 Welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining us. Wow. What a day. I mean, it's it's really been fascinating. And I can't think of a more important historical topic than understanding the Enlightenment. I mean, think about it. The Enlightenment is the source of the modern world as we are living it today. Everything good in the world in which we live today originates with the revolution that was the Enlightenment, whether it is our political system, the economic progress, our respect for technology and science, our respect for reason. All of those originated with the thinkers, with the activists, with the teachers of the Enlightenment. I found it interesting that Greg today talked about the Enlightenment is a movement. It's really, really important to understand this movement because he was a movement that advocated for reason and individualism and succeeded. It actually changed the world. It actually brought us brought the world into a much better place. And I'll talk about this. It improved the world dramatically because of the work of the intellectuals of the Enlightenment and the movement in a sense, not an organized movement, but a movement, nevertheless, that they created. So to the extent of we, you know, to the extent that we are similar to the Enlightenment in our advocacy of reason and individualism. Indeed, we are convinced that our advocacy of reason and individualism is more complete now, is more grounded in reality in a proper philosophical defense because of Ain Rand. They succeeded. We could learn from them a lot on how to succeed, how to convince, how to change the world. And in many respects, they faced odds that were far more difficult, a reality that was far more difficult than we face. They faced a world that was still dominated by religion, by mysticism, a world that was dominated by a pretty primitive way of thinking about the world. We are the beneficiaries of the world that we inherited from them. We are the beneficiaries of the world that they created. So understanding how they did it is crucial. So I'm not going to do that. I'm not a historian of the Enlightenment and generally that is a caveat to everything I'm going to say today. I encourage those of you interested in history. To me, I cannot think of a more rich period in history than the 18th and early 19th century, the transition of an Enlightenment period into the 19th century, the industrial revolution, the consequences. But also in the causes, I think it would be a fascinating project for an objectivist historian to look at in greater depth. I want to talk about today about the consequences, about the way in which the Enlightenment has brought us to modernity, created modernity, created the world in which we live. And I also want to talk about what I think would happen, and this is going to be speculative, but what I think would happen if we could bring the Enlightenment ideas to be taken seriously today. If we can complete the project of the Enlightenment thinkers, if we can complete that project today, what would be the consequences today for rebirth of the Enlightenment ideas? So, I think again, I think this is something I encourage people to study to look into greater depth. I'm going to give Kevin an outline, some key areas, some key ideas in this direction, but there's a lot more work that needs to be done here. And if we can understand how the causal relationships, hopefully we can adapt some of those to our battle today. The Enlightenment was an amazing period, a period of great discovery, of obviously great thinkers and philosophers. One of the glimpses you can get into this world is at the British Museum. I don't know how many of you have ever been to the British Museum in London, an extraordinary place, highly recommend visiting it. And in the British Museum, there was a room called the Enlightenment Room. And it is a room that tries to represent kind of everything that the Enlightenment achieved. It kind of represents what an Enlightenment thinker, what was interesting to Enlightenment thinkers at the time. And it is truly a magnificent room, a room that really would give you a sense to the extent that it represents potentially a library of a curious mind during this period of time, obviously of wealth, because it is a room that expresses immense wealth. But if you look at what's in this room, what the things that they were interested in, it's truly fascinating. You find in this room, of course, the beginnings of innovation and industry, of discovery of products and artifacts from all over the world, archaeological digs and all kinds of tribes in the world as is being discovered during this period. And there's a room filled with books and artifacts of history, of natural sciences, microscopes, telescopes. It reflects this idea of an Enlightenment figure who's interested in the world, in reality, in nature and everything available to him. It truly is. I mean, again, I would encourage you to go visit this to get a sense of flavor of a world in which at least intellectual class, the intellectual class was immensely curious and a collector and engaged in science, history, archaeology, technology, business, innovation, invention. In every aspect of human life, true, we came to call them Renaissance men because the first such maybe man was somebody like Leonardo da Vinci. But there was a whole culture of this during the Enlightenment. And Thomas Smith in a talk just now mentioned one of the things that I think categorize the Enlightenment and one of the things that we've inherited from the Enlightenment and it impacted the immediate aftermath of the Enlightenment so much. And that is that once you take reasons seriously, once you take the human mind seriously and what it's capable of, once you take the idea the truth is available to you, it is to be discovered by your mind as an individual. It is not an authority that tells you what the truth is. It is not revelation from which the truth comes. It is not ancient books uncritically examined from which you discover truth. It is from reality. It is from using your mind. It is from reason that one knows what is true. Imagine what impact that has on an entire culture. A culture that until this point has relied on revelation, has relied on faith, has relied on authority, has relied for everything, for all their knowledge. And suddenly there's this idea, hey, we can know what's real, we can know what's true. We don't need these authorities. And the result is, and Tara talked about this immense curiosity. She talked about Gerta, a poet, author, but also a budding scientist. And he was not unique. All these people were engaged in discovery, engaged in ideas, engaged in knowledge, wide knowledge across all areas. This eagerness to know, this excitement about knowing. It's one of the things I feel like I'm so missing from the culture today. I mean, yes, some people, there's still a lot of people who are curious, but the scope of that curiosity. And the depth and the energy and the amount of time they were dedicated to learning, not to going to school, to going to university, but to learning. Most, many of the thinkers, scientists of this era and the era immediately following it was self taught. This idea of curiosity, which still exists today and still exists today