screen you can possibly get. Let's see. Yeah, I'm going to try. 90% of Bitcoin can receive. Not a bad plan. Hey, man, Ocean Park. Meet up next Thursday, everybody. Taste the smoke. I got to get ahold of Stephen, though, CVC here. Ocean Park, best beach. I love that place. The pool is gone. Pool is always calling. I want that. Yeah. They're not bad. Pool day. Adorable. Thank you, everybody. Shaolin says, and Shaolin's got a good point here. Companies will be building their own private and permission L2s on Ethereum. The end game for ethos and what you think is not for dog coins. It's a good point. I remind you, though, that JP Morgan are the same thing on Avalanche, and they seem to like what they saw. So it could be Ethereum. It could be that. I think all these L1s can do permission chains. But the question then is, do they have the liquidity to settle everything on chain? That's the big thing. But yeah, permission, I can definitely see that for sure. Back looks better. Back's going good. Therapy's going on. Should be okay. What do you hold? The pool is cold. Thanks. I don't bother earning this one. Never win an L. Tesla, you'll win. At some point, you will. The text is so tiny, I bet your man is. It's true. Merry Christmas from Norway. Rotate selling to Bitcoin. Not a bad plan, actually. Rob says, dump right now. We aren't in the past to having, you know, yeah, some people will say that this market is overbought and that we should really think about selling some for the impending second scare or the next pullback. Which it could. We could go down 30%. But let me ask you guys a question. Let's say that you're in profit. You bought Bitcoin at $100, and then Bitcoin goes up to $200. So then you sell it. So your profit's $100, right? My math is correct. But then let's say that you did that and it was under a year. And now you got to pay short-term capital gains. So now whatever tax bracket you're in the United States, I don't know how it works everywhere else. I think in Germany, if you keep it over a year, there is no tax. Correct me in the comments for Germans. And I don't know where, I don't know everything else for Spain and UK and everything else. I just tell you like America. So whatever your tax bracket is, let's say you're in the 34% range, right? So now you just got $66 in profits, but you just had to pay the government, you know, $34.  And then let's say that Bitcoin rockets back up to, you know, that $100 or $200 mark. And now you got to buy it at $200 and you kind of go from there. It's like, if you're thinking about taxes and the tax brackets that you have to go into, it really will determine when you want to really want to take your profits. That's why some people, I think they hold too long. It's like, I don't want to pay taxes. I'll pay taxes if I, you know, 100X and go from there. But I mean, it's all relatively the same. It's just a big pain.  I always talk about taking profits because I'm trying to make sure that everybody understands that hitting that sell button is tough.  We bought low. We brought it all the way up and we didn't take enough profits and went all the way down. And the reason is, is because we never really sold. It's just like everything else. It's just like boxing. It's just like fighting. It's just like working out. It's just like doing anything. It's what, it's what you're conditioned to. And if you don't do it, you have atrophy. And I call it selling atrophy where your muscles just kind of waste away because you don't really do it too much. So I just want everybody to just take a little bit of time and go, Oh, sell, you know, sell a little bit. So, you know, so later on when we get, and you watch, hopefully watch the video, when I'm going to sell 80% of my crypto, incorporate some of that, take some from somebody else, and then go, Okay, this is what I want to sell. Or maybe you never sell.  I'm just going to sell Bitcoin until, you know, Fiat gets destroyed and we're all in the Bitcoin standard. Sure. Yes, exactly. I have an I trust capital Roth, but sitting in cash, feel like I missed the boat. Remember, there's also another thing, if you have a Roth IRA, I have it with I trust show sponsor. Thank you guys. I had them for two years. And remember, you can trade within your Roth IRA account, and you don't have to pay any taxes on that.  No taxes. That's in America. I don't know how it works everywhere else. Keep that, keep that sell muscles strong. You know, it was really, that's why I like I like meme coins. Because have you noticed that when I've talked about selling things, specifically, I've said, what have I sold? Bonk. I made a whole video about it. It's very easy to sell that. Because you're like, I don't really think bonk is going to like, you know, change the world. Maybe it does. I don't know. But you can definitely take profits on a meme coin. I think meme coins are great to do those things.  And I sold it and made a little bit of profit. Yeah, pretty easy gets you used to it. I think that's that'll be the training ground from now on, where it's going to get into crazy, crazy doggoins. Why not? Hello, Art. Everyone's good, I think. Shalon says, I'm selling January 1st. Got to push the tax of 2025.  Some people will sell towards the end of this year. Some people sell. Watch out for end of March, early April. That's when most Americans start to sell for tax reasons. So they'll see a little bit dipped there. So you'd said, I know not financial advice, but confusing using the PyCycle Top. Do you wait for it to start selling or leave 40% to finish selling at this age? So for me, that PyCycle Top is pretty much my top indicator, right? It was close enough last time in 2021. So that's when I'll be selling the majority of my Bitcoin. Now, I don't sell at all because you never know.  Who knows? Maybe President Trump comes out. All right, don't get all crazy. President Biden comes out whenever whoever wins and says, hey, we're putting Bitcoin, that's going to be the standard. And we're going to incorporate that into our central banks.   Is it cold? We'll get in the hot tub. All right. So we'll get in the hot tub then. Is it cold? All right, let's see.  So that's what I try to do. That's the plan. Oh, yeah. I do like that guy. Brian says, that's true. I'm the coolest. And the sorest. The one with the worst back too. Let's see. We are just on recovery. Most of the alto down by 78% from all time high. Overbought for short term. Just wait on bull run. That's a good point on short term. That's just it.  