 I ran with born Alicia Rosenblum in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1905. She was born to a middle-class Jewish family, her father was a pharmacist, he owned his old pharmacy, and when she was 12, she witnessed the Russian Revolution and the rise of communism in Russia. The pharmacy report was naturalized, it was taken away, they had to give up their apartments, they had to move in with other families, you've heard, I don't know if you've heard of it. Hopefully you know a little bit about the history of the Soviet Union and what happened in Russia, the communism. There was a prolific period of time, a period of time in which they tried to move to the part of Russia that was ruled by the whites, which were the anti-communists and moved back and forth, and she got to experience firsthand what communism was really like, what life of the communism was, and she came to the conclusion, in her teens, in her early 20s, she came to the conclusion that she would not survive, she would not, she would be killed, she could not keep her mouth shut, she did not like the system, she objected to it on a very principled fundamental way, and she did everything she could to get out of the Soviet Union. She wrote a book later in life called We the Living, I highly recommend it, it is a beautiful book, and it's about the life of a young woman in Soviet Russia, and her life, the disasters that occur, and her attempt to get out of there, so she wrote, it's not a biography, but it's semi-biographical and sensitive, it reflects much of what happens to man during those years. It was actually interesting, he just does an aside, it was actually made into a movie without any man's knowledge, in the early 1940s, in fascist Italy, under Mussolini, it was made, and the fascist regime thought, oh, this is a movie that's anti-communist, so fine, you can go ahead and make the movie, and they made the movie, it's a beautiful movie with Anita Valley, the gorgeous actress, very, very well-made, and it went out into the theaters, and as part of this, a copy was sent to Goebbels, the guy responsible for propaganda in Germany under the Nazis, and Goebbels watched the movie, and immediately telegraphed Mussolini, that the movie was not an anti-communist movie, the movie was an anti-authoritarianism movie, and then he should gather up all the copies and burn them, and they did, they gathered up all the copies and they burned them, once survived, and it exists, it's being cleaned up, the picture being cleaned up, the sound is being cleaned up, it's a beautiful movie, it's Italian movie making, they know how to make movies, one thing they know how to make them, well, at a fast cost, but I highly recommend it, if you ever get a chance to watch the movie, of course, read the book as well, anyway, at the age of early 20s, in the early 20s, there was a little window in which Lennon allowed people to leave, to leave Russia, to study overseas, to go project on a condition, of course, that they came back, and she had an opportunity to go, supposedly, to study American movie making, she had done a degree at a Russian university, and she had the opportunity to leave, she had relatives in Chicago, who owned a movie theater, who owned a villa, say, that she was invited to come, and she was allowed to leave, everybody in her family, everybody knew she would never come back, that is, that this she was leaving for there, she spent a little bit of Chicago, which she immediately headed out to Hollywood, here's a 22, 23 year old young woman from Russia, a second language, a third language, a fourth language is English, you French and German as well, she arrives in Hollywood, her dream is to be a writer for the movies, she had, there's a young girl watch movies, Hollywood movies, and fall in love with movie making, and so she goes, and you guys won't know who this is, but Cecily DeMille, maybe some of the older people movie buffs know, the biggest movie maker of the time, she goes to Cecily DeMille movie studios, says, you know, here I am, I want to move to the movies, and they basically say, you know, don't call us, we'll call you, kind of, bye, she walks out, this is a true story, right, she walks out, and right outside the door is this big convertible, and in the convertible is Cecily DeMille, and she, this little Russian girl is staring at him, and he says, you know, what's up, why are you staring at him? So she tells him the story, she loves his movies, she loves movies, generally, she's going to Hollywood, she wants to write for the movies, she says, okay, get in the car, so she gets in the car, and he takes her to where they're filming, the story, the king of kings, story of Jesus Christ, and he says, we're making this movie, here's a pass for a week, you can hang out, and you can see how movies are made, and she did, she became an extra on the movie, she met her future husband on the movie set, and that started a career in the movie industry, she later on got all kinds of odds and ends jobs, she would work in the wardrobe and all kinds of things, all while studying English, writing and writing and writing and writing, and by the early 1930s, she had written a play that was successful in Los Angeles, and made it to Broadway, she didn't like the Broadway production, but it made it to Broadway and gave us an income, she was writing We the Living, the book, which was published in the 1930s, got awful reviews, because New York in the 1930s was, you could argue, a satellite of the communists, there were a lot of communists, particularly in the cultural world in New York of the 1930s, the left, by the way, wasn't invented yesterday, the left's been around for a long time, I think a lot of young people think that this left was invented, but they mean, and there'd be dominance in the cultural world, particularly in America, for a long time in New York, and she got the play, she got the book, she started writing in Hollywood, she wrote a couple of movies, ultimately she wrote, she started to write, she wrote a little book called Anthem, which you can get, it's a very short book, takes you two hours to read, and that was published, wasn't published in the U.S., you couldn't find it, it was published, it was published in England, where a young writer who went on to write Animal Farm in 1984, probably read it before he wrote those books, so there's a good chance that she had an influence on him, and then she started writing The Found Head, which was her first major project, and The Found Head came out in 1943, and it was rejected by 12 publishers, 12 publishers said, ah, this won't sell, it's philosophical, it's too idealistic, the 12th publisher picked it up, didn't print a lot of copies because they said, ah, it won't sell a lot, so they printed just a few copies, 2000 copies, I think it sold very quickly, they immediately had to reprint it, and it became a New York Times bestseller, and it became a massive hit, later made it into a movie with Gary Cooper in Hollywood, and that kind of launched, I ran into becoming, I think the name that she became, I lost to say that during this period in the 1940s, she got involved with kind of freedom loving organizations, she got involved with different parts of the American kind of classical liberal scene, it didn't always go very well, but she was very involved in seemingly the foundation of economic engagement, which today is the major player in kind of the free market world. She then wrote At the Shrug, At the Shrug came out in 1957, by the time At the Shrug was published, every publisher wanted it, so they were competing, they