 I have a question about the Ayn Rand Institute activity. I've been an ARI supporter forever since it started, and I love the essay contest, which helps spread the reading of Ayn Rand's book. I donate to the book project, and I see ARI's mission as preserving, promoting, and teaching Ayn Rand's philosophy. But I have some reservations, which I'd like you to address, about the independent intellectual activity, some of the essays and the op-eds issued by ARI, because they're not related to, and don't promote or preserve Ayn Rand. Let me give you an example. Recently, ARI had, under a new ideal, published an essay by Elon Giorno, a friend of mine, and it was an excellent essay on foreign policy. But it never mentioned Ayn Rand, it never mentioned or emphasized her ideas, such as individual rights or egoism versus altruism, or anything distinctly objectivist in the essay. And I think that this would have been a fine essay in a foreign policy journal, but I don't think it belongs in something done by ARI, or... So I get it, yeah. So this is the mission of the Ayn Rand issue. I'm just going to read off the mission. Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism, in order to create a culture of guiding principles of reason, rational self-interest, and lies of fake capitalism, a culture in which individuals are free to pursue their own happiness. The key here is, foster is a growing awareness, understanding, and acceptance. That is our mission. That is stated on our website, that is it. Now the question is, what do you do in order to grow an awareness? And in my view, what you do to grow an awareness is not just Ayn Rand said this, Ayn Rand said that. You do that as well. What you do is you cultivate good ideas based on her philosophy, and you get them out there. And look, everybody, when everybody reads Elon's essay, and I don't know which essay you're referring to, so I'm not going to get to the particulars of their essay because I can't remember it. And I a little bit doubt the way you've presented it about it, because my suspicious is it's very much based on Ayn Rand's philosophy, even though it's not explicitly so. It's on the Ayn Rand website. It's got Ayn Rand there and it's new ideal. This is what Ayn Rand intellectuals, so the connection to Ayn Rand is not hidden. It's like when I go out and give a talk on capitalism, and I never mentioned Ayn Rand, but my title is that I'm giving the talk on this, Chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute, everybody makes that connection. I think by one of the most important ways in which we can grow the awareness and understanding of Ayn Rand's ideas is by becoming world-class experts in our field, foreign policy for Iran. I'm over general energy for Alex. Alex Epstein. And then going out there and articulating these ideas in a coherent, interesting, positive way that then people link up to Ayn Rand's ideas. And they say, wow, the Ayn Rand Institute, or Ayn Rand was about this philosophy that has all these interesting applications. And you can look at energy differently and you can look at foreign policy differently and you can look at these other things differently. And I don't think you have to mention Ayn Rand in the essay, and I don't think you have to quote Ayn Rand. You don't have to keep pounding individual rights every single time. That's not my issue. My concern is that ARI's resources should be focused on Ayn Rand, for instance. I write a book having to do with applications of objectivism to everyday life. But I wouldn't want ARI subsidizing or promoting them because it's not Ayn Rand. It's me. And the same thing with independent thinkers. I think what ARI should be doing is teaching a philosophy to the political commentators and to the people who would apply Ayn Rand's ideas to the culture, but not actually do it. I think that's your job. So I get that. So we disagree on what Ayn Rand Institute should do. I mean, that's just a reality. This is the thing. If it existed, if there was an opportunity in the world where the Ayn Rand Institute could train these people, could train the political thinkers, could train the foreign policy guys, could train like we trained Alex and train these people. And then they could go get jobs at universities, at think tanks at these places. Then great. And I would agree with you. That's what we should do. But the actual reality is, and this is, and Ayn Rand talked about this. Ayn Rand talked about the fact. Somebody asked her, what would you do? I think it's in what one should do in the essay. She said, one of the things, but maybe now, maybe it's somewhere else. Or maybe Len had told me this or something. But this is the idea. The left trains their people and gets them jobs, the universities. The right today trains their people and puts them in all these think tanks that they've created for these people. We in objectivism should train our people and then abandon them. But that's exactly what it is. We would abandon them. Because they can't get jobs in academia. We try. We spend a lot of money on trying to do that. They cannot get jobs in other think tanks. Alex is unique in that he happens to be an entrepreneur and he can go do it himself. But that's unique. Not everybody is like that. The job of the Ironman Institute, and Ironman said this, what we need is a place where you can hire the people that you train. And that's exactly what we do at the Institute. I believe that that is the most important thing. The most important thing. We can do to increase awareness of objectivism so that we don't come off cultishly and narrowly. But that we actually have ideas. We can't just, we don't just quote Ironman. We actually have ideas about things and we apply them. So I am very proud. And we're going to have to leave it here because we should take other questions. But I'll leave