 Today on the show, I'm joined by Yaron Brooke. Yaron comes onto the podcast to talk to us about the philosophy of Objectivism, especially through the lens of a well-known writer called Ein Rand. Ein Rand has written many essays, philosophical essays looking at Objectivism, but she's most well known for four books, We The Living, Anthem, The Fountainhead, and then finally her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. I really enjoyed Yaron coming on because he began to break down the difference for us the listener between faith versus reason, faith being something we can't know and we hope to live and live into the world by, and explores why faith isn't enough to make sense of and enjoy and fully live within life and why reason really is the crux and pinnacle of what we're trying to utilize to get to where we're going. It's this idea that reality is out there, it's here right now. We can touch it, it's tangible, we can engage with it, we can perform experiments on it, we can begin to get our hands into it. We engage with reality through reason and it has to be the individual who engages and uses their reason to interact with reality and there's a really interesting pattern going on here which Yaron explores with us on the show itself. Yaron mentions this term epistemology a couple of times in the show and just so you know epistemology is the theory of knowledge, how we can have, attain and utilize knowledge. It's a fantastic conversation that we have with Yaron today. I really valued his time and his thoughts as he explored Iron Rans life, her works, his own story and at the very end we have a fantastic few minutes where he talks about his views of faith and religion and why they are antithetical to objectivism, the philosophy that Iron Rand represents. If you're new to When Belief Dies, I'd ask you to hit the subscribe button and then the notification bell. You'll be reminded then whenever we release a video. And if you weren't mind giving this video a thumbs up and then sharing it on social media with family members or friends, essentially that helps to boost our visibility. The thumbs up helps the algorithms, it helps others to find this conversation. Enough of that for now. I hope you enjoy this conversation on Iron Rand and Objectivism with Yaron Brooke. Cheers. Hello and welcome to another episode of When Belief Dies. My name's Sam and today I'm joined by Yaron Brooke. Yaron, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me on, Sam. It's good to be here. So Yaron, I've been following you for quite a long time looking at your work and listening to a lot of your conversations. I've found your thoughts and opinions around Objectivism and Iron Rand to be very stimulating and very challenging to me and my original beliefs coming from a Christian background now being more agnostic, atheist. They're very challenging. So I kind of want to dive into that, but I'm aware that a lot of my audience probably don't know who you are. So would you mind just giving us an overview about yourself and your work if that's okay? Sure. So where do I start? I thought many years was the CEO of the Iron Rand Institute from 2000 to 2017. I was the CEO of the Iron Rand Institute. I am today the chairman of the board and I'm sure we'll get into who Iron Rand was and whatever ideas. I first read Iron Rand when I was 16 and at the time I was living in Israel. And I was never religious, so that was never an issue. But her philosophy blew my mind when I was 16. It changed my perspective on a lot of different things in life and has really shaped my life since then. And I'm kind of what seems like a previous life. I was a civil engineer. I've got an MBA. I've got a PhD in finance. I was a finance professor. But what I spend my time doing today is really advocating for who ideas or applying, who ideas. I have a YouTube channel. I'm on Twitter. I travel around the world giving talks. I'll be in the UK in a couple of weeks to give a couple of talks. So I'm all over the world speaking about really the application of Iron Rand's ideas to everything, to your life as an individual, to the political world in which we live and kind of anything in between. It's amazing. And what is it kind of, I guess, specifically that's kind of got you to be so enthused and so passionate about both objectivism and Iron Rand. I'm aware we can dive into the terms and who she was shortly, but it'd just be good to get that sort of spark from you. I'd say the number one thing that excited me about Iron Rand was the idea that your life is in a very deep, fundamental sense, yours. It doesn't belong to the group. You don't owe it to the tribe. You're not a sacrificial animal to whoever decides that you should sacrifice for them. The needs of others are not a moral claim against you. The purpose of your life is your happiness and your success and your living the best life that you can live. And that was for me a real revolution. I grew up in Israel in the 60s and 70s. And it was a very collectivistic place. It was a place in which you were part of this nation or even broader, you were part of this group called Jews. And you expected to sacrifice your life for the greater good of the Jewish people, for the greater good of Israel. It was just a question of, you know, when the grenade was there so you could jump on it, that was, and that was the essence of virtue was to sacrifice yourself. And Rand kind of asks this fundamental question. She asks, why? Why should you sacrifice yourself? Why is other people's lives other people more important than you are? Why are their lives or their happiness or their success more important than your own? And that was a real revolution for me that shaped it. And then once you start taking your own life seriously, once you start focusing on your own happiness and your own success and your own flourishing as a human being, that's fun and that's exciting. And that's something to be passionate about. And you get the rewards from it, right? And so I'm excited and passionate primarily about the impact that Rand's ideas that objectivism has on the individual's life and that it gives him a kind of a moral sanction and a moral okay to pursue his own success in his own happiness. I was a little bit of a tangent but I think it's worth going down. I was talking to some friends recently. They're both Polish and live over here in the UK now. They're both in their 40s and live for about good 10 years within socialism and then kind of got out of that system. And I'd read Mikhail Bugakov's The Master and Margarita, which is a very well known Russian novel from the 1930s. And I was kind of giving them my reflections on it. And what kind of struck me quite fiercely is I was very blind and I'm very blind to a lot of the socialist trends and elements or the collectivist trends and elements that Bugakov was trying to get across because I've not been raised or brought up in that sort of environment. I guess kind of this is probably diving quite deeply to start with but it'd be really interesting to hear from you having come from a bit more of a sort of collectivist setting to a theoretically more individualist society like the US but we can also get into whether that's true as well. Do you think it's possible for people who haven't been raised in that collectivist ideology to actually see the warning signs and the issues and the concerns or do you think it's something that actually we can begin to learn and teach ourselves through reading and conversations like this? So yeah, I definitely think we can shape our own future. We can shape our own focus and collectivism is learned and it can be unlearned. Individualism is in a sense chosen and learned and it can be unchosen and unlearned. So I think people are much more flexible than we often give them credit for. And look, the reality is that there's elements of individualism in Israel. Israel could not be as successful as it is today without that. There are strong elements of individualism in Israeli culture and in Jewish culture more broadly. And of course there are strong collectivistic elements in the United States and certainly in Europe. Europe is a very collectivistic place, not quite as collectivistic as I think Israel was in the 1670s. And of course Israel was also socialist back then and that has changed. So Israel has moved systematically away from socialism since the early 1980s or the late 1970s. So socialism and collectivism go hand in hand but so do fascism and collectivism. And so does much of the political systems that we have today go hand in hand with collectivism. Just a milder form of collectivism which allows some room for individualism. But what I learned from Mein Rand and what gets me excited is not to settle for these mixtures. Individualism is good in my view. Collectivism is evil. Why have a little bit of evil? Why do a little bit? So when I came to