were bidding against each other to get it, so she made a lot of money on At the Shrug, At the Shrug again became a massive bestseller, still fountain it to this day of bestsellers, in a sense that if the bestseller lists included old books, they wouldn't have to be included, because they sell so many copies. Probably the best year ever for Iron Man's books found at the Shrug was somewhere between 2009 and 2013, during the Tea Party in the United States, where those two books sold in excess of half a million copies, and all of Iron Man books sold about a million copies in one year, which is a huge number, but Arthur, who is a long dad, gets on the hood up, particularly in Arthur that everybody hates, particularly in Arthur that's not taught in universities or in schools, right? From 1957 on until she passed away in 1982, she wrote philosophy, she wrote about capitalism, she wrote about liberty, she wrote about freedom, she wrote from a philosophical perspective, which I'll describe in a minute, she gave talks, she gave lectures, she gave interviews, a lot of the interviews she did on television are now available, you can find it on YouTube, so if you go to YouTube, a lot of that is being republished by the Iron Man Institute, put up online, fantastic interviews, she was quite a character, if you've never seen her in person, wow, I mean, again, little old lady by this point, and she had an amazing power and amazing ability to group with the audience, so I covered you to watch those interviews, she did three interviews with Johnny Carson, again, the young people here wouldn't know who Johnny Carson was, but he was the late night host in America, and if you watch that, know how different television is today from what it was back then, in terms of people actually speaking, in terms of actual interviews, what we're doing podcasts today was television back then, right, where you actually have time to develop your ideas. She died in 1982, the Iron Man Institute was found in 1985, and took the commonalities, little cards on the table over there, if you scan the barcode, you can download a free copy of one of Iron Man's books, your choice, electronic obviously, also there's a sheet there with information about a conference that the Iron Man Institute is having in Athens, in Greece, in April, it's going to be a kind of, we do a one-to-year, we do a conference in European Conference, this will be in Athens, particularly if you're a young and a student, we offer a lot of scholarships, a lot of people come there, we pay your way, we pay you to attend, so feel free to start applying, I think our obligations will open up in November, so it's just my public service announcement. So let me talk a little bit about Iron Man's ideas, and I want to do it from a particular perspective. You know, I think everybody in this room is to one extent or another an advocate for living, an advocate for freedom. We all believe that freedom, individual liberty, is something that we should fight for, it's something we strive to achieve, it's something we would like to change the culture and the world and our political system to attain. I think there's an important question we all have to ask, and I think Iron Man asks and answers this in a unique way, and that question is why? Why freedom? Why liberty? Particularly the kind of freedom and liberty we're talking about, which is so unpopular, right, with the minority, the tiniest of minorities. And the reason I ask this question is because freedom and liberty are very unusual, like they never happen in human history. I mean, today we are super free in comparison to almost all of human history. I mean, you guys had a dictatorship here, as recently as 1974. And before that, you had kings and queens, and you never had liberty and freedom in a sense. So we mean that this is not unique to what you know, this is true of humanity. The human species has had really tiny little brief periods of a little bit of freedom. At least 2,500 years ago, the Roman Republic didn't last very long. Maybe you could argue a little period in Venice's history. That's it until the 18th century and 19th century. That is it. So most people, certainly in history, but even today, don't believe in freedom. They don't believe it. They don't want it. And therefore we have to do something to motivate liberty. You can't just go out there with a big flag and say, freedom, liberty. It reminds me of this movie. I don't know if you ever saw, I'm sure you all saw Great Heart. Everybody's seen the movie, Great Heart, with Mel Gibson. He portrayed Wallace and he's fighting for something in Scotland. And there's a scene where they're all yelling, speed up. We want speed up. This is, I don't know, 14th century, 13th century. What do they mean by freedom? What do they mean by freedom? Nothing like what we mean by freedom. What they mean by freedom is, we want to be ruled by a Scottish king, not an English king. We want to be oppressed by our old people, not by those people. All they want is the same kind of oppressive government as the English had. They just wanted to be a Scott because they were a little racist. It really is. There's no freedom there, not in the sense that we understand, not in the sense that you're liberty, not in the sense of living your life based on your values, based on your judgment, living life. We have coercion, we have force, we have authority. That, nobody believes it. They all want coercion and force and authority, as long as the force and coercion and authority are in a good cause. As long as it's to make the world a better place, and of course every dictator, every king, every authoritarian, every totalitarian, nor all human history has always done what they done because they want to make the world a better place. No authoritarian has ever come to power and said, I'm here because I just like power and I don't care about people. I don't think they even believe that because I don't think psychologically they can hold that. I think they have to convince themselves in order to do the evil that they do, they have to convince themselves that they're to make the world somehow a better place. There's something more we have to advocate for than liberty because we have to ask, so the question why? Many libertarians, many classical liberals fell with something like the non-aggressionism. Well, non-aggression is good. Again, why? Most people are fine. As long as the majority votes for the aggression, it's cold. Stealing is fine as long as its majority approved. Silence in your spine as long as the majority approved. So there has to be something more. There has to be a reason why we believe in the non-aggression principle. There has to be something that says aggression is bad for whom? For what? By what standard? And the point I think part of the point I'm trying to make is, look, we won. Those of us who believe in liberty, we won the economic debate a long time ago, like Hyde beat Keynes. Mises even beat Hyde, right? I mean, we got the arguments. We can answer Locke's argument economically. We can answer Keynes' argument economically. We know Locke's work and we've proven it. And there's a gazillion examples all of the world who check the list of anybody who wants it. They're all out there. And yet we're still stuck. There's the tiniest of minorities. This is not about economics. The fight for liberty and the fight for freedom is not about economics as much as so many classical liberals would like it to be. And maybe they like it to be that because so many classical liberals were economists and economists see the world through economics. That's