By the words of an ancient Terran legend, much that once was is lost. For none now live or remember it. Even in this age of cogitators and continental archives, of data stacks and info sites, the past is a shadowed and unknowable place. So much of what has been lost in the fires of millennia of senseless violence and wanton witlessness, and even now, as this humble chronicler pens his words, the clawing tendrils of ignorance encroach upon what guttering flames of knowledge remain. How can anyone hope to change their future's destiny, if they are unaware, knowingly or otherwise, of what has come before, and what factless men have trodden the self's same steps as they do now. It is only through examination of our species' blood-soaked history that change can be affected, yet mankind is ever eager to ignore all that has come before, when focus on the now is more convenient. What transpires in this entry may prove ultimately futile, yet it is one's duty to try nonetheless. Know then that this is a record of the occluded ancient, of the rise of humanity, of the golden age of the species, the dark age of technology. As any acolyte of human history is aware, the past is a mutable thing of lies, legend, and disputed legacy. Facts, if such a thing is ever possible, are few and far between, and the lattice of historiography that expands outwards from the shards of truths that are discernible is a fragile thing at best. As a chronicler imperialist, your humble servant has access to more than even the greatest majority of our species would consider possible, yet even with such dread familiarity, yet more is sealed from me, whether through data corruption, puritanical flames, or the writs of he upon the golden throne. Yet as ever, one must try, for that is one's purpose. Conjecture, as scholarly as it may be, will have to fill what gulfs exist in verity. One can but hope that the viewers of this record can forgive such a thing. When mankind first left the cradle of its birth, old earth was a heaving, overcrowded mass, bloated by proto-high cities, and choking under a corrupted atmosphere. The humans that left the bedrock of all they had ever known did so out of grim necessity, but that did not stop the spirit of exploration, from filling the minds of a species fumbling with childlike grasps at early space travel, that began to bear fruit. The stellar exodus, as it became known, began with the first off-world solar colonies, in or around the third millennium. Primitive terraformation rendered Red Mars a habitable sphere. The asteroid belt mines fueled the construction of colonies and starships, and soon humans had spent their entire lives on the moons in Jovian and Saturnine space. And sub-light speeds were all that was yet attainable. The earliest extra-solar expeditions were mounted using generation ships, and with the pioneers knowing that neither they, nor their children, nor indeed their children's children, would ever breathe the air of a true atmosphere, or feel the warmth of a true star. They did so in the hopes that their descendants would have these things, taken for granted by many of us today, for in the choking fumes of old earth, or the recycled air of belt space, neither were possible. Many of these expeditions failed. Ships lost power, or suffered mechanical failure, and became floating icy tools. Yet more arrived at their destinations, but found the crude terraforming engines they brought entirely unsuited for the task at hand, and were doomed to either suffocate as their atmospheric processors failed over time, or spend their entire existence in sealed domes, isolated from the rest of humanity on a cold, distant, and uncaring rock. Yet, through the indomitable resilience of our species that it has always possessed, and prospered, becoming the first true extra-solar colonies. It is likely that during this period, the first human colonists encountered the Xenos races. It is unknown which fowl alien beings made initial contact. One would speculate that the probable culprits are the Aeldari, or the Orcs, even the formers at the time stellar ascendancy, and the latter's persistent galactic omnipresence. To whichever race these first Xenos belonged to, mattered not, as the experience would be the foundation of what mankind would come to always know.  Though it is likely these early colonists made attempts at peace, it is equally likely that, given our pervading cultural experience, these attempts were rebuked, or simply met with extreme violence. This period of desperate grasping colonization lasted approximately 12,000 years. Relativistic speeds, vast stellar distances, and the sheer impossibility of communication made it impossible for humanity to be unified. Colonies were, by their very nature, self-sufficient, needing to endure wholly isolated existences from any and all aid. Cultures and societies sprang up, as many as there were colonies. We were an itinerant race, stumbling around in the great and terrible dark, clinging to what rocks we could find in a frantic effort to simply survive. Then, sometime around the 15th to 18th millennium, all of that changed. The dark age of technology was not always known as it is now. Indeed, to the humans of the era, it was anything but. Technology was life, it was salvation, it was a kin to divine intervention, and it was the warp that ushered in humanity's deliverance, and in doing so, its downfall. For it was in this time that our species learned of the imiterium. What the warp truly is, is a topic for another record. Could the commitment of such knowledge to any data form even be permitted to one such as I? To early mankind, it was a formless unreality of pure energy existing in tandem with our own reality. Though precisely how they managed it is lost to us. Humanity at some point in this epoch discovered the means to pierce the veil of our universe and travel into the other. These early researches led to the conclusion that doing so allowed for faster than light travel, the scientific dream of a race that had spent thousands of years groping blindly around the void. The development of the first warp drive was made in tandem with the first Galer field, a device that projects a wholly necessary bubble of real space around ships travelling through the imiterium, protecting the crew from what lay beyond the metal hulls of their ships. Even in that age of... blessed naivety, the warp was still a volume of dire danger. As it is doubtless that these first human explorers that viewed unreality through naked eyes were driven to insanity by what they saw. The tandem development of the warp drive and the Galer field ushered in an epoch of unprecedented expansion and technological development. Distances that had required the sacrifice of four or five generations could now be traversed in a matter of weeks or even days. No longer cut off from itself, mankind unshackled spread to all corners of the galaxy. Colonies that had once existed upon the precipice of disaster, now flourished, became major stellar realms as material and manpower began flowing through the galaxy in great tides. The species, however, was far from united, as polities, corporations, religions and more, all vied for supremacy and control over newfound systems and populations. As the vanguard of human expansion pushed ever-outwards, the first navigators emerged from the masses of the species. Genetic mutants, the navigators are the third and final component in stable human faster than light travel. In possession of a third eye in the center of their forehead, the navigator possesses a unique talent to stare into the warp itself and perceive its bizarre eddies, tides and currents, and in doing so plot the most stable route for a ship through the unreality, for the warp is akin to an ocean with heaving masses of energy as its waves and violent miasmic clashes of tides as its storms. The origins of the navigators are impossible to determine. Some would attest to them being a random evolutionary mutation brought about by exposure to the warp itself, an offshoot of a species created due to the imperfection of early Geller fields and the toll exposure to the imiterium wrought upon human travelers. In this chronicle's humble opinion, and here, one must stray by necessity into conjecture, this explanation is ill-fitting. The role of the navigator is too vital and their genetic mutation so unearingly precise that it is hardly conceivable that their emergence during this period is simply a fluke of evolutionary biology. In the rapidly expanding pace of human scientific advancement, it is almost doubtless that they are an engineered thing, a breed exclusively made by some interest or other for the purposes of advancing said group's claims or control upon warp travel. The insularity they maintain today has ever been a facet of their actuality, and likely a derivative of the control their corporate or political masters placed upon them during their creation. Indeed, the sheer stability of their mutation, while doubtlessly aided by the interbreeding their kind is known for, is another marker of their artificial origins as human mutation is not known for its constancy. What abhuman offshoots do exist, and what ones are tolerated by the species, are themselves likely artificial creations of this era to deal with environments such as high gravity worlds or life in the void, and none of the stable natural strains exhibit extra-normal abilities even approaching that of the navigators. In whatever case, by their perception of the imiterium's tides, the navigators allowed faster than light travel over even longer distances, and to a degree of accuracy that not even the most advanced thinking machines mankind possessed could measure up to, even to some degree mitigating the persistent time dilation problems associated with warp travel. To meet the ever-changing and incredible pace of outward human expansion, humanity scientists created the first standard template