the United States I was disappointed a little bit because I mean I knew somewhat what I was coming to is but I certainly wasn't disappointed in that it wasn't more individualistic. And when I go now back to Israel I see more individualism there than I did when I was growing up there but it could be a lot better. So my goal is to achieve the best possible and the best possible is much better than anything exists today in the world in any country. But we have these mixtures. Some countries I think the UK is among European countries it's probably more individualistic and less collectivistic as compared to some other European countries but it's none of them are good enough. And I think people don't really realize how much they're missing out and how much poorer they are not just poorer materially but poorer spiritually, poorer in lack of happiness, poorer in lack of opportunities to grow and to flourish as human beings because they don't take their lives seriously and because they're not focused on pursuing their own happiness and pursuing their own lives because they barred into a morality of collectivism in one way or another to some degree or another. That's beautifully said. There are a few more questions down that vein which we can get to in due course but before we do it's a very big question a very big ask Yaron but would you mind giving us an overview of Iron Rand and her work? Yes I'll give you a bit of a biography because I think it's interesting her life was interesting and we'll talk about her work as well. I mean Rand was born in 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia. She was born to a middle-class Jewish family. Alicia Rosenblum was her original name, a father owned a pharmacy and in 1917 when she was 12 she witnessed the Russian Revolution and witnessed the Communist takeover of Russia and everything that was involved in that and no more pharmacy for her father, no more living in an apartment by themselves, not sharing an apartment and no more freedom of speech and the whole environment and oppression that communism involved. She went to university in what was communist Russia and quickly realized that she wouldn't survive if she stayed there. I mean she would be killed. She was too much of an individualist. She was too much, had her own views, own opinions. She didn't conform. She was this individualistic rebel within this world of conformity that was communism. There was a small window of opportunity in the 1920s where Stalin, not Stalin, was Lenin still, I guess, led a lot of some people out on different visas or different and she got out to do research related to something she was working on at the university in the United States and she managed to get out and she managed to get to the United States where she had relatives in Chicago. She spent a little time in Chicago but then she headed to Hollywood. She wanted to be a writer. From age seven she had decided she wanted to be a writer and she loved American movies. She had seen silent movies in Russia and she had fallen in love with cinema and she wanted to be in the movie business. She wanted to write for the movies. So here's this little Russian girl, I think she was 22 years old. She lives in Hollywood with nothing. I mean literally nothing and she shows up at the studios of the C.C. B. DeMille company and of course I mean most of your listeners probably don't know who C.C. B. DeMille was but he was a Steven Spielberg of his day. I mean he was the director of his day and you know they said you know don't call us, we'll call you but we don't really have anything. But she walks out and there is C.C. B. DeMille sitting in his big convertible outside and she stares at him and he asks her why she's staring and she tells him the story about being here from Russia and she wants to be in the film industry and she wants to be a writer. And he says get in, I'll show you how movies are made. And he takes it to the back lot of the studio where they're filming The King of Kings, the story of Jesus Christ of all movies and he gives her a pass and he says when she spent a week watching how movies are made and she lands up becoming an extra on the movie set. She meets her future husband on the movie set and she lands up finding odds and ends jobs not as a writer obviously. She's still young and she still Englishes us very much a second language at this point. But she starts spending her time writing and studying and figuring out English and she lands up writing a play that is actually performed in LA and actually makes it to Broadway and is performed in New York. She lands up writing a book called We the Living which is a story of a young woman in Russia and into communism. So it's the most autobiographical of all her books even though it's not autobiographical. Very powerful story about real life, what life is like in the communism. And that is not usually successful but it gets out there. And she slowly advances also within Hollywood and she ultimately will become a script writer and she does write some scripts for movies and she edits some scripts and she helps them choose scripts for movies. But then in 1945 she has a book called The Fountainhead which she has written before that she publishes a small book called Anthem and actually gets published in the UK before it gets published in the US and it's a dystopian novel that it's likely that before 1984 is written Anthem was published. You can see some cross influences across these different dystopian novels. Anyway she writes The Fountainhead, 12 publishers rejected, finally a publisher accepts it and publishes it but it's not that confident that it'll sell. It's only like print 2000 copies but Wood of Mouth has this huge impact. It sells very quickly. It then they go into another printing and another printing and another printing and it becomes a best-selling New York Times best-selling novel. It gets quite very positive reviews. And to this day it sells over 100,000 copies. It's translated to pretty much every language in the world. I think there are only two major languages in which Iron Man's works have not been published and that is Arabic and Farsi. I think every other major language in the world who works is translated. So she does very well from The Fountainhead. She returns to Los Angeles. She works in Hollywood. She does some scripts. In the meantime she writes a book called Atlas Shrugged which lands up being her last novel and Atlas Shrugged by this point publishes compete to publish it. When it's published it's an instant bestseller and again it sells hundreds of thousands of copies to this day in all kinds of languages. In writing Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Iron Man always had one goal for her writing. She wanted to project what she calls the ideal man. And so she did a lot of research about what is an ideal man. What does the culture think an ideal man? What does philosophers think an ideal man? What can I learn from them? And she's very disappointed in what she sees. There's very little consideration and when there is a talk about the ideal man it's not who ideal man. To her Jesus is not an ideal man. The Nichean Superman is not an ideal man. And most philosophers just don't project the kind of what she sees as the human potential. So she lands up having to come up with her own philosophy and discover her philosophy and figure out her philosophy as she's writing these novels. And the novels are very philosophical and there is a projection of what she believes is an ideal man and an ideal woman and ultimately what an ideal society should look like. But that is all. So the philosophy serves her literature. She's thinking about philosophy in order to write the novels. But once the novels are published she then turns to writing that philosophy. So she spends, Adler Shrug just published in 1957 and she spends the next, the rest of her life she died in 1982. She spends the rest of her life really writing philosophy and applying philosophy to current events and kind of teaching her philosophy to students, to philosophers and creating objectivism which is the name she gave to her philosophy and kind of a movement around objectivism. So she wrote books, books of essays. There's a book on her epistemology called Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. There's a book on ethics called The Virtue of Selfishness. A book on her politics called Capitalism Non-Ideal and a series of other books, philosophy, who needs it with philosophical essays applying the philosophy to issues of the day and to issues of human life. And maybe I should say something about the philosophy. So what is the philosophy? So this is kind of about one foot, obviously it's philosophy so whole books can be said but in a very short, reality is what it is. This is her metaphysics. Reality is what it is. Your wishes don't change reality. Your wishes don't