 Hello. My name is Michael Rennie. I'm President of the University of Exeter Freedom Society. We believe in free speech, freedom of market and freedom of religion. Every Thursday we meet in old timers. If you want to come along and support the cause of freedom, come and join us. I'm very pleased to be able to talk about this with you today and to share our message. With us, we have Jaron Brooke, the Iron Round Institute. He's an entrepreneur and a fantastic speaker and a very long friend of our society. Without further ado, everyone, round of applause, please. Thank you, Michael. Thank you all for coming. It's a real pleasure to be back at Exeter. I think this is my fifth time. I've been here every year for the last five years. Two of my most popular videos ever were taken right here, maybe even in this classroom or I know in this building. So thank you to Exeter for being so hospitable towards me over the last few years. I want to talk today about maybe the most important question that each one of us as an individual must ask himself. That is, what is the purpose of life? What should you live for? Whom should you live for? What is life for? And we get lots of different answers from all over the place. We get those who tell us there's some greater meaning, some greater purpose for which we should live for. Whether it's religion and there's a God that we should live for and sacrifice our love, I love for. Whether it's a community, whether it's a state, I grew up, as I think many of you know, I grew up in Israel and I was taught that my purpose was to sacrifice for the sake of the state, that the state was more important than me, that the tribe, the tribe I happened to be born accidentally into, the Jewish tribe, was more important than me as an individual. And I grew up committed to this idea. I was, I like to say, I was waiting for the grenades I could jump on, right, and sacrifice my life for this greater good, for this higher cause. Luckily for me, I think, I read Atlas Shrugged at the age of 16 and got dissuaded from that idea. Because one of the questions one must always ask of any claim that people make about anything is the most basic question. And that question is, why? Why is this group's life more important than mine? Why is the state more important than the individual? Why is my life less important to me than your life? And this is a question that is, that we get no answers for. People say, because, because we're told by some higher authority that that's the way it's supposed to be. But there is no in reason, there is no rational explanation by which the lives of the group or the lives of someone else is more important to you than your own life. But our entire moral code in the West for 2000 plus years has been rooted in the idea that what makes you moral, what makes you good, what makes you noble is to sacrifice yourself. It's to be selfless. It's always to consider the interest of others above your interests of your own life. I'm and challenge that idea for me in Atlas Shrugged and I hope everybody here reads that book. It's a, it's a life changer or at the very least, it causes you to think of, you know, I guess God forbid, but, you know, causes you to think about the world, which is, I believe a healthy exercise for anybody, agree or disagree, challenge your beliefs and the best way to challenge them, I think is to read Iron Man. But I wanted to today challenge this idea. And really, instead of focusing on the negative and what you shouldn't do, I want to challenge the idea that that is the only option in ethics, the only option in morality, the only option of living a good life is to be selfless. It's to sacrifice. It's to live for the sake of other people. We have, Iron Man wrote a book called the virtue of selfishness. Now selfishness has a really negative connotation in all of our minds. When I say selfish, what pops into the mind? What's the first thing that one thinks of when you talk about selfish? What's that? Greed, right? But what is greed? Irresponsible. What else? So when I point at somebody in the schoolyard and say, ooh, that kid's selfish. Do I mean that kid takes care of himself? What do I mean usually? Yeah, he's a twat to everybody else. Twat is a word I've never used in my life. But I think that captures the idea, right? It means that he is willing to exploit other people, to be nasty, to do whatever it takes to get his way. That's how we've been conditioned to think about the idea of self-interest, about the idea of selfishness, about the idea of egoism. He thinks of himself first and as a consequence is willing to exploit other people, to lie, steal, cheat, stab people in the back, whatever it takes to get his way. There's a sense in which in ethics we're offered two alternatives of human behavior. One is good and it means to sacrifice, to think of others first, to be selfless. The other is to be a lying, cheating, stealing twat. I was going to be SOB, but twat sounds like a good word for this. Really? That's it? So what I know he does is he challenges that idea. She asks the question, why should I live on? And then she says, well, what would it mean to live for yourself? What would it mean to be selfish if selfish, just man, taking care of self, living for oneself, placing one's own values ahead of the values of others or first in one's own pursuit of life? Would that actually lead to being all those descriptors we had before, so we don't have to repeat them? Would that actually lead to that behavior? So the first point she makes is, your life is yours. If you choose to live, if you choose to be alive, if you choose to survive, what is required of you? What do you need to pursue? What do you need to do if you want to live, to survive? But what's the first thing human beings need to do if they want to live, if they want to survive? Eat. Eat is great. How do we eat? Where does food come from? Now don't say the supermarket, please. I've had people say it is super. Where does food come from? For human beings, like other animals, how do other animals get food? Right? If you're a tiger, you chase it down and you eat it. You know, if you're a zebra, I guess, you eat leaves. If you're a horse, you eat grass. How do we get food? I mean, where does it come from? Can you look around? I mean, we're a pretty pathetic animal. No, you can look. Right? We're weak. We're slow. We have no claws. We have no fangs. How do we get food? You try running down a bison and biting into it, or try standing up to a sabertooth tiger. And yet, the sabertooth tiger last one I saw was in a museum. And here we are, sitting in comfortable chairs with leisure time to listen to a lecture, going to school and getting an education. We haven't dealt with sabertooth tigers in thousands of years. How do we do that as a species? How do we survive? How do we get food? Yeah? Agriculture. Okay, agriculture. How did we get agriculture? Where did it come from? Agriculture sophisticated. And for tens of thousands of years of human beings, we didn't even have it. How do we get it? Killing other animals. How do we kill other animals? Again, we can't chase them down and bite into them. Corporation. So we cooperate to do it. Absolutely. But even before cooperation, there's something that has to happen for us to be able to do this. By thinking. By thinking. What makes us unique as human beings is that we have the capacity to reason. We have the capacity to think. So if we're going to cooperate, we have to be able to communicate. We have to be able to communicate about fairly abstract ideas like how do we strategize about running and maybe building a trap or maybe your group attacks from that side and we attack from this side to catch the animal? Because we've seen new ideas, right? Suddenly, the next guy who discovers this and sees this maybe 10,000 years later says, whoa, I can turn this into an industry called us the Bill Gates of 10,000 years ago. And he says, I can turn this into an industry we can plant and rose and we can really cultivate agriculture. But he had to figure that out. And that's how you get an industry called agriculture. That's how you get mass production of food. Food, none of us have the gene for food manufacturing. None of us have the gene for agriculture. The only gene we have is the gene that makes it possible for us to reason, to observe reality, to integrate the facts of reality, to learn and integrate in new ways, learn new knowledge, teach other people, communicate, cooperate through teaching other people. But at the fundamental core of human survival is one thing, our capacity to reason. iPhones don't happen because somebody has a good gene. iPhones don't happen because somebody was raised in a good environment. iPhones don't happen spontaneously from all the other animals out there. That's what makes us human beings. It's our capacity to reason, our capacity to think. So when Ayn Rand talks about selfishness, when she talks about self-interest, what is the most self-interested thing that you can do? Well, if your capacity is in the thing that allows for human survival, if the thing that allows for human creation of values is reason, then if you care about yourself, then what's the most important thing one should do? What's the most important thing once you cultivate? It's your mind. It's your capacity to reason, your capacity to think. You've got one life. The way to live it to the fullest potential is to use your mind to figure out what's going to lead to the most successful life possible. You get to shape your life. You get to shape your soul. You don't get to blame it on other people. You don't blame it on your genes. At the end of the day, it is your decisions, your free will, and your capacity to think that determines who you are as an individual. And for Ayn Rand, the number one value, what is a value? These are the kind of terms we like to throw around, but what is a value? An idea we hold sacred to ourselves, but values are not just ideas. A pusher could be a value to you. Material things can be values. What is a value in the broadest sense? A guiding principle. A guiding principle at a certain level of value