, it's really hard to travel to and there's not a lot of job opportunities there. The beauty of the United States is that the sheer size of it, the diversity, the ideas, the opportunities are almost, still almost endless. Silicon Valley is still this amazing place which in spite of a politics of tribalism, they're unbelievably individualistic. It's this real, I mean, Silicon Valley is a whole analysis in and of itself in terms of the gap that exists between how they act and how they behave and how they do stuff on a day-to-day basis and the politics that they espouse. So I still think that particularly if you're in tech, that the best place in the world to live is America but of course we're making it as Americans now, making it very hard for you to come. It's really hard and London also has a lot of great cities. London is a great city, it's a great city. All right, so still? I would still, you know, I'd still say America's the place to go, yes. And we need you because the battle, the battle, you know, you have to sacrifice for the cause, you know. I'm kidding, kidding, kidding. Hi, thank you for your talk, it was very interesting. Make them really short because we're running out of time. Yeah, okay, so I was going to ask you about the evolutionary psychology, like the question that was asked before. But I was wondering about what are your thoughts on the future of humanity? Are you optimistic? I mean, knowing that humanity is so invested in the ideas of the culture.  So evolutionary psychology asks the philosophers. You heard a little bit of what I think, but I think you should ask tomorrow, particularly Ben and Greg. Greg today is going to talk about thinking. So there's some good questions there to ask. I think evolutionary psychology is much more complicated, complex. There's something there, but what is there is not what they claim there's there. That is, clearly, there's something about human nature that comes from evolution, right? But then the question is what is it and how do we define it and how do we address it? But your ideas do not come from evolution.  So are you optimistic that the world is becoming? Am I optimistic? No, and yes, right? So no in the short run. I'm pessimistic in the short run. I think in the short run in terms of politics, in terms of directions, of freedom, I think it seems to be collapsing. I think there's real challenges. I see even Asia now turning against the ideas of freedom, which they seem to be moving towards. I see Eastern Europe becoming more tribal in spite of the fact that they seem for a while to be moving towards more freedom. But overall, I'm optimistic. I think good ideas went out in the end. I think if the good ideas are out there and if we keep doing the work and if we keep talking to people and educating people, I believe in free will. I believe people can change and they can change fairly quickly. So in the longer run, I'm very optimistic. And even in the short run, I'm pessimistic about all these political stuff, but I think there's this island of sanity and that's intriguing in terms of how we use it, which is technology. So I'm intrigued by the fact that we now have these technological tools that have never existed in human history. Nothing close to it has ever existed in human history. And how we can use those tools to spread good ideas, basically, and to implement those ideas in ways and creative ways that I think are exciting. So the extent that I'm optimistic, it's about tech and it's about the long run. And to the extent that I'm pessimistic, I look at politics and I look at the drift, a political drift in the world right now. Thank you very much. Hi, thank you again for your speech. I would like to ask you when you mentioned in your speech, Apple, and your phone, it took me to think about one of the biggest challenges we have nowadays, which is the environment and the environmental destruction. And so I wanted to ask you, how do you perceive individualism and objectivism in relation to trying to save our environment? Because it was caused by our selfishness. Yeah, so let me, I mean, I just came from a tour of the UK of high schools. I spoke to 10 high schools in the UK. And this is the dominant question I got. I mean, over and over and over and over again. And young people today are terrified because the environment is collapsing and we're all gonna die, according to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in exactly 12 years. And I'm sorry, I don't get it. We live in the best environment ever in human history. The water's never been cleaner, never been cleaner in any period in human history. You know why Europeans drink beer? I mean, the real reason is because the water was too polluted. So they had to come up with a different, why did Chinese drink tea? Because they had to boil the water, the water was so polluted that it boiled it before they drank it. The air is cleaner than it's ever been. And it's only gonna get cleaner as China becomes rich and cleans up its environment. Because first you have to get rich and then you clean up your environment. The human environment, which is my focus, is what it's like to be human in this world right now. It's never been better. And I know you're all shaking your heads because I know that this goes more against convention than anything else we're probably gonna say, which is kind of strange in and of itself. But the world is amazing in terms of the environment. Okay, so it's warming. Let's say it's warming. I'm willing to concede it's warming. Then we have the capacity as reasoning beings to solve whatever problem comes at us. I'm not worried about warming. I know that people will solve problems. Amsterdam is below sea level. There's a dike built, I don't know when, a long, long time ago that prevents Amsterdam from flooding. I'm pretty sure we can figure out how to prevent other places from flooding if it came to that. If it got warm, I'm pretty sure we could figure out technologies that would cool our lives. Because what's important, it's our lives. The idea that the world's gonna end, you know, it's almost like there's a, here's my evolutionary psychology, almost a human need to believe that the world's gonna end soon.  