Some people are and they're big traders. And of course they'll say like, hey, we use probabilities. We're not gamblers, getcha. Makes sense. But I'm just a kind of a buy and hold and waiting for some blow off tops. That's it. Because nuts. Rob, did you order a saga? I did not order a Solana phone. And that's it. I wish I would have though. Ray seems to love that thing. I say, you're welcome. He wants the fame. Everybody wants. Sure. Fame. Trump. Sure. What is your mention about Moon River? I don't own it. So I don't talk about it. I own so many different cryptos right now. There's not any more room in my portfolio for anything else. Unless something really, really knocks me out. I'm like, I got to have that. Yeah. I thought the poles were green screens or I was not correct. It is a green screen. It's a dynamic green screen. Oh yeah.  They all lie a little bit to get what they want. And that's just par for the course. Do you think 0.1 Bitcoin become good? I think it'll become extremely valuable as time goes on, especially when, if this Bitcoin ETF gets approved January. Maybe January or maybe it's March. I don't know. Everybody seems to think that it's definitely January. So we'll say Christmas. They love the air drops in the second on the phone itself. Yeah, exactly. Brent says, I ordered one Friday cancel my order. I think, did they cancel the order or do you cancel it? Are you a Hedera fan? You think the meme scene will bring eyes to Hedera?  Like when I looked in Hedera, it looked like great technology and a great team and everything else was doing pretty well. Decision will do too much. It's a funny thing about crypto. Take a look at XRP. We just talked about Ripple's council, Alderadi, where, you know, he just talked about yesterday about why they had this this unbelievable plea deal in 2020 before they got sued. And then it's amazing. Someone else had said that, you know, there's pretty much guidance on that XRP is not a security. That was the whole thing of winning that trial or that court case doesn't seem really due too much for the price. You know, like, where's XRP's price right now? I mean, the right behind being, they went up 11, 12% this week, but who knows? Maybe it'll pump later. I own XRP. I'd like it to go up. Oh, no, sorry. I was looking at BNB chain. Amazing. The CEO of Binance gets busted for or bends the knee to KYC and AML problems and kill another 12%. XRP Ripple doing things. It doesn't move at all. So I know like people say like, I, this is this is the whole thing with with diversification. Let's take a look at one year. Went from 33 cents to 16. That's doubled. It's pretty good. Well, you can't do that in S&P 500, can you? So I don't know. Do whatever you want to. I think everything that people own is going to go up anyhow. It doesn't really matter. You know, crypto is one of those, those markets that just, that just happens. Doesn't really make any difference. You got dog with hat. Goes up. You got bonk goes up. You got XRP doing things, kind of goes up. Binance chain goes up. Even though we talked about the CEO, Solana goes crazy. It's crypto. There's no, sometimes there's no rhyme or reason. Sometimes it's just people behind the scenes. ICP. People love that one. Brent says they cancel the blue. I know why they cancel it is because they made a mistake in their inventory. There was an article we talked about a couple of days ago that they had more inventory than they thought they did. And they had things open up on the website. This happened me too. And we're like, oops, sorry, we, we ran out a long time ago. So our bad. Please give your thoughts on Gary Token. That's another meme coin. Probably do awesome. I don't know. I don't know. Awesome boy. Kid in the background. I have 94 dollars with a crypto. No, you don't. You actually now have $116 or 117 or something like that, because I gave him a Solana for his, for Christmas. Hey, you got to start young, right? XRP doesn't move. It's a stable coin.  Are you in Florida? I'm in Puerto Rico. I want to see what VeChain does. Gary is a live streaming project. All right. That Gary coin was a meme coin. There's another YouTuber that says McDonald's is not the best burger, but it's the most popular. It's the same. I said that, but maybe someone else copied me. The tech doesn't, it just means it wins. That's right. It's the worst food you could possibly eat. And sometimes it's delicious. Can't stop that. But yeah, just really, guys, here's the thing. Well, let's wrap this up. Moving into 2024, we're probably going to do pretty great. The Bitcoin ETF looks like we're leaning towards like 99% assured. I still think there's some something blocks. I can't give that up because, you know, I've always thought about that. But moving forward, we have having coming up, we have the narrative that is Bitcoin is being accepted by massive institutions and, you know, of course, one of the largest asset managers on the planet on top of the other 13 that are behind it. We have people that aren't saying it's a scam anymore. I mean, it's way different than 2017 and 2021 as well. So I think we're in the right place at the right time. Things are going to do pretty well. We'll probably have some pullbacks. Just expect them. Could be 30%. Hell, it could be 60%. I don't know. But if you look at it like, I look at it like, great, because I'm spending way too much. My dollar cost averaging already, even though I've been doing this since 2022, I would like some discounts. Fantastic. If this makes you nervous, then maybe this isn't for you. But if it is, I'll see you on the other side when we hit this blow off top. That's it for today. So look, like today's video, give it a thumbs up, consider subscribing. Everything we talk about is time sensitive. Get your information from somebody you trust, or at least somebody you somewhat like, because things are going to start moving really fast. But that's it. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, guys, and I'll see you next week. Have a great day. Adios.


So, here's number 12 it is then and it is the Czech Republic against Poland at the Czech Republic. How cool to convince for Kročmá, the under-21 rider coming in here. Music, that's how feeling for the Czech Republic has that lead. Smastik trying everything. And what about this? The man on the back for Puneck. Puneck in the third. Puneck, he's come through into third now though. And it's as real as they stand to watch out. Smastik's going to try the outside run in the dirt. But Milyk is looking super quick down that back straight. Really must be trying everything. Really why he has read it like a book. Absolutely Bartosz-Smarzlik determined to get to the front. Into the long Bartosz-Smarzlik. What a ride and look what it means to him. He is jubilant. He's only four laps left. Five laps, mate. Hello, mate. You've miscounted. Just, you're on your own. Great speedway here.