make reality. You don't create reality. And there is no other consciousness out there that creates reality. Reality just is. It always has been and it is. It functions by the laws of nature, of reality. We as human beings have the capacity to know reality, to discover reality and understand reality and that is reason. That is human reason, our ability to identify and integrate the material provided to us by our senses and our senses are indeed connected to reality. They give us information about reality. So reason is our means of knowledge, not our emotions. Our emotions are important. Emotions are wonderful. You experience life through your emotions. They're not tools of cognition. They don't tell you the truth about the world out there. They might tell you something about you but not about the world out there. For that you need reason. And the world is knowable. That is, she rejects skepticism and completely this idea that we can't know reality, that we don't know reality. So we can know reality and the tool for knowing it is reason. The alternative, of course, is emotion. The other alternative is revelation. There is no such thing as revelation, not the platonic kind, a play-doh with the world of forms and somehow the philosopher communicates with it or know of religion where God kind of tells you what the truth is. Truth is not. Truth, it needs to be discovered. It needs to be discovered by you and it needs to be discovered by the use of your reason. So she rejects all forms of superstition and also forms of mysticism. Only the individual can reason. The reality is that you can't eat for me. You can't think for me. And indeed, thinking is what makes us human and thinking is what makes it possible for us to survive as human beings. And the unit, the unit of value here, the unit that thinks, the unit that survives, is the individual human being. And therefore in morality her view is that what matters is the individual and his life and what matters is his ability to survive, thrive and ultimately flourish. And to do that, he must apply his reason to the question of how to live. And therefore she derives a morality from the facts of human existence and the facts of human nature and human need to survive and of his need to use reason in order to survive. So her morality is reason-based and is focused on the individual's own happiness and own success and own flourishing. As she would say, not sacrificing himself to others, but also not asking others to sacrifice to him. This is a morality of individualism where you don't again live for other people, but you don't expect other people to live for you either. You live for yourself and interact with other people by means of trade, either spiritual trade or material trade, but win-win relationships where you benefit from them and they benefit from you. And that is the nature of a healthy human relationships is through this relationship of win-win relationship of trade. And in order to achieve all this, you need to be free. You need to be free to think, to use your mind, to use your reason and therefore you need to be able to act on your thoughts. You might be right, you might be wrong, you might make mistakes, but you need to be able to be free to test, to check these things out and as long as you're not hurting other people, as long as you're not violating the rights of other people, you should be left free to use your rational judgment in pursuit of your rational values, free of coercion, free of force. And the only political system that allows for that is capitalism. Capitalism is that political system that leaves individuals free to pursue their own values using their own judgment, free of coercion, free of force, free of control by the government. So she rejects socialism, she rejects fascism, she rejects all forms of statism. She is for individual liberty, individual freedom. So that is the basic arc of her philosophy. I mean, we could get into the aesthetics if you want, but that's a whole other issue. Yeah, no, that was really well said. I think one of the questions I can imagine someone in the audience asking is, why is her philosophy not known as individualism then? Why is it known as objectivism? Is there a reason why it became known to be that instead of individualism? Yes, because I think at the heart of her philosophy is this conception of reason. So, you know, it should have been called reasonism, but that sounds weird. And so you could have called it rationalism, but rationalism was already taken, the rationalist philosophies, and the rationalists are very different than Ayn Rand's philosophy. So she didn't want to be associated with Descartes and philosophers of that nature. So she was looking for something epistemological, something that was like reason, that related to what man does in order to achieve his individualism, in order to achieve his success. And objectivism, objectivity is at the heart of that. What is objectivity? Objectivity is identifying reality, identifying the facts. It's a mistake to think of objectivity as presenting both sides of an argument. I mean, how many sides are there? There could be 55 sides of an argument. So objectivity is not about presenting lots of positions. It's about considering and then discovering the truth, discovering what's real, discovering what is actually in reality, what is what is real in reality, i.e. what is true. So objectivity is the means by which we attain knowledge, it's the means by which reason functions, and therefore it's the closest to reason that she could come up with as a name for the philosophy. She wanted to grounded in epistemology. She didn't want it to be too political. Individualism is somewhat of a political, because of contrast with collectivism, which is a political ideology. She didn't view her philosophy as primarily political. She viewed her philosophy as primarily epistemological and ethical and moral. I really like that. And the fact that we're saying reality is a fundamental fact, we use reason to interpret that. And the individual has to have that onus on themselves to go and use reason to understand and interact with reality. Yeah, to understand reality and to figure it out, to figure out what's true and what's not, what's right and what's not. And that is what reason is for. And one of the important moral point is, and it's a moral epistemological point, is every other animal out there, basically is born with the recipe for survival coded into their DNA. They know exactly what to do. There's no choices available to them. It's as close as we have to AI, right? They get the inputs and the output is determined by the algorithm inside their genetic code. Human beings are not like that. We're an evolutionary leap in this sense. We don't have the software coded in. We have the hardware, we have a brain and a mind, and we have the capacity to engage and to write the software. We have the capacity to, we have to figure out how to survive. We don't know how to survive. You know, a bird has how to fly coded into it. A human being does not, agriculture is not coded into anybody. Hunting even is not coded in. So people had to discover when they went to hunt, they had to figure stuff out, figure stuff out, use reason. They had to build tools, they had to build weapons, they had to communicate in order to maybe hunt together. They had to build traps. They literally had to do things that required cognition. And you know, I often ask the audience, it's how many of you have the gene for hunting? And there might be a few guys in the audience who think they do, but they don't. Everything that human beings create, literally everything, requires thinking, requires thought. And thinking is not automatic. It doesn't just turn on. Indeed, there are a lot of people out there, unfortunately, who never think or don't think. They mimic, they copy, they follow, but they don't think. And thinking requires effort. And the particular effort that thinking requires is focus. It requires, you know, it requires somebody to engage in free will. And I know free will is a controversial issue among many people, but it shouldn't be. It's the basic thing that human beings do, because we have to engage with our reason. It doesn't turn on automatically. And some people choose not to turn it on. And that's the sad state of many people in humanity. But to the extent that you turn it on, and you engage, and you focus, and you look, and you observe reality, and you understand it, and you integrate, and you exert the effort to understand, and to learn, and to grow, that's the extent to which you will be successful as a human being. And to the extent that you don't, you just drift, that's the extent to which you will fail as a human being. I had a question which I was going to save to the end, which was from a Patreon, which I'll read, but then I want to kind of frame it as well within this context. So