certainly in many people is new. I mean, there was no point in being curious in the past before the Enlightenment. I mean, you might discover something that would lead you to be burnt at the stake. You might discover something that would lead you to be arrested, to be silenced. And anyway, who are you to discover anything? What faculty would you use? How would you come about it? There is dogma, there is truth from above dictated to you. This idea of independently thinking, this idea of individuals as truth seekers. This idea of wanting and going out there and engaging and trying to understand nature and science, history, discovering new lands, new cultures, new peoples. While there were elements of that in the periods before the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment brought in it to the entire population. And there's an explosion of interest in all these areas. There's massive growth and interest in nature and science and technology and every aspect of human dealings. And of course, this is an age of great scientific discovery of many people becoming scientists. And the following age, the 19th century, the industrial revolution, you see exponential growth and interest in all the sciences. Yesterday I mentioned Darwin because the Enlightenment lays the foundation for the great discoveries of Darwin. There's already biologists thinking about genes and thinking about categorizing animals and plants and everything else. The classification system is a product of the Enlightenment. Again, this whole idea of discovering nature. And then in the 19th century, you get exponential growth in the number of scientists and the scientific discoveries. But they all come, they all have their base in this idea of the efficacy of reason that comes from the Enlightenment and the idea of curiosity and discovery and truth-seeking, which the Enlightenment establishes as a cultural norm to be curious, as a cultural norm to be interested in science as a cultural norm, as something you do if you have the time, the resources to do it. So curiosity, truth-seeking, knowledge-seeking is, I think, one of the great consequences of the Enlightenment. And we see that to this day. I mean, in many respects, in many respects, the Enlightenment is not dead. Everything we have today, all the better things that we have today are still products of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinking implicitly is still alive. And you could argue, well, in modern culture, it has been attacked. It is constantly under attack. And yet it's still somehow survived. Every time a company is started in Silicon Valley, that's because of the Enlightenment. Any time there's a new discovery in biotech, that's the product of the Enlightenment. That's the consequence of the Enlightenment. Every time we talk about our children having more than their parents in terms of wealth, that's the Enlightenment because that's the idea of progress. Think about it. For 100,000 years, there was almost no progress. There were periods of progress, Greece and Rome. Suddenly Rome, there was real material progress. But then it all went away. For vast periods of human history, for vast majority of human history, you were born with a certain amount of material wealth, and you died with exactly the same amount. There was no growth. There was no increased standard of living. There was no increases to quality of life. There was no increases to wealth, no increases to income. There's no American dream. There's no idea of children being wealthier than their parents. Often children were poorer than their parents because the parents had to divvy up whatever land they had among three children, so you got smaller plot of land. So for 100,000 years, again with the exception of Greece and Rome in the West and maybe certain periods in China, certain periods in the Middle East, there was almost no economic progress. From a material perspective, life was just the same. Difficult, boring, short, brutish, violent. And what the enlightenment ushered in is a period of immense economic growth. I mean, you've all seen the chart where income and wealth is just flat forever and then starting in the enlightenment, towards the end of the enlightenment. Economic growth just takes off to where we are today. Within 100 years of the end of the enlightenment, life expectancy has doubled. Wealth has expanded far more than that. Quality of life, standard of living has expanded dramatically. The population has grown significantly. By every measure of human life, life has gotten dramatically better. This idea that life can become better, should become better, is an idea coming out of the enlightenment. It's the idea that we can apply reason to making human life better. The individual's life better. And what you get coming out of the enlightenment, starting in the late 18th century and accelerating through the 19th and 20th century, is invention and innovation. Think about it, science, applying the science to the creation of a value, invention and then taking that invention and turning it into something that you can build and make and market to human beings, the better the lives of human beings to create real values for real people, innovation. Technology accelerates dramatically from the late 18th century through the 19th century. The application of science. And of course, for the first time, we get the creation of businesses, economic entities structured to take that technology, to take that science, to create values from it and then to market those to people, to make money by selling people the values that benefit their lives. Business, success, money making, profit motive. All things that arise out of this enlightenment thinking, out of the focus on the individual and his well-being, out of the focus on the human mind and its efficaciousness. What we get as an industrial revolution. A century, the 19th century like no other human century ever. In no period ever in all of human history have we seen an expansion of quality of life, standard of life, length of life. In no era have we seen human beings become so successful at living, at mastering nature, at achieving their values. And it happened so quickly at a blink of an eye. So the idea of progress, the idea of individualism, the ideas of reason, create an energy, a spirit, and a morality. Again, not an objective morality. Not a morality that fully grasps the idea of self-interest, of egoism. But a morality that says, yeah, the pursuit of happiness is a good thing. The pursuit of individual life is a good thing. The pursuit of success is a good thing. Even the pursuit of money making for a short period of time, historically. And really, to some extent, to this day in the American spirit. The idea of making money, of creating wealth is a good thing. All of that is a product, a consequence of enlightenment. All of that manifests itself in the 19th century, in the industrial revolution. And part of this is a realization of the benefits from trade. I mean, the Greeks understood trade. The Romans understood trade. The Phoenicians understood trade. But to really grasp its meaning and to globalize it, in a sense, the extent that they could in the 19th century. I mean, it is Adam Smith and many other of the economists of the time who realized the true benefit