 The first thing to understand is that we don't live under capitalism. The left has been very good at defining every problem that exists in the world today as a problem caused by capitalism, right? But we don't have capitalism today. We have what is a mixed economy. We have elements of private property and freedom, and lots of controls and regulations and taxes and massive government spending, so lots of statism, lots of socialism, if you will. So it's a mixture of capitalism and socialism. And the left has been very good for 100 years, really, in the United States, blaming every problem we have on the capitalist piece of it and claiming that the solution is always more state, more state. And the capitalist side, the people who believe in capitalism, have been terrible. I mean, gross negligence is at defending capitalism, at explaining what it is, and why all these problems are not caused by capitalism. I mean, one example from recently is 2008 financial crisis. Everybody thinks it's capitalism. It's not capitalism. There's no capitalism in 2007 in the banking sector and the mojig sector that would explain the collapse, right? These are two of the heaviest regulated industries in the United States, heavy, heavy regulations. That's what caused the financial crisis, and we can talk more if you want about what caused the financial crisis. And yet nobody went out, except me and Peter Schiff, maybe, and said, no, no, no, capitalism didn't do this. Even George Bush, who is Republican, supposedly, right? He said, no, this is caused by capitalism. We need to bail out all the banks and to save capitalism from capitalism. I mean, a mishmash of nothingness, right, and incomplete capitulation. So you've got the left being very good at blaming every problem of capitalism and the people who advocate for capitalism not standing up for capitalism. And part of the question is, why don't they stand up for capitalism? And why do the people buy into the left's propaganda? Because they do, and they bought into it for over 100 years now, since the Progressive Era, since 1914, since Woodrow Wilson, at least, if not even before that. And the reason is that fundamentally we all grow up with a well-taught, a moral code, an ethical code that is consistent with socialism. So what did our mothers teach us is good. Share. Share. Think of others first. Think of yourself last. Now they don't believe this. No mother actually believes any of this, but that's what we say. That's what we present as the moral ideal. Be selfless. Being selfish is bad. Thinking about yourself is bad. You've got to always share it. You've got to always think about other people. And sacrifice, we are told by our mothers often, is a wonderful thing. It's the most virtuous thing. I mean, they tell us how much they've sacrificed for us, how much we owe them because of all the sacrifices they've committed to. Sacrifice is like a noble word. I mean, to me, it's the essential evil in our world is the idea that people are sacrificing, right? Why sacrifice? But put that aside. To sacrifice, to be selfless, to share, that's good. Well, what does socialism want? It wants us all to share. It wants us to think of others first from each according to his ability to each according to his need. There are people out there who are suffering. There are people out there who don't have as much as we have. It's a moral duty to help them. And if we're not helping them, then all the government is doing is helping us be a little bit more moral by taking stuff from us and giving it to them. So that's one piece is this depiction of morality as otherism, altruism. We all think altruism is fantastic, right? But altruism is about placing the well-being of other people above you. And there's a second twist to this, right? So that's one piece of it. The second piece of it, we've been taught since we were very little that self-interest is what? It's about what? It's about exploiting other people. It's about being nasty to other people. It's about lying, cheating, stealing. It's about doing whatever it takes to get you away, whatever it takes. That's self-interest. So think about what that means. So we've got a file folder in our mind, in a sense, you know, our mind, our concepts are like files, file folders. And into that file folder we've put in, so the file folder at the top says self-interested people, well, selfish people. And in that file folder we have lying, stealing, cheating, backstabbing, getting, doing whatever it takes to get you away. But what else do we have in that file folder? We all know that what business is about is making a profit. We all know that when Steve Jobs got up every morning, he was like, I want to do something for myself. I'm going to make something that makes me happy. I'm going to build something beautiful for me. Yeah, everybody else benefits too, but business and a self-interested business and about doing what they love doing, what they enjoy doing, what they have fun doing and what makes them a lot of money. Capitalism is about self-interest, right? You go shopping. When you go shopping, you're thinking constantly in your mind, this is great. I'm helping my fellow man. I'm making sure people have jobs. Yeah, exactly. Right? Nobody thinks that, right? Now I'm buying shoes because I