they're kind of saying, you know, Iron Rand is all about selfishness. And they say then that it's often claimed by people that when they engage with Iron Rand, the idea that the self being at one center can't lead to fulfillment. It'd be interesting to kind of get your take on that, but also kind of just reflecting before you do jump into kind of pushing back on this idea of it's just selfishness, and you can't be fulfilled if you're at the center of everything. It kind of sounds like what you're saying is that as you use reason, you begin to use also cooperation with those around you, that you have that win-win relationship. And actually, it sounds like although the self is at the center, it's still in a holistic way. You're still driving value and freedoms and life, I guess, through those interpersonal connections and those relationships. But, Yara, I'd love to get your take on that. Yes. So first, I don't want to run away from the term selfish, right? What does selfish mean? It's contrasted with selfless. Selfless means not taking responsibility for self, not taking care of self, not focusing on self. And yes, selfish is the right term in the sense that Iron Man's morality is about focusing on making your life the best life that it can be. The most flourishing, most successful. Does that involve other people? Well, of course it does. I mean, it would be bizarre if it didn't. Living on the desert island is no fun, and it's not the best life that you can live. There's no way it's the best life that you can live. I depend on gazillions of people to, I don't know, produce the iPhone so that I can enjoy or build internet platforms so we can do this interview. And see, I have this unbelievable appreciation for all those people and unbelievable appreciation of business, generally, and unbelievable appreciation for inventors and scientists because, I'm selfish, because all the stuff that they have discovered and they do and they produce, I benefit from. And isn't that so cool, sir? Thank you to all the producers out there and all the innovators and all. See, it gives you a completely different perspective on life and on the world. You become much more appreciative of the efforts of other people and much more thankful for other people. And, you know, so I love trading with people. I love buying stuff, selling stuff, and so I want other people, you know, I don't want to get money for nothing. I want to be able to provide a service and I'm happy to trade because I, you know, if somebody is going to, if I'm going to get something for somebody, I want it to be because of something that is worthwhile. That's part of me being proud of the work that I do. I don't want, I don't want a free lunch. I don't want somebody just to give me stuff, right? That would diminish me. So selfishness really means this idea of viewing everything out there from the perspective of how does it contribute to my life? And it turns out, wow, gazillions of people do and amazing stuff is happening out there. And it's like, I'm incredibly benevolent to other people because other people contribute so much to my life. And then that's kind of at a social level. But then what about, I mean, think about the value you get from friendship and the immense visibility and the immense emotional satisfaction and spiritual satisfaction you get in friendship. And friendship is not about sacrifice. Friendship is again, it's about the spiritual trade. This is about giving and getting. And if you don't think it's trade, try doing friendship just one sided and see how long that lasts. And of course, take it one level further. What about love? I mean, whoa, are there many more important things than love in a human being's life in terms of, I mean, love is the most selfish emotion you can have. It's what this woman makes me feel. It's what this woman, you know, it makes my life better, my life better. I'm not sacrificing for her. I love her because it makes me a better human being because it's make me feel better about myself and about life and about the world. So love is incredibly selfish, friendship is incredibly selfish. And it's not about being the scent of the universe. I don't think selfishness is about being egocentric. I'm not the scent of the universe. I mean, being the scent of the universe is more narcissistic. I don't think everybody should view me as the scent of the universe. For them, their life is the center. So I'm the center for me, but for them, they're the center. And therefore, the only way I can deal with them is through trade and through friendship and through love and through whatever appropriate relationship there is. But I find that people who take this attitude, take Einstein's philosophy seriously and have this profound respect for their own life and the importance of their own life and want to make their life the best life that it can be, actually have a very, very benevolent view of other people, treat them really, really well because they realize how much value they can get in return. Now, saying all that, some people are really, really bad. Some people do you harm. And one thing Objectivism teaches you is stay away from those people. Don't feel a duty to interact with people who are harmful to you. Don't feel a duty to write a check to that sibling of yours who's a complete loser who will never make anything of their life and is leaching off of you. You don't owe them anything. And in that sense, it could even be your parents. You, in a sense, don't owe your parents anything beyond what they gave you. If they gave you love and they gave you a nice upbringing and a nice, then yeah, I mean, hopefully you love them and you can repay them in a sense. But if your parents, well, how's the parents? You don't owe them because of blood or because of genes. So Objectivism and this whole approach of being self interested is all about judging people out there and evaluating them. Are they good for me? Are they bad for me? Stay away from people who are bad for you and embrace people who are good for you. Now, it turns out that at least at a superficial level, almost over most people are good for you. And then there are a few people who are really good for you and you want to be friends. And then there's one or two people that you're really going to love and they're special and, you know, at the peak of that is romantic love. So, you know, judging people is important and having a high key of relationships is important. You don't treat everybody the same. Ayn Rand rejects egalitarianism and she rejects sacrifice or self-sacrifice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything you're saying, I mean, it's just, it's making me think of Howard Rock, right? It really is. And so one of my, one of my questions is around kind of trying to help us understand Objectivism through Ayn Rand's works, like how does she go about relaying and portraying the very things you're saying within her four novels and her essays. Four novels are probably known the most, but yeah, I'd love to get your take on how she actually pushes that vein of thought out through her pages. Well, I mean, it's very clear in her novels. These ideas are very clear in her novels. Howard Rock is the hero of the Fountainhead. He is an architect. And from the beginning, from the first line, which is Howard Rock laughs, it is clear that he is a man who is completely in control of his life and knows what his values are. He's trying to understand the world. He doesn't quite understand the world. He does by the end of the novel, but he's struggling to understand other people. But in terms of himself and what he wants and what his values are, he is focused on that. He understands it and he pursues those values ruthlessly without compromise. He never uses people. He'd never, he's never allows himself to be used by other people. He has complete integrity. And its integrity in ways that people often surprise when it comes to Iron Man because people associate, and this is part of the real, I think evil in the culture that we live in, people associate self-interest and selfishness with money. If I say I'm self-interest, oh, you're just greedy, you just want lots of money. Now, maybe I do want a lot of money, but that isn't my defining characteristic. That isn't what being self-interested means. Being self-interested means I want to live the best life that I can live. Money might be a part of that. It has to be a part of that no matter what because you have to survive. Money is essential for survival. But is that the only thing that's important for somebody who is self-interested? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. Money is just a means. It's a tool. So for hard work, what's really important to him is his integrity, his artistic, aesthetic integrity. He wants to build buildings. He's an architect the way he believes they should be built, that are consistent with his vision of architecture. And there's a scene in the novel where he is offered, he's struggling, he has no clients, he's making no money, he has nothing. And he's offered this unbelievably lucrative job. He's going to build this skyscraper for a bank and he's going to get rich. And all they want is for him to compromise on some elements in his design, just put in some Greek columns where he doesn't believe they should be Greek columns. And he says, no. And people go, and Ayn Rand's point is that's what selfishness means. Selfishness means sticking to your principles. Selfishness means pursuing your values. Money? Money is a means for facilitating this trade. But if what I'm getting in return undermines my moral principles, my aesthetic principles, it undermines who I am as a human being, there's no price for that. Give me gazillion dollars, I'm not giving you that. So no matter how much they offer him, how it works, not building a building he doesn't believe in. And he'd rather, it turns out, work in a quarry in manual labor than design buildings he doesn't believe in. And that is that, if people just got this one thing out of the font head, right, that's what selfishness really means. It means really understanding what your principles are, really understanding what your life requires and what your happiness requires, and living by that. It's not about, I don't know, just money grubbing, which is kind of the attitude people assume selfishness is. So that's in the fountain. The fountain is very much focused on the presentation of individual morality and how it plays out in a man's life and what success looks like when you pursue kind of this morality. And I don't want to give the novel away, but so I encourage people to read it. Atlas Shrug, then, is a bigger book in a sense. It deals more with not just the individual, also the individual, and there are striking examples of individuals there that face very similar kind of alternatives as work does and I think choose properly and some who don't and some for the consequences. But here it's kind of a society-wide lesson. It's more, the theme is broader and deeper than individual morality. Really, when Ayn Rand was asked what the theme of Atlas Shrug was, she said it was the role of reason in man's life, the role of the mind in man's life. And you can see what happens when somebody is committed to reason and when somebody abandons reason and when society respects reason, when society abandons reason and it's all geared to that. And people usually think of Atlas Shrug as a political book, but it's not. It's about epistemology and that's crazy, but that's how Ayn Rand thought. And it's an exciting book. It's an exciting book that is so relevant to life in the world today. And what you see there is a reason versus unreason, living your life for yourself versus not. There's a great character in Atlas Shrug, Reardon who is struggling. He lives kind of his family life. He lives on the morality of altruism and the morality of sacrifice and the morality of his family owns him in a sense. He feels guilty for not giving them enough, but he doesn't really want to give them that much and he feels guilty for not spending enough time with his wife, but he doesn't really want to spend that much time with her. What he really wants to do is work and he loves his work. He's passionate about his work. He's completely self-interested when it comes to his work, but he thinks that's material and low. He thinks sex is material and low at the beginning of the novel. And he has to learn. He has to learn that, no, this is the best in him. And if he needs to apply this, the principle that he applies at his work, to sex, to his relationship with his family, to every aspect of his life, and the way he changes throughout the novel is one of the most interesting features of the novel. But again, it illustrates every aspect of her philosophy, facts, reason, individualism, a morality of self-interest. So she does that throughout the novel through all her characters and through the plot. And then, of course, in a non-fiction, she's got an essay, The Objective Ethics, where she talks about selfishness. She even talks about why she calls herself selfishness. And so these are more philosophical. I said, now granted, they're philosophical, but they're not written for philosophers. They're written for the layman. And I think a lot of academic philosophers' rejection of her has to do with the fact that she didn't write their language. You pick up a philosophy book, it's hard to understand. Ayn Rand is easy to understand because she's writing in your language. She's not easy to fully grasp. A lot of her stuff, you have to read more than once. But the language is the language that every, and the chain of logic is understandable, and it's in English. It's not in philosophies. Will you support when belief dies? Your support enables us to keep having these conversations and improving everything that we do. There are three ways to support when belief dies. Firstly, would you rate when belief dies in Apple podcasts, Spotify and Audible? Rating us in these spaces boosts our visibility. Secondly, would you share this episode with your family, friends and followers? We grow mainly through word of mouth, so please consider who might find this a helpful conversation and share it with them. Lastly, would you consider supporting the show financially? You can support the show on Patreon with a monthly gift or a one-off donation via PayPal or Bitcoin. Everything you give goes directly towards the running and improving of the podcast and YouTube channel. All links are in the description and thank you for supporting the show. Right, let's get back to this week's conversation. Yeah, I really, really appreciate her style. Yeah, I also interestingly read the books in probably the reverse order and that they published. It was the reverse order, so I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, then Anthem, then We The Living. I'm actually halfway through We The Living at the moment. Finding it devastating, actually. I've read things like The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Stolzhenitskin, and that's all about kind of what life was like in these concentration camps, essentially, within Soviet Russia at the time. And I've actually found that We The Living seems to be providing me more of a down on the ground what communism looked like and how things are stripped away from people and the fact that they're eating food and trying to get food and having to go hungry and then trying to, and again it's, you know, Kira, I believe her name is the sort of main character within this novel, at least currently, is trying to live her life in this very kind of self, I want to go in this direction and I want to build bridges. That's what she's trying to do. And she's having to do that and also live within this sort of regime, which is completely counter to who she is a person. How would you encourage people, Yaron, to engage with her books? Would you say to kind of start the beginning and work to the end or would you encourage them to start with something like The Fountainhead first, maybe? No, I would encourage them to start with The Fountainhead. I read Atlas Shrugged first and then The Fountainhead and then Anthem and We The Living, so like you. But I would encourage them to start with The Fountainhead. If they really, really, really don't like fiction for some reason, which I don't understand, but if they don't, then they can start with virtue of selfishness or capitalism, not an ideal. And I agree with you. I also read Szilvian Nissen and I find We The Living in some ways much more powerful because it sets up this amazing young woman who just wants to live her life, but she's very rational and very thoughtful about it. And the obstacle she runs across and then the men that she falls in love with and the conflicts that that creates and all she's trying to do is live her life and she can't. And then how the system affects different people, like she won't give up, but how does it affect the other people and how does it destroy, not just destroy them materially, but how does it destroy them spiritually? How does it destroy the capacity to live and to enjoy life? And I think she does a magnificent job at that. But I would definitely start with The Fountainhead. I think it gives, it's the most personal novel for the reader, I think, and it's the most engaging. And then if you're really into politics, let's say, or politics and philosophy, then you could start with with Adler Shrugged and then read The Fountainhead. But I think for most people, I would say, start with The Fountainhead and then go to Adler Shrugged. And in all four of these books, when a character, whether they be living through a sort of objectivist, lends themselves or not, when they see somebody who is living