all they could see in the world. And when those economists dabble in the Wolfville Chocko Foundation, they often tend to be convention. And the sad thing about conventionality is convention always leads the same thing. Statism, it always means the corrosion and force and authority in the name of some common good. If we're going to advocate for a new political system, we have to advocate for a new philosophy. And this is what Ray does. She doesn't just start with the existing philosophy and say, all right, we'll start from here, we'll build a new family. It doesn't work that way. And if you build something, it'll crumble because the base is quicksand. The base has built statuses. Everything, all the philosophy that's come before us has built the world we have today. It's not a bad world. There's some good in it, but it's not the world that we believe we can build. So for when she's not for freedom because GDP will go up, she's not for liberty because we'll get a better economy. All of that is true because we'll be wealthy and all of that is good. Something wrong would be richer. Cool. But that's not why she's for liberty. She is for liberty because she believes that it is the only political system that facilitates and allows people to be moral. And for her morality is it's the only political system that allows people to live their lives in pursuit of their happiness using their rational mind because it's the only system that takes out, takes out of the equation, rejects the thing that is the enemy of the human mind. Enemy of reason. What's the enemy of reason? We're in force, coercion. I put a gun to your back of your head. Reason doesn't matter anymore. You do what I tell you. I tell you as the FDA, that if I tell you as the FDA, as the regulatory agency, the sponsor of the drug development, I tell you this area over here will never be that proven. You don't think about that every year anymore. It's done. It's finished. It's gone. What's the point? You're never going to get permission. You don't get development. You're not going to do anything. No venture capitalists will fund it. The mind is just stronger. The opportunities are just stronger. Reality is just stronger. Regulations, force, coercion, authority, think about the Catholic Church, get together there, right? Can't think. There's certain things you can't think. So you don't think? Think about how science was probably held back decades, maybe more, by the fact that the Church was burned. The state, people who came up with scientific theories that didn't match an old book, right, that weren't consistent. So first coercion, forced coercion enemies of the human mind. And for Rand, everything in a sense was down to the human mind. Because she looks at us as human beings and she says, what makes us better? What makes human beings human beings? It's interesting, because I do a lot of toxic classes in the universities and high schools. And I ask kids, what makes human beings human beings? What is it that makes us human? And it's fascinating the range of responses you get, almost never the right one, but all the responses, right? I tell them in advance that they can't say thumbs, because, you know, their anthropologist would claim this is what makes us better, right thumbs. They'll say, I don't know, they'll say empathy. They'll say communication. They'll say all kinds of things that almost always relate to your relationship with other people. But what makes human beings human? What makes communication possible? Your ability to think. Ability to reason. That's what makes us human. We're just an animal without it. What makes us human is our ability to not just observe the world out there, which every animal can do, but to form concepts and to form abstractions and abstractions on abstraction. And then to integrate those abstractions to a few about the world, a scientific view about how it works, and then take our knowledge and go change that world to a depth to us. I mean, no other animal does that. In that sense, we change our environment to fit our needs. This is, you know, my argument against the environmentalists, right? So what about us leaving the environment alone? Human beings survive by changing their environment. If we leave the environment alone, we die. We cannot survive. We chop down trees to build huts. We cultivate the land, create agriculture. That's not nature. That's us doing it. How many people can survive by picking berries and nuts? Very few. And when we hunt, anybody here have a gene for hunting? Somebody has a tweet sense of that. Some countries you know they all think they have a gene for hunting. Nobody has a gene for hunting. I put you in the middle of the Amazon. You don't instinctually know what to do. You might speak the language, but you don't instinctually know what to do. What do you have to do in order to survive in the Amazon? Or anyway, let's figure it out. What food is poisoned? What is not? How do I build traps to catch the animals? How do I hunt? There's a lot of thinking to do. Human survival requires thinking and new survival requires adapting the environment to spit out. So, man as a rational being, reason requires what in order for you to be free to think, to use your mind. What do you need in order to be able to use your mind? You need freedom. You need to be left alone. You need the gun to be withdrawn. You need the regulators to go home. You need the authorities to shut up. Slowly not to impose their will on you. You need the freedom to think, really, and to act on those thoughts. Human beings will quiet that in order to survive. Survive fully as human beings in order to thrive, in order to be successful. We must be allowed to think and act on our thoughts. Some of the stuff we think will be wrong. We will fail sometimes. That's okay. Failure is part of the equation. Learn from that. Rise up. Try again. Try something different. But to think we have to be free, so the reason we want to be free is that it will be to think and act on those thoughts. And it's important to note that that's how human beings survive, thrive, flourish. And at the end of the day, what's the purpose of thinking and what's the purpose of life? So one of the things that we're not born with is the instinctual knowledge of how to survive in the Amazon or any way, really. But we're not born with the code that tells us what God usually should pursue. How we are supposed to live. In a sense, we're not born with morality. Morality should be the guide to action. How to live. What to do is right. What not to do, that's wrong. We're not born with that. We have to figure that out. Reason is the means of figuring it out. We don't have any other. And for what purpose? What do we need morality for? This is our amen. That's it. What do we need morality for? We need morality to provide us with principles, with guidelines on how to live, how to survive, how to thrive, how to be successful, how to live the best life we can live. The purpose of morality, according to Ran and here, excuse me, in a sense, channeling as far, the purpose of morality is to learn how to live the good life. It's how to live successful life as a human being, not as an animal, as a human being. So we want to identify the values of Gucci that lead us to be success at living the success as a rational animal, as a reasoning being. So she rejects 2000 years of morality. She rejects the idea that morality is about sacrifice, that morality is about other people. You know, we're so hard-wired, we're so wired in a sense of our educational system to think of other people. And when you ask people what