of trade. Which only enhances the benefit of individuals to my life. If other people are creating values that benefit me and I can trade with them, then their lives are no more valuable to me. It's not an accident that with the rise of the industrial revolution, with the rise of the idea of individualism and the efficacy of reason, we also get one of the longest errors, maybe the longest errors of peace. At least relative peace in human history. From the Napoleonic Wars to the First World War, Europe, a place of constant warfare and constant bloodshed is at peace. Why? Because people are busy making their lives better. People are busy trading with one another rather than stealing from one another. People recognize the value of division of labor, the value of trade, the value of progress. And it is only with the rise of the anti-enlightenment ideas and the beginning of their dominance in the early part of the 20th century do we get back to kind of a normal Europe. A normal Europe of wars, of collectivism and of destruction. But in the immediate aftermath of the Enlightenment, once, I mean, sure, there was bloodshed during the Ferti Revolution and during Napoleon. But as again, those again are the forces, the anti-enlightenment forces, wearing an ugly head, trying to preserve the anti-enlightenment ideas of the past. Napoleon indeed pretends to be an Enlightenment figure, but of course is not in the end. But as soon as that is over, as soon as the Enlightenment ideas kind of settle into the culture, they become cultural norms. The tragedy of course is at the time the philosophers are already planning their counterattack and the destruction of this Enlightenment. But as soon as they become cultural norms, peace, prosperity, trade, innovation, progress, industry is the result. So in terms of economic progress, in terms of the politics, the Enlightenment has immense consequences. And of course, politically, what could be more important than the, I think, the croning achievements of the Enlightenment from a political perspective, and that is the creation of the United States of America. The land of the free, the land that respects individual rights, a system of government built on Locke's idea of individual rights. And we know the story of America. Indeed, the consequence of the Enlightenment is America and everything that happens in America during the 19th century, not the things people like to focus on like the slavery. But indeed, it is only the Enlightenment that makes it possible for slavery to be abolished. For the first time in human history, there is a set of ideas that make slavery incompatible with morality, incompatible with truth seeking. And slavery is abolished soon into the 19th century, first by the British, and then of course in a bloody civil war in America. And during the 19th century, it's abolished in Latin America and in vast parts of the world. It is the Enlightenment that is responsible for the abolition of slavery. And it does it through this idea of individual rights which establishes the concept of political freedom, which creates this social, political, economic system of capitalism. I mean, nothing riles me more, gets me more angry than when people blame slavery on capitalism. You may get it exactly the opposite. It is capitalism that makes possible the abolition of slavery. It is capitalism that ultimately makes possible the granting of rights to women because it is capitalism that recognizes that all men are created equal, equal in rights, equal in their liberty, equal in their freedom. And it's just a matter of time, just a matter of time before we apply this consistently that all men means all men and men in this context means men and women. So this movement of political freedom and equality of rights is a consequence of the Enlightenment, a consequence that the Enlightenment makes real. This is all the ways in which the Enlightenment is successful. It's successful in America, but the model of America then inspires much of the world to become freer. The Enlightenment is also successful in changing people's orientation towards their own life and therefore to their own values. Now we talked about this in terms of curiosity and certainly that's a big part of it, but more than that, at every level of society, people start taking their own lives seriously. Before the Enlightenment, there was no such thing as a career. You were born into a guild. You do what your father did. Or if you're a farmer, you farm like your father did. And your position in life is fixed. It's fixed by the class into which you were born. If you're an aristocrat, you're an aristocrat, you have certain real privileges, not in the way it's used today, but real privileges. If you're not an aristocrat, you do what the guild expects you to do. I found this fascinating story about... I read a book about Leonardo da Vinci, a fascinating man, one of the most fascinating men I'm sure in history. There's a Walter Isaacson published a book recently about Leonardo da Vinci. That's just fantastic. And one of the interesting things about Leonardo da Vinci is you have to ask yourself, how did Leonardo da Vinci become, in a sense, a Renaissance man? How was he allowed within the context of Italy of the 16th century to do everything that he did? Was his father an artist? Was his father a scientist? Was his father an engineer? No, his father was a notary. So why didn't Leonardo become a notary? I mean, didn't he automatically, by force, by fear, become part of the guild? And the interesting historical accident is that Leonardo was a bastard. He was born out of wedlock. And as a consequence, he was not allowed into his father's guild. He was an old man. He had no profession because he wasn't recognized, because he wasn't legitimate, which allowed him then, in a sense, to choose his own and to follow his talents, which were immense, and his passions, which were immense. And he was an extraordinary, extraordinary human being. But think about that before the Enlightenment, before this period. You were born, and you did what your father did, and what his father did, and what his father did. That was it. There were no choices. There was no figuring out what career you would have, what kind of life you wanted to live, what job you wanted to do, switching jobs in the middle, studying something new. But once it was clear to people that what was going on around them was that they possessed this faculty of reason. They mattered. They could discover the truth. Then the immediate question raised was, well, if that's true, why can't I choose what kind of work to do? Why can't I choose? And the guilt system fell apart. And people started pursuing their own values, their own interests, their own passions. And suddenly you had people specializing and going out there and living their life. And of course, as life expanded, it was no longer life expectancy being in the 39, you could actually now plan for the future. So the whole idea of career is a modern concept, a concept coming out of the Enlightenment. The idea of romantic love, as on Kogate discussed it yesterday, is again, if I can discover truth, if I have a mind, if I can take care of myself, wait a minute, why can't I choose who to marry? If my values matter, if my life as an individual matters, as