with self at the center, they're often describing how they appear to them. And on round uses very almost mathematical or maybe geometrical or masculine in a sort of way. The language to define this talks about the lines of their face and how their head was upright, how their back was straight. She talks about the figures of the ladies and sort of how their legs were positioned and things. It's very, it's such interesting language. I've not sort of seen that anywhere else. But she seems to almost be imbuing these characters with definitive, complete imagery, whereas other characters she'll maybe mention the sort of shoes they were wearing, or the scuffs on their jacket, whereas these characters are full people in a sort of way. And I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit for us. Yeah, I mean, I think she's an artist and she's trying to through the way she's describing these people and the way they stand and the way they walk and the way they carry themselves to tell you something about the character. She can't invest in every one of the characters the full time to teach you to tell you about them. She can only do that to a few characters with the heroes of the story. But she wants you to get a sense of the character. And we all know that often we get strong first and often correct lasting impressions just by looking at somebody, how they dress or how they carry themselves or how they walk. I do think Love at First Sight exists because we can connect in some way very quickly and very directly with those kind of things in other people. So she is activating that. So she's trying to activate your maybe a certain perception of what masculinity is and a certain perception of what femininity is and also a certain perception of what a horrible person would look like or what they would do and how they would be maybe bent over and maybe they're particularly you know ugly. She's not saying everybody is ugly is a bad person but she's using it as an autistic mechanism to activate a certain emotion a certain context for the reader. And she wants to present her heroes heroically. It's art. It's in art you know I think she agreed with with Aristotle art should present reality as it should and could be right but should and could. So she's trying to present people as the heroes as heroic and therefore having the stature of heroes. And she had a very definitive view of what she thought masculinity and femininity were as an artist and how to convey that. And of course as an artist you have to have some insight into human psychology to be able to to be able to really project your characters effectively. We've kind of talked about the sort of vision of the perfect man and her sort of research around what that looked like. You mentioned obviously Nietzsche the idea of kind of Superman or kind of beyond good and evil almost the sort of power the power to will. And so I think it'd be interesting to kind of talk a little bit about Iran then around the sort of the idea of masculinity and the perfect man and how she does portray that because there does seem to be a man isn't always used necessarily in a sort of humanity everybody but sometimes it really is kind of actually a male figure that she's kind of writing about here. And for some people that can be a bit of a turnoff but I think it'd be good just to address it to kind of help people understand what they should expect. Sure so first she does use in her writing she does use man to represent humanity this was not different than pretty much everybody else at the time. This is pretty standard English at the time you know the Zonian modern times that we do he she and all this stuff in order to cover everybody. But she does have she does believe men and women are different and and that they have certain psychological differences and that they have you know certain differences in how they're oriented. And you could agree and disagree with that but but she definitely has a particular view of that and for her and and look just to put this in perspective the hero of Atlas Shrugged I mean the one the hero of Atlas Shrugged in the sense that the one written most about in the book is a woman Dagny Taggart who runs a railroad now this is 1957. I never shattered any glass ceiling that might have existed she places a woman as clearly the most competent person on planet earth to run the most important railroad on planet earth and she does it efficiently efficaciously she's a negotiator she's tough she's amazing. Dagny is just amazing as a business person and but she's a woman and for Rand there's something different between a woman who's a business person and a man who's a business person in terms of their personal life in terms of their psychological life in terms of she's feminine and she exudes femininity when she's at a party when she's in a social environment when she's having sex and and and men while they might not be as competent as her in business in a different setting they exude masculinity so for her saying somebody something's feminine something's masculine it's not a judgment it it's a positive it's a positive to be masculine it's a positive to be feminine both both the positives um so there's nothing inferior about being a woman but she does have this view that men that masculinity is an orientation towards reality towards conquering nature it's it's towards discovery out there and that femininity as a as a as a psychological characteristic is oriented towards a man towards finding a hero and and and admiring a hero so there is that psychological orientation that she identifies with masculinity again you can agree with that or not i think still think you'll love the heroes and particularly when you realize that in spite of Dagny's orientation towards looking for a hero a man who is a hero to love she's also a heroine she's a superhero really and and she's the most competent railroad executive in the world so so i i i think people love the characters uh in in these novels and love this representation it's very unmodern it's very non-modern uh in in a sense of that modernity is so much about no there's no differences between men and women no there are differences and we should celebrate yeah i i totally agree i think they're fantastic the the novels and and that and that mantra and i've got three more four more questions um the sort of next one is around i guess kind of um i'm round end of life um it's it's often viewed that i don't know if this is true or not that um when somebody's living out this sort of um objectivist mindset that as they get towards the end of their life because they're no longer to necessarily do everything that they want to be able to do that sort of happiness begins to subside because maybe they've not built the family around they wanted or they've not built the support networks etc etc because they've been go go go and i thought it'd be interesting you know to kind of get your take on that that towards the end of Iron Man's life she was maybe kind of sad or disappointed that it hadn't been everything that she thought it could be i don't know whether that's true but i think it'd be helpful to kind of view objectivism through that sort of final day stage where people do get to the end and kind of begin to reflect back as well so i don't think that was true of Iron Man i think she might have been saddened by the fact that the world did not live up to her expectations that is that the world was not as good as she thought it could be and that it had not responded to her quite as positively as she had hoped they would despite of being best sellers and despite of all her success monetary success and esteem i mean she she was on tv she was in the white house she was i mean she was a real celebrity at the end of the day the world did not just embrace her philosophy and run with it it was still very controversial throughout her life so i think she was a little disappointed in other people in the world but i think she she embraced the life that she had lived she had lived she thought and i think she did the life of one hero characters from the novel she had lived a heroic life a successful life she had done everything she had set out to do i don't think she had any big regrets in terms of what she had done and i think look how what happens at the end of your life is very much going to be dictated about how you live your life if you indeed take your life seriously if you indeed pursue your values if you're thoughtful and and and and you know make your life the best that it can be and make it interesting and make it enjoyable and make it and and you're happy and and you're thriving and successful and flourishing and you embrace this life then at the end of life i think you look back and you know i'm not young anymore you look back and you say wow cool i you know i lived i lived a good life i did an amazing number of things i tried an