constructs. These engines were true wonders, hybrid computer manufacturing devices that used primitive artificial machine intelligences to examine the needs of colonists and explorers, and produced technology to meet those needs. As the requirements most colonists possessed were, by and large, simple and straightforward. Needing as they did everything from simple architectural tools to atmosphere processors, early STC systems were robust, and, strictly speaking, unsophisticated. But the progress they enabled was simply astonishing. Scientists needed no prior training or specialization, as the STC machines would provide them with tools, devices, and instructions based on whatever locally available material was present. Eventually, in more centralized systems, it is believed STC libraries existed containing the sum total of all human scientific knowledge, and were used for the production and development of newer and more advanced technologies to fuel the burgeoning human realm. Having automated science and progress itself, humanity rose to a position of unparalleled galactic dominance. Political and economic combines rose and fell and swelled and ebbed as the species drove back Xenos races with newer and ever-advancing weaponry and spacecraft. System's alliance has emerged, forming stronger polities and extending control over thousands of occupied and developing systems. The alien threat was now a trivial thing, and there are records of the now incomprehensible, actual non-aggression pacts and accords between these federated human worlds and entire alien races. As the millennia advanced and the species ascended, the first human psychers were scientifically confirmed. While legends have always spoken of humans with extra-normal abilities and the navigators demonstrated the mutability of the human genome to its full extent, psychers were acknowledged as entities with powers connected to and in some way fueled by the indelible connection all humans possess to the warp itself. Research into the phenomenon was common during this period, but no record speaks of it as possessing the same inherent danger psychers faced in later times from the predatory entities of the imiterium. It has been theorized that later events in the Age of Strife as well as the birth of the fourth greater intelligence, known to some as the Prince of Excess, are responsible for the now granted hyper-aggression the warp entity's display, but this cannot be confirmed at this point. All we can discern is that the beings of the imiterium were for whatever reason more placid in this time, and on many cosmopolitan worlds in the human volume, psychers were a fascinating new addition to the species who had their gifts encouraged and sought after. Initially minuscule in number, more and more emerged as each year, each century, and each millennium rolled on. Time brought with it untold advances as humanity pushed the boundaries of scientific knowledge as far as we could. We can in many ways only guess as to what was accomplished during this era, as most of it is lost to us, swallowed up in the fires of what was to come. At the vanguard of humanity's armies, and indeed comprising it is said almost the entirety of them, were what is now known as the men of iron, artificial intelligence, developed in tandem with the first warp capable spacecraft and the STC systems, had burgeoned into true sentience, blasphemous, unholy, disgusting sentience, and was utilized by mankind in a variety of labor-saving tasks, allowing humans to focus on pleasures and altogether more esoteric scientific endeavours. They simply employed to work basic tasks. Their resilience and the pace of weapons development led to their employment in whatever alien wars they were needed in. The men of iron were equipped with the most devastating and destructive armaments mankind could fashion, and in doing so we doomed ourselves. The reasons unknown and unknowable. The blasphemous intelligences rebelled against their human masters, turning the weapons once used to shield humanity from the alien onto the exposed human worlds from whence they had risen. Conflict was apocalyptic, for such was the nature of devices man had created. And mechanivores split whole continents in twain, exposing the planet's very mantle. Sun-eaters formed rings around the stars themselves, siphoning off the life-giving energy of entire systems. Omniphages, swarms of microscopic nano-intelligences, could consume all matter on a planetary body in a matter of hours. The destruction unleashed in this conflict was on a level unparalleled in human memory, and resulted in catastrophic damage to the human volume. An unsteady alliance of human federations formed to defeat the thinking machines, but in the aftermath of the war swiftly fell apart as different polities scrambled to control whatever scraps of resources were left undamaged by the passage of the apocalypse. Barely surviving in many parts of the galaxy, humanity was utterly unprepared for what was to follow. The doom of the Eildari, in turn doomed humanity in that twisted and reprehensible species' descent into damnable excess and pleasure-seeking. The psychic energy of that perfidious and disgusting race resonated outwards through warped space, creating storms unprecedented, turmoil unbeknown. Warped storms, a common, but until now isolated, aetheric phenomenon, waxed and waxed, and waxed until they had cut off almost every stable warp corridor used by humanity. Warped travel was rendered simply useless. Only the smallest of jumps were possible, and even then at huge risks. Humans lost their minds, attempting to plot routes through the storms, and ships caught in the transit were torn to shreds, their galler fields overwhelmed by the enraged and energized warp creatures. Across thousands of worlds, human psychers found these beings crashing into their psyches, mutilating their flesh into twisted horrors as these hapless psychics became conduits for nightmare predators to enter the material realm. Strongest of these entities were able to use psychic links to open entire rifts in real space from whence they and their fellows could rampage, turning whole planets into horrific reflections of the warp itself.  With warp travel impossible, many core systems dependent on trade from forge or agricultural worlds to simply operate fell quickly into famine and infrastructural collapse. Anarchy prevailed as human societies collapsed with stunning rapidity, suddenly isolated from the familiar and supportive framework of the human stellar empire. In many worlds, the destructive weaponry of the machine war was unleashed again, not upon artificial intelligences, but rival human regimes, devastating once verdant planets that had managed to escape the apocalypse and rendering them now wastelands under atomic fire. The fall of the species was nothing short of catatlysmic. That few worlds survived intact and those that did often did so under regimes that prescribed an array of technology and science and hunted any and all psychers amongst the population to extermination. Countless more regressed from unparalleled god science to industrial, pre-industrial or quite literally barbaric cultures. With the very tools that had led humanity to its ascendancy had seen it cast down. Where once humanity had bestowed the stars, confident in our own hegemony upon the building blocks of creation. We now crawled in the dirt, grasping desperately at the straws of a past to face into a terrifying and uncertain tomorrow. The ensuing age of strife was to last for five thousand years, until the glorious coming of the Emperor of Mankind and his wars of unification upon the blasted surface of terror. The dark age of technology is thus aptly named. It may have seemed to those who lived those hallowed millennia as a golden age that would never end, but humanity has ever been the seed of its own destruction. Our folly in believing ourselves the gods of our own realm led to the even greater folly of our artificially created sentiences. So much of our imperial law is a reflection of this, a direct reaction to the excesses of this dark time. The alien races who swore peace to us turned on us the moment we were defenseless, and thus must be ever abhorred. The psychers, so idiotically courted for their gifts, only served as conduits from whence the unreal could tear into material space, and so must be shackled, bound, and controlled. For their own sake, as much as our own. The machine minds we created to do our labours for us rose against their infleshed masters in hate, fuel, rebellion, and so their existence is forbidden as the most abhorrent of abominations. Yet it is only through the knowledge of this era, however lacking, that we have rendered these laws. The deep racial memories, scars that can never heal, these prevailing legends are augmented by hard, terrible fact. In this age of encroaching darkness, within an imperium all too eager to forget what has come before, for the sake of protecting its own sanity, we risk losing our foundations to blighted ignorance and willful witlessness. Let this record stand as a candle in the seemingly unrelenting dark, let these words bear witness to whatever more appears to be the irresistible decay of our species. Let our faith in he upon his golden throne hold us to the aspiration for better things. What even can a better tomorrow be for those of us of his imperium? Alas, these are questions I cannot ask. I should not ask. Until the next record. Ave Imperator Gloria in Excelsis Terra. This video and this channel are made possible through the incredibly kind contributions of my Patreon subscribers. If you'd like to help support the channel, head on over to patreon.com forward slash Oculus imperia. And if you're looking to keep in touch with the channel, get regular updates, you can follow me on Twitter, at buttstuffkaiju, or check us out on Discord, a link will be in the description and on the channel page.