becomes that. But again, I value food. I value my iPhone. I wouldn't consider them guiding principles. They're values in ethics, where I think it's a guiding principle. We'll talk about what that means, but values generally are things that we act to gain or keep. It's things that we really care about, that we want. And in morality, values, moral values are those abstract attributes that we want to hold, that we care about, that are really, really important for our lives. For Ayn, the most important value, the number one value is reason. It's the thinking. It's to take your life seriously enough to think about what you're doing. And what does that mean? What does that mean to say thick? Because we all have emotions, right? What about emotions? Should we follow our emotions? Should we follow our reason? Should we ignore our emotions, suppress our emotions maybe? Who cares about emotions? What do emotions come from? A little psychology. Yeah. Yeah, so emotions come from your thoughts. Not always your conscious thoughts and not always thoughts that you're aware of in a sense that they might be thoughts you had when you were three, right? Emotions come from conclusions that we've come to in the past. They were not always aware of and they're automatic quick responses based on those conclusions. You see something that's scary. You don't even know why it's scary. You haven't had a chance to think about why it's scary. You feel fear. Why? Because at some point you've automatized that that thing, a shadow, a dog, I'm scared of barking dogs, right? Whoa. Right? I think when I was a kid, you know, maybe a dog tried to attack me and I, dog's bad, you know, right? Those are the kind of things that cause you emotion. But emotions don't. They're not tools of cognition. They don't teach you about the world. They teach you about you. They teach you about your response to the world. So when we make decisions in life, should we use emotions? Should we use facts? Reason? Logic? Well, given that we don't exactly know where our emotions always come from, given that they're based on conclusions we might have come to a long time ago, I'd suggest that maybe we embrace emotions. Emotions are wonderful. We live through our emotions. We experience life through emotions. It's cool, right? But they're not decision-making tools. This is your decision-making tool. Your reason, your ability to look out the world, figure out what's a fact and what's false, false or fake news, what's real, what's not. Use logic to figure out what is true, what is right, and act based on that. So reason means orientation towards facts. Now, if I'm oriented towards facts, let's take some of the claims that we made about being selfish earlier. Lying. We said lying, stealing, cheating, right? Lying. Would lying be consistent with a self-interested life that was guided by, that placed its highest value on reason? Is reason and lying, are they consistent? Reason is about facts. What's lying about? Non-facts. The opposite of facts. It's about deception of facts. And the person most important in life not to lie to is whom? Yourself. Because if you put garbage in, what are you going to get out? It's a computer science. The garbage in, garbage out. If you put in nonsense into your mind, if you put in fakes, anything in there, what you're going to get as a result is not logic. It's not truth. It's not reason. So you want to make sure when you deal with reality, when you deal with people, when you deal with anything, that the facts are true, that they're real. You don't want to deal with lies. What about other people? Is it in your self-interest to lie to other people? Sometimes easier. It's sometimes emotionally less stressful to lie than it is not to lie. But do you think that's a good strategy in life? How many of you lied in your life? I don't really want to know. And I suspect I know the answer anyway. Lying sucks. It's a bad strategy. Now, I'm a little older than you guys, quite a bit older than you guys. And I can barely remember what I did last week. Particularly in my travel schedule, I can't even remember what continent I was on last week. Now imagine I lied about what I did last week. Now, instead of remembering one thing, I have to remember two. But it's more than two. Because after I remember what I did last week, who I lied to, who I didn't lie to, and you can add on to that. Why I lied to these people, I didn't lie to them. I mean, it's, whoa, blows my mind. It's way too complicated. I value my machinery, if you will. I value my reason. To lie is to deceive yourself. To lie is to obstruct your capacity, your focus, your ability to reason properly. It's too much work. It's too destructive. It's not in your self interest. It's just a cheap way of avoiding reality, of avoiding sometimes the hard truths that need to be set. Lying is not self interested. Lying is not altruistic. Lying is just stupid. It's just not good for you. It's just bad. And you can take all of these behaviors and evaluate them based on the standard of reason. Now, what does one have to do other than think in order to survive? So we can think thinking is great, but what else does one have to do in order to survive as a human being? If you took your life seriously and you really wanted to, you know, first survive and then really thrive in the world, what would you have to do above and beyond thinking? Breathe. Breathe, yeah, okay, breathe is kind of automatic. So something you had a choice about and important. Adapt. Do we adapt to the environment as human beings? Interesting question. Do we adapt to the environment as human beings? Yeah, we adapt the environment to fit our needs. If we're cold, we build a fire. If we're really cold, we build a hut. If the hut isn't good enough because the window blow down, we build it for bricks. And when we really get to it, we'll build skyscrapers. We change the environment to fit our needs. Again, makes it very different than any other animal out there that adapt to the environment. We adapt the environment to us. One of my concerns with environmentalism, you can ask me in the Q&A, is exactly this point. They want to undo that fact. The fact that we change the environment to fit us, they want us to leave the environment alone. Wait a minute, that's not how human beings survive. That goes against our nature to leave the environment alone. So what do we have to do? Think and then act. We have to act. We have to produce. Food doesn't just show up. It doesn't just come from the grocery store. You have to work to make the money to buy the stuff in the grocery store. Or the farmer has to actually plant the seeds and whatever farmers do. I don't know. Don't have the gene for that, right? Whatever they do, somebody has to do it. So the second virtue, virtue is an action necessary for attainment of your goal. Necessary for the attainment of a God is to be productive. Every human being should have the sense that they are producing and putting food on their table, that they can achieve something through the productive effort, their mind and their actions integrated to produce the stuff that goes on their table. So if you're productive and you succeed and you're challenged and you're pushed and you really do well, what is that sense that you get about life? Confidence? There's a word and I worry about using it, but hey, I've used selfish, so I can use this one. Because it's so distorted today in modern usage, which is self-esteem. Right? Self-esteem means I belong in this planet. I'm good. I can cope. I can achieve. I can be successful. Life fundamentally is good and compatible with me. Self-esteem is an incredibly self-interested sense about the world. That comes primarily from the work we do. It comes from our successes. It comes from being challenged and being pushed and and achieved something at whatever level we can achieve it. Everybody can achieve self-esteem, but it has to come from you and it has to come from your achievements. Production, work is primarily where we get our self-esteem. I mean, I know people tell us all the time that we're really important to them. If you ask people, what's the most important thing to you? What do they always say? Family. Then why the hell do you spend so little time with your family? You spend most of your time doing what? As an adult, not you guys. What do you spend most of your time? Working. We spend most of our life at work. Not because we have to. If all you needed was food and water and shelter, most people in modern society can work a lot less than they work. But we work a lot. Why do we work so much? If you're healthy and hopefully you get to choose your work and you've done okay in life, then you do it because you love it. You do it because that's where you get your self-esteem from. You do it because that's where you're being challenged. That's where you're being pushed. So work, being successful at it, at whatever the work happens to be, at whatever level you're capable of leads you to the self-esteem. What happens if you steal stuff? Going back to lying, stealing, cheating, or if you cheat? What are you admitting to the world and to yourself? That you can't produce it. Somebody else produces it. You can use your muscle. Not too easy. Your muscle in order to take it away from them. But they produce it and you know that they produce it. Self-esteem down the toilet. You're not going to have any self-esteem. You're not going to have that confidence in a world. Now one of the things I hate in modern movies is that in modern movies, almost all movies that have good guys and bad guys, who has fun? Always. Who's like a confident, happy, successful person? Gets the girl if they're male, gets the guy if they're a woman. Who is it? It's a bad guy. Always. And a good guy is usually divorced and miserable and hates his job. And he has to be a good guy. The burden of being a good guy. That drives me nuts because bad guys are the ones who actually suffer. Criminals don't have fun. Lying, cheating, stealing people are not happy. They don't have self-esteem. They don't like themselves. There's a famous case in the U.S. called Bernie Madoff. Again, generations