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May 15, 2025 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:31:13

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1165

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	Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
	Welcome to the podcast of The Lotus Thesis for Thursday, the 15th of May, 2025.
	I'm joined by Dr. Nima Parvini.
	Hello.
	How are you doing?
	Thanks for having me, Carl.
	Good.
	Wonderful spring.
	It's been lovely, actually, isn't it?
	You can see why Starmer's like, yeah, we're going to turn off the sun.
	You're having too much of a good time.
	Not on my watch.
	But today we're going to be talking about the absolute state of modern education.
	Because, of course, this is something that has deeply concerned me for many years.
	You know, I'm a dad.
	You're a dad.
	Our children are getting the worst education.
	It's probably since the Middle Ages, if not before.
	And it's just dramatic embarrassment.
	Then we're going to be talking about how Julius Caesar was, in fact, a wizard.
	And I'm not going to qualify that.
	I absolutely mean when I say Julius Caesar had access to magic.
	He did.
	You'll find out what I mean.
	And then we're going to go on a crusade against Latin.
	The language.
	When used in the English context.
	Look forward to it.
	It'll be good.
	Trust me.
	Anyway, so...
	Let's begin with the absolute state of modern education.
	Now, it's actually not any kind of revelation to say that, well, modern education is pretty poor, isn't it?
	I mean, everyone knows it.
	It's...
	Everywhere, all around us.
	And this is an old joke that old heads will know, right?
	A video called Modern Education that was produced, I checked this, nine years ago, right?
	But what this was mocking was the advance of woke and SJWs through the education system back then, which was totally fair.
	But the problem of poor education...
	Predates this by a long way.
	This is something that began in the sort of middle of the 20th century, probably around the boomers, actually, and was taken away from us.
	And weirdly enough, it was something that came up a lot when I was talking about adolescence.
	Did you watch adolescence?
	I haven't seen it, I'm afraid.
	You know, I think you'd actually enjoy it, because it's actually more interesting than you think.
	Because one of the things that's portrayed in it is the schooling system.
	And the only thing you can come away with from watching their portrayal of the modern school system is that this is totally dysfunctional.
	And, in fact, the police officer who's investigating in the series says, how does anyone learn here?
	And the answer is, of course, they don't, because it's dominated by women, which means the boundaries are very soft when it comes to punishment, and the children are totally disrespectful to the teachers, and of course, they're not really learning anything in the classrooms.
	And so when I was on GB News, that was something that just kept coming up, because it's like, well, look, this is a real reflection of our reality.
	Like, you go to any state school these days, it probably looks a lot like what's represented in adolescence, unfortunately.
	And this is...
	Completely well known in academia and in the literature.
	They are well aware of the fact that actually things have gone downhill dramatically.
	And there's no reason that it should have been the case.
	Again, this is just from Cambridge Assessment, where they are like, my God, why are things going downhill?
	Why is it?
	The quality of education that we're getting is plummeting.
	And I just want to go through some examples of just how bad our education is getting.
	And so, I mean, this is in 2008, but again, in the early 21st century, you can find this in The Guardian, right?
	Where this was in 2004, where The Guardian's like...
	Well, hang on a second.
	Why exactly is it that we as adults now don't really even understand the Victorian exam papers that 11 and 12 year olds had to take then?
	I mean, you see this, critics of school policy have seized on a Victorian exam paper as proof that education standards have been dumbed down.
	No question of it.
	And I just want to, right, just a quick caveat on this.
	We're going to look stupid, right?
	Because we are the products of the modern education system, as are you.
	As other people writing this, who, as campaigners say, the school entrance exam would be too difficult even for most of today's A-level students.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So let's have a quick look at some 1859 exam paper questions, shall we?
	Because these are...
	Honestly, it's embarrassing.
	It's genuinely embarrassing that we've got to this point, right?
	So they go down to here.
	Here we go.
	There's the examination paper that any 12-year-old in 1859 would have had to take.
	And we're going to skip the arithmetic ones.
	Because I can't answer them.
	I mean, I'm not a mathematician.
	A wedge of gold weighing 14 pounds, 3 ounces and 8 DWT?
	The hell's DWT?
	I don't know what that is.
	And it's valued at 514 L. Which, I mean, is that pounds?
	I mean, I don't know.
	And 4 shillings?
	What's the value of an ounce?
	Man, I don't know.
	Good God.
	Anyway, like I said, we're going to skip the arithmetic ones and go to the English grammar analysis and composition ones.
	Mention some connective words which are not conjunctions.
	I have no idea.
	Is the definition usually given of the relative pronoun applicable to any other pronouns?
	What is the distinctive characteristic of the relative pronoun?
	Hmm.
	What?
	I don't know.
	I don't know what the answers to these questions are.
	And I'm 45 years old and deeply embarrassed by this.
	Define the degrees of comparison of adjectives.
	Give a list of adjectives which have irregular forms for the comparative and superlative degrees.
	Any idea?
	These aren't easy questions, I'll tell you that.
	For us, anyway.
	Right?
	I mean, thankfully, the next section is History of England.
	I can actually answer these questions.
	For example, explain the terms Wetenegamot, Dengelt, Curfew, Doomsday Book, Scootage, and Magna Charter.
	I assume you can do those as well.
	So, just for anyone watching, the Wetenegamot was an Anglo-Saxon...
	And, of course, the Magna Charter is...
	The beginning of the historic constitutional liberties of the English, signed in 1215 under duress by John I?
	I think it was John I. So at least I can answer the history ones, but the only reason I can answer the history ones is because as an adult, I was like, oh, I'm interested in history.
	I will learn about this.
	Whereas any 12-year-old would have been expected to have been able to answer this.
	I couldn't have answered that at 12 years old.
	Could you?
	No.
	Right?
	And so, why is this the case?
	I mean, again, the...
	I can answer these as well, but I won't for now, just to save time.
	But the point is, this is what our kids used to have access to, this level of understanding and information and knowledge.
	And the BBC did a kind of dumbed-down version for modern audiences.
	Right.
	So I thought we'd go through this.
	This is a bit easier, right?
	All right, yeah.
	Find the lowest common multiple of 10, 24, 25, 32, and 45. Should we take a guess?
	Let's take a guess.
	Oh, wonderful.
	7,200.
	Thank God.
	Let's go to the next one.
	Explain the chemical changes that take place during the process of combustion and ordinary fire.
	Hydrogen combines with oxygen to make water vapor?
	Definitely not.
	Hydrogen combines with nitrogen to make ammonia?
	Definitely not.
	Carbon combines with oxygen to make carbon dioxide.
	Magnesium combines...
	I reckon it's that one.
	I mean, I don't think it makes ammonia or water vapor, right?
	No, energy is contained.
	Energy has to be released.
	So maybe it's this one.
	I don't think it's making water vapor.
	Maybe it is.
	I don't know.
	This is the point, right?
	Victorian school children knew this.
	Bollocks!
	The point is I don't know these things!
	What are the three main elements in the composition of air?
	I'm pretty sure it's this one.
	Sounds right.
	21 cent oxygen.
	There we go.
	Suck it, Victorian school children.
	Describe how a note is affected by having a dot placed immediately after it.
	I don't play music.
	So I don't know.
	Let's just choose one.
	Oh, that's a lucky guess.
	I at least know what the Doomsday Book is.
	A written record of everything, so that's fine.
	When it is 12 o 'clock in Greenwich in winter, what time is it in St. Petersburg?
	How many hours ahead is Russia?
	Let's think.
	I'm going to go three.
	Your guess is as good as mine.
	Yeah, let's go three.
	Oh, there we go.
	What is a preposition?
	It is a...
	Let's have a look.
	It's not the first one.
	A word that tells you where or when something is in relation to...
	It's that one.
	I actually know that it's that one, and I'll explain to everyone why I noticed this one shortly afterwards.
	Correct.
	And what was the Spanish Armada?
	This one is correct, of course.
	So, even in the dumbed-down one, we only got seven out of eight.
	Smashed it.
	And that was two lucky guesses.
	I mean, if it wasn't multiple choice, we wouldn't nearly have done so well on that one.
	But this is the point, right?
	And so it's become...
	It's dramatically apparent that even to very well-educated and credentialed gentlemen like ourselves are missing something.
	There's something that we should have that it would have been expected that we would have had 200 years ago.
	It's genuinely embarrassing.
	It's just hordes of children in school in the 19th century learning things that were important to know in order to be able to just do things in the world.
	We've been deprived of this.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, I mean, one of the things, of course, Carl, that all of the 12-year-olds would have done in that day and age was something called the trivium.
	That is true.
	We're going to be talking about it soon.
	Well, you know what?
	It's funny you should mention that because that's actually making a comeback, right?
	Interesting.
	So this is an article from just the other day, just February, in which there's a modern school in Britain that has decided...
	What we might want to do, given how stupid everyone is now, and educated is now, is maybe reintroduce the form of education that they had in the 19th century, and, well, as you can see, with astounding results.
	And this really shouldn't come as any great surprise to anyone, but I'm just going to read from this article, right?
	Newham Collegiate Sixth Form Centre has an atmosphere of respect, hard work, traditional instruction that can be traced back to its founding in 2014.
	That the...
	The school has a liberal arts program which uses methods inherited from medieval and ancient teachers to introduce students to cultures of the past.
	This model is called the Trivium.
	And so what they have done is brought back the Trivium for 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds, and as they say, quote, the results are astounding.
	At A-level in 2024, 96% of their students were B or above.
