Okay, folks, welcome to Young Heritage Conversations. This is going to a series of specials. It's not going to replace the regular weekly episodes where we talk about

the history of the West and the Western canon. It's just a little bit of extra stuff. Talking to friends

of mine and people I know and people out there in the

world who are doing interesting things especially things that I think show some

promise some excitement for a path forward.

This show is the classical education that you never knew.

You were missing.

That's the point of it.

You're here.

We're here to talk through the greatest ideas that we have inherited from the traditions of Athens and Jerusalem

and all of that is we're doing that because of how enriching it is for our lives in the here and now. And when you get into that it can be very joyful, but it can also be kind of depressing because you end up feeling like all the best things, all the best days are behind us, and now we're just in this kind of

slog to try and as T. S. Elliot said to shore up fragments against our ruin and I am

not a doomer at all.

In fact, you know, people often ask me, you know, are you an optimist or a pessimist?

Do you think that the West is going to fall apart or do you think that we're all going to be fine?

And the answer to that question is neither, because the secret is both

optimists and pessimists are making predictions about the future. If you're an

optimist you're predicting that everything's going to go fine so you

maybe don't have to do that much maybe you get complacent. If you're a pessimist you're

predicting that everything's going to fall apart and so why do anything at all?

What's the point? You get a lot of that these days among people like

us that like to talk about the great ideas and the great tradition. And I have news for both of those

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