https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=dncyXvPR8uU
came out of North Korea, then you went to university in South Korea, so you got to see that culture as an outsider, and then you came to the United States and you got to see Columbia University. So what did you conclude about your time in Columbia University? What were your impressions? What do you have to say to people about what you saw? Oh my gosh, so that four years from 2016 to 2020, it was a complete madness. I became very pessimistic about the Western world after university because, literally in these humanities classes, even economics, I was studying economics for two years and later human rights, the professor would send me emails, oh, this class, we’re going to cover this, this, if it triggers you, you don’t have to come to the class or don’t even do the reading. I’m a rape survivor. I’m a slave. I’ve gone through so many things and they say, oh, this can trigger the rape, this can trigger this. And then, before the class, they say, let’s go through what do you want to be called, your pronouns. And my English is not that good. I sometimes mistakenly call him or she, like, and then they start asking me to say they, and then I don’t know how to incorporate in my English that pronoun properly. And it made me so nervous to talk in the classroom. And one day I got into a fight with my professor. And she was saying, you know, the fact that you’re letting men holding door for you is you are giving in to their overpowering you. And I was like, no, it’s need kindness, it’s decency. I hold the door for people too. It’s not like I’m trying to signal that I’m powerful than you. And she was like, you’re so brainwashed from North Korea. And I was scenario, of course, my GPA is going to be affected. And it’s like, OK, I got a really shot up. I got to try to do my best to get a good GPA. So that four years, I learned to censor myself all over again. And it became ridiculous. I literally, exactly. I literally risked my life to say what I think is right. And now I’m like, you know, country, we are four years of time trying how to be creative space and be sensitive enough. So I’m like, where am I? And it gave me a lot of chaos. Did I become free? Like, was it? Where am I? Is there any truly free place in this world right now? Well, OK, so you you are in this university in Korea and Korean universities are intense. And so how would you contrast the quality of the education that you received? And they’re very Western influence, the South Korean university. So they’re a product of the Western university system. So how would you contrast your experience at the South Korean university with Columbia, which is in principle one of the great Western American institutions, educational institutions? So I do think South Korea is way more technical. They are way more into trying to teach you the skill set. Maybe if, you know, more giving you actual knowledge. But I think Americans are very obsessed. That was my impression of Columbia. We’re really trying to help you how to think, but almost like you would shape how you think. They are very into shaping your mind, how you think about something in South Korean study program was more like, oh, this is a fact. This is what happened in history. This is what we’re going to do. This is a modern, you’re going to apply to solve this criminal case. Like, you know, this is how things work. But lately, though, when it comes to sociology, it’s been very influenced by the Western, like the mainstream education. So a lot of anti Western sentiments was definitely there. I have been somewhat oppositional. I’m not exactly like a Mr. Go long and get along guy with this stuff that I don’t always have the best reality check on my own behavior. And so, you know, I was just saying, well, OK, if I if I did cause offense, then, you know, I feel like it’s OK to apologize. And there probably was a better way for me to do this. Some of my comments were leaked or may or transmitted to other people that weren’t in the meetings, people that were in the BIPOC meeting, you know, particularly my my BIPOC is a black and indigenous people of color. So they were having their separate meeting of faculty and students where they receive different content. And why was it separate? Out of curiosity, the rationale is I could as I can understand it is so that the. The group’s that have been marginalized won’t be exposed to, you know, they’ll have their own thing so that they’re not exposed to the. I think the incense, it possible insensitivity of the. Oppressors. It’s the best I can understand the rationale. But it wound up happening anyway, because it would be rude of me to point out that that’s somewhat paternalistic. You know, just as an observation. That’s a good one. Yeah. I mean, yeah, totally. Well, I guess that is a characteristic of white supremacy culture, though paternalism. Yeah. So I guess it’s. Well, as long as it’s in a good cause, then I guess it’s forgivable. Yeah. Well, I found it so interesting because the day after the meeting, there was an email that was released that said healing resources. You know, healing resources that will help you come to terms with what happened. And the first healing resource