it with this where we disagree. I am very proud of the people I've trained, or we've trained. I'm very proud of Ilan writing on farm policy and getting those words out. I wish, I wish I had 20 more people like that applying objectivism and writing out of the Institute about these issues. Because, you know, ideally they would be out there in the world but they, they're not going to make a living out there. And I want to support and I want to make sure that these people have a job and that they can, and I think that this is what it means to promote objectivism. What it means to promote objectivism is not to promote Ironman. That's one aspect of it. But what it really means to promote objectivism if your goal is to change the world and my goal has always been to change the world. There's not been, and I told the board when I took over, I did not view my job as exclusively to protect, to defend, to, you know, preserve. My job was to change the world. To change the world you have to apply, apply, apply, apply, apply. And that's what I did if you remember right after 9-11. What did I do? I took Ironman's ideas and applied them to 9-11 and applied them to foreign policy. And I went out there and hustled to do that. Now you could argue that was bad, which is fine, or shouldn't have been the focus of the institute. But that's how I view it. And I would love that if there was somebody right now writing on the riots and all of this stuff constantly and writing about politics and writing about all kinds of issues outside of politics, all, you know, science and all this other stuff. And people are going to disagree with stuff that the Ironman Institute puts out. And there's no litmus test counts. It's the claims that were called. There's no litmus test. I know we probably disagree on some political issues. Betsy, nobody's kicking you out of the movie movement because we disagree about politics. It's a movement where we're going to disagree on application. But I think if we can get the best minds using objectivism to apply these ideas, we come across as a movement. We come across as an ideology. We come across as something that's interesting. And I know, I mean, maybe this sounds a little, but other than Rand and Leonard, I don't think anybody's brought more people to Ironman than just me talking. And that's because I apply objectivism in an interesting way. And I think that attracts people to Ironman. I don't do it. My goal is not for them to follow you on. I mean, I'm not Ironman. My goal is for them to read Ironman. And I say that all the time, go read Ironman. That's this awareness and a little bit of understanding because I don't think I enhance understanding that much beyond what they read from Ironman. My goal is to increase awareness. And I increase awareness by talking about Trump. You know, and some people don't like it that I talk about Trump, but that's, that's the reality. You're muted. I can't hear anything you're saying. Well, I muted her because you said that it's, that's it. Well, okay, let it just say something and then we'll go on. Okay. What about having debates among objectivists sponsored by ARI over controversial topics? Yeah, we could do, we could do that if there was, if there were, if there were, you know, if we could find equal partners, if we could find people who could stood up for that. I've no, you know, I debated Leonard on immigration. You know, and, and, and I'm happy to, to, to, you know, if we find people with a disagreement and they're, they're worth debating, sure. I don't have any problem with that. And one of the reasons, if you remember that when I debated, debated Leonard Peacock on immigration, which to me is, I get a little shiver when I think about debating Leonard Peacock, a little crazy was one of the reasons he agreed to do it. And why I wanted to do it was we wanted to illustrate to the objectivist audience. There can be disagreements in objectivism. We can have those debates and discussions. The Wood of the Einwand Institute is not written on stone somewhere. It is not Einwand. It is not even part of objectivism technically. You know, so, but it is to the best of our knowledge, the best of our ability, the application of objectivism and people are going to disagree about it. I don't have a problem with people disagreeing with, as long as they do it respectfully and they do it, they do it honestly, but I don't think, I don't think an institute whose mission is to create a culture whose guiding principles of reason can do it without massive application and showing the world what it looks like to apply. And that to me is the mission. So it's, I don't see any other way. And realizing that I take a risk that I offend you or somebody like you and they stop supporting us and that's happened. After 9-11 a lot of people stopped supporting the institute because they didn't like the message. I know that around Trump a lot of people have stopped supporting the institute because they didn't like the message. I have to call it like I see it. I can't take a poll of my donors and figure out what, how to apply and how to not apply based on democracy. Before we move on. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning, any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims, or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the stare, cynicism, and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist brought. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it. But at least the people who are liking it, you know, I want to see, I want to see a thumbs up. There you go. Start liking it. I want to see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a, a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this. And you know, the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. 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