	That is incredible.
	And then they point out, for context, Eton is only 93.6.
	So it's a better education standard than at the best school in the country.
	Excellent.
	Not surprising, though, to be honest.
	No, not at all surprising.
	But, like, the question is, well, okay, why were we deprived of all of this?
	Is the real question, right?
	Nobody scored less than a C in anything.
	What?
	That's crazy.
	Last year, 95% of students received offers from Russell Group universities, including Oxford and Cambridge.
	And they're going for, like, Harvard and wherever.
	So, okay...
	We really should be doing something different with our education here.
	And so you've got various educators who are like, yeah, no, we need to bring the Trivium back into classrooms.
	We absolutely need to do this.
	We should never have let it leave.
	Why was it ever taken out is the question.
	But we obviously should bring that back.
	So Martin Robinson is an education consultant who has been...
	Doing the same thing.
	And he's the person behind this particular school.
	And within three years of opening, the school is sending pupils to MIT, Harvard, Princeton.
	And the...
	Just, again, you read this, okay, why was this taken away from me?
	It's like, why is it now, if I go to the average man on the street and ask him, what's a syllogism?
	He's like, I don't know.
	Why would he know?
	Whereas you can watch...
	Interviews with people, like men on the street interviews in the 60s, and you'll notice how much more intelligent they seem.
	And this is not a coincidence.
	This is because they had the trivium and the classical education, and it's beginning with the boomers, I think, that this was in fact taken away from them.
	And this has been the curse that we labour under all of this time.
	Any thoughts on this so far?
	Yes, I mean, I think one of the things that sets Trivium, apart from the sort of education that we may have had, is that I think maybe starting in the 1960s onwards, there was a kind of thinking that we have maybe progressed, quote-unquote, beyond this, that we're more sophisticated now.
	Enlightened, perhaps.
	Right?
	And so therefore, rather than spending hours upon hours...
	Learning about demonstrative adjectives and parts of speech and how to construct a sentence and boring things like syntax and how to use a comma.
	Instead, we're going to be doing feminist deconstructions of a poem.
	I'm not even really exaggerating that much.
	I'm just thinking back to my own school.
	I mean, I was lucky enough to go to a school at a certain time that did actually teach old-fashioned grammar parts of speech, okay?
	But in that school, my textbooks, I remember, I opened them and they were printed in 1948.
	And I was being taught by ancient 80-year-old nuns, okay?
	That was a kind of...
	Not everybody had that education.
	No, I certainly didn't have that education.
	But moving forward in my education, certainly that emphasis on grammar and the fundamentals, the ABCs, gradually reduces over time.
	Certainly by the time you're 12, and then certainly by the time you're doing GCSEs and A-levels, it's completely gone.
	Logic, which is the second part of the trivia, I mean, I should probably explain.
	The Trivium was writing, logic, or grammar, you should say.
	Logic and rhetoric, okay?
	Logic never taught at any time in my education at any point was logic.
	Formal or informal taught.
	Just a quick point on that.
	I had to do a degree in philosophy to get an education in logic, in formal logic.
	And that is crazy if you think about it.
	Because, I mean, constructing a syllogism is something you do every day.
	Is the sky black?
	Yes, the sky black.
	Then it's going to rain.
	Then I should bring an umbrella.
	Everyone uses logic in every decision that they make.
	And the fact that, like, 12-year-olds used to have a proper conception of what a formal logical proposition was.
	And adults now don't.
	I mean, the question is, what is the agenda behind this?
	Now, one thing that lots of people now think is that, well, it was a deliberate attempt during the 20th century to create compliant workers, to man the factories, to man the offices, and honestly, maybe they're right.
	But you have a choice as to whether you're going to allow that to be the future that they condemn you to.
	And I've decided to make the choice against it.
	But sorry, go on.
	What's the rest of the trivia?
	And then the third part, of course, is rhetoric.
	Where, you know, I mean, literally from the Greek rhetoricians and philosophers, you learn, you know, not only what the...
	I mean, I think there's a kind of...
	People remember some of the memes, you know, not an argument and all of that, where you learn a few fallacies here and there.
	But I'm talking about dozens upon dozens of rhetorical forms or ways of thinking about how to approach an argument, what you're actually trying to achieve, things like Kairos, which we were talking about earlier on.
	Methods of persuasion.
	And pivotally persuasion.
	In terms of rhetoric, which I would say has been the one not taught for the longest time, I think that those darker arts of rhetoric were basically co-opted by the advertising and the marketers and kind of kept as almost like a secret knowledge.
	But anyway, the point is that...
	Before we go on that, because again, this is another thing that you can see yourself.
	Go back and look at speeches from politicians 60 years ago.
	You'll notice that they are all...
	And George Galloway is basically the last great rhetorician in this country.
	And compare it to the speeches that are given in Parliament now.
	It's total amateurs who do not know how to project.
	They don't know how to construct an argument using...
	Grammar, because we never talk grammar.
	They don't know how to make sure their arguments are logically consistent, and so you can always poke holes in them, because they've not been trained in logic.
	And they don't know how to deliver them in a persuasive way, because they've all got that same kind of modern, Blairite-sounding mediocrity that underpins the quality of their speech.
	And you see this in, like, the...
	Just the Labour front bench, frankly.
	Well, I mean, the Prime Minister, I mean, as much as many of us liked his speech the other day.
	He's a terrible speaker.
	He doesn't speak from the diaphragm.
	He speaks all up here.
	Very nice.
	The full force of the law.
	People.
	But it's a different resonance where if you listen to Galloway, and I was lucky enough to see George Galloway speak live a couple of times, and he objects to the back of the room.
	He's a great public speaker.
	You may dislike his politics.
	Oh, I do, but you can't deny that he is a force when he is speaking.
	He is able to summon up genuine rhetorical power because he knows how grammar and logic and rhetoric dovetail together to make him a presence in any room that he is in.
	And this is, again, Galloway is a great example.
	You can pair them with just anyone.
	Ed Miliband, right?
	Just listen to Ed Miliband explain himself.
	And you realise you're dealing with a very pathetic person who doesn't, like, do you remember when he was, who was it, that he was talking to, like, some interviewer, and they were saying, are you tough enough to challenge Vladimir Putin?
	He's like, heck yeah, I'm tough enough.
	And it's like, there is just no way, I mean, that was a joke, you know, fell completely flat, because he had no rhetorical power, he had no logical force, and he had no ability to combine words in a certain way to...
	Tickle the back of your brain and make you think, oh wait, this guy might be on something.
	And so you can see that Ed Miliband is the product of the modern education system.
	All of this, the technique, has been drained out of it.
	And our parliament is full of these people who have no technique.
	It's embarrassing.
	I mean, ideally, if you master all three parts of the trivia, you will make an argument that somebody gets instantly, i.e.
	it's so clear that anybody, even a 12-year-old, Or, you know, whoever was going to get it straight away.
	Even a Labour Party member.
	Yeah, even a Labour Party member won't get it straight away.
	The second thing is that the argument makes sense.
	It's coherent.
	It's valid.
	It's true.
	And then the third part is you're getting underneath the mind and you're hitting the non-intellectual parts of which is the majority of how people think and how they're persuaded.
	And ideally...
	And if you can do all three of those things, then, you know, well, like...
	The world is your oyster.
	You're going to be ahead of a lot of other people.
	The other thing to say is that, like I was saying, the modern education system tries to do a lot of running before it can walk.
	And what the Trivium is very good at is building block by block from the foundations where it's like you're building up a toolkit to be able...
	It's like the difference between You know, giving a man a fish and teaching a man to fish.
	Oh, genuinely.
	Right?
	And it's like one of those skills that once you've mastered these things, you'll have them forever, and it will see you good pretty much in any given setting.
	And it will help with any other subject, not just English, but any topic.
	Getting back onto the sort of more conspiratorial aspect of it, you can see why...
	If you were thinking, well, I want compliant workers to work in offices, I don't want them having hypercritical skills.
	I don't want them being able to analyze correctly the world around them.
	I just want them to be compliant and be technically proficient.
	And so one of the things I've always wondered is, why do I know what Pythagoras theorem is?
	Why do I know what this is?
	I remember being taught it at 14 and thinking, okay, I'm never going to be called upon to use this.
	And lo and behold, you know, 30 years later...
	I've never been called upon to use it, but I still know it's A squared plus B squared equals C squared for some reason.
	And that's the kind of drone programming that our schooling system has given us at this point.
	Whereas I had to...
	Luckily enough, I'm fairly smart, so I had to go and find all of this for myself rather than it being the standard.
	And you cannot think, well, this has been done on purpose.
	So anyway, I guess this is a good part to point out that what we're doing now is producing courses.
	And so we have licensed your Trivium as the first course that we are going to be producing.
	Now, these courses are not going to be idle.
	The purpose of these courses is to reconstruct the education you had denied to you.
	The Trivium will be the first one that we're producing, but Stelios is currently busy writing a second course that will be out very soon, which is about how to lead a good life.
	Because again, this is one of those things that has just been...
	Deliberately, I would say, deprived from people in the modern era.
	Because it used to be that there was a whole suite of wisdom literature that the ancients had access to is what you should be doing.
	Because at the moment, oh, you're free.
	Go and do what you want.
	Well, actions have consequences.
	What is it you're supposed to be doing?
	And so Stelios will have a course coming very soon.
	But for now, we'll focus on the Trivium.
	Because if I recall correctly, I was the one badgering you to write this, wasn't I?