these philosophers are saying, why can't I pursue the man or woman I desire? Why isn't it my choices, my values that dictate who I marry? And the whole idea of romantic love, of romance, of marriage is not something of convenience, but something of related to love and values is born. It will struggle. All of these things takes decades for the culture to completely absorb them. But again, these ideas, all ideas coming out of Enlightenment thinking. And finally, think about the impact on art. You know, in the past, even during the Enlightenment, most artists relied on the aristocracy. They had a pleas, the aristocracy or the church, because that's where the only source of income for them was. So if you follow Mozart's life or even Haydn, they were, to a large extent, to a large extent, it's certainly Bach, if you go further back. They were, to a large extent, dependent on what their aristocrats liked and wanted or what the church desired. But the Enlightenment freed them from that. It allowed them to stretch the boundaries of their art. And it allowed them to find a new audience. Because one of the things that progress was creating was a middle class. A middle class that can now afford to go to concerts. A middle class that could afford to buy a piano and buy music and learn to play. A middle class that had time, time, time, the most precious of commodities, right? Time, which nobody had before progress, before business, before innovation, before the industrial revolution, before wealth creation. They had time to enjoy music. They had time to consume music. They had time to purchase music. Here, the transitional figure, I think, is Beethoven. Beethoven is the first composer who actually makes money off of things like sheet music, off of selling the music. He's written to people who are now buying pianos and want to play it themselves. He is also the first composer to make money from selling tickets to concerts of his music. He set up big concerts, and he was entrepreneurial in a sense. And he would make an income from the ticket sales of those concerts. He often conducted the music himself. And of course, he was also groundbreaking in expanding the scope of the music, in shattering conventions, in exploring new ideas in music, and in breaking the classical mold in music, and ushering in the romantic era. And post-Bateman, musicians, independent creators, they make a living off of selling their music, off of performing, off of... You even get superstars, like Franz Liszt, who travels around you playing piano to large audiences that remind one a little bit of beatomania in their admiration for Franz Liszt. So that individualism, that personal values, that excitement over being able to pursue your own life and pursue the things that you love makes possible. An artistic world that the world has never really seen of artists, entrepreneurs, artists, performers, artists who are making a living, a good living in some cases, off of art. It is an era, maybe the one era in history where artists do not have to be starving, do not have to be suffering, because there is a marketplace for their products. And it's not just in music, although music booms and flourishes and innovates and just the number of great composers that the post-Enlightenment era creates. The number of great composers that are doing the 19th century is astounding. The quality and the quantity of the music that they produce has never been matched, obviously, and it truly is stunning. But the same thing is true in painting and sculpture and literature. Think of a world in which you have Hugo and Chopin in the same city at the same time. Dostoevsky in a country next door, but literally giants that this period produces. And it's all a consequence of a culture of enlightenment, even though the thinkers of the enlightenment are now dead. I think of the 19th century as a culture of enlightenment. And again, even today, everything good in our culture today is a consequence of the enlightenment. And there's a lot good in our culture today. So artistic creation flourishes and booms and expands and is truly magnificent. Post-Enlightenment, that's the consequence, that's the result. Finally, I'll just say a word about something I in Iran talked about. And that is the sense of life that the post-Enlightenment era produced. The sense of life of the 19th century, the sense of life of the closest we've ever come to capitalism, the sense of life of freedom, the sense of life that accompanies the idea of progress, the idea of innovation, the idea of life can be better, life can be great. It is a sense of life of just that. A people with self-esteem, confidence in their ability to live, to succeed, to improve. A sense of life of people within a culture that is getting better, where life is getting better, where happiness is the goal, is the standard, is taken for granted as the standard. A sense of life that Iran says and from everything I can see is absolutely true, died. Probably around World War I, died with the death of the 19th century, the death of that spirit, the death of that Enlightenment spirit that permeated Europe and America throughout the 19th century. That love of life, that love of life that you can see in one of the forms of art, I love the most, which is operetta, light and beautiful and fun and just embracing of the goodness in this world with no sense, no hint of the cynicism and skepticism that will come later. So in every dimension, that spirit of Enlightenment sustained the humanity, made possible the modern world, keeps us going in spite of all the enemies, in spite of all the badness, in spite of all the difficulties that we have today. It is the spirit of Iron Man. It is the spirit of Iron Man's heroes. So when we look at the world today, we can see that Enlightenment spirit around us and we can see its enemies around us and we can see in a sense the constant battle between the two and it does appear. And I think that's real that the anti-Enlightenment forces seem to be gaining on us every day a little bit and that that spirit seems to be decaying every day a little bit. And that the world of the Enlightenment is shrinking, certainly it is out from art. There is no Enlightenment art or very little, certainly not as a cultural phenomena. But it's still in personal values. It's still in the fact most people in America still want to pursue a career, want to pursue romantic love, want to pursue their own well-being, even if half had a heartedly, even if not completely. It's sad that they combine this pursuit of values with cynicism and skepticism brought in from Kant and the enemies of the Enlightenment. It is still somewhat, you know, economic life and our love of technology, of innovation, of progress and that is under attack constantly by our skepticism and cynicism which results in regulations and controls and antitrust and anti-progress mentality and economists who write books about the end of progress and growth. It's still there in some of us being curious and many people out there in the culture being curious but we also see it in an educational system that tries to kill that curiosity early on in children and if they survive then suddenly in college. And of course, it survives in the political freedom we still have but it's under constant attack by