on the list was a CNN interview with a poet named Damon Young. And. Damon Young, you know, in this interview said things like, you know, we we need to get rid of all of capitalism. We will have to do a carpet bombing, not a carpet cleansing of society. And it was incredibly radical statements that were, I would imagine, would be frightening to to many people. And that was listed as a healing resource as well as well. Well, as long as the carpet bombing only targets the malevolent people. Well, yeah, I guess. And then things there was a Robin DiAngelo article that said, you know, what white people need to be made or kept uncomfortable. How can we become more uncomfortable? Also, you know, really kind of, I would just say racist characterizations of white people in these links. Things like, you know, white people have never had to be guests in this country. And like the Irish, for example, they were really white to begin with, though. So, yeah, yeah. And so I found this very ironic. The idea that especially by the way, postmodernism and the league instruction and all those attendant pseudo philosophies, you read Milton to find out if he mistreated his daughters, not this miracle that we call Paradise Lost or Samson Agonistes. You read Homer to find out, you know, if he’s a blood worshiper. This whole game of taking the great documents of Western civilization as a hunting ground for moral, woke offense. Well, first of all, it’s catastrophically stupid. If you have the 48th Symphony of Mozart or the Beethoven’s Fifth, the only reason you’re playing it is to find out if either Mozart or Beethoven had a sexist attitude. You’re out of your mind. Self-stop this. And the idea that one of the great proportions of a certain segment of Western society is simple envy and resentment of its success, even as those who are envious and resentful are basically being fed and kept by it. They go into these institutions with some sort of childish, immature animosity towards what, you know, if you think of it, the rise of thought is the greatest thing we have. And in the richest part of the world, the most prosperous, the highest institution. Have you been reading some of these whiteness things, the new rules? Like the ones the federal government are using to train the civil servants? You mean those? Yes. The epidemic of anti-racism, which is a kind of racism, diversity, which is monosyllabic. If you don’t have our ideas, you don’t have any, or you’re a racist, or you’re this or you’re that. I don’t know how a free people have succumbed so easily and so lethargically to a kind of it’s not physical, but it’s a metaphysical restraint. And then the cowardice about some of these universities that apologize for some professor, the New York Times guy, 49 years columnist, and in an explicatory conversation using that n-word, the editor said, no, nothing wrong with him, but then they fired him. The universities, damn them, were the place that this other pandemic began. And while we’re living through COVID, we should also understand that the intellectual pandemic, this goes to our heart and core. We are displacing ourselves by allowing charlatans to wreck the intellectual standards of the Western world. What I’ve read is that you made some claim that Canada wasn’t systemically racist, that that wasn’t the right way of looking at the country. And to me, that means now, is that the case now that at a university, if I stand up and say that I don’t believe that the lens of systemic racism is the proper way to analyze Canada, especially compared to other countries, that now I’m so reprehensible that I deserve to be suspended if a couple of people object? Is that the situation that we’re looking at, or am I being too hard on the university? I have to admit, I may be wrong, but there may have been a flavor for that during that month. So like it was like my story was sort of a scapegoat for something that is much bigger than a deer, a simple deer, a silly deer. Sometimes we’re not allowed to write serious things or silly things or be wrong or change our mind. In your situation is also particularly peculiar, I might say, because you don’t seem to be the right sort of target for this sort of targeting, you know, because you’re using the terminology that I don’t appreciate in the least. I mean, you’re female, you’re an immigrant, you’re you’re at least in principle part of the communities that the people who push this sort of nonsense are hypothetically trying to protect. So why is it because you are in one of these victimized categories? And you dared to say something that wasn’t in accordance with the necessary moral ideology that you’ve been targeted? Maybe they wanted to be sure about of the Bambi’s blog. You see that that deer does not want to fit in any group and put in a box. So I’m supposed to be racialized, you know, be a poor me. I don’t have I don’t I don’t like to be victimized personally in my life, even now with what is happening to me. I think I’m a dignified person. So so so in that sense, I like the term invisible minority, visible minority, you know, the terms that used to be used in Quebec my time when I immigrated, I see myself more in them than like like put us divided into your this group, that