Greetings everybody. Welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs. I'm absolutely thrilled to have a wonderful scholar, a dear friend, a great thinker in how to make peace on the planet. Talk about one of my favorite books, not only of his, but of all books. I think it's an absolutely splendid, spectacular book and a great read. And that is Aristotle's Children. The subtitle is How Christians, Muslims and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages. Richard, thank you so much for joining. Richard Rubenstein is a professor emeritus at George Mason University and has led wonderful programs on conflict resolution and peacemaking at the George Mason and globally for many, many years. So it's just an absolute delight to be together with you. Oh, thanks so much, Jeff. I'm very happy to be here. And as you know, I think you're one of my role models and I'm very delighted to be here to be able to talk with you about this book. It's so much fun and thank you so much. You know, I consider myself an Aristotelian. I love and adore Aristotle. I think he gave us so much of Western culture and ideas. I came to Aristotle relatively late in my career because I thought as a young person when I was starting out at school, I just wanted to learn some math and how to pull the levers on the economy. So I loved economics and I had actually walked across the hall at Harvard in my freshman year from a course on political philosophy to a course on mathematical economics and how I got started. So it was only many years later that I came to absolutely love and appreciate Aristotle and ancient Greek wisdom and what it means for all of us. So I want to start asking, what about you? Was Aristotle an early love or how did you come to a whole line of work because you have written beautifully, wonderfully on early Christianity, Aristotle on another wonderful book on the Hebrew prophets of yours. So how did you come to this line of inquiry? Well, I really came to it through, just as you're suggesting, I came to it through being interested in religion and religious and particularly in religious conflict. I was teaching and still connected with an emeritus professor and I was connected with the Jimmy Carter School of Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University and I become fascinated by the problem of religious conflict in our own society as well as in the world in general. I had, earlier on, I'd written some books on terrorism and I got more and more into thinking about why religion, which is supposed to be a cause of peace, you know. The better side of us. That's right. How come it had become such a bone of contention for so many people around the world? So I wrote a book called When Jesus Became God, which was a book about the Aryan controversy and I wrote that book because I wanted to know why what looked like a hair-splitting theological controversy that should have been worked out by priests or monks, you know, in there and talking with each other ended up being a conflict which burned down cities. It was a conflict over the nature of Jesus' divinity. And so it made me wonder why do religious matters become, how do they become linked with social conflict and how do they become so destructive and so violent? So after I wrote that book... By the way, how immediately relevant in these weeks and months... Yeah, I'm afraid so. I'm afraid so. With the new war in Israel and Palestine, it's terrible, but so much religious underpinning to this. Absolutely. We need to get back to that because what happens in this book in Aristotle's Children is that really what I expected to be another war story turns out in a way to be a kind of peace story. When I started writing the book, I was interested in the fact that... As you know, the works of Aristotle, which had been lost to Western Europe, most of them had been lost to Western Europe for a long, long time after the collapse of the Roman civilization and the so-called Dark Ages. Aristotle's work were rediscovered in Spain when the Christian knights and Christian rulers went into Spain to take Spain back from the Arabs, and the Muslims, who had controlled it for 400 years, they discovered not a backward civilization, but a civilization in many ways more advanced than their own, in which, among other things, the Muslims had translated the works of Aristotle into Arabic and not only the works of Aristotle, but of other Greek geniuses, like the Galen, the founder of medicine and Archimedes, the founder of engineering and all of that. Well, Aristotle was one, but for Christians or for people interested in good and evil and how to live and also people who were becoming interested again in nature during the hard years in Europe, the years of foreign invasions and poverty and all of that, there was not a great deal of interest in nature, but interest in nature revived in connection with developments that were transforming Europe, increasing agricultural production, increasing population, creating cities, creating universities, kind of revival of culture in Europe in the 11th and 12th and 13th centuries, which some people call the medieval Renaissance. Well, what happened was when the Christians went into Spain and they found all of this stuff, Aristotle's writings on nature, Aristotle's philosophies, Aristotle's ethics, Aristotle's writings on the soul and the rest. It's been called the most revolutionary intellectual discovery in Western history and it probably was. It's an amazing moment and let's take a pause here just for one moment to give listeners a sense of the chronology of all of this just so that they have the background. If I could be very quick in this and please jump in at any moment. Just to say that Aristotle lived in the fourth century, BC in ancient Greece. He was of course the student of Plato who was the student of Socrates and Aristotle's great works were especially between 350 BC and his death in 323 BC, I believe it is, or 324. But in any event, this great, great genius, I would say perhaps the greatest of all geniuses of the Western world, wrote it towards the end of the fourth century BC and together with the Platonic influence and other Greek schools of thought, the Stoics and the Epicureans and others had a profound and lasting influence on Western civilization including not only the Greek era but then the Hellenistic era that followed with Alexander the Great and then the Roman period, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. Then very quickly when as Christianity rose and the Western Roman Empire fell, that was a kind of double whammy to Greek thought because Christian theologians were skeptical or radically antagonistic in many cases to pagan philosophy