Welcome to the Symposium. Today we are joined by Dr Benedict Beckled and Dr David Thunder.

Hello to both.

Hello, good to be here.

I must say I'm very happy to be talking to you again. I remember we have done

interviews separately and I thought that it would be a very good idea if all of us

had a discussion.

Sounds good to me. Great.

So we are very pleased here at the Lotusitas to have both of you again talking about things like the present state of Western societies, what is not working, what is working, what is working, what should be preserved, and whether there are grounds for optimism or pessimism.

Of course, these are very abstract questions.

I'm sure the answer will be very qualified,

but let me just say that I think that it will be a very good discussion.

May I ask both of you to tell to the audience where they can find more of your work, please.

If you like, I can begin.

So my professional website is my name, David Thunder.com, David Thunder

and I also have a blog, the Freedom blog which people can find at David Thunder dot substock.com.

So they're the two places that you can find me.

Great.

And yeah, I had the same idea my name

dot com so Benedict Beckled dot com that's my website

and Benedict Beckled is my handle pretty much everywhere

Twitter and uh... Facebook and so on.

So, that is great.

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