	Yes.
	Yeah, back in, I mean, whenever it was.
	Yeah, like 2016 or something.
	Yes, you were talking loud and clear about how something like this needed to be available.
	One of the things I found when I actually came to do this is that a lot of the textbooks were Victorian, some of them even older.
	I was telling you just before we came on air that for rhetoric, because it hadn't been taught for so long, I was having to uncover books from the 18th century.
	And one of the textbooks I, you know, was reconstructing this course from was literally falling apart in my eyes like an antique, you know?
	Yeah.
	So there is an extent to which all of these things have to be kind of put back together, you know, rediscovered.
	By us as a generation who basically were denied these fundamental skills.
	I mean, one of the things I should mention really is that, I mean, I have a PhD.
	You know, I've taught at the highest level.
	I've seen...
	You were a lecturer for many years.
	Yeah, I've seen students come in to study English who can't write a sentence.
	These are all people who have A-levels in English literature, by the way, who need to be taught how to write again.
	But even from my own background, okay, when I was a student, I mean, I'm not just saying this to, I'm not saying this to boast, but when I was an undergraduate, I had the highest grade for 80 years in the college I went to, okay?
	Then I went on to Oxford.
	And then I went on to, well, this is where I'm getting to.
	Then I went on to Oxford.
	Got a distinction from there, okay?
	Then I came to do my PhD, and I handed in my first chapter, pleased as punch, you know, cock of the walk.
	I was, you know, this is it.
	I'm the best thing since sliced bread.
	Came back.
	It was absolutely covered in reading.
	And my supervisor was like, you can't write, can you?
	I was like, what?
	I've got a master's in English.
	What are you talking about?
	I'm the best student ever.
	What are you talking about?
	Yeah, you can't write, can you?
	And then I kind of, it really kind of rocked everything.
	And I was like, shit, he's right.
	I can't write.
	And I had to basically teach myself again how to write from the ground up, unlearn.
	All of the terrible habits that have been built up from the education system that I'd had.
	Okay?
	But you should have been instructed in as a child.
	Yeah, this is stuff I should have known from the age of 12. But in fact, the system was rewarding those bad habits all the way through.
	Okay?
	Until I was literally that late on that I came to realize.
	But then I realized other things.
	Okay, I've written all these essays.
	Okay?
	Have I ever studied logic?
	Do I actually know?
	I'm analyzing arguments, but do I know what an argument is?
	Do I know how to define a term?
	Do I know what a premise is?
	And this is something else that our school system, right?
	I did GCSE history and A-level.
	I remember being asked to compare sources, analyze this source against that source, but we'd never been taught, you know, the basic skills of what makes a good argument, what is logical.
	So you're basically asking kids to do things they've never been taught to do.
	And probably the teacher doesn't know how to do it either.
	They're a product of the modern education system as well, because I do think this began with the boomers in the 60s, where the education system was changed to deprive them of this.
	And so my parents, me, and my children...
	We're all missing out on this.
	And you can see that it's being brought back experimentally.
	It's like, oh, well, what a surprise if we experimentally bring it back.
	All the kids are doing brilliantly.
	It's like, yeah, so who's held accountable for this?
	Who can we hold accountable for ruining our education?
	I mean, the analogy I'd make is that it's like...
	Being sent out to play football, right?
	But you know all those little tricks that Messi and Ronaldo used to do, like the flip-overs and stuff?
	It's like sending somebody out, but you've only taught them how to do the fancy tricks, but you've never taught them how to do just the simple side pass, the little A to B, the really basic things of positioning.
	It's exactly like that, and we're sending thousands, millions of kids out into the world, having never taught them the fundamental ABCs.
	So, yeah, I mean, when it comes to these courses, I really believe, not just for 12-year-olds, okay?
	I mean, some 12-year-olds may even, if they're used to the sort of work they'd be doing, they might do these courses and think, ooh, this is a bit of a step up.
	But I would recommend this for anybody who never did this stuff in school at any point, even if you're a PhD.
	You know, it's funny.
	I was on Twitter the other day.
	Did you see that one?
	I'm a PhD.
	You don't need to tell me what median is.
	It means average.
	Oh my god.
	Did you see that one?
	No, I didn't.
	So that was like...
	Median, as I understand, is the middle point.
	It's the middle point.
	It's not the average.
	So we're now producing people who are on Twitter saying, I've got a PhD.
	Don't try to explain to me.
	So they've got the letters, they've got the status, but they still don't even understand the absolute basics when it comes to argumentation, writing.
	And, of course, rhetoric, which we're going to about to talk about.
	So, you know, the reason that I began thinking about this way back, and this must have been like 2016, 2017, I remember doing a video for my Sargon channel where I was just, I was a bit drunk and I was just rambling that, look, we are losing the quality of people that we used to produce.
	Because it used to be when someone from Britain arrived on a continent on the other side of the world, that was an important thing.
	Like, sorry, you've got like an educated Englishman who has now stepped foot in like Malaysia or something.
	Oh, this guy's going to be able to do things.
	He's going to be able to understand things and make things happen that otherwise wouldn't have been able to happen.
	This is an important and impressive person who's travelled across the world and he is going to make a difference.
	And we used to produce generation after generation of these people.
	These were the men who staffed the British Empire and made it the largest imperial project ever and made it respectable and worthy.
	All I was thinking at the time is just, we are just not producing those kinds of men anymore.
	And at the time, I had no idea why, obviously.
	I just could see that we were not...
	Because I was, you know, researching and just watching old things and thinking, why are we just such worse communicators?
	Why are we just worse intellectually than these people?
	And of course, it's because they did the Trivium and we didn't.
	And so I've sat there and I've done your Trivium and I've...
	One thing that you get is it humbles you because you realize, oh, I didn't know this, and I should have known this, and you can already see where you yourself, where you think about things you've done recently or whatever, and you're like, hmm, I shouldn't have done it like that.
	I should have done it this other way.
	And it's one of those things where it's like, right, okay, no, it is absolutely true that we are going to just have to retake our own education.
	This was stolen from us.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, and one of the things, you see, the knock-on benefits are so great because the key thing is not even just writing and communication.
	It's clarity in your own thinking.
	Yes.
	Okay?
	And this is, I mean, having taught hundreds, thousands of students over the course of my life, you can always tell if somebody doesn't really know what they're talking about.
	They're just writing words or they're just trying to fill up the space.
	And it all comes through as a quality of your writing.
	Foundations of writing will actually force you to think about what you're saying in a sentence, to make it make sense.
	And one of the things we can talk about later is even the order of the words in the sentence.
	Subject, verb, object.
	Subject, verb, object.
	And this is one of those things that once you start spotting it, you'll start seeing how politicians, for example, hide the pronoun.
	So rather than saying, I did this, they'll say things like, oh well, mistakes were made.
	Well, you're now hiding the doer of the action.
	If you think, well, every sentence needs a doer of an action, you're already...
	So it's automatically making the world more real, because it's concretising it.
	But also, this shows you how the politicians are getting away with it.
	If the people they're talking to have been denied an education in grammar, well, it's not self-evident to them to look for the hidden pronoun in the sentence that gives the politician...
	plausible deniability and cover for their own actions, for the things they've done.
	And you wonder why we've got such poor quality politicians and they keep getting away with it.
	Well, it's because the public can't really see what's happening because of this.
	And it's all down to this, I So, basically...
	Live now at courses.lotuses.com is the Trivium, and I'm very, very, very pleased with all of this.
	So you can buy the courses individually if you are interested only in logic, rhetoric, or writing.
	I mean, for example, I did logic during my degree in philosophy, so I actually didn't do your Foundations of Logic course.
	So I looked at the syllabus and was like, well, this is exactly the same as my philosophy degree syllabus.
	Did you do definitions of terms when you were?
	Probably.
	I'll have to go back and check my notes.
	I'm sceptical of that.
	Look, I just didn't have time to do it in preparation.
	So one of the things I think is important to stress with this is that this is not just you watching YouTube videos, right?
	What this is, there is an hour-long lecture for each one, then you have all of the materials that go with it, and then you have a series of, like, examination-style questions that you yourself have to write.
	This is not just watching entertainment.
	What this is is...
	Improving yourself, because you are not what you should have been because of what the 20th century has done to us.
	That's literally that simple.
	And so, yeah, I had to spend a day going through each one of these, and just in preparation to be able to talk about them now.
	And already, I mean, I'm going to go back through them, because there are definitely...
	The writing thing in particular, because I do a lot of writing myself, so it's like, yeah, no, I really should be more buffed up on this by a long way.
	I'm reasonably confident about my rhetoric, but the rest of it...
	The writing in particular, I personally found a lot of good in.
	So this is definitely what I would recommend.
	If you do take it, I would say that the order you should do them in is the order that you see.
	I would do writing first, then logic, then rhetoric.
	The reason I say that is because, you remember I was just talking about walking before you can run?
	The writing and the logic is almost like learning how to walk.
	Rhetoric, you're getting into a jog or you may even be running.
	Like, you know, there are some...
	You kind of need to know the rules before you break the rules.
	And rhetoric doesn't always play by the rules of logic or even good grammar.
	But it is also one of the most fun parts, I have to say.
	It's the fun part.
	I do.
	It was the bit that I went to first.
	But the rhetoric is more fun.
	But anyway, Carl, you need to...
	You need to have your roughage, eat your Brussels sprouts and your veg before you move to the delights of the plate and eat the meat.