and pagan knowledge and the Roman era which had embodied the Greek intellectual thought had disappeared in the West. And so as you said, Aristotle's texts disappeared from the Western Mediterranean region, survived in the Eastern Roman Empire and much of which was then conquered by the new Muslim rulers and the Muslim rulers were extremely interested in Greek knowledge. They wanted to suck up all the knowledge they could find from ancient Greece and Rome but India and elsewhere and so some of the greatest learning was in the golden age of Islamic philosophy and Islamic thought in Baghdad in other centers of Arab scholarship in ancient Cairo, Faustat in the Medieval times and in Spain under the Caliphates, the Umayyad Caliphates of the Muslim conquerors. Then as you said, a reconquest took place over several centuries in which Spain was returned, one could say, to the Christian rule that had been the case of the Roman period before the conquest by the Arab and Islamic rulers and you pick up the story there. As you say, all of a sudden this unbelievable wisdom in the form of Arabic translations of ancient Greece, it's like discovering the world's greatest library suddenly that they had no idea existed in Western Europe and that's where this incredible story of yours takes off. Yeah, good. Thank you, Jeff. That's a perfectly wonderful summary of the history that leads up to this and you mentioned that Christian thinkers, early Christian thinkers would consider this kind of thing pagan philosophy and they would be suspicious of it and were suspicious of it for lots of reasons. So I knew that before I started doing this research and so really what I expected to find was a kind of old time battle between fundamentalists and modernists or the equivalent. I expected to find the Christian dogmatists resisting Aristotle and the Aristotelians being kind of like, oh, I don't know, intellectually I guess I'm a child of the 60s. So in my book I talk about Peter Abelard who was a great teacher at the University of Paris who was a kind of rock star, almost like a 60s character in some ways. And really I expected to find a great battle between the kind of Christian fundamentalists and the Aristotelian modernists and then I was very surprised to discover that that's not really what happened at all, that at the beginning that's what happened. The Christians go into the great Muslim cities of Andalus, of Spain, which I have to say in some ways, I'm really tempted to recommend another book to people who are listening to this. There's a book by a woman who died recently unfortunately named Maria Rosa Menacal called The Ornament of the World and it's about this Spanish civilization that was really in some ways, you don't want to sentimentalize it and exaggerate things, but it was a magnificent civilization in some ways. You were just in Cordoba, in Sevilla, in Coledo, unbelievable beauty. It is and it was a place where the Arab rulers had learned to tolerate, even more than tolerate, even to encourage a kind of cultural diversity. It wasn't problem free, but especially comparing that with what happened in Europe later on, it was a golden age where Christians and Jews and Muslims and all kinds of ethnic groups as well could live together in peace and discuss things with each other. At any rate, this kind of collaboration made possible the translation of the works of Aristotle from Arabic. They had already been translated into Arabic in other places in the Arab Empire, but now the question was how they were going to get translated into Latin. You had a situation in which you had Jewish, Arab and Christian scholars working together to translate these works from Arabic into Castilian and then from Castilian into Latin. Anyway, it's a really wonderful story. One can actually see in Toledo, the place where this large translation factory was underway. Then you have a kind of historical contingency, you have luck. As luck would have it, all of this was happening when Europe had reached a point that new ideas like this were going to spread and spread very rapidly. These books, of course, there was no printing press yet. They had to be copied by monks, but they copied thousands of them and spread them all over Europe. As you said before, the initial reaction on the part of the European Christians was negative. Let's say why. The initial reaction was negative, not only because Aristotle was a Greek, was a pagan, but because of certain things that he believed, but also in some ways even more because of his attitude. The things that he believed that were controversial to Christians were things like the eternity of the universe. Aristotle thought probably with the unit, every effect is the result of a cause, he said. Therefore, if every effect is the result of a cause, you can have an infinite chain of causes and effects. When I say that every effect has a cause that's one of the fundamental doctrines of Aristotelianism, then I'm also pointing at something else. Aristotle was such an interesting guy. He was, in one way, one of the first empirical scientists. He was particularly interested in biology and living in Greece and stuff. He was interested especially in sea life and he was interested in plant life. With incredible powers of observation and also dissection of the animals and plants and embryology is stunning. That's right. The first thing to think about just being an Aristotelian characteristic is this kind of concentration, this kind of focus on the natural world and really wanting to observe, really wanting to see what was going on there. For example, if you're looking at something in the natural world, is that just one thing or is it composed of parts? If so, what are the parts? How do the parts relate to each other? That sort of thing. When I say that there is some resistance to this sort of thing on the part of Christians, what I'm getting at is in Europe for centuries where your main job is to survive and where life is really very tough and you manage to survive and you seek consolation for this really short, brutish etc. life in thinking about the life to come. The old saying, man is born, suffers and dies and so what you're thinking about is how can I live a relatively controlled and a somewhat decent life as long as I've got the life, but how can I die well and go to heaven? That sort of otherworldly cast of thought which really lasted for a long, long time in Europe is challenged by people who say, wait a minute, look at this fish. How can it breathe underwater? For really a long time, I think the attitude in Europe was, who cares? We're worried about how we're going to make it till tomorrow with the Vikings invading and everything else that's