pass. Bernie Madoff ran the largest pyramid scheme in history. $63 billion he stole. $63 billion. Then do you think Bernie Madoff said now one day and said, hmm, I wonder how I can be happy? I know. I'll steal my best friend's money. Nobody does that. Very few. Maybe some hardened criminals do that, but almost nobody does that. Bernie Madoff saw a pile of money, saw an opportunity to cheat, and he took it out of emotional desire. He didn't think it through because you know what happens with pyramid schemes? Always they collapse and you get caught. So you never thought it through. Thinking is not an attribute of bad guys, crooks, thieves. They don't think. They are more. And was Bernie Madoff happy? Hey, he had $63 billion. How could you not be happy if you have $63 billion? Was he happy? Well, it's interesting because people interview him. Now he's in jail. He was caught. He's in jail. Not only was he caught, who do you think caught him? Maybe somebody knows who caught him. No, not a competitor. Competitors warned the authorities that he was doing a pyramid scheme, but the authorities couldn't catch him. Who caught him? Who figured it out and caught him and told the police, basically, his son, to his kids. And what happened? A son a year later committed suicide. And today, Bernie Madoff's in jail, knowing his son committed suicide, and yet he says that he's happier today in jail than he was before he was caught. He never enjoyed the money. Why? Because he had no self-esteem because he constantly obsessed about when he was going to get caught. It was obviously he was going to get caught. Who would catch him? He was constantly lying to his best friends, constantly lying to his family. How can you live a life where you can't look people in the eye because you're lying to them? He had a horrible life all because he didn't think. He acted on emotion. And usually, as you get older, you'll discover this, you probably know it already by now, you get into trouble when you follow your emotions and you don't think first. That's almost always the case in relationships, in school, in work, in almost everything. If you follow this and you don't think it through, that's when you get into trouble. So being self-interested is not about being a lying, cheating, stealing, whatever. It's about being a thinking human being. It's about using your reason. It's about thinking things through. It's about separating facts from fiction and focusing on reality and our truth. And in exercising the muscle, the most important muscle we have, which is the brain. There's the brain and muscle on that, which is true. Anyway, whatever, right? Number eight. That's what it means when Iron Man talks about the virtue of selfishness. She's talking about the virtue of using one's mind to pursue the values you choose for yourself based on the facts of reality. What will make your life the best life that it can be? Because you only get one shot. You only get one shot at this life. There's no second chances. As far as I know, there's no reincarnation. And even then, you're not guaranteed to come back as a human. You could come back as a cockroach. Bad stuff, bad common, right? So there's one shot, one life. It's yours. The whole idea is to make the most of it. And you make the most of it by using your reason, by focusing on reality, by thinking things through, by living and enjoying and having passion for the values that you figured out are good values, things you should actually be pursuing. And I promise to talk about the implications to politics. So let's transition. So what does that mean? What kind of life will, what kind of world the people who want to live for themselves, using their mind, not exploiting other people, but not expecting to be exploited by the people either, by treating other people based on what? Based on something called the Iron Man called the trade, for instance. The idea that if I'm going to interact with you at any level, spiritual level, material level, it should be a trade. I should get something, I should be better off because of the interaction. And you should be better off because of the interaction. I like to think of the idea of the virtue of selfishness as, in terms of other people, that you want to maximize, you want to maximize your win-win relationships in life. You want to maximize the relationship in which you gain. But if somebody else's loses when you gain, you're not going to sustain the gain for very long. Win-lose always turns into lose-lose. If you don't believe me, try it with a friend. You know, set up a win-lose situation and see how long that lasts. So they're truly self-interested. You want to create these win-win relationships. You want to be able to use your mind. You want to go out there and experiment with life because you don't know exactly what works and what doesn't. You don't know exactly what values you want to pursue. You're young. The world is open. What kind of world would somebody like that want to live in? Well, what is the enemy? What do you think the enemy is of reason? What is the thing that makes reason impotence, that incapacitates reason? The reason doesn't know how to deal with it. Cannot deal with it. What's the enemy of reason? Yeah, force, coercion. If I put a gun to the back of your head, there's no point in thinking. You just do what I tell you. If you're interested in survival, thinking now is out the window. It's irrelevant. The one thing that is the enemy of individual success, of individual reason, of thinking, of achieving a producer is force. It's coercion. It's putting a gun to somebody's head. It's authority that tells you what to think. And if you don't think what they say is to think, what happens to you? Well, if you're lucky, like Galileo, you go to house arrest. If Galileo had been born maybe 20 years earlier, they probably would have burnt him at the stake because that's what they did with people before Galileo who challenged the dogma, the authority of the time. So force is what we want to ban from human relationships because force cripples their mind. Now, how do we do that? How do we ban? Because we get into a community, we get into a society, and there are always going to be some bad guys. There are always going to be some people who think they can get away with stuff. There's always going to be a boony made of, unfortunately, who thinks they can get away with it and who doesn't think but just emotes. So one of the reasons, the only reason really, when we get into a social context to create a government is to ban the use of force. It's to have an agency and a government is just, in my view, an agency that basically has the monopoly over the use of retaliatory force. It does not allow us to engage with one another through fists. It takes the fist out. It takes the gun out. It bans the use of violence and fraud, right? Fraud is a form of violence from human relationships. It says you can do whatever you want. A good government says you can do whatever you want. You can live any way you want. You can value what you want to value. You can use your reason or not. But the one thing you cannot do is use violence against another person. And this idea of that being the purpose of government, who came up with it kind of first, who is the guy who really formulated this? I mean, Hobbes, in a sense, but it's actually post-Hobbes because Hobbes doesn't come up. Hobbes doesn't believe in individual freedom, right? He believes in the state having authority, but it doesn't just use that authority to use force to protect you. It uses that authority to crush you. So who came up with the idea that the state should not? No, way before Max Weber. No, I wish Plato played. The whole history of the world would be different. Plato had thought of that. John Locke, thank you. John Locke, you know, one of your fellow countrymen, I guess, right? Who is this, this account? I don't know, depends on where you are in Great Britain, I guess. John Locke, the whole idea of individual rights, which Locke is not the first, there were some Dutch thinkers that come up with this before Locke. But Locke is really the first to formulate and formalize properly. What is the idea of individual rights? What individual rights mean? It means you have what? You have freedom. Freedom to do what? What's that? Well, whatever you want, but really in Locke's view, you have the freedom to use your reason to live your life based on your values that you deem necessary, that you deem necessary for your survival and thriving. Free of what? Because what does freedom mean? Freedom means the absence of force, coercion, domination, authority. The whole idea of individual rights is the idea of freedom from coercion. And we set up government in a proper society to help free us from that coercion, to mitigate that coercion, to be our objective enforcer of the law, of property rights, of that you can't use your fist against me. And of course, unfortunately, that government, those governments have usually a what? They're the biggest coercors in the world. They're the ones who actually use the fist. They're actually the ones who coerce us and force us and so on. But the ideal of government is to be a government that does one thing and one thing only and has protect our rights, which means protect us from criminals and cooks and fraudsters and bad guys and leaves us alone so we can use our mind. We can use our reasoning to live our lives as we see fit. So a rational egoist, a philosophy of selfishness properly understood as I ran understood it is compatible with only one system of government. And that is where government does this one thing. And it has a police force, it has a military, it has a judiciary. That's it. Where the government doesn't coerce us, the government protects us. It's only function is to protect us. And that of course has multiple implications to how our government would run. And it certainly contradicts how our government is running to logics then, how our government runs today where the government intervenes in every action that we take. Everything almost is today regulated, controlled. You need permission from somebody who is