amazing number of things i succeeded i failed but i you know it was i i you know it was a well-lived life that that's what you want at the end right you want to say i didn't waste my time i didn't i didn't just sit around i didn't just drift i didn't just follow the crowd i i i didn't just follow orders i lived i used my mind to shape my life could have done better here could have done better there too you know what the difference it make it's too late now probably surely and you can always learn and if i had the knowledge today that i do when i was 20 yes i'm the obviously things you would change but that's not the point the point is did i do the best that i could do when i did it and and did i did i did i did i achieve flourishing and did i make the effort to make my life great and if the answer is yes then hey that's all you can hope that's all you can do in life in the end and that's just kind of sad but we know it has to happen so so be it so the next questions around sort of her early days in in in the us when she'd come over and she obviously left soviet russia and she moved into theoretically kind of free america and i think from what i can tell she was quite shocked by how easily swayed individuals were within america towards kind of socialist ideas and that then affected her writing affected obviously the books that she produced that there was a sort of domino effect from that but i thought obviously we get you are the experts would be good to get your taken kind of how obviously she fled that she came to freedom theoretically what she believed to be freedom and then she experienced something did that experience then push her into exploring objectivism for herself further but also then trying to help us as now her readers also understand the broader landscape yeah so i i i definitely think she came to the united states and was disappointed at the level at which americans understood the freedom that they have the willingness you know she came here just before if the always elected and then she saw what if the odd did and to really move america away from capitalism and away from freedom so she was disappointed in the willingness of america to embrace socialism in the 1930s when we the living came out she found so many american intellectuals thought communism was fantastic and rejected her book because how can you be critical of communism it's amazing and and so that definitely very very much disappointed her and i think ultimately she was motivating educating americans in what they had and and the value of what they had and and and encouraged them not to give it up and and and but i think a primary motivation as i said to develop a philosophy was to write her art to write her novels and and to elevate the individual and to give the individual something to look up at and something to to to um uh you know to to really help people inspire people to live their lives the best the best lives that they can live but then it became clear that she had to articulate that philosophy more explicitly and it wasn't just enough in the novels and i think she did set out to in a sense save america and save liberty and save freedom and and philosophically complete the work that was started by philosophers in the enlightenment and and really ground reason philosophically and ground egoism philosophically and and and then ground capitalism as a consequence philosophically and ground freedom so that was definitely part of what she was trying to do and and what she was hoping to do uh and and what she devoted much of her life i think um particularly after the novels but even while she was writing the novels too is to achieving that that philosophical completeness that philosophical grounding of of these ideas yeah and then you see those ideas flourishing her novels um which is beautiful um okay this is a question i've been very excited to get to um so systems of faith say for example the catholic church um seem to be antithetical to objectivism um it'd be interesting to kind of hear from you why this is um and kind of suggests because it does suggest that that these big kind of views of faith are essentially wrong so kind of how how how are they antithetical and why does that then suggest that a faith system isn't isn't correct yeah so they're really antithetical in every dimension i mean and start with the idea of a system of faith uh what is faith face is the acceptance of something where there is no evidence for it it's the acceptance of something in spite of the lack of evidence the lack of fact the lack of reality faith is the antithesis of reason is indeed the rejection of reason it's saying i don't need facts and reality and and my senses and reason i just know you know i i just know how do you know i just know revelation god spoke to me whatever but in the end of the day it's all emotion all that's left is emotion once you reject reason you're left with emotion so so how do you know that god said it to you well you keep it in you know you emotive you you don't observe it out there because it isn't there so uh you so so faith is just the the the the manifestation of an of of of of emotionalism it's it's it's the the the absence of reason and objectivism rejects anything where reason um where you uh we put reason aside reason is a means of cognition reason is our basic means of survival reason is the way we know the world and and anything that undermines reason needs to be put aside and religion undermines reason i they can tell you that um they believe in god that it's rational to believe in god but but it's that's BS nobody believes in god because it's rational they believe in god because they want to believe in god because emotionally they they are they have committed themselves to believe in god they they want it for some emotionalist reason um and then they might rationalize it with some you know all the logical proofs of god which all of them have been uh have been shown to be false by philosophers as it did it change any religionist mind probably you know maybe at the margin but most people are not convinced by because it's not about reason it's not about logic it's not about rationality so that's the beginning of it and and really in a sense the end of it because once you accept faith well how do we know what we know well it's written in a book right and for thousands of years until Galileo even physics was written in a book you couldn't challenge that so uh you know in in one of the books in the old testament it says that basically the sun goes around the earth because god actually stops the sun from moving across the sky uh so uh joshua could win a battle so he gets more daylight so he can win a battle right stops you know he completely contradicts the laws of physics um so yeah but god did it god could do anything according to faith faith is faith is completely open you can do anything but then Galileo says well but you know something doesn't go around the you know the earth the earth goes around the sun and oh wait a minute how do you how do you know that i use my senses i use my reason to discover that well that's the conflict faith says no the other way around okay so so in some cases we we we are going to dismiss faith and we're gonna accept science because it's so obviously true okay but what about morality what's morality in the old testament where it's seven commandments are they explained are they justified are we told why we should follow these commandments no why should you follow the commandments because god says so and of any cases you wouldn't follow the commandments sure if god tells me not to follow them i won't follow them i mean religion is authoritarianism it's an authoritarianism granted to a being that doesn't exist which is a very scary type of authoritarianism because then what you want what you're afraid of is his representatives on earth channeling his will and there's no but give me a reason like abram doesn't stop and say kill my son why why would i do that that that's like stupid that's like so immoral and ridiculous and actually god it violates one of your commandments now the commandments are given after the story of abraham but you know i think even even pre the commandments everybody understood that murder was wrong he doesn't do that he doesn't question god he doesn't ask him and the reason abraham is a moral hero to jews christians and muslims he's the one that unites them all is because he says yes god i'll do whatever you say and he takes a son and he tries to murder him right it's pure authoritarianism unquestioning mindless you know follow the commandments follow instructions do what you're told to do and then you see that in religion you see that in the inquisition you see that in in every religious sect that's ever existed you do what you're told or your ex-community i mean think about spinosa spinosa was a philosopher well i mean he started out as