going on. So Aristotle's attitude is one of intense interest in the natural world coupled with a feeling that we belong here, that the natural world is our home and that we have some relationship. We're natural too. We have some relationship to nature and this is where Aristotle disagreed with his great teacher Plato because Plato was always talking about how what we see in the world isn't really real. What's really real are the ideas that stand behind all of this, the principles. So Aristotle had a complicated relationship with Plato who was his teacher but his emphasis was always on, no, we belong here, we need to figure out what our relationship with nature is and there's also another implication in this, we can be happy here. Not only is this our home but it's a place where if we handle ourselves reasonably and correctly and with some sensitivity to other people's needs, we can be happy. And just to add for people to take a look at one of the most wondrous works of art, the fresco by Raphael in the Vatican of the School of Athens because of the center of that great picture which is actually the cover of your book I'm just realizing again. Plato pointing upward and Aristotle with his hands forward, Plato saying, it's the ideal world and Aristotle saying, no, we remain down on earth. And interestingly, Plato carrying one of his dialogues, the Timaeus and Aristotle carrying the ethics under his arm. So it's an absolutely wonderful, fantastic picture but the wonderful cover of your book. So it is Aristotle down to earth. And so what happens when this reaches Paris, these new ideas of the practicalities, the happiness, the groundedness of Aristotelian thought? Well, what happens is so interesting because it's an illustration really of the impossibility of legislating ideas or the impossibility of limiting ideas. I think sometimes these days, especially we assume the efficiency of totalitarianism or the possibility of, we're very aware that some people have, a few people have a lot of power and many people don't have very much power. And sometimes I think we can get pessimistic about that thinking, well, the people with power are going to tell us what to think and how to think. But what happens in Paris is that the church initially, the Bishop of Paris, initially says you're not allowed to read this. Aristotelian stuff is dangerous because not only because of the attitude questions that we just mentioned, but because he's teaching things that are so logical that if there are things that we believe that aren't so logical or that don't seem that probable in a naturalistic sense, reading Aristotle and believing what he, adopting his views on things can undermine some basic Christian beliefs. Like a belief in the resurrection of dead people, for example. Aristotle's view is once you're dead, you're dead. And so how can anybody be resurrected? That might become a question. And all sorts of other beliefs that also might be questionable. So the Bishops say you can't read this stuff and everybody reads it anyway. I mean, that's what happens is people are so interested that the whole culture is kind of coming alive and people want to see, well, what does Aristotle say and then they want to talk about it? And what's interesting, and you mentioned it and just to underscore, this is the moment of the birth of European universities. Bologna has come first at the very end of the 11th century but University of Paris soon after and other universities. So there actually are people reading. There are students, there are student groups that are organized. In fact, these early universities generally were kind of pickup institutions where groups of students would come together and find someone to teach them. So this was like reading clubs in a way. Exactly. We found some really interesting juicy stuff we want to read. We're going to talk about it. Right. So that's exactly what happens and there are students. The universities are, say, the University of Paris is in Paris. Oxford is in Oxford, England. But the students of these universities are from all over Europe too. They come from all over the place and they live in communities, in ethnic communities that are known as nations. And just as you say, they favor some teachers get big crowds. Other teachers don't get big crowds to find something else to do. Well, the interesting thing that happens then is that since two things are happening, one is generally the students want to read and talk about Aristotle. And they're not interested in talking about Aristotle. I'm thinking about the 60s again. We were interested in reading Marx because we wanted to understand what was going on in Vietnam and other places and we thought that would help. But also we wanted to make trouble. Good trouble. Good trouble. It was kind of a rebellious act. That really was not what was going on when the Aristotelians... Let me say this is kind of complicated, but mostly students were not interested in Aristotle because they were out of love with Christianity. They weren't interested even necessarily in reforming Christianity. They were interested in Aristotle, one, because they had become interested in nature and in life and in our potential to understand things. The Great Revolution was a revolution of confidence in our ability to understand, to make sense of things. And so for a long time that had been a whole suspect activity. And that is indeed what's so wonderful about reading Aristotle 2,300 years later. How logical, how systematic, how rational, how balanced, how judicious. It's an amazing thing. One of the things about Aristotle also is that he always starts an analysis of any subject with the best received opinion, a method that he called endoksa, which is what are the knowledgeable people say about this topic. And it's exactly the method till today that we use in a scientific paper where the first section of the paper is what is said about this topic. And so Aristotle started that. It's compelling because you're up to date on this range of issues. And then he goes into, well, here's how to think about this. Yeah, I thought of that too, you know, when I was in law school and we were taught in law school if you're going to write a brief, what you've got to do is not only make your arguments, you make the arguments for the other side. You anticipate what the other side is going to say and answer those arguments. And if you don't do that, you don't have a good brief. Well, Aristotle did that. And that became under Catholic leadership in Europe that became part of the scholastic method. Exactly, Aquinas' method. What are the three objections to this? Exactly, exactly. So what I was going to say was that these students are not