group and, you know, sector or not like. Right. So you’re supposed to be first of all, you’re female. So hypothetically, you’re oppressed because you’re female, even though the evidence for suppression of females in academia is very, very it’s actually females dominate over males in terms of numerical proportion in most disciplines. It’s not the case in the STEM fields, but everywhere else. Not only especially in terms of graduates produced, it might not be the case at the highest levels of distinction in the academic hierarchy, although that’s changing pretty rapidly. So you should actually fit into at least two oppressed categories, female and an immigrant. And so and so the rule here is that if you’re in both of those categories victimized by the intersection between those two categories that there’s a particular political view, you better have or else. And or else in your case is there else you get suspended because a few people complain. That’s what the hell’s going on with the administration. I don’t understand what they’re doing. I really don’t understand. I can’t understand why they didn’t have the courtesy. Actually, I can understand why they didn’t have the courtesy to call you because the sad truth is, is that as soon as a few people complain, everyone who isn’t directly involved runs scared and looks for someone to sacrifice. No, but let me tell you something. What happened at Mount Allison University and is happening elsewhere, but particularly here is a symptom of what is happening in our country or or maybe beyond actually. So I take it like that. It’s a symptom that we do have a serious problem, as you said, like tenured professors not being able to express ideas, debate ideas, challenge students with ideas. We do have a big problem. You’re a citizen of a free country. You have a right to express yourself any way that you see fit. Second of all, you’re a tenured professor and your thoughts actually protected to a fair degree and it’s protected broadly so that you can think broadly. And the fact that this has happened despite your tenure. Well, I guess part of the question that people who are watching might be asking is why the hell should they care about this? And the reason I believe that people should care about this, first of all, is that what happens in the universities ends up happening everywhere else very, very rapidly. Absolutely. And if it can happen to someone like you, it seems to me that it can happen to anyone at any time in any place. And this this this unbelievable cowardice that our institutions show in the in the face of unwarranted allegations, as long as they’re the right flavor, is something that should be tremendously worrisome to everyone. We haven’t got to the bad stuff yet. But it started to become apparent to me. I sort of had the realization that this was really going the wrong direction when we we had a professional development meeting and they passed out the I’m sure you’ve seen it, the pyramid of racism, also known as the pyramid of white supremacy. And it had this schema. It was a schema arranged in the form of a pyramid with genocide at the top of the pyramid and then various layers that had categorical names like overt racism, covert racism, minimization, indifference, and then various. There must have been about 50 or 60 things sprinkled on the pyramid at various levels. And some of the things on the pyramid. I actually thought were, you know, in many cases virtues. So things like being a political or things like, you know, you know, there are two sides to every story. Things that were contradictory like, you know, not believing POC, but also thinking, well, my black friend said dot dot dot. So the idea that these two things were next to each other seemed interesting to me. Things that were just, you know, political party platforms. Minimization. We all belong to the human race. Right. Right. That was that was a post-racial society. Why can’t we all just get along? Prioritizing intentions over impact. That’s a nice one. Yeah. Yes, we could. We could talk about that for about three weeks. Yeah. Not believing experiences of people of color. Two sides to every story. Right. Yeah. Well, it’s very interesting when you look very carefully at the words that are lumped in with the other words, let’s say. Right. Guilt by association. OK. So you had this pyramid of white supremacy. And I was asked, you know, what do you how do you respond to this? What do you think about this? And I just I said, I think this is extremely destructive and horrible schema to put in front of a child. And I will never do it. And then there were a problem with that, exactly. So the kids stick with the list. Why? Why is that bothering you? Well, it’s it’s because it means that, you know, events, the multiplicity of possible reasons for things that that change that are different, depending on the actual incident, get reduced to this script of of explanation. And only those explanations, you know, fit the paradigm and only those explanations will be considered. And and that means that you’re not making sense of the world for yourself. You’re following a script. You may know the name. She is a she escaped from North Korea. Yes. And she wrote a book called In Order to