 So, what I want to do today is give you a little bit of a history of who she was and what she did. And then we'll go over the highlights of her philosophy, particularly as it's relevant, I think, to the world around us, although everything she said is relevant. So the intention here is more to give you a little teaser, to encourage you to read the books, to encourage you to dig deeper into the books. Are there any students here? All right. So there are flyers back there. There's a barcode. If you scan the barcode, you can download a free one of Einwund's books for free. So anyone you choose, there's a menu you can choose which one, and you can download it for free. So sorry, it's only for students. But you can do that if you register and get it. So Rand, of course, is known primarily, I think, in the US, but really all over the world, as the advocate for capitalism and advocate for individual rights, as somebody who had a huge impact, I think, on American political dialogue, but also among American entrepreneurs and businessmen. If you go back and you look at the founding of Silicon Valley in the United States, almost every single entrepreneur involved in the founding of Silicon Valley, read Einwand, Atlas Shrugged, and the Fountainhead in particular, and said they were inspired by her towards the career that they chose. I mean, some of the biggest names you can imagine thought Atlas Shrugged was their favorite book. So Rand had a huge impact on the business community. At some point over half of the, I think, the 500 biggest companies were run by people who again thought Atlas Shrugged was their favorite book and loved the ideas. They weren't necessarily philosophically completely aligned, but certainly the books inspired them to greatness. And I think that's one of her strengths is that she inspires people to live the best life that they can live, inspires them to become great. So she was an inspiration to so many and, of course, somebody who is identified with certain political views and will get into those. Rand was born in 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia. She was born into a middle-class family. Her father was a pharmacist. He owned his own pharmacy. Her name was Alicia Rosenblum. That was her original name. And she, at the age of 12, witnessed the Russian Revolution. It literally started outside their pharmacy in the big square in St. Petersburg where they had a business. She witnessed the revolution and then suffered the consequence of the revolution, the decline in the standard and quality of life. The pharmacy is, of course, taken from her father. They have to move into an apartment with other families. She goes to university. She studies. But it's very clear to her that if she stays in Russia, she won't survive. She has opinions. She cannot stay silent. She voices those opinions. And we all know what happens to people who disagree with the prevailing views of under-communism. So at the earliest opportunity, there was a small window of opportunity where Lenin allowed people out. You know, under the assumption they would come back to do different projects overseas. She got, for some research project she was working on, she got permission to leave Russia. She had family in Chicago. She left Russia. Everybody who knew her knew she would never come back. So here's a 22-year-old woman on her own, on the way to the United States. She spends a few weeks in Chicago and then she heads to what she really wants, which is to become a writer in Hollywood. She wants to make movies, but write movies. She always loved going to the theater and seeing the movies, the silent movies in Russia. And she wanted to be part of that. So she heads to Hollywood and she goes to the C.C. B. DeMille Studios. You guys probably don't know who C.C. B. DeMille was. But he was the Steven Spielberg of his time, right? He was the number one director in those days. So she goes to the studios and they tell her, you know, come back later or whatever, they brush her off. But she walks out and this is a true story. And there's C.C. B. DeMille sitting in his convertible, big automobile American car. And she stares at him. She had these really penetrating eyes. If you've ever seen pictures of her, she's got these amazing eyes. And he looks at her and he says, why are you staring at me? And she tells him the story, I want to be in the movies. I'm just here from Russia and she had a very thick Russian accent. And he says, you want to be in the movies? Okay, get in the car. And he takes her to where they're filming The King of Kings, which was a silent movie on the story of Jesus Christ. And he says, here's a pass for you to come and see how movies are made for two weeks. And that starts her career in the movies. And she becomes an extra in the movie, you know, part of the crowd. She meets a husband on the set of that movie, whom she marries a little while later. And she then takes on all kinds of odds and ends jobs in Hollywood just to stay connected. In the evening, she's studying English and writing, writing, writing, writing, writing. Remember, English is not her first language, it's Russian. She finally gets a play performed, a play that she writes, performed in Los Angeles and then ultimately off-Broadway in New York. She writes a novel called We The Living, which is the most autobiographical of all her novels. It's about a young woman's life in the Soviet Union in communist Russia. A very, very powerful novel. But nobody's interested in America in novels critiquing communism because in the 1930s in America, almost all the intellectuals are pro-communist. This is an era where communism is viewed as the future, it's viewed as more successful than America. I don't know how much you know of the history there, but the New York Times correspondent in Moscow turns out to be a Moscow agent. So he's sending stories to the New York Times about how wonderful Stalin is and how wonderful things are in the Soviet Union and he's influencing the President of the United States, the established relations with Stalin. The whole perception of the Soviet Union communism in the U.S. was very, very pro-carbonist, particularly among the intellectuals. So the book doesn't do very well. She then writes a small book called Anthem, which is kind of a dystopian novelette. That doesn't get published initially in the United States, but she gets it published in the land of dystopian short