It's probably connected to tribalism somehow. We'd have to think about it. But it's just, I just don't see it. Like, you know, that is the last thing I worry about right now is the environment. Because I've seen how much clean air gets. I mean, anybody visit London in the 70s? What a dump, right? It was filthy. It was filthy, really filthy. And now it's clean. And you go in America, city after city. We were just at a conference in Pittsburgh. One of the cities that was considered the most filthy in America. And it's beautiful. It's clean. They cleaned it up. Why? Because we are rich enough to clean it. China will get rich enough to clean its environment for human beings.  I, you know, one of my favorite lines is Canada will become habitable. As will Sweden, you know. But the point is we can use human ingenuity to solve these problems instead of panicking and fearing and wanting to coalesce around groups in order to, or coercion and force in order to solve the problems. I want to unleash the markets and unleash human freedom and human ingenuity on the problems. To the extent that they affect individuals. That's how you get the best results. Okay, last question. Thank you. Okay, hello, the last one. I would just ask you about because I spoke many times to the radical leftists and I see that the mechanism that they use is very similar that was mechanism used by fascists or communists. They take something that is true. For example, the racism exists and this problem because the white privilege, because the white man or something like this. And they add the ideological extent to this. I want to ask you, did you have this same feeling about the radical leftists or the radical rights or how to prevent this radicalization? Yes, I mean, I think every set of ideas, good or bad, starts with some element that is reasonable, that is a semi-true and then builds a lot of bad stuff over it. And certainly much of the left, much of the feminist movements are built on some grain of truth, right? I mean, women couldn't vote 100 years ago in most of the Western world and couldn't inherit wealth and there was a lot of discrimination against women, right? And the same is true of certain ethnic groups and certain people of colored skin. So they start with that and then they perverted and distorted and built a whole theory about it. And that's true, I think of every set of ideas. It's not like Marx when he wrote Das Kapital or the Communist Manifesto was completely detached. I mean, a lot of what he says is true. You read the book and you say, yeah, that was happening. And then he comes to these weird conclusions about it that don't make any sense. But he starts with an element of actual reality, of actual truth and builds on that. And I think that's true of every set of ideas, otherwise it's dismissed very quickly. Okay, thank you. Thank you, everybody.


Hi, my name is Michael Kosser and welcome to this edition of The Leader's Room brought to you by the E. Cliff Leadership and Governance Center. Today we have with us Ms. Red Hong Yee, a Malaysian artist architect who is known as the artist who paints but without a paintbrush. After graduating university she worked for the Australian architectural firm Hassel in their Shanghai office. It was while living in Shanghai that she found her inspiration to create art in a highly unconventional manner using local everyday materials as her median. Her first artwork, a portrait of the artist Ai Wei Wei, was made up of sunflower seeds and it was done in an old residential alleyway. In January 2012, Red using a basketball driveled in red paint created a giant portrait of the basketball player Yeo Ming. The process was captured on video, uploaded to the internet and went viral almost instantly. Several other videos of her artwork followed suit. Adele in tea lights, J. Chu in coffee cup stains and Mark Zuckerberg with paperbacks. Her unusual art and creativity has resulted in Red being featured in an alphabet of media such as ABC, NBC, CBC, NBC, CNN, ESPN, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, The Daily Mail, The Design Boom and, well, you get the idea. Join me in welcoming Red. So Red, welcome to the leaders room. Thank you. It's great being here. Oh, it's great having you here. I've got just a couple of quick questions that I'd like to ask you today. And the first one is, you know, how you got into the spot you're in today.  But yet somewhere along the line, you made this transition into becoming an artist. Yeah. How did that happen? I guess art has always been a hobby of mine. I've always done it on the side. And but but this all this really happened about three or four years ago after I graduated from architecture and moved to China. I kept my daytime.  But I uploaded it on YouTube and Facebook and things like that. And I guess gradually people started to watch and share with share it with their friends and went out like that. And that that was really how it happened. It was just sharing my video online, sharing the video online. And so something that had just been a hobby, suddenly became your full time application. Yeah, so I'm doing that full time right now. OK, well, great. So I'm sure you get asked this next question a lot. How did you come up with the idea of being an artist without a paintbrush? Well, I think I think when I went into architecture, I started I started playing around, I guess, experimenting with materials a lot instead of, I think, just sticking to, you know, your pencil and pen and all that sort of stuff. So I grew fascinated with materials and I think that changed the way I approached art after that. And when I moved to China, I just discovered that there was a lot of stuff I could buy in bulk over there for a very cheap price. So I decided to, I guess, experiment with all the materials and objects that I could find there. And that's I guess that's really how it started. OK, so the very first piece of art that you ever did was a portrait of Ai Weiwei. And you use sunflower seeds. Yes. How did you come up with the idea for sunflower seeds? That's because my I guess my favorite piece that's done by Ai Weiwei is is titled Sunflower Seeds. So what he's what he did was he created a hundred million, I think, hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds. And that was created by 2000 workers over the period of two two years to I guess to to to I think that was to symbolize the mass producing power of China. And I thought that was that was pretty interesting. And I wanted to draw that