makes that? You. What makes a human being a human being? We immediately think about other people. We only think about empathy. We mainly think about communicating. We mainly think about groups. It's not the individual. But what you actually do in morality is to give you guidance and living, because life is complicated. It's complex. The world out there is complex. You need some principles to know. You know, I figured out that lying is not good. Not going to lie. I don't have to re-figure it out every single time. That principle. That's what principles serve. Generalizations that are shortcuts make it easy for us to actually act in the world. So morality is there to give you that, to give you these shortcuts, to give you these principles on what a good life looks like and what a bad life looks like. So Anne develops an original ethical code. She articulates that code in a book called The Virtue of Selfishness, which is pretty radical, right? Selfish is associated with really bad behaviors normally. But for Anne, being selfish means pursuing your own happiness. Being selfish means living the best life that you can. Being selfish means finding those objective values. Those scientifically determined values that will actually lead you to happiness, that actually lead you to success as a human being, as a rational being. So I covered you, The Virtue of Selfishness, I think, is an unbelievably important work. So if you're a rational being who needs to think in order to survive and thrive, what is the number one virtue that objectives of my man's philosophy articulates? What's the most important value that you want to attain? Well, for Anne, the most important value is reason. You want to be good at thinking. You want to attain and you want to engage with that because thinking is not automatic. You think it's automatic. You're not doing it. You're not doing it. Thinking requires effort. It requires turning the switch on. It requires mental focus and mental energy. It's not just something that happens. It's something that you have to make it happen. It's a choice. Much of the world out there is not thinking. Part of the problem we face, many of you are sure of arguing with a lot of people, and you come to the conclusion, it's hopeless. And part of the issue is that they're not thinking. Part of it might be, you're not making good arguments. But part of it is they're not thinking. Thinking is an achievement. Thinking is an effort that people have to make. You can tell, I don't know, you're studying for a lot of math exam and you really engage. Well, that's what you should do in deciding about anything really important. You should really engage. You should really focus your mind because it's this, your mind that is going to solve your problems. And almost always when we get into trouble as individuals in life, it's because we don't think it's, it's because we go by emotion, we rush, we follow our heart and our mind. And it's almost never the case that you think, God, I devoted too much energy to thinking about this problem. Because that's the only way we can actually solve problems is using them. So the essence of branch philosophy, the essence of moral philosophy is thinking. Use your mind. Figure it out. Whatever it is that you're looking for, whatever it is that you're seeking, and in the case of morality, what you should be seeking is your own success at living, your own happiness on it. So, I'll try to wrap up. So for rent, she cares about living, she cares about freedom. Primarily because she cares about morality. Because she wants people to have the opportunity to use their minds, use their reason, soothe their happiness by picking their own values, picking their own virtues, and seeking fulfilling life. Without barriers, without constraints, without authoritarianism, studying what they can and cannot do. And since in order to do that, they have to use their mind. We have to extract force from society. We have to find ways to get force, coercion out of society. And it's only by extracting force from society, which is living in freedom, that we liberate the human mind to allow individuals to pursue happiness. That's the why for freedom, the way for me. Thank you. Okay, let's make a question and answer. Sure. Only reason to give a talk instead of a question. Please. I think it's better for the person to grow up and rise. For me? Yeah. Instead of for your nice speech, I love it especially the way you did it. It was very romantic and I loved it. But let me try to reason in another way. So you focus on the reason. I'm a man of science and many times I make mistakes. So many times I start to demonstrate or I start with experience when I started here. But then I can say, okay, I was wrong. I have two arguments against the idea. First, you put the emotions out of the piece. According to the man's emotion, the first move to reason, to hit out the other way. How can you reason in a proper way? Second, second, second problem. You put more, you put in more. Then we started to make an experience. And what is interesting is that now we discuss if we can experience with right. What? With right, with more. We discussed it. Some person discussed about it. But no one discussed about it. Can this make an experience in a short-term environment? Then most of the idea, the reason, definitely were very nice in those arts and so on. In the end, we crashed. First, we crashed. When I was in, there was a lot of questions that leaked that. I never believed in that. Yeah. So we're going to end up not being right. So I think with another idea, with the emotions of the question, I can be really glad. And then I can start to say, okay, I'm brilliant. I have a lot to do with it. And all the other guys that are also brilliant than myself, I can just, what can we do with society? We're going to be fine alone. Yeah. So there's a lot to say about what you're saying. First, first you can make mistakes. But the interesting thing is the only way to correct your mistakes is using reason. There's no other way to correct your mistakes. You don't correct your mistakes of saying, I feel the truth. No, I observe that what I've done is doesn't work. I go back to the drawing board and I figure out a better way to do it. But the only way to do that is through observation and through integration. And that is reasoning. So there's no way to error correct without reason. Second, I'm not dismissing emotion. I'm dismissing emotions as tools of cognition. I'm an emotional guy. Emotions are not the way we should make decisions in life. Emotions are not means of knowledge except about ourselves. What my emotions tell me is about me and about how I respond to certain stimuli. They don't tell me the truth except about myself. Emotions are super important. They import motivators. They import self-knowledge. You live your emotions. At the end of the day, what is happiness? It's an emotion. It's an experience that you feel emotionally. It's a state of being, but it's very close to being an emotion. Joy is an emotion. Of course, I want to feel joy. Emotions are super important. But emotions don't come from the ether. They don't just come from nowhere. Emotions are based on conclusions that we have already come to. Emotions are responses that we have through the world out there based on our beliefs, based on our values. There's some great examples of this. You could show exactly the same scene to do different people, but depending on the values that they have, they will respond emotionally, maybe differently to that scene. Emotions are responses to the world out there. They're great. I'm not