know that salesperson needs a job and I'm contributing to their ability to have a job. Nobody thinks that, right? We buy shoes. We buy iPhones. We buy whatever it is that we buy because we're trying to make our lives better. We're being selfish. We're being self-interested. So you've got this file folder in our mind, which has lying, cheating, stealing, so be it, and businessmen, capitalism, markets, all in the same file. Financiers like you talk about? Certainly financiers because they're after-profit. They can't even hide the product. I mean, Steve Jobs can say, look, I've made your life better. I gave you the iPhone, so I deserve the billions. What does the bank or city bank do? Well, city bank's a bad example because it's a bad bank, but Goldman Sachs, what does he do? What does he present the world? Right? Yes, I financed Apple. I made Apple possible, but that's an abstraction. That's hard to get. So all of these things go into this file folder of selfish, and they mix up. So implicit assumption, our instinctual assumption, our immediate assumption is, businessman equals crook. Capitalism equals a system of exploiting lying, cheating, SOBs that are going to do bad things. You know, why do we have, you walk into an elevator here in LA or anywhere in the country. There's an elevator and there's a little diploma on the thing that says, a government bureaucrat has inspected this elevator, it won't drop and kill you. Why do we have that? Because we're convinced that those greedy, selfish, profit-seeking businessman would build elevators that killed us if not for the government inspector, right? Because the best way to make money in business is to kill your customers. We believe that. We truly believe that, right? Because there were no food inspectors. Restaurants would poison us all the time, like McDonald's. Every time we'd go and get a hamburger at McDonald's, you would get food poisoning and some of us would die. So we need food inspectors to make sure that it doesn't happen. Because those greedy, selfish SOBs, right? We know business equals selfish, selfish equals lying, cheating, stealing. They're going to lie, cheating, and steal. So we regulate them. We control them. If you're in business, if you're selfish and you're in business and I know you have the potential to be a lying, stealing, SOB, what am I going to do? I'm going to put a government bureaucrat right behind you, watching everything that you do and making sure that you don't do it, right? You don't die, steal or cheat. So this moral framing of sacrifice, sharing, taking care of people, frames everything, everything, that we think about in the world out there. And that selfishness is bad and lying, cheating, stealing. That's the behavior. That way of framing the world has to lead to socialism or it has to lead to some statism. It leads away from capitalism because capitalism, no matter what you think of it, capitalism is a system of self-interest. It's a system where people pursue selfish interests. So if selfishness means truly lying, stealing, and cheating, then capitalism is a system of lying, stealing, and cheating, and we have to regulate and control it. And then we have to help those other people because that's our moral duty and the only way to help them because you're too selfish to help them yourself is for me to tax you and to give the money to them. So I think everything, everything we experience today in the world can be explained in terms of this moral view. And unless you have an alternative to this moral view, you can't fight socialism. You can't fight socialism. You can't fight AOC on the basis of how you're going to pay for it because there sophisticated economic economists out there, whether they're modern monetary theorists or the Paul Krugman, who is anti-monetary, modern monetary theory, but pro-Keynesian economics, he can fight a justification for people who justify the economics of it. They find a way to pay for it. You have to challenge on morality. But what's the alternative? The Republicans have exactly the same morality, moral code as the Democrats. That's why the Republicans have drifted left every year. They're more socialist. I mean, if you take the Republican Party of after the New Deal, FDL's New Deal, Republicans swore that when they got into power, they would undo the New Deal. They got into power in Isaha. They didn't, they didn't do anything in the country. They protected the New Deal. And what exactly was the New Deal? The New Deal was massive regulation of financial industry, massive. Every aspect of finance became regulated. Every aspect of banking became regulated. The New Deal was entitlements. The first kind of real entitlements, primarily social security. Social security ensued at the beginnings of a welfare state. You know, the first time America really engaged in industrial activity, the big Tennessee Valley projects and building dams and building these things. So it was big government projects where the government is directly involved in the economy. Did Republicans undo that? No. Did they undo social security? No. Did they undo the financial regulations? No. It's part of what some on the left would claim. And then we had the Great Society. So the Great Society was now a big step towards full welfare, right? So it's