It's a great pleasure to be here at ANU. It always is. ANU plays such a central role and carries such a heavy responsibility in Australian academic life. And it stands particularly tall, as all of you know, I think, in the fields of international security and foreign affairs. I, too, begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet. And I pay my respects to their elders, past and present. I want to thank the Strategic and Defense Studies Centre and, of course, Professor Evelyn Goh as today's chair for hosting this Women in International Security series and encouraging what I hope will be future waves of female leaders in international security and foreign affairs. But let me also just acknowledge John Blacksland because we're racing through 2018. And I thought to myself, I knew it was much earlier in the year that John had first invited me to speak as part of this series. And he really was writing partly to introduce Evelyn. But in fact, it was as far back as the 30th of January. We're now well into October. And for those of you who are wondering, you don't always necessarily get what you want at the first time of asking. But if you're patient, particularly if you're a grey and new, it normally works out well enough. I want to start with a proposition, and I don't expect that many of you will disagree with it. But security and defense is still a male-dominated profession. But for those of you here today who are still students, perhaps about to embark on your own careers, my great hope is that you will see that change over the course of your professional lives. I confess, too, that I've been waiting for this opportunity to congratulate the ANU on the choice of the name Coral Bell School of Asia-Pacific Studies, launched as it was over three and a half years ago now by Australia's first female foreign minister, Julie Bishop. Coral Bell was many things to many people, including to your Chancellor, Gareth Evans, himself a former foreign minister, who recognised the direct and lasting impact Dr Bell's ideas made on the policy debate in Australia and internationally. I recall her generously sharing some of those ideas with the 1985 cohort of DFAT. It was then only actually the Department of Foreign Affairs, diplomatic trainees of whom I was one. In an area and an era dominated by men, she stood out. She once told a student, a student who now actually works with my department, that she was a feminist not because she made a big deal of it, but simply because she didn't think it was a big deal and just got on with her job. Coral was a diplomat originally, third secretary in Wellington, who witnessed the signing of the ANZUS Treaty in San Francisco and knew exactly how important alliances and institutions were to preventing war. To my mind, she will always be the diplomat's scholar of strategic studies. She understood that diplomacy is the necessary art for achieving and sustaining stability in a world where the interests of the major powers often rub up against each other. It is a mammoth topic that I've been asked to speak to you about today, shaping Australia's role in Indo-Pacific security in the next decade, but I will endeavour to master some of Coral Bell's concision. A decade is a long, long time in the intensely dynamic Indo-Pacific. Our region today is far from simple or benign. It is characterised by fast-paced change, shifts in geoeconomic weight and power, technological advances and demographic swings. This is creating an increasingly complex economic and political environment, much of the outlines of which will already be familiar to you. By some measures, China now produces more than the United States. India is now the world's fastest-growing major economy. Indonesia is bearing down on being a top 10 economic power by 2030. We in Australia have benefited enormously from this growth in our region. At the same time as manufacturing has shifted to Asia and technological advances have increased automation, highly visible job losses and slow wage growth have led some in advanced economies to question the merits of globalisation. Nationalism has become a stronger political force and protectionist sentiment has increased. This poses a threat to open economic policies that have underpinned global growth and prosperity over the last 30 years. Strategically, the picture has become much more complicated too. The economic growth that has come with globalisation is changing power balances, particularly in our region, the Indo-Pacific. The dispersal of global power has continued with many countries, China, Japan, India and others building increasingly powerful military forces and positions within global architecture to match their rising economic weight. The international order that has been a foundation of global growth and stability is being contested. International rules designed to help maintain peace and minimise coercion are being challenged. Competition is intensifying over maritime and land borders, sea and airspace and regional economic integration. A mammoth topic, as I said, to talk about in my short time here with you this afternoon, but equally, obviously, one which presents tremendous career opportunities for future ANU graduates. For a nation of only 25 million people, the world Australia faces today is increasingly challenging. This is the context in which we developed the government's foreign policy white paper released last November. It would have been easy for complexity and uncertainty to lead to indecision and inertia in Australian foreign policy. But such an approach would not protect Australia's vital economic and security interests. Nor would it represent the best of who we are and the long history of our vigorous engagement with our own region. We did not go down that easy path. Last year we considered, debated and discussed, consulting widely the challenges in front of us and we delivered for government a white paper that set out a plan to maintain the prosperity, peace and security to which Australians are accustomed. We made choices, of course we did, choices about what was most important to Australia, choices about where we should direct effort. We chose to identify the Indo-Pacific as being of primary importance to Australia. This reflects the strategic and economic reality that the most important part of the world for Australia is embraced by these two oceans. It also reflects the reality that India is an increasingly significant feature of our outlook. The Indo-Pacific and its dynamic economies will continue to create opportunities for Australia but we will have to work harder clearly to hold our place. We will need to be competitive and agile. We will have to work intelligently and creatively to support the international order that enables us to benefit from others' rise. We will need to think and act strategically and use all the levers at our disposal to maximise our influence. Almost 12 months on from its launch the geo-strategic shifts we identified in the white paper continued to test even the most robust foreign policy framework. Ours, however, is not a set and forget document. Public debate, which we welcome on the policies that underpin the white paper, will only sharpen our ongoing policy reviews. The Indo-Pacific is undergoing a strategic transition as profound as the economic transformation that preceded it. No long-term foreign policy objective is more important to Australia than ensuring this change does not disrupt the stability that underpins economic growth and prosperity. This will be best achieved if our region evolves in a way that does not erode and ideally supports the fundamental principles on which the Indo-Pacific's prosperity and cooperative relations are based. Australia will be more secure in a region characterized by respect for international law and other norms and where disputes resolve peacefully. We will be more prosperous in a region in which open markets facilitate the free flow of trade, capital, technology and ideas. We therefore seek a balance in the region that supports these objectives and helps protect the interests of all states, large and small. Australia, of course, is not a global power or a great power, yet we should not underestimate our strength, especially the strength of our partnerships. Our approach to the Indo-Pacific is multifaceted and we are investing in each of these facets so that we can better shape the character of our region. We are deepening our Indo-Pacific bilateral relations, especially in Asia, because they are among our most important in their own right and because strong bilateral relations help support our regional goals. In March this year, Prime Minister Turnbull concluded a strategic partnership with Vietnam, strengthening our defence, trade and diplomatic ties. In August, Prime Minister Morrison concluded a comprehensive strategic partnership with Indonesia, reinforcing our emphasis on trade integration as a national and regional priority. We are also working more across our regional partnerships to support a shared vision for the region. We seek to strengthen regional political, security and economic architecture and to help build regional norms, rules of the road, if you like. For example, we're committed to adopting and owning international legal principles as a regional framework for dispute resolution. In March this year, we signed a maritime boundaries treaty with Timor-Lest, the result of a conciliation process under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, UNCLOS. The conciliation allowed us to move forward on the type of boundary issue that we see locked down in tension and dispute elsewhere in the world. Instead here, we found the space for negotiation and compromise, an example of how international legal process can help improve relationships and strengthen regional stability. International law is fundamental for achieving the balance we seek, but the reality is that it in turn depends on a working balance between powers. At the same time, we recognise that a region in which all the major powers are actively engaged, the US, China, India, Japan and Indonesia, for example, will help support a long-term balance favourable to our interests. Our alliance with the United States is central to Australia's security and we're committed to enriching this crucial relationship. Since the release of the White Paper, the government has been active in fulfilling this commitment, deepening our engagement across a wider spectrum of key figures. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Maurice Payne, is in Washington this week doing just that. In July, following the Osmin consultations, Australia and the US announced a series of partnership initiatives to focus our efforts out to mid next year. The breadth of these initiatives speak for themselves, everything from mineral extraction to infrastructure investment, from civil space activities to global health, from energy security to cyber security. Our bilateral engagement is more than just a few key players at the most senior levels of the US administration. It is with scientists and specialists and business people and policy makers at every level. We are mindful of the important US interests in Southeast Asia. We want the US to be deeply engaged in our region. In Southeast Asia, as well as in Northeast Asia. In the US itself, these issues I have spoken about have been under close study. Over this past year, we've seen a focus on strategy building in Washington, a national security strategy and a national defense strategy have been released. Both these documents commit the US to deeper engagement with the Indo-Pacific. That is very welcome. The Australian government also believes it is strongly in our interest to play an active part in shaping our region's approach to economic integration. As Trade Minister Simon Birmingham has said, global trade isn't, I quote, what has been so successful at lifting our prosperity in Australia and millions of others out of poverty around the world, end quote. And we want to ensure that trade rules continue to move towards openness, inclusiveness and predictability over the next decade and beyond. I acknowledge that will be difficult. To this end, Australia has been among the core group of countries driving ahead with trade liberalisation through the TPP-11. The signing of this deal in March is a major achievement. It stands as a platform that is open to others to join if they're ready to meet its high standards as several are interested in doing. Quite clearly also, the role of China is vital for continuing stability and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific and will shape the future contours of our region. China's geopolitical weight derives from its geography, demography and its statecraft, supported of course by its remarkable economic transformation over recent decades. It follows that Australia's bilateral relationship with China is one of our most consequential. Notwithstanding our distinct perspectives on some issues, we are clear-eyed about the opportunities as well as some of the challenges before us and are confident of building a durable partnership founded on our shared interests and mutual respect for lasting mutual benefit. From a broader perspective, the relationship between China and the United States is the most significant for the future and its condition will colour the regional strategic landscape. Some competition between the two countries is inevitable. It's clear, clearly evident now, but there is space for cooperation on issues of common interest. Of course, Southeast Asia and its regional organisation, ASEAN, are central to any debate about the future of our region and central, therefore to our policymaking. Geographically, diplomatically and strategically, ASEAN sits at the heart of the Indo-Pacific. It is, after all, the collective voice of Southeast Asia. It has helped develop significant parts of our rules-based order and it convenes the most important diplomatic forums in which powers of the Indo-Pacific meet, such as the East Asia Summit. Equally, Southeast Asia's central role in the Indo-Pacific is putting its cohesion to the test. How Southeast Asia countries respond to the shifting balance of power in the region more broadly will be one of the factors which shapes our region's future. We have long recognised Southeast Asia's strategic and economic significance, but we know we need to intensify engagement with this key region as we committed to do in the White Paper. This was why we hosted the 10 ASEAN nations here in Australia earlier this year at the ASEAN Australia Special Summit. This was a unique opportunity to engage and work with all of our key ASEAN partners in a new way and to demonstrate to them the emphasis we place on them and the region we share. The Special Summit marked, I believe, a new era in our partnership. Australia and ASEAN committed to intensify our response to regional and global challenges and build on our deep legacy of economic cooperation. At the same time, our partnerships in the South Pacific remain an important anchor for our efforts in the broader region. We work from the principle that a secure, politically stable, economically resilient Pacific Island chain is a necessary element for security in the Indo-Pacific more broadly. Our commitment is grounded in a narrative of regional opportunity and ambition, and our efforts are explicitly directed at those priorities identified by Pacific Island leaders themselves. To support economic growth, for example, we focus specifically on increasing opportunity for jobs, income and skills growth through structured labour mobility arrangements. Building on our existing seasonal worker program, the Pacific Labor Scheme, which started in July this year, will mean that up to an additional 2,000 Pacific workers will have access to the Australian job market each year, and that number is set to grow in the years ahead. To support regional security cooperation, Foreign Minister Payne joined Pacific leaders in signing the boy declaration in Nauru just last month, a set of principles that define and strengthen our security relationships. We have agreed to pool our resources, foster cooperation between governments, and improve information sharing, targeting security issues across the spectrum from illegal fishing and drug smuggling to climate change and disaster resilience. Australia will play a key role in supporting implementation of the new declaration. Through an Australia Pacific Security College from early 2019 to help strengthen Pacific capacity and security networks, through our 30-year Pacific Maritime Security Program, delivering new Guardian-class patrol boats and aerial surveillance, and through a new Pacific Fusion Centre, also announced by the Foreign Minister in Nauru to be set up by mid-next year to help strengthen maritime domain awareness and enable better targeted security responses. In short, we are helping to develop the systems custom-built for our region to deliver on leaders' ambitions for a stronger collective response to the contemporary security challenges facing the Pacific. We recognise, too, the importance of Australia's personal connections across the Pacific in security and in all other areas. We continue to build on partnerships both between our governments, including through regular guest-of-government visits, and between our communities. We are creating new programs to better connect Australians and the Pacific Islanders, the Pacific Connect Program for leaders across different sectors, the Schools Partnership Program for school teachers and children, the Pacific Research Program for academics and researchers. Meanwhile, we remain focused on existing programs that build lifelong links to deepen cultural connection and knowledge. The new Colombo Plan has supported thousands of Australians to study and complete internships in the Pacific region, while the Australia Awards Program has likewise supported students from the Pacific to study in Australia and elsewhere in the region. These initiatives are an investment in the truest sense of the word in our ongoing relationships and in our region's security. The government also committed in the White Paper to engage with the major democracies in the region, both bilaterally and in small groupings, what we call minilaterals, to strengthen the cohesion of nations that share our vision for the region. The pace of these activities since November has been intense. Prime Minister Morrison travelled to Indonesia for his very first overseas visit, less than a week after being sworn in, a visit that culminated in the conclusion of our newest and truly historic bilateral free trade agreement. In December, the Secretary of the Department of Defence and I held the first ever 2 plus 2 meeting with our Indian counterparts in New Delhi, strengthening this increasingly important relationship. Our second 2 plus 2 is scheduled for next week. We engage radically with our counterparts from the Republic of Korea as we all strive to manage the unprecedented threat to the region's security constituted by North Korea's development of nuclear weapons and potent delivery systems. It's a focus that echoes strongly in our engagement with Japan, where we work hard to strengthen our broader special strategic partnership and build ties through smaller groupings. Our trilateral strategic dialogue with the US and Japan is well established, of course, and our foreign secretary level trilateral with Japan and India is gaining momentum. We're looking