dismissing emotions. The third thing was... You're dismissing other people? It's very unreasonable to dismiss other people. Not because of emotions, but because of the value, the objective, factual, rational value we get from other people. We get immense value from other people. I couldn't eat if not for other people. I don't know how to grow food. You know how to grow food? No. So I go to the supermarket and I buy my food from other people. And then they buy from people who grow the food. I mean, the division of language is one of the most amazing, beautiful things, and it makes us connect with other people in deep ways. That's just material. But then, you know, I love us. What am I going to be with Michael Angelo? I love artists. I love people who spiritually enhance my life. And then what about friendship? And love. And romantic love. All of these are values to a human being, to a rational human being, not to an emotional zombie, but to a rational human being that express your emotion, but they're all values. So there is no conflict between the individual and, you know, so-called collective through the group, right? It doesn't have to be a conflict. And what makes sure there isn't the conflict is the political idea of individual rights. That is, you might not like other people. You know, you're a genius. You think other people are useless. You can't harm them. You can go live on a desert island. You can go build your own somewhere. You can be alone if you want. But you can't harm other people because they have rights and we have built a political system to protect those rights. So individual rights are key to the political, to moving from ethics to politics is this concept of individual rights that basically says that every individual has the freedom to act based on their own, that based on their own mind and suit of their own values, without coercion, without force, without authority. That individual right prevents the kind of hostility, the kind of damage that a genius might do to a group. But it's not even self-interest. It would be a stupid thing for somebody to do because of the immense value we get from others. Okay, more? So you mentioned and then decided to accept a job to write a movie about God and she was really against God. Do you think she dreaded a higher value for a lesser value during that period? Because I'm not sure it was a movie about God. She writes a movie about God, right? She performed a movie about God at the beginning when she went to Hollywood. Oh, she was an extra. So my question is, do you think she dreaded a higher value for a lesser value by accepting it? I mean, I don't want to see, I don't want to go see Cuauvales or you know, religious movies. It's not even wrong. I love, I saw my favorite art work. You could all use religious art for it. I mean, Michael Adams of Piazza, right? It's one of the most amazing, stunning, beautiful, and mostly that you'll ever see in the world, right? It's Jesus and Mary. And you can say, ah, it's just religious art. But art is so much more than the religion. Art, if it's good, it has universal values and telling the story of Jesus going to a movie by a secular director, season with the millers, no religious, right? There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing, you know, in participating in that. It's not even trading. It's just, it's a guy who's got a job. And it's in a movie but directed with a genius. Nothing, there's no undermining. One reference, I think, to Masuo Akinu, Masuo Akinu was a reference. Oh, yeah, she was a huge admirer of Thomas Aquinas. But she said, not as Aquinas, what reason back into the West after it disappeared through the dark ages, right? So it started to disappear with Rome and it came back with Aquinas. And interestingly, it came back to Aquinas because the Arabs had preserved the writings and brought them here, right, to a little bit of south of here, in a very peninsula. This is where the biggest libraries of Greek literature and Greek theater were all in what is now Spain. And in the library stand, those are the copies where the Christians conquered Spain. Those were the libraries that they took back to Italy. The Thomas Aquinas read Aristotle. So he read translations from the Arabic that was translated from the Latin that was translated from the Greeks. But as that was lost for a thousand years, it was lost to civilization, other than the Arab civilization. It was lost in the West. Okay, please submit. I have a question. How would you dismantle the argument about common good? And how do you fight this when you talk to other people? So I need to stand on the idea of the common good. Well, the fundamental is there is no common good. So there's no common, right? So there's a group of people and you're one person and he's another person, but the collective groups are just groups of individuals. The fundamental unit in reality, both observable and with emotions and with thoughts and is the individual. There's no group consciousness. There's no group values. There's no group, you know, a group can't eat for me. A group can't think for me. A group can't, I mean, they think they can think for me. They can't. And they can't value for me. So only individuals can value. Only individuals can think. So only individuals have good. Now, there's a sense in which you can talk about the common good, but only in the sense of what's good for individuals in the commons, right? And what's good for the individuals in the commons is reason and liberty, right? So that that thread, that's good for you as an individual, and therefore put a bunch of individuals together. It's a little good for each one of those individuals. So we need to refine and make sure that as they interact, they don't you know, that's individual rights. So then when you like, of course, this was a question that we already know the answer, of course, but I wanted to do something else. Milton Friedman used to say if the majority votes to shoot the others, we could do it. No. So how can you correct democracy as it is right now? Because what we see is that this type of democracy that we have. So the only way, again, the only way in a sense to challenge the world as it is today is to challenge the fundamental. So behind the question, if the majority chose to shoot this guy, you wouldn't do it, or the majority decides to tax you and not to tax him or to tax you and give it to him or whatever. All of that is based, for example, that is based the way it's raised is based on a utilitarian view of morality. The greatest good for the greatest number of people, the greatest good for utilitarianism is a nasty system. It's a bad system. But you have to be able to replace it with something. You know, people need a moral code. And if you're not going to say utilitarianism, not a good moral code, then you need to have an alternative moral code. And this is, again, what you need. The reason why not succeed, in my view, the reason the living movement is not succeeding and not really making a dent out there in the world is because we're afraid to challenge what matters. We're willing, we take their language, utilitarian language, the majority of people was guilty of this, as much as I love him, he was guilty of this. We take their language and we try to tell them a story about how in their terms, our system is better. But it's not. Because they're not about success, they're not, it's not their purpose. They're about sacrifice and suffering, many others. So you can't take their standard and use it against them. You have to, particularly when the standard is wrong, you have to question