	That is true.
	And that is exactly what I explain to my children, but I still don't do it.
	But seriously though, this is...
	Honestly, I'm very proud to be able to have this as our sort of flagship course.
	And you guys know, watching the podcast, I've been complaining about the state of education forever.
	And it's not coming back for us, right?
	If you're an adult watching this, which undoubtedly you will be, you aren't getting this from somewhere else, right?
	No one's going to provide this to you.
	You should have had this when you were a child.
	This was taken away from you.
	And the thing is, in your schools at the moment, I know a lot of you are going to be dads.
	My kids are going to be doing this.
	When my oldest son reaches 12, sorry son, we're sitting down and we're doing the Trivium because you need to know.
	And I will have to be the one who tests him in a homeschool on this course.
	The other thing I'll say is that with this course, no wokery of course, but also no corners cut whatsoever.
	I was literally going to source.
	You know, what is it that the Victorians did?
	And I didn't really dumb it down, if that makes any sense, for a modern audience.
	Because the whole point is that you have to learn.
	So there are a few parts of it, especially when you're doing the logic, they get a bit esoteric, where you have to start learning these weird words to try to remember the order of the premises and so on.
	But these are like...
	Actually how they would have done it.
	Because a lot of the sort of education they had in the Victorian time, they did a lot of drumming.
	You just have to learn this through repetition.
	And one of the things I wanted to build in is by making the tests at the end.
	I was pretty impressed that you got through them.
	Because you can't get 5 out of 10 or something.
	You have to get...
	Full marks, basically, because it's testing.
	Do you know this?
	And there's no shortcut.
	You either have to know it or you don't.
	So that's another thing that I wanted to try to get a little bit of that kind of Victorian strictness in there, if that makes any sense.
	And this is another point.
	This is the point I was making when I was talking about adolescence.
	The strictness is...
	Actually a necessary guardrail in order to keep you on the correct path.
	You just have to have it.
	And so, like I said, this is not you watching YouTube videos.
	This is you doing active work.
	But the point is to make you something that you weren't...
	Before you did it.
	This is a way of genuinely leveling up yourself.
	And it genuinely is in every aspect of life.
	You will find yourself understanding things quicker than your boss.
	You will understand why your boss is talking nonsense or why the people around you just are not...
	Able to properly formulate and articulate a correct argument to things.
	And these are all things that you should have had as a child.
	So this is currently live, like I said, at courses.lotuses.com.
	And because I've managed to drag AA into the studio, we are also going to be doing a free webinar.
	So this will be at 7pm on Thursday, which will be today, of course.
	We'll be linked in the description, so come and follow it.
	We will be live at 7pm, where me and him, he'll be explaining the depths of this to us, and I will be the normie asking normie questions, and we'll take, of course, a Q&A from the chat, so you will be able to ask direct questions on why you need this.
	And I genuinely think we do need this.
	And I'm not just saying this, because, you know, obviously I've been, had the Trivium, you know, for a while.
	I have had people who've taken it.
	And being like, yeah, I took this and my grades improved or I aced my exams or I even had one Carl help me get a date.
	Look, I mean, this is what the thing's for.
	I had one Carl saying, help me get a date because she wrote back and said, you write such beautiful English.
	Oh, really?
	Yeah, it made him stand out on OkCupid or whatever it was.
	This is the point though, isn't it?
	Because what these skills do is give you certainty about yourself.
	You are actually now the master of the things happening around you.
	And that really, honestly, that's what women look for, frankly, is a man who's got mastery over the surroundings around him.
	And so, honestly, I can't recommend this enough.
	Like I said, it'll be 7pm today, free webinar.
	Go and find the link, come and join, and we will see you there.
	You've got to sign up with your name and email, and we will send you the thing for 7pm today.
	Right, so let's move on.
	To Julius Caesar, who actually is a famous spellcaster.
	And people don't realize that, in fact, many people in the ancient world were famous spellcasters.
	And a lot of people are like, well, hang on a second, what are you talking about?
	He's just saying he was likable, because it's well known that likable people are, of course, more successful.
	And this...
	It's 90% of politics, as we cover politics all the time.
	This is why Boris Johnson is a genuine threat to Nigel Farage still, even though no one wants to talk about it, but Boris could probably come back and upend the Apple Cup because people like Boris.
	Boris is a good speaker, and he's just affable, amiable, and this is an important characteristic.
	But the thing is, you might not be likable.
	So what's your second option?
	Well, your option is to be persuasive, and that is also very important.
	If you can construct clever arguments that actually are, well, yeah, fair enough, that makes sense, then you can get where you want to go in life.
	Because 90%, again, of everything is just persuading people that they want the same thing.
	And this is what Julius Caesar, This is why Julius Caesar was able to get into the position that he was in to cross the Rubicon, become the leader of the Populares, and win the Civil War, and merely become the first citizen of Rome.
	I mean, I'm not going to call him anything worse than that.
	But the point, as they make in this, is that, look...
	Rhetoric is persuasion, but not just any persuasion.
	It is persuasion towards the truth.
	And so we know about Julius Caesar studying rhetoric because Cicero was also studying rhetoric under a famous rhetorician called Molo Rhodes when Cicero was over there as well.
	Because this is what they used to consider rhetoric to be, a kind of magic, a kind of persuasive talent.
	In fact, because they were the ones who invented the trivia and they...
	Gave themselves the ability to properly construct sentences using grammar, properly construct arguments using logic, and then properly deliver them using rhetoric.
	Now, if you've ever been to a job interview, this is a supremely important skill that you absolutely need.
	And as someone who has interviewed many people for jobs now, man, can I tell that a lot of people have not been taught even the very basics of this skill.
	Yeah, I mean, the thing is, is that this word magic is very interesting.
	Now, I was a Shakespeare scholar, or still am a Shakespeare scholar.
	In Shakespeare's time, they genuinely believed, inherited from classics, that words had magical power.
	Yes.
	There is a truth to that, because if you say something with conviction, If you say it with authority, if you vibrate it even, right?
	I mean, if you watch like a film, like Lord of the Rings or something, and listen to Gandalf's voice of power.
	Or Saruman, or Christopher Lee.
	Or just listen to Christopher Lee talk, right?
	That booming voice.
	There is something in that that gets beyond the rational brain, but also there is a power in...
	This is going to sound a little bit strange, Carl, but if you repeat something often enough with enough conviction, you can bring it into reality.
	Okay?
	And, I mean, there are, like, I've said this before, Donald Trump is kind of a bit of a wizard, right?
	He...
	Mean magic is real.
	He, just through the power of words, through repeating something often enough, has brought things into reality that seemed impossible.
	Only a few years ago.
	So just as a quick thing here, I genuinely didn't believe in meme magic when in, you know, 2016, it was, you know, we're going to build a wall, make Mexico pay for it.
	I thought this was a big joke.
	And you got the posters online who were just like, no, no, no, this is going to happen.
	I was like, it's not going to happen.
	And then all of this stuff happened.
	I was like, okay.
	And again, come sort of now, I'm just like, okay, no, there is definitely a power in it.
	And this is what the ancients knew.
	In fact, they were well aware, again, as this article discusses, of the danger of rhetoric.
	This is a power over other men.
	This is something that itself was considered, obviously, it could be used for great good, but like with any power, it can be used for great evil.
	And honestly, I think this is one of the reasons that they just don't want to teach this anymore.
	It's like, well, do we want an active, intelligent population who can use a power against us?
	No, if I was the managerial regime, the last thing I would want is strong rhetoricians running around doing anything.
	And it's worth mentioning as well that this is a double-edged sword, okay?
	So yes, it can be empowering.
	Yes, it can.
	But it can work the other way.
	Let's pretend the person who's always putting themselves down, or the person who's always saying, oh, well, I can't do that, okay?
	If you repeat it often enough...
	Self-fulfilling prophecy.
	You make it real.
	Okay.
	Now, this may sound a bit strange to some people, but there's a deep truth.
	There is a deep truth to it.
	And, you know, even sometimes when you're joking, when you say things like, I mean, in my darker moments, Carl, I've often wondered, like, should I have mean Tony Blair is the Dark Lord?
	Well, I actually worry about that too.
	I really do worry about it.
	Have I brought this into reality?
	Because it's kind of weird how that happens.
	Possibly in small part, you know what I mean?
	But you are right about the positivity aspect as well, and the sort of self-belief.
	Again, Julius Caesar's a great example of this.
	When he was captured by the Cilician pirates, they're like, okay, yeah, we'll do it for like 50 dinars or something.
	He's like, no, it needs to be double that, triple that.
	How dare you only ransom me for this petty amount?
	And they're like, okay, fine.
	And of course, they raised it.
	He raised it, came back and crucified the lot of them.
	The point is self-belief is important.
	The pirates themselves were won over completely by Julius Caesar's ability to charm them with his words.
	Because, of course, these were just like backwards tribals who were living on the coast of Asia, who were just like, okay, yeah, we can get a boat and we can catch people and they'll give us money for it.
	Literally like Somalians now, right?
	If you can charm them with your words...
	They gave him a very nice captivity.
	Julius Caesar enjoyed his captivity because he was just able to be charming and they liked having him around.
	And then he came back and crucified the lot of them.
	So you can see that, as he says in here, look, it's as if rhetoric itself acted as some magic spell set by a warlock on the listeners to coerce them into thinking terrible thoughts.
	If it's been used for evil, yeah, that's how it comes across.
	But then, conversely...