Medicare and Medicaid. It's real welfare, actually giving people at the federal level, giving people who are poor money, food stamps, food stamps were introduced, I think, in the New Deal. But direct cash payments were introduced in the 1960s during the Great Society. And then Republicans swore at the time. As soon as we get into power, we're going to undo all this. Never happened in the country. Now somebody like Donald Trump runs and says, we will not touch social security and Medicare. We're going to make them stronger. You know, we're going to make their welfare state work better. But we're huge advocates of welfare state or Republicans hold that. So what you have is a complete shift to the left of both political parties. But it's inevitable because how are you going to say you're going to do away with Medicare, right? I mean, old people. You're not going to take care of old people. What's going to happen to old people? I mean, I mean, the heart starts pounding. I mean, you start feeling bad and markets, you're going to let those greedy. You're going to let those lying, stealing SOBs do health care for old people. They're going to exploit them to take advantage of them. They're going to cause these old people to die. We know that, right? Because that's what markets do, because that's what selfishness does. So unless you challenge the fundamental underlying moral premises, you can never get rid of the policies, right? And nobody is willing to do that. Nobody is willing to do that. And there's even ideas deeper than that because, you know, statists, socialists, others always claim, one of their basic claims is that most of us don't know what's good for us. We're too stupid is one way to think about it. But more importantly, they would argue philosophically. They would say, it's not so much about stupidity. It's about the fact that truth, what's really important, what's really true. It's just not accessible to simple things like us. You know, you need to be, you need to kind of commune with the spirits to really discover what's true. This is Plato, right? If you go back to Plato, you know, only the philosopher, King knows the real truth. Only the philosophers see the sun. We all live in a cave. We see shadows. We don't really know what's good for us. We don't know how to live. So the philosopher needs to tell us how to live. And it's OK for him to force us how to live, because it's better for us. So we should embrace the force inflicted on us. And if you think about every authoritarian regime, it's always, well, we know what's good for you. You don't know what's good for you. So so again, how do you challenge that philosophically? You have to you have to change the terms of the debate. So what I ran does what I ran, why I ran, I think is the most important philosopher of the last 2000 years. And I think the most important thinker in all of these realms is because she challenges that assumption that you can't think for yourself. She challenges the idea that you can't figure out what's good for you. And then she challenges the whole morality of sacrifice, of selflessness, of other people. And she's the first philosopher in a comprehensive, systematic way to actually challenge the conventional wisdom, the conventional approach, which I think conventional is statism, conventional is socialism. Conventional is other people making decisions for you. Well, because correct me if I'm wrong, but the idea of capitalism or just a free market and individualism had never really existed before like modern day. No, so it's actually it's actually existed in in well, modern depends how you define modern. Yeah, I would say as long as, you know, civilizations and so there's never been capitalism until about 250 years ago. Right. Capitalism is a modern phenomenon. And capitalism is a direct consequence of the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment is a period of time, let's say from 16, I don't know, 70 until until 1800, something like that is a period in which people are saying, thinkers are saying two fundamental things. One is individuals have the capacity to reason, to think for themselves. And all of us have the capacity to know the world with our own minds. If you think about the attitude before the Enlightenment, before the Enlightenment, the attitude was truth is to be found in ancient books interpreted by priests. Right. There were no no real philosophy. It was all about religion and it was all about revelation. Truth was to be revealed and very platonic in that sense, in the sense that truth is in a different dimension. And you need somebody to reveal to you the truth. Protestants, you know, have a slight modification to that in the Reformation. They say every one of us has access to the truth through God. But it's still the truth is revealed to us through an ancient book and through the Word of God. And if I can speak to God, good for me. If I can't, I don't know what I do. Right. And so the Catholics say only the Pope can speak to God. So you have to follow the Pope and the Protestants say, no, you can all speak to God. But that's problematic because a lot of people don't. Nobody does so. So, right, but some people pretend and some people, some people are better at pretending, I guess, than others. But the point is, the