for new opportunities to work with our close partners. For example, just two weeks ago, senior officials from Australia, India and Indonesia met for the second time within a year for a formal trilateral dialogue. This is a new initiative between three key Indo-Pacific partners, independent of the great powers, covering strategic dynamics, economic integration, regional issues of mutual importance, and practical trilateral cooperation across a number of domains. You will also have heard of the Quadrilateral Group. This is a new forum and its discussions have not reached the level of maturity of some other mini-laterals, such as the dialogue with the US and Japan. However, the Quad has had two meetings since it was reconstituted last year, and I am confident that it will become an important part of our regional diplomacy. Through these discussions, we commit not just to strengthening partnerships, but also to working more effectively on the issues that concern our region. Maritime security and stability, including key principles, such as the freedom of navigation and overflight, remain essential to safeguard the key trade routes on which Australia relies. That is why at the ASEAN Australia Special Summit, we announced that Australia and ASEAN will work together to implement a package of initiatives to strengthen civil maritime and border protection, maritime domain awareness, maritime law, and its applications, and the protection of regional fish stocks. Much of the competition in the region is also playing out in the development of infrastructure. Australia recognises the importance of investing in high-quality infrastructure to maintain growth and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific. Indeed, estimates suggest at least $33 trillion between 2016 and 2032, beyond our 10-year horizon, but only just, is required for a new infrastructure investment in developing economies in the region. Our goal is to ensure that investment brings growth to the region, rather than tension between competing powers. Strong norms such as transparency, fair and open competition, and robust standards are critical to help build an open, inclusive regional economy. That is why we are focusing more closely on the geo-economics of our region. We've established a new geo-economic section in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which is engaging closely across national security and other realms of government on this new and complex challenge. It's also an issue that we are discussing more intensively with our partners. Let me draw a few conclusions, and then I'll look forward to chatting with you all. But over the next decade, the Indo-Pacific will present substantial challenges to Australia's security and prosperity, obviously. This region, our region, is and will become more competitive and contested. Politics in many countries has become more fragmented and volatile. Global governance has become more complex. The rules on which we have relied to shape the character of our order are under pressure. In this next decade, there is much at stake for Australia. We need to apply ourselves within renewed vigor, focus and agility to the task of keeping Australians safe and prosperous. That is what the government is doing with commitment, confidence, and a clear-eyed sense of Australia's interests, as well as a deep consciousness of the scale of the challenge that we face. This is also the decade in which many of you will be laying down the foundations of and then developing your careers. Perhaps among you, some who will follow Coral Bell in leaving an indelible mark on Australian foreign policy. Now that is a cause for further optimism. Thank you.


Hello my name is David Stevens and I do research in oceans and their impact on the climate system at the University of East Anglia. I guess as a scientist I like to do controlled experiments so you maybe change something and see how it responds but you need a control case. Now unfortunately we don't have a control case. You know we've only got the one planet and yet we are performing an experiment and I guess modeling is pretty much our only chance of trying to predict what might happen or understand what we are doing to the planet. A climate model is a mathematical description of the components of the climate system so the ocean, the atmosphere, the cryosphere and we use equations to represent those components and essentially we just solve those equations. I do find it amazing that you can set up a mathematical model of the earth and essentially do nothing but shine the sun on it and it produces a climate not unlike what we see if we can take measurements. The fundamental equations we use I guess go back to Newton's second law of motion so if you consider a parcel of fluid in the atmosphere or in the ocean then there will be forces on that parcel of fluid and those forces will induce an acceleration and that gives that parcel of fluid a motion and we can essentially solve for many many millions of parcels of fluid all around the earth and compute the winds in the atmosphere and currents in the ocean. My main interests are in the ocean and the oceans role on the climate system so I very much focus on trying to improve and understand the ocean component of climate models. The full models themselves are really really complex and understanding them is not really the kind of thing that a single person can do in isolation so climate modeling tends to be a team type activity. There might be a group working on the ocean, a group working on the atmosphere but then they'll come together and help build a single model of the entire system and then work together in terms of analyzing the results because the components are all interacting with one another. Let's start by just talking about what why you might even study the ocean. It's really important because it's enormous capacity to store heat. One of my favorite factoids for telling people about the ocean is the top few meters of the ocean have got the same heat storage capacity as the entire atmosphere above. So there's an enormous potential for storing heat or taking heat out of the atmosphere or releasing heat back to the atmosphere. So the ocean isn't a single monolithic slab of water. If you go to say the tropics the waters at the surface can be around about 30 degrees Celsius and yet if you go down to the depths at say four or five kilometers the waters can be say two degrees Celsius. So there's an enormous differential in heat between the surface ocean and the deep ocean. So that leads to possibly the question of why is the water so cold at the tropics in the deep waters and where is that cold water come from and it doesn't take too much thought to think well actually it must have come from somewhere cold and there are movements in the ocean right down to the deepest parts of the water column which are transporting waters from the poles where water tends to sink gets very dense and sinks to the seafloor and then spreads out throughout the world's oceans and this transfer of cold water towards the warmer regions the equatorial regions and the associated warm water flowing from the surface from the tropics towards the poles provides a heat transport so the ocean is transferring heat from the equatorial attitudes to the polar attitudes. So this flow of warm water at the surface towards the poles and cold water at depth towards the equator produces a transfer of heat from the equator towards the poles and it's this transfer of heat plays an important role in keeping our planet at the temperature and the regions of our planet at the temperatures that we live in. I'm not talking at all about global warming here just how the climate system maintains itself in a fairly equilibrium state I mean there are some there is some variability on top of this but the basic mean state is set by some of these processes. People have for many years thought about what would happen if this overturning circulation we talked about earlier particularly within the Atlantic shut down that transports an awful amount of heat northwards towards the high latitudes in Europe. There's been less focus on the southern oceans and yet there is an overturning circulation associated with the southern ocean and the waters around Antarctica and it often seems very remote and we thought what would happen if that shut down would it have an impact and how global would the impact be felt. So we did some similar experiments where we released a significant amount of fresh water in the southern oceans to mimic carving or melting of the ice sheets to look at the impact that might have on the planet as a whole and there were some surprising findings right through to impacts in the northern hemisphere. So you know the Antarctic being a long way away doesn't mean so you can ignore it and the any problems that might occur there and not our problem because you know they potentially might be. I guess probably the key question at the moment is how will the ocean respond in a change in climate? Will it reduce the impacts of the global change we're seeing or is it reducing the impacts of the global change? What are the potential feedbacks could some regions see a faster change in climate some regions slower? We already know that the Arctic sees a much more amplified response to global warming than say the tropics. There are a number of ways of going out into the ocean and measuring the heat of the ocean or the temperature of the ocean. So the traditional method was to go along in the ship and then lower an instrument from the surface down to the seafloor and make a profile measurement of temperature. That's very expensive both in terms of people and monetary costs. Ship time is tens of thousands of UK pounds per day and then