Live, which is an amazing book. And the book ends in 2015. But after 2015, she enrolled in Columbia University, which was a dream of hers and a dream of her father that she be an educated person. And she studied humanities at Columbia. And I asked her what that was like. And she said that it was a complete waste of time and money and that she felt that she was completely unable to utter an opinion that was genuine the whole time she was there. And it shocked me, you know. And so I asked her very specifically. I said, come on, come on. You’re you’re not going to tell me that the entire time you spent in Colombia, you didn’t have at least one professor or two professors who stood out, who really taught you. Now, she had told me during the interview that she had encountered George Orwell’s work when she was in South Korea, particularly Animal Farm. And that was what partly what influenced her to start speaking and writing. And so and she had read a lot when she was educating herself in South Korea prior to going to South Korean University and then to Columbia. So it’s not like she was unfamiliar with the potential impact of, let’s say, the classics on on on on on her life, on her philosophy. But when I pressed her, the best she could do was to identify a single biology class which dealt with evolution, which was a complete mystery to her, given her background, because history sort of started when her dynastic totalitarians were born. But she said even that took a wicked turn to the politically correct direction by the time she was done. Universities now at the humanities level, from everything I read, are a disgrace. The treason of the clerks. It is it is they are so suffocated by these arch and empty philosophies that have no logic and are punitive. I would know I’m a person that was so taken by the university. I almost worshiped it. And now I tell people that have younger people, younger children, 20, 21, 22. Don’t go to the damn university unless you’re taking science. Go to a trades college or just go out on your own. It’s the saddest thing that has happened in the Western world that we’ve allowed second rate minds, political agents, propagandization as instruction. We have decimated the soul of the university. I mean, look at what animal farm did for you. That’s what reading great books does for people. You know, it illuminates their soul. It’s not optional. And I’m so appalled that that was your experience at Columbia. It’s so awful that you went through all that and managed to get to this great university. And, you know, in that and that you had to shut yourself down and that your basic conclusion was that it was a waste of time. Now, did you have courses where that wasn’t the case? Did you have courses that were worth it? I mean, so one class I remember in my senior year, it was called the Western Civilization, the music art. One of the core that Columbia had is the Western art. And it has still not for long. But then I was excited to learn about it. But I thought at the end of the day, this is still the West. America is in the West, right? It would be funny if you want to study Eastern music at the end of the in the core. And professors like who has a problem with calling the Western civilization like art? And then every single one of them all lifting their hands because they were saying there are so many artists who are greater than Beethoven and Mozart. We silence them, erase them all. And that’s why we have now end up studying these bigots who are racist. And I’m like, and then they were like looking at me, why are you not putting your hands up? And I was like, I’m not even talking about somebody who doesn’t have the problem with talking about Western civilization. So that’s like, I was like, do I even have to do this to graduate? And that was, of course, necessary to do that course to graduate. So every every class had an element of being politically correct and shaping you how you think. And I learned how to censor myself so well at the Columbia. And then I was freaked out one day. What am I doing? This is now an escape. You know, it’s just and I’m so ashamed of that. That’s so awful. I can’t believe it. You know, it’s no it’s no picnic to watch these great institutions hang themselves. Yeah. I literally felt like it’s a suicide of civilization. Like we are killing ourselves here. And and that’s why I like what I mean, that’s what scares me is that when I was a student, when I was so grateful to going to South Korea was also of North Korea was at least a place that was left to be free. And all these people obsessed fighting for, you know, climate change, animals rights, gender equality, transgender, whatever all these things people fighting for. Wonderful. But then imagine when nobody’s free in this world, who’s going to fight for us? And that’s like what terror for me is like, imagine all of us became enslaved like North Koreans, all of us did in that system. There’s no one can stand up for any of us. And I guess because I’m always I always knew that it wasn’t guaranteed like when I go camping with my friends, my friends, somehow always a confidence that they’re going to find food, even though when they’re going to the remote area. Not me, I always packing this like