truth is not to be found in reality. Truth is not to be found through the use of reason. And then you get the Scientific Revolution and you get the Enlightenment. And suddenly Isaac Newton tells us, no, you can figure out how objects move. We can understand the world. We can understand what's going on. We can explain it in these relatively simple mathematical equations. We can show you why things act the way they do in the physical world. And this is this is huge. Maybe, you know, one of the most important things ever. All right. And because people then go, wow, you mean it's not in the book. It's reality. It's I have the capacity using my mind to figure these things out. Well, wait a minute. If I can understand the movements of objects and the movements of planets, why can't I choose my own profession? Right. Can I use that same tool, reason to figure out what I'm good at and to go and pursue that? And how about I choose who I marry? That's new, right? Because again, before this, our lives were completely dictated. Can I choose? Can I, you know, I have my own values. I can figure out what my value should be. I can figure out what my life should be. And how about I figure out who my political leaders should be? How about I just live my life and you leave me alone? And that's the American Revolution, right? The American Revolution is leave me alone. I want to live my life. I have an inalienable life, right? To life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. Don't interfere. Let me live my life free of coercion, because I have this tool to do it. So the enlightenment's a period where we rediscover reason. And then because we rediscover reason, we also then say who reasons, right? There's no collective reason any more than the collective stomach. We don't we don't eat for one another. But we can't think for one another either. So every individual is what matters. So you get two ideas coming out of the enlightenment, the efficacy of reason, the importance of reason, all knowledge comes from reason. And what matters of the individual, not the group, not the tribe, not the state, not something outside of the individual, not even God. What matters is the individual. And now you've got capitalism. Capitalism is the merger of those two ideas. Capitalism is basically the social political system that says that the only role of government is to protect us from force, from coercion. The role of government is to protect us from force that cripples our minds, that makes it impossible for us to act on our own judgment. Capitalism is a system that leaves us free to pursue our own values. What we choose to do with them, what we choose to invent, what we choose to start businesses, what we choose we can marry anybody. So both socially and in economics, capitalism is a system of freedom. And that that idea of freedom, freedom being the absence of coercion is brand new. It's 1776 in a sense. And from there, you get this era of an increased dominance of capitalism. Capitalism never fully manifests. Because it's never been completely unregulated. Well, I mean, if you think about America, you've had slavery in the first 70 years, right? And so that's not capitalism. That's the opposite of capitalism. That's worse than feudalism. And then you've always got the government dabbling in stuff. From day one, they were regulating banks. Then they regulated railroads. So they were always trying to because part of the problem with enlightenment is I mean, it's hard to say problem because enlightenment is such a huge achievement, but they didn't get it all right. They didn't get morality, right? So they got the sense of morality in the Declaration of Independence. It says you all have an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, not other people's happiness, our own happiness. So that's that's pretty close to my vision of morality. But they couldn't challenge Christian morality, Christian morality was just that was the prevalent morality. That was everything. Nobody challenged that. You and nobody knew where to go with challenging it, right? Which was sacrifice, giving. Jesus dies on a cross. He suffers immense, the worst kind of death, right? Not because of sins he committed, but because of sins other people commit. I mean, that is the ultimate sacrifice, giving up your life for something other people did. I mean, to me, that's one of the most horrific injustices, right? And that's why I consider Jesus a bad guy, right? What's what's what's he doing? I don't want, you know, if he didn't commit any sin, why is he suffering, right? Why? Why is God letting him this happen? Right? But the point that God's letting us happen is to teach us that sacrifice is noble, sacrifice is good. Jordan Peterson calls him a superhero, really superhero because he died for other people's sins. I don't consider that particularly heroic. I think it's stupid. And but that's the culture that views Mother Teresa as a superhero, right? What did she do? She suffered, she had a horrible life. She was in pain and agony and misery and she never enjoyed her life, but she helped other people. So she's a saint. No, she's a waste of life. What a waste of a life? I mean, I want people to be happy, to enjoy life. And she was miserable. That should be a measure of whether