Hello, welcome back to Young Hertics Conversations. This is our Friday interview series every now and then. I like to take a break from

sticking my nose into old books. I like to lift my head up from whatever musty library I happen to be in and look out into the world and talk to people, friends or people whose work I admire, and just get a sense for what's going on out there in the world that can give us hope.

You know if you listen to this show, I'm a big hope pill enjoyer.

I am your average hope advocate because people talk all the time now about

pessimism and optimism. Do you think that the world is doomed? Do you think the country is doomed or do you think everything's going to be okay? And as a student of history and the scholar of the great books, I know that nobody ever knows what's happening in the future. You cannot write history in the present tense and you can't predict

what's going to come down the line. So both pessimism and optimism are kind of misguided. They're

predictions about something you do not know about. And they lead to all sorts of actionable problems. Like if you're a pessimist, you will probably retreat from life because nothing matters and why do anything at all. If you're an optimist you might get

complacent because everything's going to be fine so why would you worry? Why would you try to fix things?

Neither of those seems helpful and pessimism especially, which is an addiction of the conservative movement, pessimism is a temptation to despair, which I believe is a sin. On the other hand hope is a virtue.

It's one of the three Christian virtues that Christianity added to the catalog

if we had the cardinal virtues of the classical world.

Faith, hope, and love were the three additional virtues that Christianity really emphasized.

So hope, which is the assurance of things not seen, the belief that there is a possibility of goodness and that God is good and is acting in the world, that's to me what I'm always looking for. Where can I find hope?

And my guest today is a really interesting person in that respect.

Her name is Isabel Brown. She's an independent content creator and she has a book called The End of the

Alphabet coming out which makes an argument that will shock and surprise those

pessimists out there and I know I have some listeners that kind of

tend to or the pessimist side of things so that this will be it will be good for

you to hear if you're like me and you are ancient and you're a millennial, you go on Twitter, which is our kind of platform of choice and you'll see these clips from Tic-Toc of blue-haired LGBTQIA plus identifying 20 year olds or college students, high school students,

and they're crying in their car and they're screaming and they're saying bizarre jargon that nobody understands about the like you know

identifying as to a demon or as a cat or whatever and some of this is you know

perennial it the older generations always react in horror to the younger

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