those who would like to limit and constrain our political freedom. Free speech right now is under attack, maybe the one idea that is at the heart of our freedoms, our political freedoms today. So it's there but it's on life support. We're struggling to keep it going. It's under clear attack and yet we have the philosophy as other speakers have discussed that would complete the project of the Enlightenment. We have now a proper fully validated conception of reason integrated into a new ethical system integrated into a new political, social, economic system, reason, egoism, capitalism. We have a philosophy that completely thoroughly rejects all forms of mysticism and faith. We have Inran's philosophy. We have what it takes to resurrect and complete what the Enlightenment started. And I just want to end with maybe a little bit of fantasy. Imagine what would happen if we were to be as successful as the Enlightenment was. What could be achieved in the world in which we live? I mean the Enlightenment had a massive effect on a part of the world in the short run and all of the world in the long run. Today you can find some of these Enlightenment ideas everywhere all over the globe. It's what has helped raise billions and billions of people out of poverty. Imagine if there were eight billion minds engaged in the pursuit of values. There were eight billion curious human beings on planet Earth confident in their own ability to think and to reason, discover, discover truths, innovate, have careers, engage in arts, create values. Whatever was achieved by the 19th century would pale in comparison just because of the sheer number of people engaged in that kind of activity. It's one of the reasons I am optimistic about the future. It's the fact that knowledge is not anymore an exclusive realm to a few people. It's not anymore an exclusive realm to people within a few countries. Knowledge now is universal. Eight billion people have access to the entire body of knowledge that has been produced by humanity in the last hundred thousand years. Technology has made that possible. We now indeed have eight billion minds potentially working on problems, on the creation of values and if they were freed up and if they were, if they could embrace the true spirit of the Enlightenment. One can only imagine what could be possible. We, even with the mixed economy that we have, even with the mixed philosophy that we have, even with the mixed culture that we have, the innovations that are going on today astounding. We are potentially on the cusp of significant innovations to extend human life. We are at the cusp of seeing computer power grow exponentially to the point of, well, who knows, artificial intelligence, what's called computer learning and you might object to the particular terminology. But the idea of applying computing power that was just unimaginable even just a few years ago to problems that we all face is astounding. The potential to bring about, you know, just think about how much self-driving cars would help you, how much time they would buy you, how much efficiency they would, how much more efficient your life would be, how much less time you would waste in traffic jams or in driving and be able to do productive activities. But think about that application of that kind of technology, that kind of technology that is, quote, smart, not smart in the human sense, but smart in terms of problem solving, to so many of the problems we have today, to medicine, to transportation, to everything that we do, to the acquisition of knowledge. Today, little capital and very little labor is needed to create enormous wealth and enormous progress, enormous innovations. We have the potential to create an economy built around innovation, products of human reason, almost exclusively with all the manual labor done by robots. I mean, that is astounding. Think about the impact that has on your quality of life, on your standard of living, on the length of your life and your health, because it's not about just living long, it's living healthy. It's all within our grasp. It's all within our reach. It's not that far away. But it relies. It relies on that spirit. It relies on the ideas, the ideas of reason and its efficaciousness, the ideas of the sanctity of the individual and his ability to use that reason to pursue his own values. It relies on the ideas of individual rights and political freedom. It relies on the ideas of the enlightenment. And we now have those ideas in a form that they did not. I mean, I think a complete form, an integrated form. So it is our job. It is our job to make this amazing future a reality and to make it a reality. By helping the culture rediscover the enlightenment, by helping the culture rediscover reason and individualism and bringing about consequences that you'd have to be a science fiction writer to imagine because I do not have the imagination. I can just get a glimpse of how amazing life could be. Thank you, everybody. Thanks, Yaron. For the Q&A portion that we're going to start now, we're going to be joined by Ankar Ghatay. Ankar, are you with us? Yes, I'm here. Thanks. Great. All right. So we have a couple of questions already. I want to remind everybody to post your questions in the Zoom Q&A module and we'll take them in the order in which they come. So one question came in in Spanish and was translated. So this one, either of you can take it. So how are so many people? Why is it so many people in Silicon Valley are capable of creating such amazing products but are either on the left or are mystical in some sense at the same time? You know, it's hard to tell, but I think there's a number of reasons. They do not have a good philosophy. That is, they have the spirit of this Enlightenment thinking. They value reason. They've integrated into their own life. They value their own life and they are searching to make their life better. But many of them, you know, I find this amazing. Many of them are convinced that this ability to apply reason to your own life is unique to some people and other people need to be taken care of. You see this so often in things like UBI, this universal basic income. It's this idea that, yeah, I can do it. I'll survive when the robots come. There's a certain attitude that it's that it's exclusive, that disability is exclusive. So I think that they have false philosophical ideas about reason and they have false philosophical ideas about individualism. They are still shaped by a certain form of altruism. But I also think it's dangerous to put them into these political categories. They're leftists in what? They're not leftists in everything. And from that perspective, what is the option to being a leftist? The option to be is to being on the right. When the right, I always use this example. When you have a Republican debate, you know, candidates debate, and the question comes up, do you believe in evolution? And not a single candidate says yes. And you, an entrepreneur, say like, value values science and innovation and reason and progress. How could you be a Republican? How could you think that these are good people and this is right? So I think they've been fooled by this political dichotomy and they've rejected the right because of its anti science mentality and bought into a package deal, bought