just being rebellious when they read Aristotle. They want to understand, but also their faith tells them that God created everything. God created the universe. And whatever the universe contains, we're discovering God. It's a way of discovering God. And there can't really be any fundamental conflict in what science discovers and what God did. Because the last thing that any of them wanted to do was to be involved in a heresy called the double truth, where you would say, well, science says this, but religion says that, and they're opposite, that's true. No, they said that's right. And St. Thomas Aquinas' primary method and article of faith in a way was that there can't be any fundamental conflict between the religion as he understood it and science as he understood it. Right, and we hear that actually from Pope Francis today. Faith and reason? Of course, how could there be any conflict? So the image that we have in much of our discussion that there's this pitched battle between science and religion or between faith and reason for these receivers of Aristotle, these students and these great scholars that you talk about, was, no, science is revealing God's work and God's plan. It's the same. It's another way to read the book, the divine book. Exactly. And of course, let me give two illustrations of this, kind of two sides of this. One is, sometimes I think if I could go to any school, be in any classroom at any time, where would I might like to be? I went to Harvard like Jeff did, which is a wonderful place to study. But I think if I could study any place, one place I'd like to be in Peter Abelard's class. That was pretty wild. That's one. So I'll give you an illustration of what Abelard did. This was Christians using Aristotle to challenge certain Christian doctrines, but not the fundamentals of faith. And when I say challenge, I mean challenge and restate. Reform, if you like. Intellectually reform. Christian doctrines. So one of Abelard's famous lectures is where he asks the question, he always starts with a question, and he asks the question, did the Jews sin in killing Christ? He takes the gospel accounts of the crucifixion, which lay a lot of blame on the Jews. Not the Jews generally, by the way, but Jewish leadership. And he says, well, that was, of course, that was deicide. That's sinful. And that, as you know, became one of the basis for anti-Semitism in Europe for centuries and centuries was the charge of deicide that the Jews had killed Christ. So Abelard says, it all depends what you think sin is. And the question is, the question that he asked to make a long story short is if you don't think he's God, if you don't think he's the Son of God, can you be guilty of deicide? And the answer is no, not if sin is a matter of intention. If the primary factor in making a sin-sin is that you do something knowing it's wrong, which, by the way, was St. Augustine's definition of sin. Sin, Augustine does a chapter in his Confessions where he talks about eating the pears on a pear tree, knowing he wasn't supposed to take those pears from the tree.  And that's the problem. And Abelard takes the same definition and he says if the Jews sincerely believe that Jesus was just a guy and not divine, they can't be guilty of deicide. Well, to some people may seem today like common sense. It was semi-revolutionary in Paris. He didn't get immediately into trouble over that. He got into trouble over trying to explain the trinity in rationalistic terms. But it was a spectacular class and when the class was over all of the commentators say the students went out in the streets and continued the discussion. And the point was, let's talk about it. There's nothing we can't talk about. But I think actually if I could go back to Paris and be around in those centuries, I would want to be, I think I would want to be in the 1240s or 1250s at the University of Paris when St. Thomas was debating with St. Bonaventure. Tell us about that briefly. Well, that's where, you know, this is where Thomas believed that human reason was divinely given to us. Just let me pause for one moment to explain. Thomas Aquinas, who was one of the great saints of the Catholic Church till today, was a brilliant young Dominican scholar who became a student of Albert Magnus, who was one of the giants in the reception of Aristotle. Albert the Great, Albert Magnus, and his student was Thomas Aquinas, who arguably is the most important Christian philosopher, perhaps in history I would say, and certainly in the church today, the foundation of the Catholic Church's modern social teachings. And I wanted just to read one phrase from your book where the students mock the appearance of Thomas Aquinas.    It's incredible because he did fill the world. So back to your classroom with Thomas Aquinas. Yeah, he's so... Anyway, it would have been something to hear him lecture. Thomas believed deeply that that reason was God's greatest gift to us. A belief, by the way, which at the end of his life he also questioned. Anyway, I'll get to that in a second. In the classroom and in debates with his fellow monks and his fellows and with the students, Thomas was passionately involved in trying to reconcile what we would now call science and religion. Remembering that Aristotle didn't make that distinction at all, that when Aristotle talked about the world, his philosophy included much of what we would call now biology and psychology, but also it included ethics and included philosophy. He was not a specialist, right? This is before the kind of separation of these disciplines, which has proved to us in some ways very advantageous and in other ways a curse. But of course Aristotle had to invent these disciplines first, which is amazing to me because almost everything you wrote was the first great text on a particular subject. That's true. So Thomas was an Aristotelian, and what that meant for him was that if you could, you would look at nature and you would try to understand nature, and there was no problem as far as he was concerned with believing that nature operated according to certain chains of cause and effect that were totally natural, but that you could trace the origins of all of this back to God, that God had put into effect a system in which causes produced effects in an explicable way, in a rational way. And rational to Thomas didn't just mean something that was going on in our minds, it meant something that was going on in the universe. So when he was affirming that there was a divine source for all of this, he was also affirming that the universe was in some ways intelligent and intelligible. So this produced a few problems. One problem was, how could you explain Christ? How could you explain God