the standard. And in this case, you have to question utilitarianism. And you have to present an alternative. The reason I think we're losing it, we're afraid to challenge morality. Libertarians and three market people are very comfortable talking about economics. We're very, very comfortable talking about economics. We know it all. But nobody cares. What really matters is I want to be a good person. And if being good means I have to pay taxes, I'm willing to pay taxes. If being good means that we have to silence certain people, I'm willing to silence certain people. I want to be good. So your job is to question what they mean by good. Not just what they mean by common good. What do they mean by the individual good? What do they mean by how you should live your life? And then show them that the only way if you have a proper perspective on the good, the only way then to manifest it in reality is to be good. And that's why we're profiting. We're profiting of something that can't be good. Sorry. Donner? I hope it all happens. Thank you for this event. Thank you for talking to me. I agree, you know, as an object of this, I agree with most of the philosophical issue. But regarding your answer to fixing democracy, let's go back to what we talked about in our conversation here. One of the things, I know you've taught me a lot, but one of the things you taught me is that you cannot force a man to think. That thought is important, but that you cannot force a man to think. So while we are here all focused on liberty, living our own lives and acquiring knowledge, there is a group, a large group of the population that we cannot force to think. So what guarantee is there that no matter how knowledgeable and free and loving we become, we'll be able to change the system from the inside that requires the majority of thought. So my question to you is why instead of trying to change the system from the inside, trying to change the system from without your laughing, because you know where I'm going, but I have to answer this question already, right? I mean, you wrote my answer, and you're asking me anyway. Look, I'm opening any way to change the system. If you can find an island some way, convert it to capitalism, make it this shining success, and what's that? It exists already. It doesn't exist. I visited a few years ago in Honduras. Yeah, I mean, yes, it exists under the thumb of the Honduran government. For now, yes, it exists under the thumb of the Honduran government. It changes its constitution. That city is gone. Of course, that city is still not free, because you try to start a bank in that city. A bank, let me finish it, a bank that is truly private, a bank that is actually the way the Swiss banks used to be, truly private, truly secret, and all of that, you won't last. I'm willing to put money, real money, on the table. If you try to start a bank like that, they try to start a bank like that, they will be shut down. That's fine, but it will be shut down. I'm not arguing that they will try. I'm arguing that the powers to be in the world, the Federal Reserve and the Central Bank of the world and the military, stand behind them, will not allow you, because they'll accuse you of money laundering, they'll accuse you of being the banker or the drug dealers, they'll accuse you, they'll make up any excuse they want to shut you down. If the founding fathers start that way, you'll be of the United States. Be a huge difference, but we can have this argument offline. A huge difference. Possibly in the relative ability, forced to both parties, but the fact is that I've seen libertarian striders for 40 years, started a little island, started a lot of projects. This is the best. But Honduras is the best, and part of the reason why it's the best is because they're willing to compromise. And my guess is by the time the bank opens, it won't be a truly free bank because they're willing to compromise because they know they can be shut down. The people behind this, behind the Honduras thing, are people of the world. They know how the world works, and they know the forces at large that would prevent a truly free bank functioning, and they will, they will, you know, I told you what, I think the only way to have a truly free society is in the bank. You don't need to point to Moscow, Moscow is useless. A nuclear bomb, only way to have a free society is to have a nuclear bomb pointed to Washington DC. And then they'll leave you alone. But if you think that the powers to be will not be, will let you run, for example, a free bank or have a place where you can trade in drugs, not that I'm for drugs, but you can trade in drugs and things like that, or develop new medicines without the regulatory approval, you're in for a big surprise by the people out there. So that, you know, you need to be able to make sure that they won't come after you. We always have the other people, so to live with the other people, even if we don't agree, they don't agree with us, let's say us. And it's not a question of compromise. So in the end, it's ideas that must be always put forward. And so only ideas can change the world, let's say. I'm sorry, I seem to be lost, trust me. Thank you. I was wondering, as representing the Anne Ryan Institute, how you would differentiate objectives from the other students of the law, the Chicago School, the Austin School, the Annacostes. So how do you differentiate it? How is getting the Ryan Institute more worthy of our attention than say, pay it or we need it? Great question. So first, I meant to present a philosophy. She doesn't just present an economic theory. So if you look at the Chicago School, it basically accepts utilitarianism and presents an economic theory based on utilitarianism that maximizes utilitarian, to maximize economic efficiency, however you want to call it. It flows with statism periodically. Milford Green, of course, a big fan of central banking, not to the end. He changed his mind at the end, but he was a big fan of central banking. And Ryan would reject it because he would reject any use of force. Central banking requires force. So Chicago School is a good, I think, flawed economic theory. The Austin School is very similar, just, I think, a better economic theory. I think the Austrians are right in the fundamentals in terms of economics. They've got a broad outline of economics right. I think they've got, you know, the business cycle mostly right. I don't think completely right, but mostly right. There's still missing some elements, but that's work to be done. The right methodology and the right ideas are there. It's just a matter of getting it done. So the Austrians' School is excellent when it comes to economics. It's, I think, a cutting edge. I think they could learn a few things from Chicago, that's me. But again, that's economics. That's science. Let the science fall where it may. When the Austrians try to do anything but economics, I think they're terrible. I don't think they're particularly good social thinkers. I don't think they're particularly good philosophical thinkers. I don't think they're particularly good thinking outside of economics. And the same is true, by the way, of Chicago, because Gary Becker, for example, in Chicago, tried to explain everything in terms of economics. So that was his philosophy. The philosophy was out, sociology was out, psychology was out. All the matters are economics. So who you marry is determined from economic factors. I mean, so completely nonsense, in my view. Interesting, often fun, but not in front of many some. And the same thing is true in Austrians. I think Van Mises was