energy bars, blah, blah, blah, always with me because I know that you can end up not having all food. So maybe this is a mentality that in the West, freedom was always there. Some people think it’s going to be miraculously going to be always there. And for me, it’s like, no, it can be not there. That’s why we were supposed to be educating young people. We were supposed to be teaching them that. No, it’s not always there. It’s it’s fragile and you better take care of it because the default condition is authoritarian starvation. And if that isn’t happening, it’s a bloody miracle. Well, I’ve seen this over and over in the universities, too. You know, it was often the case that it was my psychology classes where the students learned about what happened in Stalinist Soviet Union and Maoist China. They hadn’t been taught at all. They hadn’t been taught that tens of millions of people died in China. They hadn’t been taught about what happened in North Korea. They hadn’t been taught about what happened in Russia. It was like that never existed, even though the Cold War was all about that. And it was it’s appalling. And I think you see exactly the same thing while you’re pointing out exactly the same thing. I’ve been thinking about the question of the meaning of life and the first objection, I suppose, arose that arose in my mind was an objection to the question of the meaning of life. It was an objection to the question itself because there might not be a meaning in life. There are places where people derive meaning and and. You can list them, and it’s useful practically if people are thinking about how to organize their life, if they’re unhappy and they want to know how things might be better. My observation and obviously not only mine is that people generally need to have a career or a job to keep the wolf from the door, but also to engage them productively with others, which is a primary source of meaning for conscientious people and for creative people alike. You need to be you need to pursue your education to to flesh out your intellectual capacity. You have to take care of your health, physical and mental. You need an intimate relationship. You need a family. You need friends. You need intelligent use of your leisure time. You have to regulate your your susceptibility to the temptations that might lead you astray drugs and alcohol and perhaps pornography and those sorts of things. But then there is a core to all that around which these more practical endeavors arrange themselves, and that’s something like attention to the spiritual or the philosophical domain or the religious domain. I think you can in some sense put all those together and that might be well. It might be that the attempt to answer explicitly or at least to address the question of well, what is all of that practical life in service of? And you said, for example, that when you were working with the inner city kids in Halifax, you were trying to help them realize that they were meant for the higher things and vice versa. And someone might ask, well, what’s the why bother with that when you can just bother with the skills? And it seems to me that the answer is something like, well, we all have to make decisions about how we’re going to behave in life and how we’re going to act ethically. And if you help people understand their relationship to what’s ultimately noble, then you can help them fortify their their resolution to do good in the world instead of to do harm. It’s it’s it’s it’s it seems to me to be I mean, I think we’re always deciding with every decision that we make whether we’re going to do good or do harm by action or by inaction and. Whether we should do good or harm or nothing at all, I think depends to some degree on who we think we are and what we’re capable of. And it seems to me that the humanities, when when they’re properly taught, are the study of who we could be, each of us as individuals. And we need to know that because otherwise we’ll be much less than we are. And that’s not a that’s not a trivial problem. It’s a cataclysmic problem. I did a talk at Harvard four years ago and. I pointed out two things to the students in the audience. One was that. A tremendous amount of civilization and effort had gone into producing the institution that they were now part of and that everyone who was part of that institution was hoping that they would come there and learn everything they possibly could. That was relevant and important and that they would be the best possible people they could be and they would go out in the world and do as much good as they possibly could. That was the essential mission of the enterprise. And that was really the case. And also that learning to write in particular was going to make them more powerful than they could imagine. And number of students came up to me afterwards and said, I really wish someone would have said that to us when we first came here. If you were going to recommend to a young person what they should study to prepare to be a researcher, psychological researcher, a clinical psychological researcher of your type. What what’s what should what should they do at the bachelor’s level? Let’s say what what’s the right preparation and then let’s walk through the