becoming man and dying for the sins of humankind? How could you explain that things were created out of nothing, creation next nihilo? A couple of items like this. And his answer was there are a few things you can't explain rationally. There are some things which have to be accepted on faith, as Thomas said, but very few. The existence of God himself, Thomas thought, could be proved rationally. According to a kind of Aristotelian idea that there had to be a first mover, a prime mover. Exactly. And then when it came to other things like, was the universe eternal or was the universe, was there a big bang? Was the universe created somehow out of nothing? Thomas got himself into some trouble with people. I mean, he was considered erratically. He became the thinker of the church, the St. Thomas. But before that, he was considered dangerous. Yes, exactly. And one of the things that made him dangerous was, he said, well, you can't really prove logically that the universe was created. Whether the universe is eternal or not is something that you can't really prove one way or the other. One of the things, Richard, that as I was reading it, first the debates and then the fights over whether you could teach Aquinas or not, whether he would lecture what writings were allowed. And then most importantly, who would be hired next? A Dominican or a Franciscan. What overwhelmed me in reading your text was that this is like curing in on a... A faculty meeting. Pure faculty meeting from the year 1280. And it's exactly the same as the faculty meetings that we have until today. That's true. It's true. It's just a wonderful gossip also. And they're fighting with each other and fighting over tenure positions.  And it's exactly what you expect and want of a university. So anyway, what happens is you have a period of time in which science and religion have kind of learned to live together. And when I say... And you might ask, for one thing, it doesn't last forever. Thomas himself at the end of his life decides not to write anymore because he has a religious experience. There are some accounts of that experience. Some are fairly strange. I mean, interesting accounts. People were claimed to have seen St. Thomas kind of floating in the air and so on. But anyway, he had... He said he had discovered things that he couldn't talk about. And he eventually retired to Sicily. He'd come from Sicily at the time when that was the cultural center of the world, Sicily. Kingdom of the two Sicilies came from around Naples. But it was called the Kingdom of the two Sicilies. He retired there and he eventually died. Just to mention, by the way, for the listeners, this is the 750th anniversary exactly in 2024 on March 7, he died on his way, actually, to what was going to be an attempt to bridge the schism that had developed in the church between the Western Roman Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. And he died in a monastery, Fasanova, on March 12, 74. So we're at the 750th anniversary, exactly now, just a very poignant moment in a poignant time. But please, back to you. Well, no, that's interesting. Thank you for that. You reminded me of that. Thank you. So the other thing that happens is that the Aristotelian movement has produced various great characters like Peter Avalard and Thomas. But it doesn't stop there. It then produces people you might call left Thomas or maybe anti-Thomas, post-modern Thomas, in which, in particular, two figures who I write about in the book, and I won't bother, we won't talk in detail about them now, but Don Skotis and William of Ockham are brilliant Aristotelians who kind of start to turn in some ways Aristotle's own methods against him. So I have to say that two things are happening at the end of the 13th century, around the time Thomas dies. You have Christian philosophers, like the ones I just mentioned, especially Ockham, who start saying things like, look, you can't say that God is, God is causing all of the things that happen on earth, all of this natural law which Thomas is believed so deeply in, both in terms of human law and justice and also in terms of scientific law, he believed in law was natural and law was from God. And William of Ockham and others are saying, but wait a minute, God can do anything he likes. And the absolute power of God and the sovereignty of God means that all of this could change anytime. And that everything is provisional. Yes, the natural laws are natural laws, but you can't, if they're laws of God, then they're always going to be the same. And also you know them in a very absolute kind of way. But we're here to tell you, Ockham says, I'm here to tell you that all of these things are provisional, they've changed before, they can change again. And he started when you read Ockham, you start to, you feel like you're reading someone more modern in some ways than Thomas because, and this is kind of opening the door to scientific relativism. And doubt everywhere. Skepticism. And David Hume centuries later saying, just because the sun rises in the east every day, can you be sure that it will the next day? Exactly, exactly. So, but the other thing which is a mindblower is that while all of this philosophical and religious talk is going on in the University of Paris, you know what's happening to the University of Paris? The faculty is inventing physics. And people like John Buridan, Aresmi and others are, they are doing experiments and theorizing about things like motion. In which they're questioning Aristotle and they're doing it in a way which Aristotle himself would have approved of. They're saying, wait a minute, Aristotle says things are, if you toss something in the air, it continues to move through the air for at least for a while because the air behind it is displaced and stuff. And there's, you look for a natural, you know, for something in the air, an ether or something which is pushing the object which allows the object to continue going. So you have these, the scientists, the University of, the theologians, they're all theologians at the University of Paris saying, no, but wait a minute, we've done various experiments and we're not finding any evidence that air is being displaced or any kind of objects that are moved. In fact, you can spin a top and you can see there's no displacement of air there. And so let's be scientific like Aristotle was. And let's realize if you, once you throw a thing into the air, it's going to continue to move for a while because you threw it. And we're going to call that impetus. And we're going to not only can we say that's what's happening, but we can measure it. We can multiply the volume of what's being thrown by the speed at which it's being thrown. And this