you live the successful life or failed life. But we elevate suffering, right? That's what this morality demands from us. So the saints are always people who suffer. People who have a good time or enjoying life, even if they change the world, even if they've helped their fellow man in enormous ways, are never going to be saints because they didn't suffer. So a moral code, this Christian moral code is a disaster from a perspective of freedom. And yet the founding fathers, John Locke, the thinkers of the Enlightenment, with the exception of the French, people like Voltaire and Diderot and people like that who are even Montesquieu, who were willing to give up on religion. So Voltaire was certainly an atheist. The both dominant strain of the Enlightenment, the Scottish and British Enlightenment, weren't willing to give up on Christianity. The founders weren't completely willing to give up on Christianity, even though they were more deists than Christians. Sir Thomas Jefferson, for example, takes the Bible and he cuts out all the parts he doesn't like. And what doesn't he like? He doesn't like miracles. He doesn't like mysticism. He's a man of reason. So he takes out all the miracles, all the mysticism. Now imagine a president of the United States getting elected when we know he just cut up and sliced up the Bible only to keep the parts he likes. Imagine that today, which is just suggest. Oh, you couldn't. You couldn't. That suggests to me that today we live in a more religious society than the founders did. Because Thomas Jefferson won an election in spite of the fact that he was accused of being an atheist and he cut up the Bible. But the point with Jefferson was that he cut up all the parts that were about mysticism because he was a man of reason. But he kept all the parts about sacrifice. He kept all the parts about the moral code of other people. So in spite of his statement in the Declaration of Independence about the pursuit of happiness, at the end of the day, his morality was a Christian morality of sacrifice and suffering and a moral code of serving others. Your moral purpose in life is to serve others. So America was founded on a contradiction. On the one hand, pursue happiness, but not really because if you wanna be a good person, then you should be sacrificing and you should suffer and you should share and you should do all these things. And that contradiction was not sustainable. So what happened was the further way we got from the original documents, the further way we got from the spirit of enlightenment, the further way we got from capitalism, the further way we got from the economic consequences because the altruism, the Christian morality came to dominate more and more and more. And of course intellectually, in the 19th century, the Enlightenment was attacked. It was attacked by German philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, a whole string of them ultimately Marx, Nietzsche, they attacked the Enlightenment. They repudiated the Enlightenment. So the whole intellectual world turned against the Enlightenment, against reason. Today, if you go into the humanity state, it's not about reason, it's about what group do you belong to, right? It's about what are your genes telling you to do? Evolutionary psychology, which all these guys, right, Sam Harris and John Peterson and almost all of them are advocates are, tells us, you know, reason doesn't matter because you can't choose anyway. I mean, Sam Harris gives reason lip service in a sense, but he denies free will. If you don't have free will, what's reason about it? Reason is the process of activating your mind. It's a process of activating your mind and engaging with reality. But if you're not activating it, if it just goes on and off automatically, then there is no such thing as reason. I think I heard someone ask you about if you thought people were the way they were because of biology or their genes or if it was because of environment. And you said, neither. Neither. Yeah. I mean, both play a role. So there's some role, both in the environment. Certainly, if you have really lousy parents and they treat you really badly, I mean, that's going to have an impact on you. And yeah, your genes have some role. I mean, you know, if only because physically you're born in particular ways that I think have psychological implications. You know, I don't think, I don't think you can separate the psychological from the physical completely, right? But at the end of the day. But there's a third option and that is your choices. What you chose to do, the conclusions you came to, given the experiences you have and given the genes that you have, what choices did you make? And to me, that is the most important thing. And now a lot of people choose not to choose. They choose just to drift in life. And if you choose not to choose, then yes, you're going to be shaped by your environment and your genes because you chose to be shaped that way. But if you take your life seriously, then you take control of your own life, which means you take control of the process of choosing and you shape, I mean, I in my end, I think talks about shaping your own soul. You make yourself, you build yourself. Given what you get from the environment, given your genetic makeup, which might determine