the greatest economist where I built it. But his taxology is not very good. So I don't think it's very valuable because he's trying to do philosophy. He's out of his league. It's not his thing. His thing is economics. Economics is super, right? I think all of them, starting with manga, Van Bovick, Mises, that whole line is they've got the economic thinking down. They've got to wait. I don't know. Do you really want me to talk about any of that? Look, an output capitalism in my view is a contradiction in terms. There's no such thing as capitalism without government. Anarchy is maybe the most barbaric form of human existence. I think it is a disaster. I think it's all about bloodshed. I think it would be horrible to live in a world like that. And yes, I've read David Friedman and I've read Rothbard and I've read all the explanations and it's detached from reality. It's detached from the real world. And what it rejects is the idea of objective values and objective law. It rejects the idea of individual wage. You can't have individual wage in an anarchy at the same time, not if you have competing governments over the same territory. So I think Rothbard, if I want to follow with Rothbard, he's a subjectivist. He's a subjectivist in his fundamentalism and his theology, but more importantly in morality. He's a subjectivist in ethics and that undermines it. Again, his economics, fantastic. But once you get to the philosophy, I think he falls apart. So I think the problem is that all these schools of thought, what they really require is Ironman. What they really require is philosophy. What they really require is the philosophical revolution that Ironman would lead, who ideas would lead. And I mean, I sometimes fantasize about a wall in which Mises and Hayek took Wren's series. Not even, I mean, Mises took it somewhat seriously. I mean, he wrote maybe the nicest review ever about the shrug that I've ever seen. He wrote this magnificent letter talking about what after shrug meant to him and how much he enjoyed it and how important it was. And they used to have dinners regularly and they communicated. But in the end of the day, he couldn't accept philosophy. He couldn't accept philosophy as a separate topic, but he was committed to it. But imagine if they really taken it seriously, we would be 50, 60 years ahead of the code in terms of the battle for freedom. It would be unimaginable what we would be doing. And we keep losing because the materialists keep insisting and people who believe in liberty keep insisting that philosophy doesn't matter and that Ironman is insignificant. He writes a good novel and inspires that the philosophy is insignificant and it doesn't prove to the cause. And I think that's a huge mistake. I think it's a huge mistake. Economists of the liberty have made for the last 50, 60 years and it's a mistake maybe your generation can fix, but it's crucial. It's urgent. We won't move forward unless we're willing to challenge the world out there on question of what is reason? Is it important? How does it function? What does it mean? And then questions of morality. And those are the questions that lay the foundations for anything you build on top of it politically. I don't know how much time that's left. I'm willing, you know. Hi, Aaron. Thanks so much for coming to the lovely talk. And so on this note, trying to change the system from the inside. So I completely buy your audience, your friends. I think that once you get someone to listen to your own group show or to read Atluscribe, you're done basically. The problem is how do you get the person in there? I think that objectivism is full of loaded language, like some words that are scary and ugly. Let's say like this. So basically what we would need is Iran in every house, so we cannot do it. So I think that this is at least the way I see it. Maybe you already thought about it, maybe you have a better solution. What's the, maybe Diana is into it. We need some kind of like greater university or projection. I always recommend Capitalism is not ideal. Capitalism is not ideal, really. And it lays us off the foundations for the whole ideas of Capitalism, why it's a ball system. But look, we need a lot more content. And we need to pray to university like, but we're not good at five minute solvents. So we've launched the Iron Man University. You can find it online. It has amazing courses, amazing content. You can take live classes, you can get graded, you can join as a full-time student. We're trying to train the future generations of intellectuals. We want hundreds of them, thousands of them. So we've got a university that's not accredited, but it's an online university where we're training people to do exactly that. Look, I mean, I like the idea that if only more people read Out of the Shrug, but the reality is that millions and millions of people have read Out of the Shrug. And only a certain percentage of them take the two seats and do anything with it. I have almost as many people unsubscribing to my show as subscribing. So just listening to my show doesn't quite do it. Some of you love it and stay with it. Some of you leave. I offend people on a regular basis. And it's not because of language, it's because my ideas are controversial. A lot of people on the right, a lot of libertarians love Putin. I hate Putin. I hate everything he represents and everything he's done. And my advocacy against Russia and from Ukraine has lost me a lot of subscribers here on the bookshelf. For example, abortion. I can list long topics that I lose subscribers over. This is a long-term, complicated, ideological battle. It's about ideas. It's about ideas people feel very passionate about that are very at the heart and core of the world. And it's just going to take a lot of work. And to do that we'll need lots of intellectuals. If you're interested in becoming one of those intellectuals, I encourage you to sign up for the Iron Man University. So let me just put it a gap. So I think this is aiming at connecting intellectuals, what I was talking about with younger people, like maybe even children. So to remove the modern language. So basically, I'm quite sure that the first time someone encountered these ideas, we can almost you could probably write a prototype of the questions. And what's with young ones and how did these ideas go? But you can talk back now. You talk to people that never expected you to see the questions. What's here, what's here. So maybe like prototype. We need a lot more intro kind of text. We need a lot more videos. We need a lot more material to bring people in. But it's not as simple as David Alistair and it's done. It's ongoing work. And I think to produce all that content, we need a lot of intellectuals. So for now, we're the state where we need to create the intellectuals to create the content. I mentioned earlier, in regards to the Austrian school, we appreciate it. And one of its black ones is the concept of objectivity and value. Yeah. Do you think it's a useful concept exclusively within economics or because you also mentioned that Rothbard is a model subject. So I don't. So I think it's badly labeled. It's not the same. Yeah, it's subjectivism in the Austrian. Yeah, but I think the idea of a subjective value, the way it's presented by Austrian economists, particularly Mises and Bafork, and Iron Man's idea of objective value is applied to the marketplace of the same. I don't think there's a conflict. I don't think there's a contradiction between two. There's actually an excellent essay by a guy named Rob Tahr, T-A-R-R. It's available online. It's available at Iron Man