process. Bachelor, master’s, PhD, postdoc, because people don’t know that. And so what do you look for in a student at the if you’re looking for a master’s level student, what should have they done in their bachelor’s degree? I guess they have to be passionate and at the same time, ready to work very hard to clarify how you go about understanding what you want to to understand. So you need it’s it’s almost as though you need the interest and the discipline. It’s it’s like that in every discipline, even a hockey player or football player. It is if you want to be successful. Yeah, you need to be interested because you have to want to. And at the same time, you have to take the time and and like investing yourself. So is it fair to say that you taught yourself to read and you got your GED equivalent? You did that in one year and so you were ready to go to university at the age of. How in the world did you do that? How much time were you spending every day studying? Oh, I didn’t. So that was a funny story. I ended up in the ER and then like they were saying you’re managed because I didn’t have time to eat. I forgot to eat. So even when I was sleeping, I would turn on the like a Ted Talks or NPR so I can like listen. My brain still kept working. And even when I was sleeping, I would put the books behind my pillows or the like knowledge really going to me. I was obsessed. I was crazy. You were obsessed with. Yeah, I was. I was completely obsessed with learning. So you’re completely obsessed with studying to the point where you’re not even eating. And and we should also just stress here. It is definitely the case that the education process is unbelievably competitive in South Korea, as you’ve already pointed out, far and above what people in young people in North America can imagine or in Europe for that matter. And so you were facing very, very heavy competition. So but you got obsessed to the point where you weren’t even eating. That’s amazing because I would have thought that you would be more motivated to eat after what you did virtually. But you were hungrier for knowledge than for food despite. And you had been starved of both. Exactly. I was I was working at this. I don’t know. You know, something could die. So it’s like a one dollar store in South Korea. The Japanese branch. So I was working there as a part time job and I was minor. So my mom had to give the authorization that she would let me work. And then I was working as a wedding host, like serving food as a waitress. So I was working and then my mom was also doing the dishes and helping me. And I was living in these rooms in Seoul because I was studying where underground I didn’t even have a window. And I still remember those times. I was so happy because I had a goal. Like I was, you know, like this tiny room where you can stretch your feet like barely. I’m like five times tiny in that room. I was like living there. All I had was books with me and dream. Yeah. Well, a room full of books isn’t small. Exactly. It was it was large. Yeah. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. So you got your GED and then you applied to university for in a competitive program and there was still trouble with you getting in. But you managed it. How did you manage it? And how did you decide what you were going to do? I was going to study criminal justice. It was so, so much injustice. And even in South Korea, so much of it. I really wanted to understand how that worked. You know, how how what these things call justice. So I’m grateful they gave me opportunity to study that program. And but now it’s I it’s such a like, I don’t know how I was going through all of that. But somehow back then, I had a drive that I didn’t even knew I had. So but your experience at university, go into that a little bit more detail. Well, I’m glad you elaborated that as you did. And I suppose not. I suppose I know I brought up that university experience in the hope that we do it now down the road in this conversation. I think outside of family, that is always principle and will never be superseded. Outside of family, if there’s anything that that contributed to the way that I look at things and have given me lasting benefit, OK, you may be familiar with Samuel Johnson’s remark about literature, applies to all the arts, that it exists better to help us endure life or to enjoy it. It fixes the mind. And when you have a real university, you get these things. The professor I mentioned, for example, when he found a book, it was one of Arthur Kessler’s, I won’t bother to name it. He actually walked to my house on a Saturday afternoon. I was just a kid and in all of them. But he came to the little studio, sorry, the student house and wanted me to have this book for a week so I could read. I mean, this kind of almost genuflection to the emergent or emerging mind of a young person is something that stays forever. So that long winded again. The university experience was the strongest because the universities then had values. They worshiped and that’s a good word not to be backed off from. They worshiped the best creations, the best fashions, the best styles of thought, the best scientific finesse. And they made you not made you. They induced you enticed grateful