wielding force, who has the capacity to wield force against any of us. Not a government who's limited, not a government that's restrained, but a government that is unlimited. This is much more Plato's influence, somebody mentioned Plato before. This unlimited government is much more Plato, right? Because Plato, well, Plato's, you know, pretty down in democracy, but he is big on the government should have a say in all of our lives and what we do if you read the Republic, Plato's Republic, hey, who you marry, what profession, all of that is dictated by somebody above you. Because what does Plato not have respect for? Your individual capacity to reason for himself. See, I believe everybody can reason. I don't care what circumstances you're born under. I mean, unless you've really got some, you know, brain issue, right? Some real incapacity. Everybody can. It doesn't matter where you come from. It doesn't matter what color of your skin is, what gender you are, any of those things don't matter. You've got a mind. You've got the capacity to reason. That's what makes you a human being. And if you know more about what you need, what is necessary for your success as a human being, for your thriving, for your achievement, for your survival than anybody else, nobody else can tell you what your value should be. There are moral values. There are principles that I think are universal, reason, productiveness, honesty, integrity, things like that. But how you apply those to your particular life is only you can make those decisions. Only you can choose that. And if the ideal, as with Rand, it is, is to live a happy, successful, prosperous, wonderful life, then these are the ideas that make that possible. The idea of the state, controlling our lives, regulating us, taxing us, cursing us, goes back to a different set of moral codes. If your life is not yours, if your right life belongs to the group, then a group gets to decide what to do with your life. If your life belongs to the state, if the primary is not you as an individual, but the primary is the state, then the state gets to tell you how to live. The state gets to tell you what business to open. The state gets to tell you how much to pay your employees. The state gets to dictate how much of the money you create you get to keep, whether it's through a process of voting or not through a process of voting. The group now has priority over the individual. So I often say that the problem we face today, those of us who believe in freedom, those of us who believe in a limited state, those of us who believe in capitalism, the problem we face today is not so much a lack of understanding of economics. And I'm sure some of that will come up in the Q and A. We've solved all the economic problems. I mean, there have been so many great economists, there's no real open questions about whether flea markets work from an economic perspective. There's no question of how to structure government in order to protect our rights. founding fathers of America figured that out pretty well. The system is broken today, but at the time, the division of powers and separation of powers and no one institution can dictate what is done was pretty brilliant and pretty amazing. If they had consistently applied it, it would have been fantastic and still would be, but we've lost it. It's not any of those problems. The real problem is the moral code we live on. As long as we believe that our life is not that important, that the primary is the group, that the primaries are the people, that our purpose in life is to live for them, then the group gets to save. So the real revolution that's needed in our thinking is a moral revolution. It's the flip there. Individuals don't want paternalistic government sitting on their shoulders and saying, don't drink that, don't eat that, can't start that business. Oh no, don't ingest that. No, you want to be able to make decisions for yourself based on your own mind. And yeah, you're going to contold with experts, you're going to look for what is true and what is not, what effect is what is not, but you don't accept authority individuals living for themselves using their own mind with self-esteem. Don't accept authority. They don't accept the dictates of other people. They don't accept even the rule of the majority. Their life is sacred. Their life is theirs. And as individuals, we should be allowed to live that life as we, using our reason, see fit to live it. Thank you. Kevin, awful lot of time for questions. I hope you're ready. Well, I left a lot of time for questions because my favorite part, yes. Thank you, Darren. Good luck back in Exor. I think the potential criticism that I ran that she has, what one might say, a very optimistic concept of what individuals are capable of. You mentioned three names, Galileo, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. But the simple fact of history is that these have always been exceptions to the rule. Most people simply can't think like Galileo or make money like Bill Gates or make money like Steve Jobs. But then it seems to follow that Ein Rand's brand of corollate individual self-belonging here, a name, is only realistically appropriate for a few individuals and not for many to do anything wrong and quite happy to follow what others do not think themselves. So I was just wondering what you think about that. So that's a critique that is often presented about Rand's theory, but I think it's ultimately wrong. I don't think people are happy to follow the dictates of the group. I think they do follow the dictates of the group. The happy I'm not convinced of because I think people who follow the dictates of the group are really, if ever, happy. I think happiness acquires that sense of self-esteem, that sense of confidence that one has in this world. And again, I don't think that's a question of ability. It's true. I'm not a Steve Jobs. I'm certainly not a Bill Gates and I still need no Galileo, right? Any of those. But at whatever level you are capable of, you can be the best human being you can be. You can be the best bricklayer in the world. You can't, I mean, it's funny, but it's true. And people get pride out of doing a task, whatever the task is, however simple that task is, really, really well versus skimming and not really doing it, or worse, not doing the task and getting a welfare check. So give you three possibilities of the same person getting a welfare check, doing the task half-heartedly and just getting by, or doing the best job that you can in the simple task, right? Who do you think is happy of the three? Who do you think has pride that they're putting food on the table, comes home with a sense of accomplishment at the end of every day? Only the person who's putting in the effort, who's making, to the extent again that they can. And in the fountain, and I know it's fountain, there is an example of a construction worker. There's an example of this. There's a wide variety of examples of people who are accomplished in whatever it is that they do, which doesn't necessarily require the Galileo's IQ or Steve Jobs' imagination and passion. So the point is, again, everybody has the capacity to reason at whatever level you have. And exercising that reason, taking that seriously, and being productive at whatever level you can be, is what gives purpose to your life and what gives meaning to your life, and I think makes it possible to be happy. Unfortunately, we tell poor people, and this comes from Plato, right? We tell poor people, you don't have a hope. Forget it. You can't take care of yourself. We, big brother, will take care of you. Don't think for yourself because you can't think you're too stupid. Here, we'll give you a paycheck. We'll take care of you. We'll tell you what to think. We'll tell you how to think. The philosophy, again, think about Plato's, I mean, in many respects, Rand makes this point, but a philosopher named Leonard Peacock really articulates this, and there's a book called The Cave and the Light, which makes this argument, that Western civilization has been a struggle between two philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. And Plato basically says, you know, some people can reason, there were few, right, the philosopher kings, and they can commune with this world of spirits, or the forms, to use Plato's terms, that only they can see. The rest of us, we're in a cave somewhere, and all we can see are shadows. We never see the real world. We never see the sun. We never see truth. But the philosopher kings, the philosophers, they see the truth. Now, if they see the truth and we don't, then who should we listen to? Them. We can't use our own reason because we can never find the truth. So we have to follow their instructions, and they are the elite who guide us in everything that we do. Aristotle, on the other hand, says, oh, wait a minute, Plato. No, no, no, no. Every individual has a capacity to reason for himself. No, we don't live in a cave. We're all outside looking at the sun. If we choose to, if we choose to exercise our capacity to reason. And that's what I think what it boils down to is the choice. And I don't think the choice is an issue of IQ. I don't think the choice is an issue of ability. We use Steve Jobs and those guys as examples because they are, you know, they are so brilliant and they achieve so much. And I think they make all of our lives better by so much. But all of us are capable of that, again, at the level that we're capable of. Yeah. Yes. Yes. I got this question. The staff, I always get this question. So it's good. Yes. No, coercion is wrong. It doesn't matter how much coercion, coercion is wrong. So you cannot fund the government through coercive texting. So the question is, how do you fund the government? And I man has an essay on this and capitalism, I don't know an ideal book I highly recommend. And part of our answer is, look, we're probably looking the decades before we get there, let's cut taxes to the level where it's low and then we can figure out how to make them not coercive. But okay, but how would you do that? Well, I mean, a number of things. There's certain things that government does that you could charge a fee for service where the government could charge you a fee for service. And then the other way would be a voluntary system where people voluntarily provide a funding. And I know Europeans always look at me funny when I say that because you guys are all cynical. And it's true that the welfare state creates cynicism. But free people have no problem being charitable or being or recognizing the fact that when they're getting something, they want to write a check to paper. Nobody wants, if you're free, and you have self esteem, you don't want to get free stuff, you want to pay for what you get. So I'm a strong believer that such a small government, such a limited government could easily be funded actually would write surpluses every year, just by the fact that people would write checks and say, yes, I want to support my police and my, my government and my, my thing, but let's get there and then have dollars. It's my view, right? How are you exactly do it? Right? We're so far from it, though, we'll figure it out. We've got like 50 years at least, maybe a hundred before we get there. We'll figure it out by then. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to separate two things. I want to separate the concern with having clean and clean water, which all of us for very self-interested reasons have a concern about that. We don't want to pollute out. We want to be healthy, right? And the idea of environmentalism as an ideology. The ideology is primarily dominated by people who view nature as an intrinsic value, as a value external to human beings and what we as human beings value. And I think that is false. I don't think anything has a value except as a human being, right? A value to whom? Right? Values are something we as human beings act to gain. Okay. Not something that has a value in and of itself. Nothing has a value in and of itself. So my view is, you know, the solution to most environmental problems, twofold. One is property rights. If you have property rights over everything, and I mean everything, right, lakes and rivers and stuff like that, then we have a long tradition of common law and a long tradition of legal system that you can't dump your garbage in my backyard. Well, if my backyard includes the lake, then you can't pollute the lake. I sue you if you do. And there are clear consequences to that. If you're polluting and I'm breathing and I'm getting sick, again, I can sue you and get compensation and stop you from doing that. And if it's clear damage, the government can ban it in the name of protecting me because I'm physically being damaged. So I think most of the legitimate environmental issues are sold through private property and through the legal system of harm, the issue of real harm, right? So what's left? Well, I don't know. You like spotted owls and they're going extinct, right? And I don't like spotted owls. They don't taste good. What do we do about spotted owls that are going extinct? Well, my view is, if you care about spotted owls, if you think spotted owls are important for some reason, whatever reason, right, maybe you think they're important for the ecosystem that provides whatever for human beings, or you just like spotted owls, they're pretty, whatever, right? Then buy a big forest and have some spotted owls on it. Just don't expect me to have spotted owls in my forest. It's mine. So I always say with endangered animals, if you want some, buy some. But you know, what's endangered for you might be a pest for me. The standard, in other words, is human life. The standard is individual human life. It's not nature. It's not the environment. And just to put this in perspective, human beings, in all of human history, have never had a better environment than they have right now. The air is cleaner than it's ever been. You go to London, go, do a time machine, go back to London, 19th century, where the, what was in the streets of London in the 19th century? What? Well, smog is in the air. What was on the ground? What's that? Feces. Whose feces? Well, mainly horses, because that was the means of transportation. They were poopy. You know, in Disneyland, when the horse poops, there's somebody in the back there to sweep it up and take it away. That didn't exist in London. Too many horses, too much poopy. But then, of course, it was open sewer because we weren't wealthy enough to build real sewer systems, right? So it was filthy. What about the cavemen? You think the air was clean? Why do Europeans, normally Europeans, drink beer? Well, you know why we drink beer? Because water was so polluted that, polluted by what? By just feces and stuff, that beer was the safest thing to drink. Why did a Chinese drink tea? Just true. Why did a Chinese drink tea? Because it forces them to boil the water. Because the water was so polluted. We're so sickening that they figured out that if you boil the water, nobody drank water. Where's my bottle? Right? Look at this. Evian. I get it from France, from the spring. Pure. Capitalism. I mean, no time in human history could you drink better and cleaner, healthier water than we do today. You could choose between Evian and Fiji. They have different minerals in them. You could choose based on your profile, what you like and what you want. I mean, it's crazy. But it's wonderful. We've never lived in a cleaner place. We've never lived longer. I mean, what was life expectancy just 250 years ago? At the time of lock? What was life expectancy during lock's time or during Adam Smith's time or Hume's time? What was life expectancy? Anybody know? What's that? Wow. You're living long if you're 50. 39. Look it up. 39. If you were lucky and lived in a relatively good place, most children died before the age of 10. Over 50% of children died before the age of 10. Today, children don't die. Oh, it's very rare. It's usually unfortunate because it's such a traumatic event because it's not our experience of life. We don't experience children dying. We live to be what? You guys, your generation is going to live to be 100. I mean, I hope I'm going to live to be well into my 80s. Maybe it's my 90s. I mean, that's wow. That's unthinkable. I mean, I believe that if biotech was unregulated, you guys would be living to be 150 or 200. I think the knowledge we're close to really extending human life dramatically if allowed to use our reason and do the work to investigate these things and do it. When is human life being better? We're richer. I mean, we're so rich we've lost any appreciation of what it means. You literally have to travel around the world to go to really, really poor countries to find people who live like we did 250 years ago to appreciate a little bit how rich we are today. And I encourage everybody to do that. Go to Africa, certain parts of Africa, go to Cambodia, go to places just to gain appreciation of how rich we are because we really are. Amazingly rich. Imagine what life would be without running water. Nobody had running water 120 years ago. Imagine what life would be without electricity. Nobody had electricity 120 years ago. I mean, your generation is all global warming or whatever, right? All upset at carbon fuels, right? But carbon fuels make your life. I mean, this is one of those amazing inventions in all of human history. We have electricity. We have automobiles. I flew over here on a Boeing that used up tons of carbon fuel. Life is made possible because of carbon fuel. We live in the best environment, even if they're warms by three degrees, we're still living in the best environment we've ever had. And we're so rich that we can afford air conditioning even in England if it gets too hot. I mean, really? So that would be my, you've got to follow up on environmentalism. Just put it forward. Sure. We've got plenty of time. So I'm trying to get to all the questions. It's just, especially after we live in the best environment, I find hard to disagree with it. But there has at least been publicly related news science that we are almost creating too good an environment for ourselves that we start to, basically, it's too good for us to be destroying anything. Yeah, walking the dice. So to me, this is a new millennial cult. I mean, look, I mean, really? I'll give you this. Every single generation believes that it is living at the end of times. Every single generation. There's always something it's going to end tomorrow. Right. I've lived long enough to remember a book by Paul earlier that came out in 1968. Paul earlier is still around. He's still a professor at Stanford, still well respected within the environmentalist movement. And he declared in 1968 that in the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people in Europe were going to die of starvation. And the world was going to end as we know. A few years later, I remember the headline in New York Times saying the earth is cooling and we were entering a new ice age. And the world was going to end by the end of that decade. Right. And every now species extinct. Then they're going to wipe out all the species in the world and we don't have anything to eat or whatever. Every few decades or every few years, really, there's a new thing to be afraid of. We don't think religious seriously enough to believe that I don't know, Jesus is going to come back and we'll have the end of times that way. So we invent new ways in which we're going to have an end of time. But we're perpetually obsessed with the end of time. The world is not going to end. Human beings are unbelievably smart. If the globe is warming as it seems to be, then we'll figure something out. You know, air conditioning is not a bad solution. Amsterdam is Amsterdam right now for hundreds of years has been below sea level. And Amsterdam is one of the most amazing cities in the world. And maybe the freest country to go back long enough in the world with a fabulous history and the below sea level. So you think we can't in rich America figure out how to deal with sea levels rising? Of course we can't. Just use your mind, figure it out. And if we allow free technology to advance, then we'll have the technology to deal with these things. So again, every generation has the hubris to believe they're it. If we don't do something, the world's going to end. And by the way, when you say you can't argue with the fact that things are good, but nobody thinks that way. And indeed constantly your generation in particular is taught that life sucks and it's terrible and you're the cause or your parents are the cause and you should rebel against this world because life is so hollow. By the way, just one other point and then I'll go back to questions. How many people 250 years ago lived on less than $2 a day or less than $2 a day? In absolute terms, that is in inflation adjusted $2 a day. An equivalent of what would be today $2. What percentage of the population? 