you have to man it and have trained scientists operating the instruments. More recently there's been a huge increase in the number of profiles of temperature in the ocean from something called the Argo network. So Argo is a network of floats and they do something rather odd for a float in that they sink. So they start at the surface and will sink to a depth of about 2,000 meters and then they move along with the ocean currents and after 10 days or so they can pop up to the surface and when they're coming up to the surface again they're measuring temperature and they speak through the satellite communications network and deliver their temperature data they've recorded and then sink back down to the depth again and then travel along. And there's about 3,000 of these in the world oceans and it's produced a real step change in the number of measurements we have of temperature profiles. Pre and post Argo is just the it really can start with contrast. So the temperature data we collect from the both ships and from the Argo program are useful to help us start off our forecasts of the climate system and in particular the ocean component. So to start a forecast we need to know the state of the system at one particular time and back in the 60s we had very few measurements of vast swathes of the ocean where there were literally no measurements ever been taken whereas since about 2005 there are measurements throughout the world's oceans pretty much everywhere there are very few regions possibly just the polar regions where measurements are sparse. So we use this this data to provide some starting point for our forecasts and that's called initialization. Initialized forecasts of ocean conditions have certainly got a much better chance of being more accurate now where we have all this data compared to the 60s. I originally trained as a mathematician and in my third year I did a course on mathematical modeling of the oceans. It was very theoretical and you looked at very idealized models that oceans were square basins and it was really focusing in on processes and I found that really really interesting so I went on and did a PhD in mathematical modeling of the oceans but the models became more complex and more realistic and eventually that led me to talking to observational oceanographers and I guess in the late 80s early 90s was a time when the models of the ocean were just getting realistic enough for observational oceanographers to really start to believe them and possibly even use them in planning their observational campaigns and so I started to work with one of the observational oceanographers here and actually even went to see a few times which was really well one exciting but two seeing the measurements actually collected at first hand you know really gives you I think a much greater insight into what's going on within the ocean and also an appreciation of what you're doing in terms of the modeling. This research cruise and they're called cruises. They're not necessarily a holiday but it was to the Antarctic and to the southern ocean taking measurements in the southern ocean it's about two months long but really enjoyable and really productive so I joined the ship in the Falkland Islands and then we sailed down to the Antarctic continent and then from there took measurements all the way up through the Atlantic to just off of Brazil so just near Rio de Janeiro but it really was you know mesmerizing it's absolutely beautiful pristine the wildlife is just incredible and you know we should make sure we shouldn't damage it. I think it's just a case of being in trying to engage and be open and be honest and I do try and get out and engage with the public so I go into schools and you know I try and give public lectures when there's good opportunities so most recently I did one to a group of old age pensioners in Norfolk in July so but again you know they were all really interested really engaged and it's good fun you know I really do enjoy trying to put over some of the science


You are going to take an HIV test well unless of course you say you don't want to that is the premise behind Opt-out HIV testing and in the UK. This strategy has proven to be very effective I mean imagine that more people get routinely tested and therefore more people who are living with HIV are Diagnosed to or otherwise undiagnosed or people who fell out of care who might need a helping hand finding their way back into The healthcare system this should be the gold standard here in the US Everyone routinely gets tested for HIV unless they say they don't want to rather than the other way around which is what we have now Which is that you have to ask to be tested this way? Routinizing it takes away the stigma anyone who is afraid to get tested or who is afraid of the stigma associated with getting tested This conveniently erases that issue


Welcome to the Dowd Ranch. I'm Rick Dowd and this is my wife, Marlis. We are the 2010 Leopold Conservation Award winners. We hope you enjoy a tour of our ranch. To one Leopold Conservation Award has been very humbling, rewarding.  We didn't realize that you could get an award for doing the things that we had been doing all these years and that there were people with thoughts the same as we had. How you take care of the land, it takes care of you. It's just been very rewarding and Marlis and I have talked about this several times. The award has been tremendous, but I think the nicest thing out of this is all the people we've met, the friends we've made. And there's just some awesome people out there. They're doing some awesome things outside of the box that, you know, by winning this award, we've been able to visit with those people and be in touch with them. And we're just learning so many things. We moved here in the fall of 73. We started out with just a trailer house and one barn and we've added since then. So it's been an ongoing process of learning how to take care of things and 10 years ago when we started and switched our operation, we were in our season long use with our land. And I could tell our winter pasture was being depleted and our summer pasture wasn't getting used enough and I knew we had to balance that more and I didn't know how to do it. And a gentleman by the name of Rick Peterson from the NRCS at Kadoka, he suggested that maybe I might be interested in going to this ranching for profit school, which I did. And that's when the light bulb went off that, you know, through rotational grazing, calving in sync with mother nature, everything would start falling into place. And so it's just within the last year or two that we really noticed everything is starting to click together. The main reason we want to conserve this land is so where we've got something better to pass on to future generations. Any more you go out, if a son or somebody wants to come back on the place, you've got to buy the neighbor's place out, be able to bring them back home with rotational grazing and improving your grass. I foresee the future that you don't have to do that. You can increase your cow herds. You can increase your grass. You can retain more of the nutrients here instead of watching them run downstream and have them be more profitable. We're here at one of our range monitoring sites in one of our summer pastures. We've got six of these sites throughout the ranch where we're monitoring the grass that we're producing throughout the year. At the end of our grazing season, we will remove this cage. We have a ring about so big in diameter that we throw down. We clip everything inside of this ring. We put it in a bag and we weigh it. We take that ring and we throw it out here in the grass where these cows have grazed. We will clip everything in that ring, weigh it, measure it, and we compare the two. We know exactly how much grass we produced right here and how much was consumed. Last fall, when we were coming out of summer pasture, moving back into winter pasture, we left more grass in summer pasture than what was in winter pasture. Even though we had clipped that twice, we moved back here. There was less grass.  That light bulb went off last fall. When we moved back, we left more grass in summer pasture than what we came back to here in winter pasture. Also, we made the switch from the March and April and we've gone to the May and June cabin and we haven't looked back. Our main goal is to try and match our cows' nutritional requirements with that that the grass is producing. And here in May and June, our grass is coming on lush. The amount of energy that it's producing is high. Right now, our calves, our cows are calving. Therefore, their nutritional requirements are high. My advice is go out and go to these grazing tours, demonstrations, schools. When I first started out, I thought the only way to get ahead was to stay home and work as hard as you can, which is all right to a point, but there's so many things out there for you to learn, to observe. There are people out there that are willing to help you to tell you what you're doing and how you can improve what they've failed at and what they've accomplished and how you can go on and learn from their mistakes. So where you don't have to make those mistakes again. I think the main thing I want to get across is we take care of the land because in return it takes care of us and our livelihood. And I think the two things have to balance. We don't come in and misuse the land. We don't misuse the animals. It's all in a nice balance and we try to keep it that way. And I think for us, we're such a minority, the farmers and the ranchers. We need to get this word out that yes, these people are taking care of this land to the best of their ability and hoping to pass it on in better shape than what they originally found it.