	If it's used for good, it comes across as heroic.
	I mean, we'll get on to Churchill a bit later, but Churchill employed a lot of very powerful rhetoric in the defense of Britain and the Allies during World War II.
	Whether you like or love or hate Churchill, you can't deny his power.
	And Boris Johnson's very much in the same vein.
	There are extraordinary examples in history as well, Carl.
	One example is Pope Gregory VII, right?
	Where...
	There was an army assembled to take on the Pope.
	They marched on the Vatican.
	They got there.
	They were red.
	There was an army there.
	The Pope had nothing.
	He was just a man.
	And it's like he melted their brains.
	And they just stopped and knelt.
	Yes, there's faith involved.
	There's other things.
	But it's just remarkable.
	Well, another great example of that is Napoleon's return from exile during the Hundred Days, where they sent Ney and the army to come and accept him.
	And he just walks forward, his chest press, will you shoot on your emperor?
	And they all, no, bent the knee, long live the emperor.
	And it's like, there we go, Napoleon's off.
	And all he had to do is walk up to them and speak to them.
	The power is all of that.
	And of course, he had the education that we're talking about not having.
	And then I want to give a great example of my favorite piece of rhetoric.
	So I spent my 20s and early 30s just listening to audiobooks of ancient writers talking about things.
	One of my favorite was Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.
	And I absolutely love Athens.
	I love Athens because Athens is mad, right?
	Athens is the maddest place in the world.
	Everyone thinks, oh, the School of Athens.
	No, no, no, no.
	The Athenians were mental.
	And they wanted war all over the place, right?
	And so at one point they're like, shall we invade Syracuse and Sicily and take over Sicily?
	It's like, okay, you are in the middle of a war with Sparta.
	Don't you have more pressing things?
	We can do this.
	And so there's a debate on the Pnyx, the ancient forum of democracy.
	And here you have Alcibiades, who's completely in favour of the war.
	He's like basically an ancient Greek version of Milo Yiannopoulos.
	He's a total playboy, but...
	Totally rhetorically strong.
	And then on the other side, you've got the stuffy Nicias.
	And Nicias is like, no, no, this can't be done.
	We definitely shouldn't do this.
	And so I'm just going to read a bit about Alcibiades' rhetoric, just so you can see how much more powerful their speaking was, right?
	So Alcibiades says...
	In this state of things, what reason can we give to ourselves for holding back, or what excuse can we offer our allies in Sicily for not helping them?
	They are our confederates.
	We are bound to assist them, without objecting that they have not assisted us.
	We did not take them into alliance to have them help us in Hellas, but so they might annoy our enemies in Sicily to prevent them from coming here and attacking us.
	Men do not rest content with parrying the attacks of a superior, but often strike the first blow to prevent the attack being made.
	Be convinced, then, that we shall augment our power at home by this adventure abroad.
	Let us make the expedition, and so humble the pride of the Peloponnesians by sailing off to Sicily, and letting them see how little we care for the peace that we are now enjoying.
	And at the same time, we shall either become masters, as we very easily may, of the whole of Hellas through the accession of the Sicilian Hellenes, or in any case ruin the Syracusans, to no small advantage of ourselves or our allies.
	And so Thucydides said, well, such were the words of Alcibiades.
	And as you can see in that, giving that on a podium in front of the Athenian men assembled, you can see how this would be highly persuasive.
	And by the end of this speech, it's much longer, but that's just an excerpt.
	By the end of this speech, the Athenians are like, Yeah, this is brilliant, right?
	We are a powerful empire.
	Syracuse, who cares about Syracuse?
	We're just going to get, you know, however many men, 10,000 men, 20 or 100 ships.
	We're going to sail over there and smash them.
	And so Nicias gets up and he realizes, oh, everyone's blood is up now.
	Alspide is an amazing speaker.
	I guess I'm just going to have to come out and be like, well, I mean, if you were going to do it, you'd have to take double the number of men and double the number of ships.
	It'd be really difficult.
	Now Spidey just gets up and it's just like, done.
	And everyone's like, brilliant, yeah!
	And so Nickius, he has rhetorically brought him into a trap.
	He has brought everyone's blood up.
	And all Nickius can do, he can't calm them down, all he can do is say, well, you would need much more than you've got access to here.
	And so Nickius essentially is...
	Tricked into pulling a coup de grace on his own argument, you know, promising even more.
	And so suddenly everyone, and then they go off, they invade Syracuse, and it fails completely.
	But the point being is you can see how, as a master of rhetoric, Alcibiades was trained as a young man to...
	Arrive at this point, to be able to persuade an entire crowd, an entire city, the cockpit of an empire, to embark on the adventure that he wanted to go on.
	And this is all what the point of rhetoric is.
	This is why it was considered a form of magic that moves men's minds and souls.
	Absolutely, yeah.
	I mean, we should mention, it's not...
	So we've talked about the power of words.
	There are other non-verbal elements that are part of the performance.
	Hence me moving my arms here.
	Yes, right.
	And so there are...
	I mean, we talked about Caesar.
	There are all sorts of hidden persuasion nodes, we could say, like authority, for example.
	You know, they've done...
	Well, let me, because I did your course, as I said, and I noticed that you lent on Caldini's Six Principles of Persuasion.
	Yes, absolutely.
	Because they've done, like, for example, you see these all the time on an advert.
	I don't know if they do so much these days, but...
	You know, when we were growing up, it'd be like a pierce a lot of it, buy it.
	But they put the guy in the doctor's jacket.
	Science has shown that this, you know...
	Wasn't it the Milgram experiments?
	Well, it's just the guy in the...
	In the white jacket.
	Yeah, and they'll just rank up the electricity.
	I mean, we lived during COVID.
	You see how much power the idea of the expert, the idea of the guy with authority, carries.
	And for a lot of people...
	That is enough.
	Just the authority alone.
	I can imagine the authority a man like Caesar would have had, you know, could have moved mountains with it.
	I mean, there are other persuasion.
	I mean, one of them is just really simple.
	Do people like you?
	You have to be likable, you know?
	And some of those things are difficult to quantify.
	I mean, say when you're on about Tony, he was kind of likable.
	Gordon Brown couldn't smile, famously.
	No, you didn't want to look at Gordon Brown.
	Pretty much the same ideas.
	A little bit to the left, maybe.
	But, you know, some people just don't have it.
	Other people do.
	Trump is likable.
	He's a kind of likable guy.
	Kamala Harris, not so much.
	This is why CNN stopped broadcasting his just talks where he was just, you know, I'm in front of a stage, I'm on a stage talking to the audience for an hour.
	Because if they just let Trump talk...
	Off the top of his head for an hour, people come away going, yeah, I quite enjoyed that.
	It's just funny.
	It's like watching a New York stand-up comedian or something.
	And so they just stopped broadcasting his campaign because it was like, no, it's going to win our violence.
	So that's two of them.
	And then, well, one of them is something called social proof, which is, I mean, it's as simple as you go to buy something on Amazon.
	Oh, a thousand people have given up one star review.
	I don't buy that thing.
	What's wrong with it then?
	I don't know.
	So this is the social proof.
	You're looking for the fact that other people...
	Is anybody else doing this?
	Now, some people aren't persuaded.
	Like, for me, I'm not persuaded by the crowd.
	I don't really care.
	If everybody goes that way, I don't care.
	I'll go the other way.
	So I agree with that.
	But when I'm buying things off Amazon, the social proof is really important to me.
	But a lot of people are like, this is terrible.
	A lot of people won't do anything until they see...
	That's social proof.
	Yeah, I'm one of those.
	People are kind of like herd.
	Well, you're a herd animal.
	When I'm buying things off Amazon, at least.
	So there was that one.
	Reciprocity, scarcity, authority.
	So reciprocity is I'm giving you something.
	You're giving something to me.
	Money, say.
	I'm giving something back to you.
	So it's a fair exchange.
	You know, pretty simple.
	And then what were the other two?
	Consistency and commitment.
	Okay, well, so consistency is basically you can have trust in this person because they're always going to be there.
	If they say they're going to be there on Tuesday, they're going to be there on Tuesday.
	That's why flip-flopping is such a crime in politics.
	You've got to maintain a consistent through line.
	Yeah, or like, I mean, say this Channel Lotus, if you say you're going to go out at 1pm every day...
	And you decide, I don't know, I'm going to take a month off for no reason.
	People will be like, hold on a second, I can't.
	They're not consistent.
	So it's a pretty simple thing.
	And then the last thing is scarcity, which is basically like, I'm telling you a secret.
	This is forbidden knowledge that has been kept away from you by...
	Dark elites type thing.
	Ironically, this is actually what has happened.
	I mean, it is actually what has happened.
	That's not even...
	That's genuinely what has happened at this point.
	You know, you arouse the curiosity factor.
	And it's a basic law of economics, of course.
	The more scarce something is, the higher its value is.
	And it's obviously true.
	So anyway, like we said earlier, the Trivium is available on courses.lotuses.com.
	Go and get it.
	You will absolutely not regret doing this.
	Like I said, we are not offering you something easy.
	This is not something you are just going to watch.
	This is work.
	You are going to improve yourself, but you will be glad that you did at the end of it.
	And once you've got it, you can go back to it as many times as you like.
	Of course, you know, it's yours forever.
	And like I said, at 7pm today, That is...
	British time, which is 2pm New York time and 11am LA time, we will be doing a free webinar.
	So go and sign up to the webinar.
	The link will be in the description.