aspects of your IQ and your intelligence and your skill set, talents and so on. But given those things, you then choose how to use them and what to do with them and what kind of person you want to be. Your character is something you either defaulted on or you chose to create. Sometimes you choose to create something really bad. A lot of people out there are really bad people because they chose. Most people just drift. Most people don't engage in it. But you can also choose to create a good character, good soul, and that's what I think happiness requires. Happiness requires that we work on making the right choices in life that are actually gonna create the right kind of character, the right kind of soul, the right kind of human being that is efficacious in the world out there and can actually be happy. But your own, that's hard. Yes, it's work. That takes a lot of effort. Yes, yes. And that's why I think a lot of people drift. But it's worth, it takes a lot of effort. I always tell people to be truly selfish is hard work. So people think of selfishness as, I'll just do whatever I feel like doing. But what you feel like doing is not necessarily in your self-interest. What you feel like doing is often self-destructive. What you feel like doing usually gets you into trouble. We can all think back on things that we did that we regret and almost always, it's because we didn't think about them in advance. We just did it. And they weren't in our self-interest. Well, if you suffer from them, it probably wasn't in your self-interest. Now you can make mistakes sometimes. You can think something's in your self-interest and it's not. But usually when we get into trouble, when we do bad stuff, it's because we didn't think about it. So for Iron Rand, morality is about thinking. It's about using your mind to figure out what's good for you. And that's not easy, right? To figure out what's good for me is not easy. I'm gonna live until 90-something. What do I need to do today that won't screw me up in 10 years, that it'll actually enhance my life. You know, if you're young, what career should I choose? You know, who should be my friends? Who am I gonna marry, right? All these, these are hard decisions. Yet, what's the alternative? You either make your own decisions or you let other people decide for you or you just let your emotions guide you and we know where that leads and we know where other people's choices are. I won't decide on profession, I'll just ask my mother. And she'll decide for me. Now, are you gonna be happy if you've read The Fountainhead? Basically one of the key characters in The Fountainhead becomes an architect because his mother wanted to become an architect. He wanted to be a painter. So he went in architecture, lousy architect. He became very famous, but he's a lousy architect. He never got the self-esteem, the pleasure, the self-confidence of building something that was worthwhile. He just got praise from other people, but that's not worth that much. And by the time he realizes what he's done and wants to return to painting, he's too old. And he's wasted his life and he's miserable. On the other hand, there's another character who says, no, I'm gonna do what I believe. I'm not gonna pay attention to other people. My mother, the society, my university professors, anybody, I'm gonna do what I think is right. And I'm gonna build the kind of buildings I wanna build. And even though he fails in terms of a big part of the novel from getting praise from other people, he's the happier one. And he ultimately is a successful one in every respect. So you've got a choice in life. You can either do the work, turn yourself into the kind of human being you wanna be, achieve happiness, achieve success, achieve a life worth living, or you get default on that. And you can just live like everybody else. And most people, I wouldn't say they're miserable, but they're not exactly happy. They're not exactly embracing life. They're not exactly enjoying every moment. Or they're not seeking new challenges and new wonderful things. So everybody has that choice. And, you know, but they're never taught to do it, right? We're not taught to do it. We're not taught to think for ourselves. We're not taught that the purpose of life is your own happiness. We're not taught that the purpose of life is to live the best life you can live for yourself. We're not taught that reason is the way to achieve that. We're not taught any of that. We're taught the exact opposite. So it's not surprising that 90% of people don't embrace it because they've never been told it's good. They've never been shown how to do it. They've never been encouraged to do it. They've been slapped in the face when they try, right? A lot of people try to do something interesting, to do something original, and they're slapped in the face. Even when they're young, you can see parents where the kid is going, why, why, oh, just shut up. Really? I mean, that's how you destroy your mind. That's part of how you destroy your mind. So we have an educational system that at best is boring and at worst is actually mind-numbingly crippling. I mean, instead of making knowledge exciting, interesting, fascinating, you look at little kids, you put them in a Montessori classroom where they can explore and they