98 is a pretty good number somewhere between 95 and 98 percent. What percent of the population of the earth lived on $2 a day or less 30 years ago? 50, anybody else? What's that? 80. 30 years ago, 80, 50. So it was 30. It was 30. So it is a U.N. numbers. So, you know, they're biased, but probably not in my direction, right? Probably the opposite. So 30 percent 30 years ago. How many live below $2 a day today in the world we live in right now? How many people live on less than $2 a day in the world? What's that? Okay, 20 percent less than 20 percent. Anybody else? What's that? 12.5. Well, no, I know the answer. So you don't have to google it. It's about eight. Eight. The U.N. estimates that by within 15 years, the amount of what's called extreme poverty, under $2 a day, would basically be zero. We've never lived in such good times. And yet all we do is rich and complete. So I have an observation and question. It first seems that until at the end of reason, it seems to me that what you really identified is not force, but what is at the root is desire. Because the desire for my life makes me conform to force. And so it's not so much I'm afraid of force. I'm afraid of the outcome of force like me, which is the loss of that which I desire. No, I don't think that's right. I think forces is at the root, right? Forces are consequent usually of emotion, of desire, of other people. It's rather reason to wear the people use force, initiate force, because they thought that goes back to my burning made up example. But I do think force is the primary. It's, it's, I'm afraid of a fist in my face. I don't want a fist in my face. I certainly don't want a gun pulled out at me. And then I get to talk or I don't want the church or authority telling me what to think and what not to think and what's okay for me to think and what not okay for me at the threat of burning at the stake or death or something like that. So force is the antagonism to my freedom to think to use my mind to explore the world to discover new truths. And if you put force, that's what constrains. So desire can be overcome. I have lots of desires. Some are good, some not so good, right? But I have the reason I have the capacity to control my desires, to limit my desire. But if you pull a gun on me, the only way for me to respond is with force, unfortunately, right? And I don't want to do that, right? Because it places my life in me. So, so my question, my question is, there are certain decisions that we're not able to make as individuals because they're so big that we sort of have to make them collective. That's how it seems. So my question on that is in the modern Europe, is Hungary and Poland, are they being rationally selfish when it comes to immigration? And are countries like Sweden the irrationally altruistic? And is that, is that hurting? All right, you had to be in immigration, huh? I think they're all wrong. I think they're all irrational. So if Poland and Hungary was only dealing with immigration, then maybe you could say, okay, but Poland and Hungary are also dealing with out and out racism. They're also dealing with nationalism. That is the elevation of state above all else. They're also dealing with censorship. Hungary, there is no independent press anymore. You know, Oban is basically taking over all the press. The same is true, or starting to be true, more so in Poland. They haven't quite got to Hungary's level with the movement in that direction. On the other hand, the reason Sweden has opened its borders not only allow you to present, but when you come in, you get a check and you get housing. When Swedes can't afford housing, you get, you get housing. That's, you're right. That's altruistic, and that's selfless, and that's wrong. So I think they're both wrong, both the Hungary model, the Polish model, and the Swedish model are wrong. My attitude is, again, it's do away with the welfare state. And then if somebody wants to come to your country and is willing to work, then great. I think immigration isn't that positive. If it's not an immigration to come and get the welfare check, and you're not giving the welfare check. But for example, a lot of the immigrants who came into Germany are not allowed to work, even though ones who want to work for like a year. That's absurd. So if you want to come into work because you're coming to make your life better, welcome. And if we in the West say, this is how you have to live. These are the standards. These are the laws. This is the culture. This is the civilization. You have to adapt. It's the old American melting pot. I'm a big believer in the melting pot. We keep the best of your culture. We dump the lousy parts of your culture because some cultures are not that valuable. But in order to do that, and I know you're not supposed to say some cultures are not that valuable, some cultures are downright evil. I'll say that. Not all cultures are the same. Some cultures are pro-human life. Some cultures are anti-human. And if you're coming to a pro-human like culture, you better adapt our culture, at least at this minimal level. So if we had the self-esteem to declare reason, productiveness, as superior to anything else, then I don't think immigration becomes a problem. I think immigration is a problem because we're so weak, that we don't uphold our own values. And I think the West, again, it's an accident of history. I don't think it's genes. I don't think it's color skin. But as an accident of history, we inherited the greatness of the Greeks. We inherited these ideas of reason, of science, of individualism. And we need to live up to them. And if we live up to them, bring in the immigrants. Great. I mean, I love people. It doesn't matter to me where you're from or what the color of your skin is or anything like that. What matters at the end of the day is how you live and whether you're willing to respect the primacy of reason. All right, we'll go through this group and then go back there. I'll try to make my answer short. Yeah. What would you say, in your opinion, are there any limits on the use of retaliatory force, for example, between individuals or between states? And would you say there are any, what means, if any, too far? Well, I think, I think certainly individuals shouldn't be retaliated. This is why we have a system of law. So if somebody attacks me, certainly on the spot, I will defend myself. But I'm not going to go chase the guy who attacked me. That's the job of the police. That's why we have a separate entity that is responsible for retaliatory force. And for the police, there has to be a level of proportionality. That is, there has to be a level of what is the threat? What is the crime? So you don't execute, you don't give the death sentence to a pickpocket, right? But you might to a murderer, although I'm not a big advocate of the death penalty, because I think too many mistakes are made. But you know, you might be. So there's a certain proportionality in terms of that. I think war is different because war is about death and destruction, right? You don't go to war over a pickpocket. But if somebody really wants to kill you, and your only means is to kill them folks, or to kill them in the process of battle, then I don't, then I think you have to win and you have to win quickly and you have to minimize casualties on your end. That's your responsibility. So I'm an advocate of you do what is necessary to win when it's a self defense. I'm not an advocate of going to war for the sake of going to war for the expansion of war. Anything like that. But when it's self defense, you go to war to win and get it over. You said that we've only got one life and we have to live it to the best of our ability to do so. But what if there's a government getting in the way of you doing certain things? You said at the end that we should rely on a revolutionary change besides you. But then you answer another question that's going to take 100 years. We're already 20 years into our life. We can't wait another 100 years or we will be dead. Is it not permissible to use force to achieve that state if it's for the greatest good of every single individual in the world? So what you're saying is it appropriate to launch a revolution for the sake of freedom like the Americans did in towards you, but I think it is in the right circumstance. So I'm not against revolution on revolution, but I don't think the time is right for two reasons. I think as long as we have the freedom to speak, then reason is our means to try to convince our fellow human beings about a better life and how to live that better life. And this is why I think of all the issues in the world today. Confronting us free speech is the most important. There is no more important issue than free speech because if you can't speak, you can't use reason. You can't debate that all you're left with is a gun. All you're left with is a revolution. So I think the priority needs to be to speak, to argue, to persuade. That's why I do it. And it's why I think the whole de-platforming, the whole inability of some people to speak, even people they despise, they have to be allowed to speak because once we restrain some people's ability to speak or restrain other people's ability to speak, there's no limit to that. And then we're back in the inquisition, and that is an awful place to be. And Europe right now has, does not have free speech, and it is a real problem. And as that goes away, you will see more