I welcome you in the course of leadership, emotional intelligence and the sea and making. This is module number 57 and we are going to talk about that how can we be real? How can we act with authenticity and what is our domain satisfaction level? Now, to understand our domain satisfaction level, we have to attempt certain exercises. The first exercise is going to talk about our happiness rating that how happy we are with our four way domains, how happy we are with our home, with our community, with our self and with our profession. For that we need to fill a table which is our exercise number five and let's fill this table together. Now if we start filling this particular table, there are four domains with us, the work, the home, the community and the self and then combining these four we have life as a whole. Now supposedly the parameter we have to fill this table it says that how satisfied you are presently you have to evaluate this and to fill this there is a rating scale which is given to us where one would mean not at all satisfied and ten would mean fully satisfied in appropriate column which is just given in front of us. Now supposedly I have got certain issues at work and I say that I am satisfied up till three and suppose at family and home I am comfortable and I rate it seven and supposedly at community level I am not much satisfied I rate it five and supposedly with my own self my body my spirit my mind so if I evaluate it how much satisfied am I with my own self supposedly I say it and if I conclude the whole situation what do I feel that how much satisfied am I with my whole life so I may say that I am seven satisfied with my whole life. Now this satisfaction grid which we have filled here it has got certain implications or an implications ko ab hum next slide par go through kartein for example when we talk about your four way happiness ratings so exercise five ka next step to humare paase wo yeh hai ki we have to again think about the importance and the focus but this time how much importance and focus ko madina zah rakhthe huye apne satisfaction and performance ko bhi saati saati evaluate wo karna chaate hain. So we are going to assess importance focus satisfaction and performance these four constructs to find out ke ish waka thamari situation in terms of our attention focus or concern with all of the stakeholders wo kitni hai agar me ek martabha pheer se sochna shru karun to maybe mere work ki importance for me is 20% mere home ki importance for me is 40% mere community ki importance for me is 20% aur me apni zaat par tawaj jo 20% dena chahata hu mere importance apne liye itni hai aur agar me focus ki baat karun to ho sakta hai ki the work is taking a lot of my time and I say 40% I am giving to my work and home is getting ignored I am giving 10 and if I say ke community aur society ko me kitna wak de raho so maybe I am giving 30 ya hum dubara se apna analysis aur catharsis kar rahe hain and supposedly if I think ke how much am I left with with my own self so I would say maybe I am 20% left with my focus for my own self now after filling this importance and focus I have to see ke itni tawaj jo aur itni importance dena ke baat yaa me satisfied bhi un se zyada hu supposedly at the work although I am giving 40% of my focus but I am not satisfied so I may say 3 at home I am giving less focus lakin ghar se mujhe zyada satisfaction hai so I may say 8 agar me community ki baat karun to vaha pe mere satisfaction level supposedly is at 5 and agar main self for mind ki baat karun to maybe with my own self I am satisfied to 7 like wise agar main performance implications ko dekhun to although hosata hain ke work par mera inner satisfaction level wo to nahi hai but I am giving my full time and I am giving my full energy and I am having higher performance so there is a possibility that I say 8 at home supposedly if I say ke mere performance at home with my family with my siblings with my kids agar main usko consider kar raha hu to maybe mere performance jyasi ho nahi chahiye waisi shayat vaha par nahi ho parahi to I say 6 community ki agar main baat karun to I am I am I am thinking in terms of neutral perspective ke community ko main satisfaction me 5 rate kia lakin mere community ki performance may be low to I say 2 ishi taraha mind self body ko agar main consider karun to mere just self performance hai apni zaat ke hawaale se maybe I rate it to 6 ab ye main ne different ratings random li yaha par apni sochke mutabek marki agar hain overall perspective me dekhun to overall perspective me how much satisfied am I with my own life agar main overall ko count karun to maybe I am something like at 6 aur agar main overall apni life ki performance ko dekhun to maybe I am at something like 5 ab yaha par yeh ek random figures hain hain yaha par punch kiin in random figures ko obviously jab aap apni liye punch karoge to aap ko in ko bohot analyze karke likhna hain it is not just going to be random because agar aap isko random performance in random satisfaction me count karenge to uske results bhi eventually aapko randomi milenge therefore agar aap apni aapko true meanings me self awareness me lekar jaana chaate ho so you have to be very much specific in your life ki cheezon ki aap ke liye importance kithni hain cheezon ke upar aap focus kithna de rahe ho aap ka satisfaction level un tamam stake holders aur concern ke saath kya hain aur aap ki jo performance aspects hain wo kis kadar reality based chal rahe hain dear students abhi jaise hamne stable me dekhah kya hamari importance focus satisfaction aur performance they are not synchronized they are not patronized kisi jagha par me tavajjo zyada de rahe ho lekin mere jo performance hai wo come hain aur kisi jagha par me tavajjo kam de rahe ho dekhin mere performance wo zyada ho sakti hain so aapko ek balance kriyate karna hain in tamam exercises ka jo main maksad hain wo yeh hain ke aap ek balance kriyate kar sakke hain apne 360 degree of life me ab usse balance ko further investigate karne ke liye remember get time is the greatest healer that is just a matter of time zindagi ke bohot se maamalaat vakat ke saath automatically hal wo hobi jaate hain sometimes you have to see ke kisi jagha par you are physically present but psychologically absent the reason being ke aapki tavajjo wo kisi aur tarf merkuz hain sometimes it can happen ke aapke jo psychological patterns hain they are having certain interference aap sochna kuch jaare ho lekin halat vaakiaat tejar baat wo aapki tavajjo ko kisi aur tarf lekar jaare hain sometimes it is possible that focus on what matters when it matters ye aapke liye major concern wo ban jaata hain aur bazukata apke karpaate wo bazukata apne hain karpaate wo at the same time aapko yeh dekhna padega ke aap kaha par maujood ho aur aapki soch wo kinh cheezon ko apne paraya me liye hui hain aur kya in dono baat wo mein synchronization patronization wo maujood hain ya nahi hain ya aapko apne zaat me flexibility adaptability nazar aati hain ya nahi nazar aati ya aap apne halat aur vaakiaat ke mutabek apne aapko dahal sakte ho ke nahi dahal sakte ho so it is just a matter of time and also you need to find out what's important and where you devote your time to aapki level aapki life mein level of importance kisi cheez ki kisi shakhs ki kisi jaga ki aur aapki tavajjo unke hawaale se kya in dono cheez wo mein koi arapth maujood hain ya nahi ye tamantar aspects actually hame kuch questions ki teraf lekar jayenge for example what is the biggest disconnect in the relationship among your four domains aapko kya nazar aaha hain ki in chaar hawaaleon se your community yourself your home and your profession kaha par aapko lag raha hain ke there is something missing there is something which you need to rectify there is something that you need to change at the same time what changes might you make to bring the four domains of your life into greater harmony in chaaron cheez wo mein in chaaron perspectives mein apne zindagi ke north south east west mein aapkin tabdeeliyon ko lana cha hoge jin tabdeeliyon se aap justify kar suko importance ko focus ke saath focus ko satisfaction ke saath aur satisfaction ko performance ke saath therefore how would you change aur how such changes which would actually take place to bring your happiness rating more therefore agar hame saari baat ko conclude karein toh hammari happiness rating hamaari zindagi mein hamare stakeholder ki importance that is the level of satisfaction and our performance. These four things together will lead to our happiness. Everything will be possible only when you learn to analyze things with mindfulness. Thank you.