is happening 300 years before Galileo. So before Galileo gets into his big fight with the church over whether the sun is at the center of the universe or the earth is at the center of the universe, you have guys at the University of Paris saying, you know, the earth might be, the earth might be at the center of the universe because there's no way you can prove because whatever you think about motion depends on where you are, where you're doing the observation. That insight then gets proved if you like by Galileo, but the reason I'm mentioning this is because we're so often we think about science versus religion or science versus the church. Galileo fights this heroic fight and actually he's forced to recant after a while. And so we kind of think of the reason and faith as always being an opposition. But these principles of physics were discovered at the University of Paris when it was under Catholic control and where everybody was in the church. And we could, by the way, jump forward and remember that modern genetics was invented by a monk by Gregor Mendel and there are countless examples of exactly that. The interplay of religion and scientific advancement is very complex and often deeply synergistic. I'm sorry that I would love to continue for hours with you, but we're coming close to the end of the time. I wanted to jump several centuries to the present and just on two points. This advancement, as you say, turning Aristotle on its head, introducing skepticism, led to a kind of antagonism to Aristotle as an enemy of science for some centuries, which is one of the weirdest and most unfair judgments because Aristotle would have been the first to love these new observations. I'm absolutely sure. I just wanted your quick take on that. And then second, I want to come back to Thomas Aquinas and our current world. But first, just on this quick turn against Aristotle by early modern science, which I always found a little sad, a little peculiar. Maybe you can understand from a polemics point of view, but it never seemed fair to me to Aristotle himself.  I mean, in the first place, where it was fair was that some people who were... who called themselves Aristotelians had become dogmatists. And they were so interested in protecting Aristotle or preserving some of the things that some of his principles that they were willing to do that even though all the evidence was that the principles were wrong. Aristotle had said that the heavenly bodies were all perfect spheres and even conscious. And they even had consciousness. And Galileo turned his telescope, his brand new telescope, on the moon and saw pock marks on the moon and saw other things. And said, well, this is not the kind of heavenly body that Aristotle was talking about, there it is, it's on the telescope. So some Aristotelians, people calling themselves Aristotelians, said there must be something wrong with your telescope because Aristotle can't lie. So they had become anti, in a way, anti-Aristotelians. I mean, they had done what we, you know, we so often see in philosophy and political philosophy and especially people becoming dogmatic proponents of some doctrine which has just been proved to be wrong. And that gave Aristotle a bad name but there was something more important than that going on and that is that Aristotle, Aristotle's association with the church but also his association with an attempt to harmonize science and ethics had fallen out of favor with a new generation of renaissance thinkers who call themselves realists. Well, they either call themselves realists or they call, or Protestants. And the realists said, there's nothing but power. Politics is power. Don't bother us with ethics. You know, so... Thomas Hobbes. So Thomas Hobbes says, if you're talking about moral law, Thomas Hobbes says, that's a metaphor. There's only one law. That's the law of the state. And if you're talking about moral law or any other kind of law, all you're doing is poetry but has nothing to do with the real world. So that vicious doctrine, we're still laboring under that vicious doctrine. I mean, some of my best friends are realists. I mean, I know a couple of really good realists. But goodness, that was a disaster. That Hobbesian separation of ethics and politics was a disaster. So that was one. Then you have Martin Luther was a whole other story.  And because you're saved by faith alone. And we don't need all this. Let the people who want to do reason stuff go off in their corner and do it. But we're into his particular brand of Protestantism, which, by the way, many Protestants have grown away from. But that's a whole other story. So Aristotle had a bad reputation, both from the part of the realists and on the part of the Lutherans. Let us come quickly to the present. Thank you for the generosity of your time and all of these wonderful insights. Aquinas after falling out for some time and Aristotle after having fallen out for some time was brought back to the very center of the church in the end of the 19th century by Pope Leo XIII, who started what is now 135 years of encyclicals called modern Catholic social teachings, starting with the Rerum Navarum in 1891 and based very much on Aquinas and with a lot of Aristotle mixed in. And I want to say that what I find extremely exciting and gratifying about that body of knowledge and philosophy is that it brings ethics back into the core of our discussion and the idea that human reason actually can find a way to peace as well. That reason can be something to help better lives on earth. And I want to say we've come to the end of the time but you have played a magnificent role and play a magnificent role in that idea. So not only are you a wonderful historian, Richard, but you're a great moralist in the best sense of saying we can do better and we can resolve conflicts. We can deal with each other. We can have good academic battles, no doubt, but they don't have to turn violent. They can be creative battles. I want to end by paying tribute to all of your work and leadership and conflict resolution. Let's look for another chance to talk about some of that because many, many things to discuss and many things to learn. But we've had more than our normal hour on the book club. I'm sure everybody is listening with wrap, the attention and gratitude to you. We've been discussing Aristotle's children by Professor Richard Rubenstein and it's a fabulous book, but you could feel from this discussion it gives you, it's like swimming in the 2,300 years of Western thought and it's an absolute joy.  Thank you so much, Chef. I really enjoy being here and talking with you. I always enjoy talking with you. Thanks a million. We'll be together again soon. Thank you.