and more people result of violence because if we can't communicate by reason, all that's left is a gun. So I think as long as we have that, we should do it. The other issue is can you win, which isn't important. And you can't, not today. There are too few of us, and the other party has nukes. I mean the equivalent, right? They have armies, they're tanks, they're big guns. And so to do it to lose is not, you know, sometimes it's, if you're enslaved, if you're truly enslaved, then it's sometimes better to die, try to fight for your freedom and die than not have ever fought before. Give me liberty or give me death is real. But we are free enough today to be able to use argumentation to try to change the world. And that's my view. And again, that's why freedom of speech is so, so important, because when we lose that, chaos will break out. Yes. Thank you for the talk. One of the most infuriating things about reading is listening to the criticism against Ain Rand and the book. I want to ask you about the criticism that's most often here, which is the elevation of both James Taggart and Dagen Taggart. And they seem to think that Ain Rand is doing it in her books. At least that's the... What do you mean the elevation of it? Well basically, they think that Ain Rand proposes both as equally moral paths. Or just like... I don't know what book they read. No, that's the exact thing. But that is my question. Do you think they actually have first of all, Med Ain Rand? Or do you think it's malicious that they're trying to like miss it? I have actually never heard that particular criticism. I've heard lots, but that one I haven't heard. But look, James Taggart is the villain in the book. One of the villains in the book. And he has his job because of his family, not because of his ability. And Dageny, by the way, the first female executive who runs a railroad in world literature. So if you value the idea that women can do anything, Ain Rand was at the forefront of this in 1957 writing a book about a woman who runs a railroad. Pretty amazing. She is there because of her ability. And she is a vice president while he is the president because he's a man. And because he is the eldest son. He inherited it. And because the board of directors and society are weak and collectivistic and don't value talent and ability that Dageny represents. He's the villain. She's the hero of the book. I mean, the other villains and other heroes. But in that, so no, they're not being elevated together. And one gets destroyed, not to give the book away too much. And one achieves everything she dreamt of achieving or is about to, at the end of the book, achieve everything she dreamt of achieving. So the good guys win, the bad guys lose in that for sure. Yeah. I'm curious to position on a specific issue. It's one of the headscarves. Because it seems to me that many people, sort of in France, for instance, headscarves, that is kind of explained by the fact that headscarves is seen as a kind of coercion. And so the state is protecting from coercion. On the other hand, people say that wearing the headscarf is a choice in which case the state is cursing you. Yeah. So to me, it's fairly simple. If it's a choice, it's fine. You know, I believe in freedom of religion. And if it's a religious symbol, or if it's a whatever symbol it is, right? And look, headscarves are worn by Muslim women, but very religious Jewish women wear headscarves. And in some Christian sects, women wear headscarves. So now, if it truly is the case that there is coercion placed where let's say a husband or father or whatever is literally forcing and the woman is objecting, right? And she doesn't want to do it. Then yeah, then it's forced. And then the state has a right to intervene. Not about the headscarf, because there's actual violence involved, there's actually coercion going on. So no, I don't believe in the state ship ban religious symbolism. I think certain religious acts should be banned. I think whether it's female genital mutilation or male circumcision, I think, I think, I mean, female genital mutilation is far worse, but both acts of violence against a young child, which would not be the case. How have we gone from small government to big government since over the past 350 years? So the main driver of the fact is behind collusion and the collective Play-Doh. It's all about ideas. It's all about ideas. So it's actually not Play-Doh. It's Kant. It's Emmanuel Kant. So just like, yeah, you guys knew I would say that. Look, there basically was an enlightenment that came very close to answering the key questions about individualism, about reason and about government. And then there was a counter enlightenment. There was an attack on the enlightenment, I believe, by Rousseau and Kant, and their followers, whether it's Hegel, Schopenhauer, ultimately Marx and every intellectual since then, including Nietzsche. Well, all counter enlightenment, they rejected reason properly understood. I mean, Kant talks about reason, but it's not the same reason as I think the enlightenment understood it to be. Hegel actually believes that contradictions are part of the world. The essence of life is contradiction. And contradiction, if that's the case, then logic is out. Logic is the art of non-contradiction identification. It's about dismantling contradictions, discovering that there are no contradictions. So the whole German romantic school is, I believe, responsible for the undercutting of the enlightenment principles. And I believe that Ayn Rand is part of that enlightenment. She completes much of what the enlightenment started, both in epistemology and the theory of knowledge, and primarily in the theory of ethics. She takes Locke's work and many of the philosophers at the time, and I think completes it and provides answers to a lot of the questions that those German romantics were challenging the enlightenment on. So I think it's a battle between those two forces. At the end of the day, we, to the extent that we're free, are still children of the enlightenment. We're still products of the enlightenment. The fact this is a product of the scientific revolution and enlightenment thinking. It's the idea of reason. It's the idea of the superiority of the individual. That's what enlightenment thinking was about. The collectivistic anti-reason forces that came about after the enlightenment basically have fought against that and they've managed to cripple our ability to create iPhones, right? We're still flying basically the same airplane we flew in 50 years. There's been no innovations in airplanes and on mobiles and a bunch of, I mean, because government has restricted those, the one area it hasn't restricted is technology where we're relatively doing well, right? But everything that the government has touched is crippled by that touch. You should be living to be 200, but the government is all over biotech. So you're not. Well, no, because it's not all over, you know, we're still gonna fight. But it's a case where once you challenge and once you question, once you reject the idea of reason and once you reject the primacy of the individual and the individual being sacred, sacred in the secular sense, once you reject those two pillars of what I think Western civilization is and what I think or what enlightenment thinking was, then nothing else you do matters. Then government will encroach, the collective will encroach today with the level of a tribe. America is breaking up into a little tribe. Europe is breaking up into a little tribes. You know, my ancestors belong to this tribe. So I'm going to create my own little country of 400,000 people. Really? So, you know, this balkanization, this mentality of ethnic purity, which is so destructive to human reason and to the idea of individualism, that is inevitable once you reject reason and individualism. And that's what we're seeing the world gravitate towards. So it's not that government stepped in, it's that the ideas opened the door wide open for government and government stormed in and it's still storming in because we don't have the ideas to challenge it. And my job, your job if you wish to accept it, is to challenge those ideas and fight on the side of freedom, on the side of individualism, on the side of reason. Our job is to save enlightenment. It's to resurrect enlightenment thinking. I think in the form of Ayn Rand because I think she's the best representative of that thinking. But if you don't want to buy into everything Ayn Rand, well, fine. But you know, I hope you at the very least buy into what lockwork, right? So those fundamental ideas of individual liberty and of the efficacy of human reason, those are the key to human success. Yeah. Well, thank you for finding the answer to the question myself. I want to buy into one of the reasons I can't find the answer to yet. How do we go on these few more rounds of who goes on for a minute, but I'd like to respond because I've been dying to get an actual objective response to respond to what I say. Sure. While I agree with your objectivism on some topics in the power of capitalism, I do a round of work on a degree of success, for example. And I have a sort of study every month to see if we actually give you happiness with objectives and promotes. Yeah. Each year I have an objective in the business of histomology. So as we all know, random objectivism has an epistemological promotion rationalism, which I think backs up from its sort of ethics, its egoism. Now, this is all good and well. The reason is that since it's an important part of what it is in human, it is not all that needs to be human. Like my friend Matthew said earlier on in human aid, most humans are not capable of rationalising on a plane and saying, don't get to Galileo. This is due to a variety of factors, some biological, some psychological, and even environmental. Most humans are also currently irrational, emotional or not. So tribal law is the word we have to use collectivism. This is the reason why I'm no longer inherent to objectivism. It is because in my opinion, it fails to recognise one state of man as an irrational being, as well as ignoring and sneering at