	Just put your name in your email and we will send you a link to the webinar Zoom call.
	And we will be doing a little lecture to explain the general essence of each particular course and then doing a Q&A with you so you can learn as much about it before you think of actually jumping in.
	And that will be, like I said, 7pm today British time, 2pm or 11am New York and LA time.
	Right, let's move on to the final part of this, that I personally, this has been a bugbear of mine for about a year now, and I don't know how I got onto it, but it became very apparent to me that English is by far the best language.
	You wouldn't be able to invent a language as good as English.
	It's so obviously the case that this has been organically produced by a fortuitous series of historical circumstances to produce what, again, like foreign authors will say, oh, English is the best language, right?
	So this is an Argentinian fiction writer.
	Well, I've done most of my reading in English.
	I find English far finer language than Spanish.
	Why?
	Well, there are many reasons.
	Firstly, in...
	Firstly, English is both a Germanic and a Latin language.
	Those two registers.
	For example, for any idea you take, you have two words.
	Those words do not mean exactly the same.
	For example, if I say "regal", they're not exactly the same thing as saying "kingly".
	But if I say "fraternal", they're not saying "brotherly", or "dark and obscure".
	Those words are different.
	It would make all the difference, speaking, for example, of the Holy Spirit.
	It would make all the difference in the word in a poem.
	If I wrote about the Holy Spirit or the Holy Ghost, since ghost is a fine, dark Saxon word, while spirit is a Latin word.
	So I love this distinction.
	And this is something that as soon as you start thinking like this, you realize, oh, I use a lot of Latin words, actually.
	And this is...
	One of the curses of modernity.
	So it became, when I was doing my philosophy degree, that you learn about the positivist movement, the logical positivists, through the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century.
	Who wanted to make a language that was devoid of metaphysics.
	Now, in English, what this means is a language that is purely scientific.
	And the scientific terminology in English is Latin.
	The genuine human terminology is all Saxon.
	And so it turned out that by the 1950s, this had burned out because it just wasn't possible to have a metaphysically pure language, one that didn't have it.
	I mean, just the very word I is a metaphysically loaded...
	Question.
	As in, what does I refer to?
	Is it referring to my body?
	Or is it referring to my consciousness?
	Or the concept of a person who is unique in place and time and denoted in every possible universe?
	And then suddenly you realize that even if I can't be described in a way that isn't metaphysical, then this whole movement is gone, right?
	And so by the 1950s, the scholars had worked out, yeah, this is probably nonsense.
	But the scientific revolution carried on.
	And the sciencization of our language is everywhere now.
	You'll notice, and if you start looking for this, people are using Latinate words where the good Germanic word would do.
	A great example of this, in fact, we'll get to here, right?
	This was a great post that I found, and we're going to have to scroll down because it's too big, right?
	And this is a great post that I found, and this really summarizes it, right?
	So it says...
	English has a cool built-in heuristic for detecting bullshit.
	Most of the nouns and verbs are Latin, Greek, or Germanic in origin.
	If Germanic, the things being discussed are probably real physical actions and things.
	Tree, walk, cow, shit, fall, wood, buy, go, whatever.
	If they're Latin or Greek, caution is advised.
	Concept, information, imply, connotate.
	Equity, liberty, diversity, oppress, empower, persecute, periphery, center, idea, intelligence, all these sort of things.
	They're all airy words where it's like, okay, there are many interpretations of these words, and they could be used to conceal things.
	And he says, Germanic words are the ones we needed in 1065 and have never stopped needing.
	Real words for real things.
	Latin and Greek words are the ones the Norman French aristocracy felt lost without, or philosophers and scientists felt the need to borrow from the ancients or make up.
	And this is why, like, you know, the name of dinosaurs is always some, you know, extraneous weird Greek loanword compound.
	That you can't pronounce, you know, otherwise it'd be, you know, Armoured Spike Dinosaur would be, you know, what the Ankylosaurus was called or whatever, right?
	And so this is a very interesting distinction because, as he points out here, it's not that they're all vapor, it's just good to keep that in mind.
	If you're asking yourself, is this bullshit?
	First ask yourself, is there a way to express this without a lot of Latin and Greek?
	And if the answer's no, you can be at the very least, it's not Lindy.
	So here's an example, misinformation.
	We have Germanic words that appear to cover this concept just fine.
	Lie and wrong.
	Now, which one do you feel more safe using?
	When someone comes up and says, this is misinformation, right, so you're not saying it's a lie.
	So you're not saying it's wrong.
	You're saying there's something else attached to this, which is a great observation.
	Those words won't do because misinformation doesn't mean wrong.
	It means heresy.
	It means there's some kind of orthodoxy.
	The misinformation is attacking even though it's not the misinformation.
	The thing that you're referring to, even though it's not a lie and it's not wrong because it wouldn't be accurate to say that's a lie because it very firmly grounds it in yes or no.
	Whereas this is very airy, has blurred edges.
	You don't know.
	It's maybe.
	I mean, misinformation.
	What does that mean?
	And then you get malinformation.
	It's even more.
	Sort of fruity.
	And so you've got the institutional Latin of the judicial legal domain of experts.
	You don't need a master's degree to know what is and isn't a lie, which is of course Old English.
	What's right?
	Old English.
	What's wrong?
	Old English.
	Which means they can't use a real word without looking absurd.
	They have to read the liturgical languages.
	I love the use of that.
	Liturgical languages.
	Exactly right.
	Latin being the language of the church.
	And so when we say, oh, the experts are taking on a new priestly class.
	Yeah, and they have their own liturgical language, actually.
	That's how you know they're lying.
	And so he points out the look.
	And that's how you know they're lying.
	Every word in this sentence is Old English.
	And so this is why it's not good for the Latins on the continent.
	Now, that's not to say that, you know...
	Latin in its context is bad or anything like that.
	The Latin languages are fine.
	It's just when it's being used in Anglo-Saxon, in Old English, in the English language, this is an important thing you should think about.
	Because actually, a lot of what Fauci was saying and stuff like this would all be couched in Latin language.
	Whereas a lot of the language that we, for example, the books that we read, that are still the most powerful things we read today, well, they're written in Old English.
	And an example of this is Tolkien.
	Right?
	So you've got a series of famous authors here.
	But look at Tolkien's there as the textual analysis, right?
	He writes long sentences.
	And he writes with only 8% Latin words.
	89% of his words are solid, earthy, Germanic words.
	And you wonder why people, like, in 2013, people like the BBC polled people, what's your favourite book?
	Lord of the Rings by a long way.
	The most popular book.
	So not only is Tolkien creating the sort of lost mythology of the Anglo-Saxons, he's doing in their language.
	And there's a great little anecdote here.
	When he was writing Lord of the Rings, he...
	When Bilbo...
	Well, sorry, The Hobbit, sorry.
	When Bilbo was leaving Bag End, Tolkien had Gandalf saying, Adieu, my dear Bilbo, or at least au revoir.
	This was struck through in the note reading, No, Gandalf would not speak French.
	I mean, can you imagine how much more different it would be if Gandalf was like, au revoir, Bilbo!
	It wouldn't feel right, right?
	And it's this attendance to the content and the prose and the origin of the words that is such an important thing.
	And it's, again, it's become a kind of weird obsession for me.
	And there's this kind of Anglish movement that you'll find on Twitter and online that's like, okay, well, what does English sound like without the Latin words?
	And it sounds so much more organic.
	Like, I covered this in Issue 3 of Islander.
	Like, the wanderer.
	Wanderer is actually a Germanic word, but it's used in a Latinate way, whereas the actual direct translation is earthstepper.
	And earthstepper sounds more like ancient and true than wanderer.
	Wanderer's got a possibly positive connotation, but earthstepper makes him sound like condemned, you know, to wander the earth.
	This would have been an absolutely deliberate...
	Stylistic choice, but Tolkien, of course, as a medievalist, he would have been, you know, and somebody interested in language, he would have been all over this.
	If you just go back to that Twitter post, Carl, I'll just look past the fact it's not written in proper sentences with capitalisation, which wouldn't pass the trivia on this one.
	I should say that the basic argument is absolutely true.
	Superb.
	When people are writing, they should aim for Concrete language.
	And to, wherever possible, avoid the abstract.
	Because the more abstract you get, the less clear it is for your reader.
	You should ideally aim for the five senses.
	So if I'm describing a dark forest to you, you should almost be able to smell the leaves.
	You could feel the damp in the forest.
	Chill in the air.
	And good writing, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, should aim to activate all five of those senses so it feels like you're there.
	And your emphasis on, you know, the Anglo-Saxon root words as opposed to the Latinate root words really is getting to that.
	And that's one of the things, you know, in Foundations Writing on the Trivium.
	I really strongly emphasize.
	They call it plain English.
	And in fact, there's been a long...
	I don't know if it's still going, actually, but it certainly was 10 years ago.
	Something called the plain English campaign.
	This is something that is very evident when you start reading French theory.
	Okay?
	Critical race theory.
	Oh, I'm well aware.
	All of the SJW stuff.
	There was this author I was thinking of bringing in today called Gayatri Spivak, a post-colonial author about the subaltern and all of this.
	It's all written in this horribly obtuse, abstract language where you don't know.
	It's kind of disappearing up itself.
	Okay?
	And the reason they do that...
	It's to hide the lack of clarity in their own thinking, to almost bamboozle you with thinking that, oh, this must be sophisticated.
	It's completely intentional.
	One thing I noticed when I was first reading the postmoderns is they would essentially...
