Welcome back to Young Hertics Conversations where I like to talk with interesting people that I have met on my travels and my

digital escapades, people that are doing things that I find hopeful and

interesting.

Hope, as I've discussed on this show,

is one of the three Christian virtues,

and I think it might be one of the most needful and neglected virtues of our time because there's so much change out there

that gives us opportunity for despair and people like us who love the great books and the classics and

know how fragile all good things are we're prone to despair it's very easy and

tempting to spin out disaster scenarios.

But every disaster scenario is only a prediction of the future. It hasn't happened yet. It't have to happen, it's not written in stone, nothing is destined, I believe very firmly that things are up to us, and even though the world is going to change and keep changing, we are going to have agency and we're going to have a choice as Gandolf says of what to do with the time that has given us.

And so my guest today, Jonathan B, is somebody somebody that really I'm going to let him introduce himself, but I'm really interested in the way that our paths have crossed. If you've been listening to me recently, you know that I've developed an interest in math and science and I've got my books behind me on black body

discontinuity and you know there's some there's really I think I've got Einstein behind me as well and and this has become

philosophy of science has become a major sort of part of my academic profile or one of my major interests.

And that's because as I have delved most deeply

into the things that I love best, which are the classics,

the literary classics, you know, the moral philosophy and literature,

I have come to feel very strongly that everything is interconnected and that our seemingly stem problems, our math and science problems and our

technology problems that are making the news are also and in some

profound sense humanities problems. They're problems about cosmic questions,

how do we fit into the universe, what's our purpose,

and so on and so forth.

And Jonathan is somebody, interestingly,

...