into a package deal on the left. Let me say a word about a tie to the Enlightenment. So I think one of the reasons they lean in a certain direction intellectually is that's what they've been taught. This is what they've been taught in the universities, in their classrooms. These are educated people. They've gone to university and they've absorbed a certain viewpoint. And a worldview, I think, in the end, they haven't absorbed it passively. They think about it. They're independent thinkers, but this is the direction of their thought. And then when they come out of the universities, if you look politically, culturally, in the more general, however you want to put it, newspaper, op-ed world, that level talk radio and so on. What's offered by the so-called right, I think, is not very good. And as you're on saying, if it's so tied to anti-science, tied to religion against various forms of personal freedom, it's that you're going to keep your distance from that. And I wish more of the Enlightenment were taught in universities because I think the Silicon Valley people or the people who will become leaders in Silicon Valley would respond to a lock or to a Jefferson. And I mean, many of these other figures and see, yeah, this is something, there's a real mind here and it's interested in science and it's interested in freedom. So they would see, oh, there used to be thinkers who thought science and freedom go together. Not you have to be a Bible-thumping person and then you talk about freedom. And the socialist in the 19th and then into the 20th century tried to tie science and socialism together. So that they would learn that there's no, there's a viewpoint that is scientific, row freedom and has a deep, deep view about what freedom is, what government should be, what it should and shouldn't do. I think if they learn that, they would be, they would have different views. So it's a real, I mean, it's worse than a tragedy that the universities don't teach much about the Enlightenment. You have to really seek it out to learn something about the Enlightenment in universities today. So let me follow up with a question about some figures from the Enlightenment. Do you have thoughts or an evaluation of Adam Smith and then the French physiocracy, physiocrats? I'm not sure who they are exactly, but pass that to you guys. I mean, I admire Adam Smith as an economist. I think he was brilliant in his ability to identify what was leading to economic progress. The benefits of division of labor, the benefits of trade. It's not that these ideas were not all to some extent known before him, but he integrated them in a way that was new and fresh and important. And he shaped the thinking in economics for a long time. He made errors in economics. He was a labor theory of value and other things, which it errors that you could imagine making in the end of the 18th century. I don't think he was particularly innovative when it came to philosophy and to morality. And I'm sure Ankar knows more about this than I do, but he was somewhat conventional there. And what he did primarily, a lot of people talk about his theory of moral sentiments and the ethics within the wealth of nations. He's primarily describing the ethics as they are. He's not normative. He's mainly descriptive. And it's not, you know, it's not very, it's not innovative. It's conventional. And that's, Iron Man was very critical of that in about Adam Smith. Yeah, I agree with that. It's, if you go back to people who are here for Robert Mayhew's talk, I think it's another example of the best of the enlightenment. What I think is, when you think of Adam Smith in economics, it's a scientific approach and it's very enlightenment approach. It's a lot of observations of economic reality, of the way division of labor works, of visiting factories and seeing what's going on in them, and then a real attempt to generalize and draw out principles from this. And that's part of the system building that Iran was talking about in regard to Adam Smith. If you get to morality, if what you're going to do is observe the way people actually function and the way that they think about and talk about morality, you need to be on the premise, okay, yeah, but they're deeply imbued with Christianity and Christianity is an otherworldly mystical morality. So this might be, there might be some descriptions in Adam Smith that are true about the way people actually think about and experience morality. But it's, most of it is all bad. And this is that there's not a prescriptive element, but there's not a prescriptive element because the prescriptive element would come from, yeah, okay, this is a Christian morality and it's really bad and we're going to challenge this. And one of the things that never happens in the Enlightenment is to have a figure who's going to say, just as we challenge the whole view of astronomy that you get from the Bible, the earth, at the centers, we're going to challenge the whole view of morality. And it's led us just as we were led astray in astronomy, we've been led astray. And that's enormously difficult to do, but you needed a thinker willing to take on that challenge. And that's the challenge that I ran takes on. And where morality is radically new. So let's switch to the issue of reason as central to the Enlightenment. So there's a question. What do you make of studies, scientific studies, that purport to show benefits, either mental or physical to one's health of prayer or meditation? I mean, is there a rational reason to pray? So no, I don't think there's a rational reason to pray. I mean, what is praying? It's an attempt to communicate with something that doesn't exist. It's a dead end. It's a dead end and it makes no sense. I don't know the studies. I'm skeptical about studies. Generally the purport to psychologically tell us that something enhances wellbeing. I'm not sure. I don't know how they define wellbeing. But I don't know. Maybe they're good studies. There is a wall for rest, contemplation, introspection. And if prayer is for some people serves that purpose, it's time to think about your life, to think about your values, to think about what you're doing that's good or bad. If meditation does that for you or relaxes consciousness in some way that makes you sharper just like rest generally can make you sharper, then I think, yes, it can be beneficial. But to pray, literally to pray. No, I think it does a lot of psychological damage because you're placing hope in something that is where there's no validity to it. There's hope in something that doesn't exist. And you're making your consciousness subservient to something else, to a zero. And that is incredibly damaging. Oh, God, do you want to add to that? No, that's good. So let's turn to a question about getting to that future that you said was this fantasy is so hard to imagine. What would it look like? So one questioner is asking, if ARI is going to make that fantasy a reality, how does this work? What do we need to know? When might this happen? How will it occur? You know, flesh out the steps on that road perhaps. Well, it's not happening today. But I don't know when it happens. But I think part of the part of the process, I think I would recommend reading Leonard Peacock's dim hypothesis. I think some of the process is listed