an ultra-orthodox jew who started who was considered the genius of his age when he was a child they thought he was going to be the greatest rabbi ever because he was the genius he knew the the bible he knew all the stuff like that but then he started asking questions questions that weren't comfortable because the rabbi couldn't answer them philosophical questions about the nature of god and the nature of this and why the bible says this and why this and and at some point the rabbis have to say stop asking questions this is just the way it is this is the commandments this is the truth just accepted and spinosa couldn't so they excommunicated literally his whole family nobody would speak to him nobody they pretended he wasn't there if he if he approached it they walked right by him at each so he was kicked out of his community that's religion that's religion when they take it seriously so religion when they don't take it seriously is a little bit more moderate and you know they you know but at the base of it is an epistemology of authoritarianism at the base of it is a morality of following commands doing your duty and what is particularly christianity what is that duty that you do duty is to sacrifice to sacrifice for others to sacrifice for the poor to sacrifice for the needy to sacrifice for your country to sacrifice for god in the end and and the symbol that they that christians wear around their necks and i'm sorry i'm so anti-religion but this is life um they wear around their neck is a man being tortured on a cross i can't think of a of a of a of a worse way to die than dying on a cross right it's slow and painful excruciating horrible evil that's the symbol of the religion why did he die because of sins he committed no why did he die because of sins we all committed he's the ultimate sacrificer for others he sacrifices life for our sins why would anybody do that right i understand somebody dying a horrible death for sins they they committed but why would they die for my sins i should die for my sins nobody else should die for my sins so it's it it inculcates altruism this view of altruism of self-sacrifice of suffering of suffering as virtue um and you know over the whole of western civilization unfortunately there is a man on a cross looking down at us and uh that's the big challenge of western civilization is how do we overcome that how do we overcome the fact that at at western civilizations birth we have this really horrific site associated with it because western civilization is ultimately the rejection of the cross the rejection of the crucifixion western civilization is about the embrace of reason and individualism from the renaissance the enlightenment that's what made the west and that's what we celebrate today i think in the west or should celebrate today in the west but religion religion holds us back that was maybe a longer answer than you uh one no no no it was it was fantastic i am it was very helpful for me personally as well so um very briefly then and then i'll let you go um this idea of a man on a cross being at the start of western civilization as you mentioned just then i think that also hangs over myself and many of our of my listeners um people listen to his podcast at moment just how they were raised how they were brought up and kind of how they then lived their life and then at some point something changed and they began to question it all and the sort of house came down as as as you will how do you encourage people to it's quite a personal question but how do you encourage people to begin to i guess move forwards from that place to begin to try and understand and ground reason in in the sense we've been talking about it this evening and also begin to live their life out and and explore this space with almost excitement how do you how do you know i think excitement is the right word i mean i think people i think that the important realization is this is it this life is it it's nothing beyond this life it's nothing beyond this world this reality now that means you better take it seriously that means you've only got one shot at this there's not multiple lives you're not gonna get reincarnated you're not going to have an entry all over again you're not even punished in hell for something that was written 2000 years ago it's just you and and that might sound lonely but i view that as wow what an opportunity you get to shape your life you get to discover the truth for the truth and and it's for you you're not discovering the truth for some you know for some something beyond you right i mean you hear a lot about you you got to find meaning that's beyond yourself what is beyond myself my meaning is me my meaning is my life my meaning is my values the things that i love my meaning is my morality my my goals in life and and it makes it it makes life much more accessible you're not trying to please some being that you don't see and don't understand you're not you know one of the first things you need to really shrug off is original sin you're not born with sin you're not bad because you're human you're not evil because you're alive you're not evil because you're thinking and producing and creating you know sex is not something to be ashamed of and how hidden and and and run away from life is to be enjoyed and embraced and but it's not easy you know there's a lot of responsibility there now it's up to you to figure that out to figure out what life means so it's true that for example sex is not evil and dirty and hidden as as as many religionists would have us believe but it's also true that sex is not trivial and meaningless and just have it with anybody now you have to discover the true spiritual and and and true value orientation of sex and then and then embrace it and then you know figure out who to have it with but but and that's true of every part of life and it's it's not true that you should sacrifice for the needy and you should sacrifice for this and sacrifice it you shouldn't sacrifice for anybody figure out what your values are what's important to you and go get it go go straight to it don't use other people don't exploit other people don't light other people don't you know live life as a moral human being expect other people to to be more but morality means be rational be you know honesty even honesty for Rand is different right most people think honesty is don't lie but lying is the trivial part of honesty the real issue but honesty is be committed to reality be committed to the facts don't lie to yourself but it's more than that when you make when you're making a decision when you're making a judgment make sure you have all the relevant facts make sure you're being objective right that's that's that's the objectivism so I think you know I think you know the there's a real opportunity for rebirth spiritually materially in every respect by by shrugging off religion there's a realization that your life is yours nobody else's you get to live it you get to make choices about it you get to choose your values you don't have to accept commandments or the pre-cho anybody else's you get to choose who to associate with you get to choose who to trade with now yes it's work yes it's real responsibility but that's part of the fun right the work should be enjoyable responsibility because it's your responsibility the rewards are yours and life is to be enjoyed life is to be enjoyed you should you should experience joy you just it's not a grind and you know I think original sin is really tough for people to get over I think you know you shouldn't feel guilty there's nothing to feel guilty about unless you've done something bad if you've done something bad feel guilty but if you haven't done anything bad get rid of that guilt I know Catholics have a hard time with that Jews have a hard time with that but you should never feel guilty for something you didn't do yeah thank you for that that's powerful um yeah I'm before I let you go where would you want to direct people to to find you to engage with your work and potentially reach out yeah I mean I do a podcast youtube thing you know every day pretty much six days a week so youtube if they people look me up on youtube I have a channel there I'm on all the podcasting apps as well so if they if they just want to listen it's on there I have a website but the website just ultimately refers everybody to youtube they can also find I've got some books they can search my name on amazon and I'll come across some of my books and of course I encourage everybody to look up INRAND and that's that's more important and you know the best resources INRAND is is INRAND.org A-Y-N-R-A-N-D.org which is the INRAND Institute's website and of course go read the font in it yeah yeah I'll there'll be links to all that in the description yeah and thank you so much for coming the show and talking with me today it's been a pleasure my pleasure thank you