Institute. We made a public, it was in a journal somewhere, that reconciles Rand's view of objective values and the Austrian view of subjective values in economics, in the marketplace, in trade. I don't think you could take that word subjective to mean what it means when you apply it to ethics. Subjective means based on emotion and anything goes. And that's not what it means when it's applied even to democracies. Because you might want something at a particular price at a different time. But you know, your want doesn't make it so. So something much more has to happen than just an emotional want. And that's what makes a subjective value in economics subjective. It's everything else that comes along with it. But I covered you to look at this article that was talked about. It's no cough. There's a bit of both. I have a few questions. I think you, like I said, this is one of the questions. What do you think are hard to remain different between the objective and the material? And the second one is I'm curious. I know that if it's regard for leading admissiveness, whether they admit it, but I'm just curious if you personally are objectivist, like, would you be any aspect of Christianity or if Christianity like helps the objectivist project? All right. So let's start with the objectivist libertarian. And the problem I think with libertarianism is that it doesn't really mean anything. It's too broad of a concept. When you can have, you know, people right now comparing Zelensky to Hitler in the name of the libertarian party of New Hampshire, and, you know, and narco caps, we don't believe in immigration. We want to build walls. And you can have really good Kato writers who are doing really good work in economics and, you know, other libertarians doing really good work in economics. And you can have all of those some completely crazy, nutty ideas and really, really good ideas all in one umbrella. I don't know what it means. And I don't want to be part of that umbrella because I don't want to be part of the wackos that we hear the crazy nuts who want to, you know, want to do crazy things, right? So I don't like the term and I don't use it very much because I think it's too broad that doesn't actually mean anything. You know, in the way the way it's used. When somebody says I'm a libertarian, I don't know what that means. Because, you know, are you a republican who likes a little bit of free markets? That's what we used to call, we used to call Republican libertarians, right? Or are you, you know, again, somebody who wants anarchy or somebody who wants Putin or somebody who loves Donald Trump? I don't know what it means. I have no idea. So, objectivism, I know exactly what it means. You might agree with it, you might disagree with it, but it's a set view and it's a set philosophical view. Again, libertarianism is, you can be religious, you can be utilitarian, you can be an Aristotelian, you can be any philosophy. As long as we agree on some big ideas of liberty, you're all a libertarian. I personally compare, I'm defending the libertarian side. I compare the libertarian movement with us many, sometimes opposition, as we know, well, opposition and contradictory, but somewhat as Marxism and socialism in the end of the 19th century. They were terrible and still are terrible in fighting between Marxists and Maoists. They were, but they were able to catch up the 20th century with all those contradictions and they were wrong. So, we have a contradictory movement, maybe, and with several infightings sometimes, but at least we are more, we are right in the several views of libertarianism. So, I think the 21st century maybe will change that. So, I think it should be narrow. I think a meaningful use of libertarianism should be narrow than as far as it is today. And then the other question you had was about Christianism. I don't know of any, I mean, the only value I can think of, I mean, I'm not an expert of Christianity, I was a great Christian, and the only value I think it ran so on Christian was the idea of individual salvation. That is the idea that the individual matter in a world in which the individual didn't matter, which, you know, was pretty barbaric. This idea of salvation, the idea of individual salvation, that's how salvation is rooted. We emphasize the value of individual and therefore individualism. Now, that's what Rand said. I'm a little skeptical because I think that idea of the individual already existed in Greece before the rise of Christianity. So, I have no use of Christianity. I don't see the value there at all. I think it's a detriment. I think it makes it much harder for us to win the battle because I think it's collected as an altruism and anti-reason. But again, you know, there are going to be people who argue for liberty from a Christian perspective. I just don't think it's convincing. I don't think it casters the reason threshold. Okay. I think we can... One more? Okay, the last one. I never really thought of why Christianity is associated with reason and freedom and the lifelines. And so, it can lay down the big... Well, a lot of it is history. So, Kant comes at the end of the Enlightenment. He writes a very famous essay. What is, you know, what is Enlightenment? He, in a sense, names the period before him as Enlightenment. He's the guy who kind of advertorizes it. So, he's associated in that sense. I mean, Rand Hewitt, him as the guy who destroyed the Enlightenment, who actually puts the nail in the Confident Enlightenment, who sets emotion in the structure of the Enlightenment, because of his ideas about reason. So, he's begun reason, but his idea is that reason doesn't really give us knowledge about what's out there, because we can't never know what's out there. So, reality separates reality from reason. By separating reality from reason, he separates the mind from reality and undermines the whole Enlightenment project, right? And then he's got a whole ethic of Jewy, an ethic of altruism, an anti-egoistic ethic. But he's associated with it because the way he comes is important. He's the most important philosopher for the last 2000 years. And, you know, the fact that he ends a certain period that names it as well, and most historians of ideas call Kant a figurative language. Question? Last one. Last one. Really last one. What advice would you give to a Portuguese young man and woman? Some of people here are older, like me, but there are lots of young people here. I mean, I would say read and read. A lot of you I know haven't read and read. It's worth reading. Certainly, your novels are amazing. It's an experience. Even if you decide not to agree with her then, you'll have lived the fountain and have a shrug, and that's an amazing experience just to live it. But if you like what you read and have a shrug then it works in it, I encourage you to study the ideas. And today, there are more tools to study the ideas than ever before. As I said, there's a nine-year university. There's a million videos out there of me. I think it's more important with students, other philosophers talking about man's ideas, applying them to a million different ways, to a million different things. There's just such a richness of content today that it's truly amazing. Take advantage of it, go online, search on man. I'm an institute because there's a lot of junk out there as well. But I'm an institute producer of really good stuff on Iron Man and applying for philosophy about really, really well. So don't let it just sit there on YouTube, actually watch it, share it, and enjoy it. Okay, thank you very much. And so, quiet to the Iran Good Show.