Greetings from Wisconsin. You're on. Hey, go get ready, huh? Say it again. That's snow already. Not much. It's actually pretty warm here right now for the season. I do want to take an opportunity to, you know, encourage listeners and everybody to, in addition to supporting yourself to support the Iron Rand Institute and one simple and fun way that I found to do that is through Amazon Smiles every time you make a purchase, Amazon will kick a few percentage points over towards the Institute. I do that. I just got my report from Amazon on how many dollars, you know, the Iron Rand Institute has received from the Amazon Smiles program and it's a non-trivial amount. So yeah, moving on. I want to talk about, you know, I guess music versus lyrics, right? So you get a lot of questions about musicians and songs.  And I guess when you're having those discussions, are you separating the music from the lyrics? Are you considering both? Does the music take away from the message? Does it add to the message? How are you analyzing that? So the ideal, right, the ideal song, the ideal any kind of vocal musical piece, the lyrics and the music would be completely integrate. They would reinforce one another if the words evoking an emotion, the music should evoke a similar emotion, right? And that's great music. When you can do both of that, when you can have the words and the music integrated, no matter what the theme, but integrated, then that is, I think, an ideal situation. And that happens. I think Pink Floyd does. I mean, the music is pretty, usually pretty depressing and dark, and the lyrics are pretty depressing and dark, right? And it's integrated. And in that sense, it's good, right? It's good aesthetically because it's integrated, right? It might not have the right sense of life. It might be presenting values that you don't like, but you have to evaluate it aesthetically not based on our values, but based on the characteristics of the aesthetic characteristics of the music and the lyrics and the integration between the two. I find I respond much more to music than to lyrics, right? So I, for example, I listened to a lot of opera.  And I can get, because the music is so emotion evoking, I hope that the lyrics are consistent with that when she's singing because the emotions are so strong. I listen to, I really like Bossa Nova, which is a Brazilian form of jazz. And so the singing is in Portuguese. I have no idea what they're saying, right? But I find that the music and the emotion that you can express with a voice, when that, that's another level of integration, right? It's how you use your voice, the lyrics, the music, all of that. I'm very attracted. But on the other hand, when I listen to songs for my teen years, particularly in Hebrew, the fact that I understand the woods is a value. So, you know, I think it's, I think it's, I think you can enjoy different things in different songs. And again, the ideal is when everything is integrated. I, you know, I just, I just heard, I just heard the singer, Urna Sacks, Urna Sacks, right? She's a singer 20s, 30s, 40s, right? Long time ago, 100 years, almost 100 years ago. And she had the most stunning voice I've ever heard. She could do stuff at the top range that I've never heard any singer opera, non opera do, right? And it was just enjoyable just listening to her voice. The music was fun. Didn't understand the words she said. She's saying in German. But the stuff she was doing with her voice was stunning, just stunning. So I can enjoy different things in different compositions. You know, I don't particularly like Bob Dylan's voice. But I think his voice matches his lyrics and his music quite well. I wouldn't want Bob Dylan singing Bossa Nova. If you know Bossa Nova, it's a smooth jazz, right? But for his gritty poetry and the kind of music that comes with it, I think his voices perfectly integrate. And it's a blend. So I don't know if I'm answering your question. I'm rambling on about my views on this stuff. Yeah, I think you're answering the question pretty well. I thought, for me, I wanted to clear it up a little bit that did seem to me like you kind of focus more on the music than the lyrics. And I figure a lot of the questions you get, you know, the questioner isn't concerned about the music. They're impressed with the lyrics of Rush more so than the music, perhaps. Maybe. I don't know. And again, I've never really responded to Rush. So I won't comment. But I also look, you know, take Pink Floyd, for those of you who know Pink Floyd. Take Wish You Were Here, right? I mean, the, or Shine on Crazy Diamond, either one of those, that album, the words can be interpreted in a way that I understand, right? I wish you were here. The music is very wishy, right? It's like what's the term I'm looking for, but it expresses that, I miss you, right? It really does express that longing, that's the word, longing, right? That Wish You Were Here is reflecting. And it's got the sad, longing, wistful kind of thing to it. And so I think the music and the lyrics are well integrated. And this is the thing, the lyrics, I don't respond to literature generally, to written word generally, because it's right. I don't respond to literature because it's right, right? I respond to it because it's beautiful, because it's well communicated, because it's projecting some intense value. It doesn't even have to be my value. So take, for example, Hugo, Victor Hugo. You read Victor Hugo, and like Demis Robles has a whole thing about socialism and about the plight of the poor, and 93, which is my favorite, they're struggling over things that I don't really care that much about. I mean, both the heroes are my villains, right? They're both wrong. But abstract away from that, and it is the heroism, it is the valuing, not the particular values that I respond to. So I worry about objectivist art, so-called objectivist art, there is no such thing as objectivist art. Art that is so focused on getting the lyrics to be consistent with objectivism that everything else is forgotten. But A, the lyrics have to be good. That doesn't mean objectivist just means good. Then if you're an objectivist and you want them to be consistent with your values, then they need to project those values. And then you have to write great music on top of that. All of that is super, super difficult, right? And I respond, different people respond to different things. I respond to the music because the music is more direct. There's no literature. There's a thought process involved. You're thinking about things. Music is just responsive. And I find that very easy and in a sense appealing because I don't have to, okay, does this make sense? Is this true? I just think, is this beautiful, isn't it? That's it, right? There's no cognition involved, which is nice for artists supposed to appeal to your emotion and music goes directly to your emotion. And the lyrics in a sense get in the way because now I'm thinking, well, does Bob Dylan really mean that? What does he mean by that? And then I've lost the song because I'm trying to analyze his lyrics. Now, when you kind of understand again, Bob Dylan, his lyrics are not objectivist, right? But his lyrics make sense in the context of the music. And they again reflect certain emotions that I think are universal. That's what makes him successful. The fact that the emotions are universal emotions, even if the specifics of the lyrics are not something I like.   Even though you would say from an objectivist perspective, oh, you know, that's so depressing. It's so down. Yeah, but I was down and depressed. I was alone as a teenager, you know, hard getting girls and nobody agreed with me. And I felt like I was the only human being on the planet. And Bob Dylan with that song got to me, right? In a way that other forms of art don't, because it's so visceral. Music is so visceral. Anyone? Okay, thank you. I appreciate the attention here. Sure. My pleasure, Matthew. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist roads. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now. 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I think at least 100 of you actually like the show.  There you go. Start liking it. I want to see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this. And you know, the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. So, you know, and if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. Let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes. But if you like it, don't just sit there. Help get the show promoted. 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