	So Yoda-like reverse the sentence structure just so it's difficult for a normal person to read.
	And I had to train myself to be able to read their words properly.
	And it's like, this is very strange, but it's completely on purpose.
	Just a quick thing with the Latin and the English, right?
	So when I was doing my philosophy degree, I was reading Bernard Williams.
	He was an English philosopher, and he had a term for this.
	He called it thick language, thin language.
	Now, the thin language, the Latin language, when used in English, it's not the same in the Latin context.
	This language has the air of objectivity because it isn't morally loaded.
	And so if I were to describe misinformation, that doesn't necessarily mean bad.
	I mean, you know, I could say, well, actually, we're doing a seminar at 8 o 'clock.
	And you say, no, that's misinformation.
	It's at 7 o 'clock.
	Oh, yeah, that's a good point.
	That's not necessarily a slight on my character.
	That was just, I was wrong about this, right?
	There's an abstraction away.
	If you would say, no, you've lied about that, well, the lie is, and the good thing about the earthy Anglo-Saxon words, they're all social words, right?
	So what they do is they include a lot of extra information and a lot of moral intonation into what they're delivering.
	And they're always really short words as well.
	So these are powerful words because they're many-layered.
	So, I mean, the example I was getting, I mean, lie is a superb example.
	To be called a liar is just, it's...
	Offensive on the face of it, right?
	If I tell you you're a liar, that is basically a personal challenge, and now we're in a confrontation.
	You can't just casually call someone a liar, right?
	So to call someone a liar is a powerful thing, even now, you know, because what it's saying is there's two people who are connected, there's a connection between them, and the content, the quality of this connection hinges on a malfeasance.
	Again, enjoy that Latin word.
	On a wrong that one has done the other, right?
	And so this implies a character judgment, a negative character judgment on the person who told the lie.
	So we've got a time, a place, people, and bad intent, moral judgment.
	All including just three-letter word.
	Betrayal is another one.
	No, something has happened between two people, and there's deep moral negativity.
	You betrayed me.
	Again, you can feel the power in it.
	And all of the Anglo-Saxon words have this, and the Latin words just don't have this.
	And that's why they're used in scientific literature.
	We want to be objective.
	We want to try and get away from like judgmental language.
	But this is also what makes reading books from 100 years ago so much more powerful.
	They're before the positivist movement.
	So they're just freely just casting out all of these deep, thick, earthy, judgmental terms.
	And it makes the entire thing more engaging and enriching.
	And this is why every book written 100 years ago is just better than any book written now.
	Just on the tone of There are also hidden elements.
	You know, we were talking about rhetoric earlier on.
	A lot of...
	These Germanic words that we're talking about are monosyllabic, okay?
	Without getting too into it, in poetics, there are unstressed syllables and there are stressed syllables.
	Well, those monosyllabic words scan beautifully when you're speaking them and you can talk about wrong.
	And it's kind of, I talked about plain English.
	There's something about the musicality of a long, stressed, monosyllabic word that does something to our brains when we're listening that has a power that those fancy Latinate words don't have.
	They kind of fritter away because they're, for one, because they're five syllables in it.
	And the Latinate words are designed to make the person feel superior to the audience that he's talking about.
	It's deliberately designed to separate.
	No, you don't really understand what I'm talking about.
	This is airy, nonsense words.
	And so what's interesting about this is that you get, like, you know, trying to avoid the words and stuff like this.
	But you get Jonathan Haidt's Elephant and Rider.
	This dovetails very, very nicely.
	And I think I'm the first person to really make this observation.
	The Latinate words are aimed to the rider, and as Jonathan Haidt points out, the rider is only really in control of the elephant when the elephant feels very calm, so in a very secure position.
	With enough practice, he can rationally get the rider to turn the elephant.
	Well, the Germanic words are addressed directly to the elephant.
	The elephant is activated.
	By the Germanic words.
	If I say, you lied to me, oh, I've got your elephant right there.
	You know, suddenly, whoa, whoa, you didn't call me a liar, did you?
	And it's like, sorry, what happened to the rational Latina words?
	Are we going to bring them up?
	No, we're not.
	We're about to have a fight over something, right?
	And so you can see why the power is actually far deeper and more important in the Germanic words than the Latin ones.
	This is a very good insight, Carl, because one of Haidt's ever descriptions for the elephant and the rider, I can't remember where he says it in The Righteous Mind, probably, he talks about the rider.
	As a kind of like little bullshit lawyer?
	Yes.
	He's like your little lawyer post-generating little bullshit arguments for you.
	This is why I did this thing.
	Have you ever read any legal documents?
	They're all written in legalese.
	But what that is, is a kind of arcane gatekeeping system to push up the premium of the lawyer.
	Oh, you're a lawyer.
	You speak this magic, magic kind of elite language that you need all sorts of training to understand.
	You know, probably if all legal documents were written in plain English, you know, the lawyers would not be able to charge the fees they do because half of it is understanding what the hell they're going on about.
	You'd be able to do it yourself, probably.
	But the reason I bring this up is, like, the Latin-Germanic distinction is incredibly important.
	And I found myself just...
	Just almost every day, thinking about this.
	Because if you go to Churchill, Churchill's a master of doing this.
	In the famous, we shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them on the landing grounds, we shall fight them on the fields and the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.
	Well, there's only one Latin word in that.
	And it's the bad word.
	It's the surrender, as if the Anglo-Saxons didn't have a word for surrender.
	Because why would we need that?
	And this is just one of those things where...
	If you're a master writer, you realize, oh yeah, no, this actually affects the tone and impact of the writing itself.
	And then you come on to what are Fowler's Rules and Orwell's Rules, which is what you talk about, in fact, in your Foundations of Writing course, which I, again, I didn't know this in advance of doing the course, but as soon as I saw it, I was like, all of that is correct.
	Do you want to just give us a quick recap on them?
	Well, do you have them here?
	I didn't get them up, actually.
	Okay, do we have...
	The Fowler's Rules and Orwell's Rules, they're basically very, very similar.
	Just use small words and plain language as much as possible.
	Yeah, I mean, so for example, as we've been talking about, don't use a fancy word where a simple word will do.
	Okay?
	One of Orwell's rules.
	Don't use more words.
	Than you need.
	Yeah, that's another thing.
	Economy of words is also important.
	So, I mean, Orwell is trying to get you to write economically.
	And in fact, reading Orwell, not just 1984 in Animal Farm, any Orwell, he was a fantastic writer of prose and is somebody who...
	I'd recommend people read.
	You know, I've got a great example of this.
	In shooting an elephant when he was a colonial administrator in Burma, he's like the only white man around.
	Again, this is like, oh, a white man has arrived, the Englishman has arrived in Burma.
	Okay, things are going to happen now.
	So there's an elephant rampaging through the village.
	And Orwell is describing this.
	And because he is using mostly Germanic, mostly plain language, oh, you feel like you're there.
	And this is, you can feel the pressure that's on Orwell as he's got to go get the elephant gun.
	And he sees the elephant, you know, the elephant's actually calmed down a bit, but it's still rampaging a bit.
	And he shoots it in the head and it just freezes.
	And he's just like, and so, but suddenly you're immediately there.
	And the writing is so much more compelling than if he'd used an abstract Latinate word to describe the genuine feeling of like, because he didn't want to shoot the elephant, obviously.
	And he came away and he's got a great, he's got a great turn of phrase in there.
	He's like, look, I've realized I was becoming someone I didn't want to be, because I was wearing the mask of the colonial administrator.
	And when you wear a mask, your face grows to fit it.
	And again...
	The mask, that's the Latin word, but face grows to fit.
	So these are all the Germanics being pulled out of yourself.
	And that just struck me, and it's because of these rules that he established that it just still lingers in my mind, because the writing was so much more powerful than it would have been had I written it, because I'd be using half-Latin words, because I was...
	A product of the bloody modern education system.
	Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is one of the worst habits that anybody can have.
	And if anybody is still in school or in university, this is one tip I can give you today to just stop doing, okay?
	You're writing out your essay in Word, okay?
	You highlight the Word, you press Shift and F7, you bring up the thesaurus, and you...
	What's a more clever sounding word for that?
	What's the alternative?
	Just never do that.
	Try to write as if you could explain it to, you know, somebody who's not on your course.
	I mean, I always just say, like, can I explain it to my mother?
	Would she know what I'm talking about?
	Or almost to a 12-year-old, you know, if you want to put it that way.
	And more powerful writing.
	Generally comes from when you're not trying to be clever.
	The worst writing is when you're trying to come across as if you're clever.
	Just say what you mean.
	And moreover, if you're trying to sound clever, then is what you're saying really as clever as you think it is?
	If you're trying to mask how...
	If you're trying to sound clever when delivering your argument, then your argument can't be that clever to begin with.
	So maybe you need to go back and work on it.
	But anyway, just...
	Courses.lotuses.com.
	The Trivium is live, and we will, of course, be hosting our webinar at 7pm Thursday today, and we will have a discount code for anyone who completes the webinar as well.
	So do come and see us in, well, about five hours, in fact, because we'll be doing that.
	So let's go to some comments.
	because we've got a lot of comments, obviously.
	Fleetlord Anfar says, for your information, Zoom still harvests everything bigly.
	Boomer choice to use.
	Well, okay, but it's a tool that works.
	Sorry.
	Amdine says, in my sixth grade, my class was given a writing assignment.