want to learn. They're like sponges of knowledge and then you take them into first grade and you kill it. That sponge, you kill their excitement about knowledge. That was exactly my experience. I was a very good kid. I was very well behaved, kind of a teacher's pet, loved learning, but once I got into about middle school age, I had a really hard time with classes. I mean, I wasn't, I didn't like, I mean, some of my classes I failed, but like, and it was very frustrating because I wanted to learn. Everyone thought I was a straight A student because I was a good kid, but that system just did not work for me. And now that I'm a little bit older and I've tried different methods, now I think the kind of self-employment, entrepreneurial type route of being in action and trying things firsthand, that works for me. But imagine a private educational system where entrepreneurs are entering the field constantly with new ideas on how to improve education and new trust and different schools appeal to different types of learning styles, if you will. Right, and different approaches. And where you can experiment, we can try different schools and you can go and find where you're gonna thrive, right? That's what we're missing. I think there's an interview, you can find it on YouTube with Steve Jobs from the early 90s before he went back to Apple. And he's saying, isn't it interesting that you never see a billboard advertising a school? Yeah, you're right. There's no marketing of education. Like we spend more time thinking about, I don't know why shoes are in my mind here. Because we're wearing them. Wearing them. You spend more time thinking about what shoes to buy. All of us spend more time thinking about what shoes to buy and where to get the best deal for those shoes and what style we wanna have and how many shoes we're gonna have than we spend on which school to send our kids to. We spend zero time on that because the government has told us, don't think about that, we've got it, don't worry. And they get a lousy product. But imagine a world in which there's marketing for schools. They're competing for our attention. They're telling us what they do that's different from other schools. They differentiate each other. They're competing, whether it's competing on test scores or competing on happiness scores or whatever the score ultimately happens to be or on innovation, we get, you know, we, you know, our graduates are entrepreneurs, our graduates are scientists, whatever, right? You actually, don't you see that with private universities? Cause you do see advertisements for those for USC or? Yes, and universities I think are as bad as universities are. I think they're much healthier than schools because they're less conformist, although they're becoming more and more conformist because they're depending more and more on government. So that's changing over time. But they at least used to be, there was used to be much more variety than there's in schools, much more, you know, an appeal to you as a customer, much more treating the student as a customer. And therefore higher education in the United States is much better than K through 12 education in the United States because there's basically no competition in K through 12 and there's no entrepreneurship in K through 12 education. And even in higher education, I think if the government got out of financing it, got out of regulating it, got out of controlling it, we could reach much higher, much better levels than we have today in terms of success. But you know, it all against comes down to this idea of you can't think for yourself. I mean, when I say this, people say, oh, but parents can't choose what school to send their kids. But the government can't. But a bureaucrat can't. Somebody else can do it for you. I have a friend who works in education and we were having this conversation. And he said, he was like, I think I asked him about school choice or charter schools or something like that. And he said, he didn't think that was right because parents who don't know what's best for their kids. Yes. And that, that was. But he, that was hard to figure, right? The Platonic philosopher knows what's good for other people's kids. And the question was, well, then who does? Yeah. And I didn't ask that because. The experts, the elites, the educated, the philosophers, the politicians at the end of the day, the majority. The majority, right? That's democracy, right? The majority gets to tell you, where to send your kids to school. The majority gets to decide what kind of economy we should have. The majority gets to decide whose rights should be violated, whose freedom should be restricted. That's democracy. And democracy is just mob rule. It's the mob making decisions about what's good and bad, what's right and what's wrong. So, I mean, that's another one where, you know, you have to be careful. But democracy is unbelievably corrupt. I mean, democracy is an awful, as pure majority rule is an awful, awful system. It's what sent Socrates basically to death chamber, right? Cause he was corrupting the youth and the Athenians and like that. So they voted to kill him. Is that okay? I mean, that's why we have a First Amendment to say, it doesn't matter how many people think you should shut up. You have a way to speak.