novels, The United Kingdom in England. And there's evidence to suggest that it is read by the author of 1984, so there's a connection there between the various dystopian novels of the time. But the book does fairly well in England. And then she starts working, you know, and at the same time she writes a number of scripts in Hollywood. She becomes somebody who reviews scripts and gives her opinions on them. So she's very successful in Hollywood after all these years. And then she starts writing a book called The Fountainhead. It ultimately is published in 1945 and becomes, you know, 12 publishers. She sends it to 12 publishers, they all turn it down. Nobody will be interested in this book. It's not, you know, it's too idealistic, it's too philosophical. We don't want it. The 12th publisher publishes it, but doesn't really believe in it too much. Right? So they make only, I think, 2,000 copies. They do a first run. But the book really takes off. And word of mouth, and it becomes a best-selling book. And they immediately print more copies. And to this day, The Fountainhead sells, you know, tens of thousands of copies in the U.S., potentially hundreds of thousands of copies if you count all global sales, since then it's been translated into pretty much every language on the planet. Only two major languages don't have Ain Rand in them. Anybody want to guess which two languages? No, Russian, they're all translated to Russian. They've sold very well in Russia in spite of, I don't know who's reading them there. Putin actually has a copy of Atlas Shrugged in his bookcase. We know that, because Ilanayov, I don't know Ilanayov, who used to be in the late 90s, Putin's economic advisor, was a huge Ain Rand fan, and he gave Putin a copy of Atlas Shrugged. Probably never read it. Or if he read it, he thought the villains were the heroes. The heroes were the villains, something like that. But no, the two languages it has not been translated in, unfortunately, Arabic and Farsi. So Iran and the Middle East is where it hasn't expanded. But every other language you can think of, including Hungarian, the books do exist. So she published the Fountainhead, became a great bestseller. She starts on her next novel, which is Atlas Shrugged. It takes about 12 years to write the novel. It's published in 1957. And of course at this point everybody's competing to publish it, because she's done so well in the Fountainhead. She publishes it. It becomes an immediate bestseller. It today sells hundreds of thousands of copies. It is translated to every language. And so it's become, you know, she's been dead. She died in 1982. And the books still sell, which is almost unheard of, that a dead author's books sell when, particularly when, the books are not taught in schools, right, because they're not part of the curriculum. So a lot of old authors still are alive today in their books, because schools teach them. But how many ordinary people go out and buy a book by a dead author, it doesn't happen much. Einrand is unique there. Sales have only increased over the years. From 1957 on, after Atlas Shrugged, Einrand basically starts writing philosophy. And it's interesting why she wrote philosophy. Why she became interested in philosophy. Einrand's goal from the beginning in her fictional writing was to portray the ideal man. So the perfect human being. And so when she was researching for the Fountainhead and for Atlas Shrugged, she started reading about people's perceptions, people's views on what the ideal human being was like, what values, what virtues, what character did this human being, what did philosopher think did this human being have. And everything she read, she was disappointed. This isn't ideal. This isn't right. This is no good. It didn't fit her sense of what a hero could actually be. So she started, in a sense, to create her own philosophy in order for her to be able to create her ideal character so that she could write her novels. And her novels indeed project an idealized vision of men and women. Her heroes are amazing once you accept certain tenets of her philosophy. So she became a philosopher in order to be able to write her novels, in order to achieve her artistic goal in the novels, which was to portray an ideal. But after she published Atlas Shrugged, she realized that while she had this philosophy that was being portrayed in the books, in order to get the philosophy out there into the culture, she would actually have to deal with the issues that people cared about philosophically and politically and even aesthetically. And she started writing books about ideas. She particularly wrote a lot of essays and then made the essays into books. And, you know, books again are all in print. You can find them in a lot of different languages, but books like capitalism, the unknown ideal, the virtue of selfishness, which has a purposefully very, very controversial title. Of course, selfishness is not usually associated with virtue, but for Rand it is, and that's a big deal. And philosophy, who needs it? She has a book on epistemology, which is the theory of knowledge called Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. And she called her philosophical ideas. So all these philosophical ideas projected in her novels and in all these philosophical essays that she put together, she called this philosophy Objectivism. She spent the rest of her life writing. She at some point actually wrote the film, a script for The Fountainhead, and The Fountainhead was turned into a movie. You can still find the movie. I think it streams once in a while. It's with Gary Cooper playing Howard Rourke in The Fountainhead. So it's a pretty good production. Don't go and see The Atlas Shrugged Movies. They're terrible. They were made just a few years ago, and they're really horrible. But the movie she made, The Fountainhead, is pretty good. She wrote philosophy. She wrote commentary. She wrote a lot about politics. She was very involved in political engagement during the 60s and 1970s. She had something to say about almost every major event during that period, about every political cultural event during the period, including she commented on major philosophical debates. For example, there's a famous essay she wrote about John Rawls, the famous American political philosopher who's been unbelievably influential over the last 30, 40 years. In spite of the fact that Iron Man trashed him completely.