	In my story I wrote, dismounted her horse, and my classmate criticized me for saying, why don't you say she got off of her horse?
	Classmate was right, I'm afraid.
	Absolutely, based Anglo-Saxon classmate, I'm afraid.
	Classmate was right.
	Karl in Harry's video, we can see the injury he sustained when he claims that he was the hands of his toddler, but obviously a case of vicious workplace violence in the hands of Stelios.
	Do something.
	I will take that under advisement, but Stelios is strongly denying that he wounded Harry, so what can we do?
	What other Western countries besides Britain and the US did this to?
	All of them.
	So, what's interesting is at the beginning of the sort of 21st century, you can see in Fiction.
	The sort of modern education system that's come in that's primarily concerned about well-being and feelings and inequality rather than hard standards.
	And it's just all of the Western countries have done this.
	Well, one of the things I can tell you is that there's a writer called Gian Battista Vico, who's actually famous for cyclical history.
	If you read Prophet of Doom by me...
	There's a chapter on Vico in there.
	But his actual day job was as a professor of rhetoric.
	Now, obviously, he was Italian, writing in Italian.
	But his textbook, that 18th century textbook I had, was an English translation of his textbook.
	So there was clearly a cross-European culture of people doing the trivium.
	Because they were, you know...
	A lot of the logic stuff...
	It was kept alive by the scholastics.
	So there's a big Catholic angle as well.
	The Catholic Church, whatever you make of them, kept alive logic.
	It's Aristotle specifically.
	Aristotelian logic alive.
	And I still think in many parts of the world, if you're fortunate enough to go to a Catholic school, as I was when I did the grammar, for example, they keep some of these things alive.
	More, regardless of where you're from.
	Oh yeah, I mean, this is one of the things that modern philosophers tend to basically assume that nothing happened for about a thousand years in Europe.
	Modern philosophy courses will go from the ancient Greeks to about the 16th, 17th century.
	It's like, sorry, there's a bit of a gap there.
	And so you don't learn anything about the scholastics.
	You don't learn about Aquinas or any of the other medieval Catholic theologians and philosophers.
	And you don't understand why Aristotle suddenly...
	It becomes relevant again.
	But he never stopped being relevant.
	For a thousand years, he was just called the philosopher.
	I love this.
	Carl, I love the scholastics because they're so autistic.
	Yeah, I know.
	It's like, here's an argument.
	Okay, but now here are 17 counters and I'm going to go through each of the 17 counters one by one and explain why you're wrong.
	So sit down and get ready.
	Number one.
	Number two.
	I mean, I love that.
	So anyway.
	I can see why Bacon was like, look, these guys actually don't have the answers.
	Because they didn't.
	But the logical form and...
	What was it called?
	It was called the Organum, which was the Aristotelian and other logical tools that they used.
	It's good that they preserved this.
	Absolutely.
	This is what is being denied to us now.
	And so, like I said, go and get the course if you want to get the course, or if you want to get a promo code, go and sign up for the webinar where we'll be giving a promo code and a lecture on the course itself, and you'll be able to ask questions and find out more information.
	A large part of logic, I can just tell people for free.
	Is categorization.
	Oh, yes.
	Categories within categories within categories.
	Oh, didn't Aristotle have his categorization?
	Super autistic detail.
	It's kind of a beautiful, beautiful subject.
	But anyway, let's go.
	Tom says, will the courses be on Lotus Eaters?
	Yes, they will.
	Courses.Lotuses.com.
	And how much will it cost subscribers?
	Well, the same to everyone, unless you come and sign up for the webinar, which you will get a discount on.
	But the bundle itself is discounted.
	So each costs $150, but the bundle itself is $375.
	So the bundle is discounted.
	And to be honest, I do recommend doing them all.
	Like I said, I did them all.
	And they were just really good.
	Especially if you've got children.
	I'm genuinely excited to force my children to do this.
	They're not going to enjoy it.
	Obviously, but that's not what they've got to learn these things.
	It's not for pleasure, it is for necessity.
	Akral says, certainly education standards are lower, but things have changed as well.
	Now kids need to know what a transistor is or how to define a Python dictionary.
	Yeah, and that's fine.
	And the ability to gain technical education is there, right?
	This is what you'll learn doing a particular course geared to that thing.
	But what you won't learn is...
	How you should be interpreting the world around you, and how to make sure you get the most out of your ability to communicate with the rest of the people around you.
	These things are genuinely important, and just for some reason, it was decided...
	Again, I genuinely am the cynical type, but I think this was done deliberately to dump out the population.
	I would also argue that understanding syntax...
	And understanding those logical categories I was talking about.
	They would help with any of those things.
	Well, I did program.
	With programming, certainly.
	It's all logic all the time.
	It's 100% logic.
	And I think one of the reasons I did quite well on my logic course in university is because of my programming background, frankly.
	I just taught myself to program.
	Pat says, in the early 1900s, American high schools taught classical Greek and Latin.
	Today we have to teach ourselves remedial English in our universities.
	Absolutely true.
	It's so true.
	And again, being forced to learn Greek and Latin, not fun when you're a kid, but it gives you so many other things.
	One of the things about learning Latin is you would be reading Cicero.
	And now, so you've got a double bonus here.
	Not only are you learning the forms and structure and grammar of a different language, which teaches you about the grammar of your own language, but you're also learning the political education that a Roman student would have had at the same time.
	And this is one of the reasons the Enlightenment happened in the first place, is that they had all been...
	Learning Latin and going through, like, Republican texts and Democratic texts from Athens and Rome.
	And so they realize, well, hang on a second, the world can be very much better and very different to the way it is at the moment.
	And you will notice that when you're reading any kind of liberal Enlightenment philosopher, they draw heavily on their education in Greek and Roman philosophy and politics.
	They will just cite these things like this.
	And most people now would have no idea what the reference is.
	I know the reference because I went through and read all those things myself.
	For the fun of it.
	But nobody else will.
	And that's a tragedy.
	It speaks to the paucity of the education system now.
	I think it's important to say that another reason that the Renaissance happened is because when they went back to those classical texts, yes, they had some degree of reverence, but they didn't dogmatically.
	They approached them in a critical way, which means that they were able to use their intelligence.
	They were actually able to use the skills to come at them anew.
	In a way, one of the things they used to teach is something called classical imitatio.
	That is, could you, like, let's say if I said to you, pretend to be Ed Davey, I don't know, and come up with his arguments better than he could come up with them.
	And they all had to do that in school.
	So they were trained.
	Now, I wonder today how many...
	Let's say, Democrats could come up with Republican arguments.
	We know they can't.
	Or vice versa.
	Well, it's been polled.
	We know they can't.
	The Democrats have no idea what the Republicans are thinking.
	The Republicans actually are very good on what the Democrats think, because the Republicans take the Democrats at their word, whereas the Democrats are like, right, so Nazi, got it.
	Okay, so you just want to kill all the Jews.
	Exactly.
	It's like nonsense, right?
	And so we know that they don't have essentially a theory of mind for these people, and this is what...
	You're being asked to reconstruct.
	Could I make Ed Davey's arguments better than him?
	Maybe, actually.
	I think I might be able to, to be honest.
	And maybe I'll do that.
	You might be able to explain why there's so much noise on the trains.
	Well, all I'm saying is Ed Davey is a secret racist.
	By left-wing standards, of course.
	By normal standards.
	He's a very normal chap.
	Russian says 90% of modern universities are an international student farming Ponzi scheme.
	That is totally true.
	And this is another issue with the education system, is it's being run for reasons that are not for education.
	So again...
	this afternoon, or this evening, should I say, 7pm British time, 2pm New York time, 11am LA time.
	Because otherwise you will be trapped in the mediocrity of modernity, frankly.
	The question always is, are you doing it for the skills themselves, or for the knowledge itself, or are you doing it for the peace of And I...
	Wonder how many students are there for the piece of paper, ultimately, because that piece of paper will get you a job, which is a very different thing from actually learning skills, and it's a very different thing from the knowledge as well.
	And I just want to be clear, there's no piece of paper at the end of this, right?
	I mean, we could send you a little thing saying, well done, you completed our course, but other institutions aren't going to understand it, but that's not what this is for.
	This is to make you better.
	This is for you to improve yourself and become a superior version of yourself.
	And the Trivium is the basis of this.
	But again, Stelios' How to Live a Good Life one, that's coming next.
	And that's going to be equally as, if not more important.
	Because just knowing what you're supposed to be doing from a human perspective.
	When I said to him, Stelios, can you write courses?
	He's like, I'm full of courses.
	I was like, okay, good.
	I need a course.
	That I want specifically tailored to young men to teach them how to be good men and to live a prosperous life.
	And he's like, I can do that.
	And so he's been working very, very diligently on this for months now.
	Because, of course, Stoess, PhD lecturer from York.
	I mean, philosophy.
	He knows exactly what he's doing.
	His course is going to be amazing too.
	But for now, go and get the Trivium.
	Come and watch us.
	Come and join us in the webinar.
	We'll be giving a lecture and asking questions and answers from the audience.
	And we will also be handing out a discount code for the bundle.
	So do come and join us.
	In the meantime, thanks so much for watching, folks.
	I've just been informed that apparently there has been an issue in the Common Sense Crusade for today has been cancelled.
	So sorry if you were looking forward to that, but I don't know what the issue with it is.
	I've just got a note that says it's cancelled for today.
	So sorry about that, folks.
	I'm sure we'll be back next week.
	And we will see you at 7pm tonight, British time.

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