to be grateful for what other first rate minds have contributed to the temper of the entire human race. My undergraduate degree, I. I encountered people who were reading these texts and saying things about them that enabled me to understand the things that I had perhaps intuited when I was younger in a more self conscious, rationally universal frame, which is of course philosophy is. Ideas are the whole are everything, you know, and the idea there should be. You should be talking about ideas based on what make ideas sound or unsound, not not the person who’s saying them. What’s your vision for Ralston College architecturally speaking? You know, I would perhaps say just by introduction that, you know, our analysis and the need for founding new institutions is directly related to the things we’ve just been speaking about the cultural spiritual crisis, the upstream influence of the university over everything else. The fact that it is the epicenter of at very best unhelpful at worst downright toxic forms of ideology that spread through anything and everything that is catastrophically beset with high costs, low value, and so on and so forth. But our analysis is simply that the there is huge demand in young people for alternatives, people who are seeking alternatives to the indoctrination and activism and fraudulent low value of the Academy. I think your own work has shown this about as clearly as anything else historically ever has that it’s a mistake to concede the to be your new book. You write about the need for creative dynamism in relation to our institutions, and it seems to me we’re in in a in a moment, not only in which that is urgently necessary, but also eminently possible if we have only the courage to to to do it. So what I would say is a few things. The first is that Ralston College has has really four fundamental commitments. First, to seek the truth with courage. Second, to apprehend beauty in all of its forms. Third, to the freedom of speech and thought that are the conditions of those pursuits. And finally, to the the friendship or even fellowship that is the context for all of these pursuits. And, you know, what’s become clear to us, Jordan, over the years is it’s been a long runway. It’s not easy getting a college going. You know, anyone who thinks that you need to go off and fight in a war in order to undertake something really hard of value. Can call me up and we’ll have a talk about other things, other projects that may be very, very difficult to bring into the world but necessary and beautiful. What’s become clear to us in these these years of development, which we’re sort of at the end of as we we now are launching our first programs and first degree is that Ralston College has a double vocation, both on the one hand, to be a reinvention of the academy, a place for in person degrees, a new model for the university that can, we hope, be pretty radically disruptive, not just because we’re going to change everything, but we hope that it will lead to many other people doing new and different and more beautiful and more adequate and perhaps cheaper and faster. But above all, just more important and higher value things in the space of higher education. So on the one hand, to be a reinvention of the the the academy, a reinvention and a revival of the academy. And on that side, we’ve received our degree granting powers from the state of Georgia, we expect to launch our first degree this autumn. In what in what this first degree will be a master’s in the humanities so it will be a pretty intensive boot camp in thinking about the big ideas, tracing them and their development through history, which we think is important both as a revival of those forms of life and culture, but also because we think they are the as it were the key to opening up the depths of the self for the students themselves. You know, it’s not that every human if I can’t play the piano. It’s not that every you talk about resentment earlier, you know, it’s not that every human being should have to play the piano like Martha Argery or Glenn Gould from your home, your, your, your current town of Toronto. 99.999% of human individuals couldn’t play the piano that way. But because Glenn Gould could and did. We can all hear the music. And in some level I think what the, the, the, the high end of the academy is about is about playing the music so we can all hear it. And, and, and so on the one hand, it’s the reinvention of the academy in in a degree form. But on the other hand, the second side of this double vocation is to be a kind of platform of humanistic inquiry for anyone anywhere who which is wishes to engage with the riches of the humanistic tradition who wishes to seek the truth with courage who who is who is who wishes to ask the fundamental human questions that that that that every human being must face about truth and beauty and forgiveness and love and suffering. To me, the universities are the key element in the conversation across the generations about just exactly what a human being is and and that’s something that it’s not some abstract philosophical. It’s not merely some abstract philosophical concern. It’s, it’s the central issue that determines how you make all the decisions in your life.