connection between, I guess, sunflower seeds and his portrait. I wanted there to be a connection with the material that I was using. So I went to my local sort of grocery shop and bought all the sunflower seeds I could find there. And there were about seven kilos and I made a portrait out of it. That's how it happened. And you've worked with such diverse materials as paperbacks, coffee cup stains. You've also used tea lights and and sunflower seeds of all those different mediums. Do you have one that you like? Oh, and socks. I saw one where you did socks, too. Socks as well and tea bags lately as well. I don't know that I have a favorite material. I think I really enjoyed painting with coffee cup rings because I think it's it's a nuisance to see coffee cup rings on your table and all that. But it was fun to turn that into something, I guess, that was visually, I guess, different. So I guess what I like to do is really turn something really mundane and ordinary looking into something that's really unusual. So probably say coffee cup stain. Have you ever used the same medium twice? Yeah, probably have. I gave myself this challenge to make a series of 30 pieces of food art. I don't know if you saw those. No, I haven't seen that one. Oh, right. OK. So I go after this. Yeah, all right. That'll be great. I could send you a link. OK. So that was a challenge for me to downscale my art pieces because I think at one point you've got too complicated for me and I was exhausted. So I downscaled it to, I guess, the size of a dinner plate. And the challenge was to use the same materials, which was food for me over the period of a month and and to just, you know, share it with my followers, I guess, online followers every day. OK. Yeah. All right. Well, so what or who are the sources of your inspirations? Obviously, some artists. Where do you get the inspiration? I guess if I had to, if I had to name a person, it would probably out of all the artists, I would say, probably Picasso, as cliche that might sound. I think it's because I think that that he was one of the my mom kept a couple of his prints at home and she would tell me about, I guess, you know, how simple lines could depict a certain image. And he has this quote that goes, all children are born artists. The problem is how to ruin an artist once you grow up. And I think that quote has really stuck to me because I think as kids, you know, we try a range of different things. We're not afraid of taking risks. And when we're adults, you know, we sort of hold back a bit and fit in and try to conform. So so I guess he was a really big inspiration for me. OK. In your TED talk, the TEDx talk that you did here in KL, you close it by saying something to the fact that I'm paraphrasing here that when you made this transition to an artist, one of the things that you gave up and left behind was your fear. Yes. Yeah. Can you talk to us about that? Yeah, I can, because with every project that I guess I embark on, there's a huge amount of fear that I feel all the time. I think generally I'm a bit of a shy person, you know, and I think it wasn't a natural thing for me to take risks like what I've done in the last couple of years. And every time a project comes about, I have to use new material and all these doubts that, you know, pouring in, you know, and I'd have that little sort of green little gremlin going, yeah, you can't do that, you know. So I think with how I've dealt with fear is that I've learned to accept that it's a natural part of being creative that it would always be there and that I should acknowledge it and welcome it and dance with it and go, hey, because I'm fearful. I know I'm on the right path and I'm doing something different. OK. All right. So when you decide to work on any project, do you ever get stuck? And if you do, how do you deal with it? How do you get unstuck? Right. OK, I do get stuck all the time. And I really think that's really part of the process. I think that's the beauty of being able to experiment and fail and finally come to a point where you go, oh, you know, light bulb is shining and you've gone through that. So I am a big believer in failing and making mistakes and learning from it until you succeed. So that happens for all my projects right at the start. There's a lot of mistakes that happen. OK, so when you're experiencing the fear and you're getting stuck, how do you keep yourself moving, though? And why I'm asking that question is at E-Cliff, one of the things that we tell leaders that come through our different workshop experiences is that there are two sources of sustainable leadership energy, one's values and one's sense of purpose and how they drive you forward. And so, you know, when you're in that stuck moment or when you're confronting that dark fear, what is it that you said that you embrace the fear? But what else drives you? Anything else? I think what how I know that how I know I'm really stuck is if I do not do anything about it. I think a lot of times I would really ruminate on an idea or a project. And I would just, you know, drag it on and not do anything about it because it's so difficult. But what I've learned is that that anxiety of not starting something really paralyzes me. So I think a simple answer to it is to really force.  So if it's just a little piece each day, that's what starts to get the momentum for you. Yeah, OK, that's a lot better than keeping it all in your head. So one of the things that I'm sure the people listening to and watching this later on would be curious about is if they wanted to encourage creativity in their own people in the workplace, yeah, what are some lessons that they might be able to learn from you? I think if I would say that you first of all, you have to really care about that project that you're putting out and you would have to be brave enough to break rules and challenge the status quo to come up with original ideas and do not be afraid of doing that and shaking things up and breaking things. That that would be my advice. So don't be afraid to break the rules. Don't be afraid to challenge the status quo. Yeah. And I'm imagining also be confident in your own ability. Oh, yeah, definitely. OK. Well, Red, I'd like to thank you for joining us today. This is Michael Kossler signing off from the leaders room brought to you by the Eclipse Leadership and Governance Center.