the left of the left, be part of something bigger than itself, as well as so it is with only good preference. I still want to be an objectivist. I think it's quite a marvellous philosophy, really, when I read out a Shrug and I was 60, like, you know, we dream again. But random epistemological worldview, which backs our ethics, is in essence ignoring the natural irrational and full state of man. And it's not still idealistic, even though we took it in my case. But in a certain way, to Ben Shapira says our facts are a parallel to feelings. I would say that feeling is a very parallel to facts. And again, thank you. I much say in response to a pessimistic objectivist like myself. You're too platonic and Christian. I mean, I don't believe in the thesis of the fallen man, and that is that people are inherently any of the things that you list today that they're inherent. And I think there's plenty of evidence. There's plenty of evidence that when people are left free, when people are respected as individuals, they live up to that, not down to that. I think you can find evidence all throughout history of people being good and people thinking. I think maybe the best evidence of that is, I mean, I can think of a few places, but certainly the United States in the 19th century post, you know, put aside slavery. And of course, the war was fought, so slavery then went away. People fought to end slavery. That's pretty cool. And people built something. Not just the geniuses built something. The genius made it possible. You can't do it without the geniuses. But people engage with the world. People went out and built farms in the middle of nowhere because they believed in something and they wanted something and they wanted the best life thing. They got us ships from little stettles in Eastern Europe to Irish farmers, you know, who were starving to death and went and made something of their own life. They didn't raise up and steal stuff from people. They actually built a life for themselves. Now again, they're not, they were the imperfections, no bad things that people did and all that. But generally, if you look at the scope of history, particularly the last 25 years, I wonder at man's ability to be rational. And this is when they're not taught it. This is in spite of the fact that we try to collectivize them and socialize them. And where religion is so dominant as a factor, again, particularly in the United States, which I think teaches irrationality and the opposite of all these virtues, right? So if you, you know, in spite of all that, I don't know, I go to, I went to, you know, first time I went to Hong Kong. It just blew my mind. Seven and a half million people live in the state on this rock, middle of nowhere. There's nothing there. There's no natural resources. And it's skyscrapers and people are busy producing and cleaning stuff. These are rational people now. They fully rational objectives. No, of course not. But to the extent that they understand irrationality, what it demands from them and that they like depends on it, they are. Now this is without an education, without being taught anything with an educational system that goes counter to all our ideas, all my ideas and people are still that good. And I meet people every day all over the world. I travel. I'm on this trip. I'll be in seven countries, right? All over the world, all cultures, religions, and you find amazing people rational people. Now, are they fully? No. Why are they not fully? Well, we've never taught them how to be. We've never expected it from them. We, you know, and again, it's, to a large extent, you get what you expect of it. You know, this with kids, right? So, you know, our intellectual leaders are telling people, particularly today, you should rank yourself, you should consider yourself a member of a group, and then you should think about how oppressed that group is, and you should rank your importance in life based on how oppressed your group happens to be. I mean, God, same as an atheist, you know, really, I mean, that's a horrific way to think about life. So, everything we're teaching people is how not to be rational, how to belong to groups, how to be a collectivist, and in spite of all that, people don't want anything. So, and again, I don't consider poor, rich, smart, stupid, I mean, stupid in terms of IQ. I don't think those are characteristics. I know, I know people with lower IQ or amazing humanities. I know people with higher IQ are the worst type of human being. And the same with racism. So, any characteristics you want that you're born with is irrelevant to the choices you make. So, imagine a world in which we had a good educational system. Imagine a world where we didn't categorize you immediately into some group and how oppressed you are. Imagine universities that taught you, and schools from primary school, they taught you how to think, how to be a critical thinker, not what to think, but how to think. I mean, we're just scratching the surface. Like, freedom, in a sense, was invented 250 years ago. The product has been amazing. Human beings have been on earth as human beings as fully homo sapiens, I don't know, a few hundred thousand years, 250 years versus a few hundred. I mean, which is the beginning of a long journey. I mean, I hope many of you live to see the journey continue significantly into the future because of the innovation in healthcare. But again, this goes back to this idea, every generation thinks it's so important it's going to end the world. I mean, we're not to evaluate human rationality. When we just discovered it, we're just not ready. It takes time. It takes education. It takes absorbing. It takes a long time. Think about how long it took Christianity to dominate, and that was all based on emotion and it fed into the existing culture. We're asking you to dump everything you believe in. Everything you've learned for the last 2000 years and accept a new idea. It's going to take a little while, and people are going to have to live up to it. But in my mind, people are so incapable of, and I see signs of their capability every single day. I see people who don't do it for a while, don't do anything in their life and just wander and look like they're completely lost, and then suddenly they decide, no, I'm going to make something of myself, and they do it. And they're not Steve Jobs. They're middle managers, but they do something, and they make something really meaningful with their lives. And I know people are the opposite who start out great and everything's great, and they make a choice. It's about human individual choices, and I don't give up on that. I don't see any reason to give up on that. And Iron Man's Epistemology, which you can read in Introduction to Objectives to Epistemology, which is a little book. When I had kids, one thing that's amazing, you know, she has a whole theory of how concepts are formed, and when I saw my kids doing it, it was like, whoa, she was right, right? It's amazing that how right she is when it comes to epistemology. Well, I think, again, your generation is way too pessimistic, and I think that pessimism is cultivated in you through a variety of things. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, this will be the final question because I have to run for the train. Yes. No, no, I mean, a central bank is one of the dumbest things a government does. So we understand, for example, and we've got a lot of experience about this, that if the government sets the price of bread, then it will be a disaster. I mean, nobody thinks the government should set the price of bread, right? Because they'll either set it too high, and what will happen? Nobody will want to buy the bread, and we have too much bread, and we'll trash it, or they'll set it too low, and then everybody will want to buy the bread, and the suppliers won't want to supply the bread. So we know this from Economics 101. We know supply and demand in the marketplace works wonderfully well for bread, right? The Soviets tried setting prices for bread, didn't they? So let's do this experiment. Let's take the most important price in the entire economy, and the most important product, if you will, in the entire economy, money and interest rates. And let's have a bunch of central planners set that. Guess your hood you're going to get. They're going to set it too high, which is going to cause recessions. They're going to set it too low, which is going to cause bubbles, which ultimately cause recessions. And it's going to be completely messed up. They're going to distribute, they're going to put too much money sometimes to do it. But there is no right amount of money, because you're taking supply and demand out, just like there's no right price of a central planner setting for bread, because you're taking the real supply and demand out. And Hayek is a genius here in explaining the informational function of prices, and how prices convey information, and how this wondrous process of price adjustments, of price changes, conveys the appropriate information to the entire economic system, so that just enough bread appears in the grocery store, just when I walk in at just the price that I want to pay for it. I mean, grocery stores are truly magical things. I mean, magical, I'm being good, you know, fascist, but they're truly amazing things, because the stuff you want is almost always there at a price you're willing to pay for it. And for those of us who maybe lived under a little bit of socialist, those of us old enough to remember, Britain is more socialist than it is today. That never used to be the case. You often went into a grocery store and the stuff you wanted wasn't there, because the government was manipulating prices and distorting them. So yeah, central banks are one of the first things that you'd go, money should be issued by private issuers, banks primarily, based on something, I believe gold, or whatever the market assumes. And you know, those adjustments should be made to supply and demand in the marketplace, just like the price of a bet. I don't think there's any difference. Money is too important to be monopolized by government. Thank you all.