there. My broad view is that what we need, it's if you look back at the enlightenment, what you had with dozens and dozens and dozens of intellectuals, working in a wide variety of fields, unified, not by agreement on everything, but unified by the principle of using reason and the sanctity of the individual to one extent or another, they were mixed. And so you had scientists and you had philosophers and you had educators and you had amateurs and you had discoverers who would go into the, to go study, you know, all kinds of tribes in the middle of the jungle or whatever. Yet all kinds of people going out there and taking these ideas and going and applying them and then communicating them. How did they communicate? They wrote books. They did studies. They did seminars, lectures. You know, lectures were quite popular during that time. And you know, one of the things that happens during the enlightenment is you get these societies created. Scientific societies and the envy of the world is the Royal Society in London. So Leibniz, I think, creates one in Germany and then they have one in France. So these competing societies of science. But they're basically taking the philosophical framework and applying it everywhere and communicating those ideas. And that is my vision for the future. We are not going to be successful unless we, we will not be successful until, not unless, until we have in a sense hundreds of intellectuals in a variety of different fields, studying and communicating and teaching the ideas as they apply in their fields. All integrated by, I think, what's needed is a small group of philosophers who can do that kind of integrating activity and who teach the philosophy so that these other intellectuals can go and do their thing. But intellectuals change the world. That's how the left was one. That's how every movement has been successful. If you look at the Marxist, if you look at intellectuals change the world. What you need is a lot of intellectuals, but not just a lot of philosophers. What you need is a lot of intellectuals in a lot of different areas applying these ideas in original interesting ways and then writing, speaking and engaging with the culture on the ideas when Newton's ideas first came out. I mean, there were all these people going around doing seminars on the laws of motion. I mean, seminars, lectures and doing demonstrations and teaching people about this because people didn't want to believe it, right? It went against so much of knowledge previously. So I think that's what needs to happen. And slowly you will see the culture changing because slowly the educational institutions will change and people's attitudes will change. And part of this, by the way, it's not just intellectuals. There's definitely a role for artists. It's just I don't think the Institute can create artists. We can maybe create intellectuals maybe, but we can't create artists. And artists are going to have to come out of this movement and project to the world the image of what is possible in order to be successful. And if you want to add Onko. No, I agree with that. I want to take sort of the flip side of the question, which is don't wait for the world to change, to change your own life. And I think this is part of what Iran was emphasizing in his talk. And this is what we inherited from the Enlightenment and you should take it seriously. And it's part of why to think about that age and era. It's a new conception of personal identity, that your personal identity is up to you. It's self created. And this is emphasized in spades by Ayn Rand and both in the novels and the nonfiction of what it looks like to create yourself and make yourself in the image of what you want to be of your values and of thinking of the Enlightenment that it has this focus on progress. It's not just sort of economic cultural progress. It's that you can progress, you can move forward. And I think part of what I respond to, and I suspect it's part of what Iran responds to about the Enlightenment, is it has a future focus, not a past focus. It's not focused on like, what did my grandfathers used to do in this? Iran brought this up a bit. And religion is basically, what did some shepherds 2000 years say and do? That's what I've got to follow. And it's always looking back. And the modern world comes into creation when it's looking forward. And it's, we're going to build a future, but the basic future that you can build and what you have full control over is yourself and that you can be self-created. You can form your own ideas. You can think what is true and only accept what you think is true. You can form your own personal values. You can pursue as Iran was talking about your own career, your own friends, your own lovers, your own life. And that's what you can build. And you have the power to do that. And we certainly, for many of us, if you're not trapped in a dictatorship or something, you have a lot of control and freedom in your life to do this. And this is what you should be thinking about. And part of looking at the Enlightenment figures, Iran was talking about in the British Museum, this room and so on. It's a very personal room. When you go into there, if you go into Monticello, say in, you get, this was Jefferson's world. And it's, again, a world of books and inventions and arts, but it's, these were particularly important to him. And you get this image of what it looks like to really create yourself. And that, if it's like, why care about the Enlightenment? If that's its primary message, do that in your own life. And if everybody does that in their own lives, the progress that we can make as a human race is just astounding. So we don't have a lot of time left during this Q&A period. So I have a couple more questions I'm going to put to you guys. And let's try to get them both answered. And then to everyone who's got questions in the queue, to remind you, we're going to do a general Q&A with all the speakers after the coming break. So just bring your questions up again if they didn't get answered. So two quick questions. They might not be quick, but let's try to get them both answered. One question is, thinking back to the 1970s, the question is observing that there were attacks on Western civilization in colleges. Was that a harbinger of sort of an anti-Enlightenment movement that we're seeing today? And then once you guys have answered that, I'll come to the last question. Can I just say a word on that and then you take it wrong? Because it ties exactly to what I was just talking about. Because I noticed I think the question you're bringing up along mentions multiculturalism. And multiculturalism in its deeper philosophic meaning is precisely the message that you don't have control over your personal identity. You have to look to your ancestry and to your biology and then your environment. But the environment that's been created for you, not the environment you're creating, that's what gives you your personal identity. That's what's significant, the color of my skin, where I happen to be born, who my parents are and so on. And it's such an anti-Enlightenment idea to teach kids that instead of thinking of their future as open and it's determined by you, it's that no, it's closed and it's been determined by your biology and your environment. It's such a crime to do that to students. And that is, for sure, is an anti-Enlightenment, anti-reason perspective. Yes, and the whole, I agree with that completely and it's fascinating that you get the same on the left and on the right now. The far left and the far right, you get the same kind of determinism, the same idea that we're determined by our genes and the color of our skin and all this other stuff. But yeah, the 60s and 70s are definitely a precursor to what we're seeing today. And it's definitely an anti-Enlightenment movement. It's a rebellion of the left against the remnants of the Enlightenment on the left, right? So there's still a respect for science on the left pre-60s student rebellion. There's still a respect for reason on the left pre that rebellion. There's even a sense of a respect for the pursuit of happiness before this. The 60s come along and they demolish all of that, right? And the student rebellion is now, it doesn't go very far and knows many of those students become professors and they continue and they start becoming the people who are teaching the next generation. And what we've got today is the direct lineage of that 60, what I meant, called the new left, which was out to demolish the old left and demolish society and demolish the Enlightenment. Everything about the Enlightenment, they reject. They reject reason in favor of emotion. They reject individualism in favor of some form of collectivism. And maybe the form of collectivism has changed, which much more focused right now on issues like race and identity and things like that. But it's definitely about collectivism during the 1960s. So yes, today the children, grandchildren of the flower people. All right, so in the last couple of minutes, I'm going to combine two questions into one. How can we get, how can the individual inspire other people to become interested in the Enlightenment given that there's so many sort of present contemporary things pulling them away to doom and gloom and things like that. And then do you have thoughts on resources? And one of the questioners is asking, do you recommend Stephen Pinker's book on Enlightenment? What else would you recommend for people to educate themselves to begin with? So I'd say, I'd harken back to an answer that Anka gave a little bit ago. The best way to inspire other people to think about these values is to live them, to live them and to articulate them yourself and to integrate them into your own life, to be passionate about them. And this is the way to stay away from all the darkness, particularly right now with the elections and everything. Think about all the amazing things that our life entails. I mean, I often talk about this. I mean, think about the beauty and the utility you get from an iPhone, from the fact that we're doing this right now. I mean, this is magic. It truly is, it's magic, right? I mean, here we are, what are the people from a bunch of different countries in Latin America? By the way, before I gave the talk today, I gave a talk in Brazil. I gave an hour-long talk in Brazil, but I never left home, right? And I'm not like Tal who has to get on a plane and go travel. He's a zoo master, he do everything from zoo. You know, it's amazing that we can do this and that we can interact and we can learn and we can, you know, life is so, you know, super amazing right now in so many dimensions that focus on that. Yes, there's certain things that are going against us. Yes, there's certain things that are very depressing. But first focus on your life and your values and attaining them, then worry about the rest of the world. I mean, we're egos after all. So make your life the best that it can be and focus on all the wondrous things that make it possible for you to live that life wonderfully. Surround yourself with art. That's one way that doesn't cost a lot of money these days because you don't have to have originals. You can get good quality reproductions. Surround yourself with beauty. Make your life beautiful. That's a way in which you can create an enlightenment within your life and then inspire people to ask, well, why, you know, how do you stay so positive? In terms of reading, unfortunately, I don't have a list of the books and I always get these questions and I'm never prepared, but I definitely would recommend Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment now. It's a fabulous book. I don't agree with everything in it. Certainly he misses whole dimensions of, you know, of political coercion and what political freedom really means. But in its spirit, it is so wonderful to read a book that is so positive about reason and about individualism, about progress and about what human beings are capable of and how the world is becoming a better place in all these different dimensions. It's just a thrill to read. I'd also encourage people to read. Yeah, the other problem is I forget people's names. Matt Ridley's books, the Rational Optimist Innovation, books like that. Again, I don't agree with everything. There's certain big issues. I disagree with Matt Ridley on, but they're wonderful books and they get you into that. He's an Enlightenment. He's got the Enlightenment spirit. You know, he's got that spirit of curiosity and admiration for innovation and knowledge and so on. The same with people like Johann Norberg. So there are a lot of writers writing about the world today and about potential future and how we got to where we are today that embed that spirit of Enlightenment. And then there's a lot of good books about the Enlightenment itself, but that's where I don't have my list with me and without the list, I can't really recommend any. But there's a lot of different texts and everything I've picked up, I found interesting even when, you know, I'm not an historian so I don't know if they're all true or not, but there's a lot of interesting, it's such a rich period that there's a lot you can read about it. Yeah, I too am blanking out on some of the, you've read this, you're on, I haven't read these yet, they're on my reading list. His last name start with a K, he's one of the newer, it's one of the newer Enlightenment. It's the author who's arguing that Spinoza's central to the early Enlightenment, but I'm blanking out on the name, but we can find that. So those are very well received. They're a little controversial I think because it's a new take on what's central in the Enlightenment. I read, which I found fascinating and it's interesting because this person's a Marxist, I think the Peter Gay has two large volumes on the Enlightenment, which I've read and they're fascinating in the, again it's, I don't, he's a Marxist, I don't agree with all the perspectives and conclusions and interpretations, but you learn a tremendous amount of what was going on in various fields in the Enlightenment and I found that very helpful as a, I mean, it's not an overview as I say, like they're two thick volumes, but the details are fascinating. I actually got them in California. One of the problems is all my books are in California, physical books, but the gray books are really interesting. All right, well let's draw a line here. If it comes to you, we can bring them up during the general Q and A. I'm sure people would appreciate the recommendation. I'll see you in the next video.