 So, what I want to do today is give you a little bit of a history of who she was and what she did. And then we'll go over the highlights of her philosophy, particularly as it's relevant, I think, to the world around us, although everything she said is relevant. So, the intention here is more to give you a little teaser, to encourage you to read the books, to encourage you to dig deeper into the books. I do want to, are there any students here? All right. So, you can, there are flyers back there, there's a barcode. If you scan the barcode, you can download a free one-of-a-kind books for free. So, anyone you choose, there's a menu, you can choose which one, and you can download it for free. So, sorry, it's only for students, but you can do that if you register and get it. So, Rand, of course, is known primarily, I think, in the U.S., but really all over the world, as the advocate for capitalism and advocate for individual rights as somebody who had a huge impact, I think, on American political dialogue, but also among American entrepreneurs and businessmen. If you go back and you look at the founding of Silicon Valley in the United States, almost every single entrepreneur involved in the founding of Silicon Valley, read Ein Rand, Atlas Shrugged, and the Fountainhead in particular, and said they were inspired by her towards the career that they chose. I mean, some of the biggest names you can imagine thought Atlas Shrugged was their favorite book. So, Rand had a huge impact on the business community. At some point, over half of the, I think, the 500 biggest companies were run by people who again thought Atlas Shrugged was their favorite book and loved the ideas. They weren't necessarily philosophically completely aligned, but certainly the books inspired them to greatness. And I think that's one of her strengths, is that she inspires people to live the best life that they can live, inspires them to become great. So, she was an inspiration to so many and of course, somebody who is identified with certain political views and we'll get into those. Rand was born in 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia. She was born into a middle-class family. Her father was a pharmacist. He owned his own pharmacy. Her name was Alicia Rosenblum. That was her original name. And she, at the age of 12, witnessed the Russian Revolution. It literally started outside their pharmacy in the square, in the big square in St. Petersburg where they had a business. She witnessed the Revolution and then suffered the consequence of the Revolution, the decline in the standard and quality of life. The pharmacy is, of course, taken from her father. They have to move into an apartment with other families. She goes to university, she studies, but it's very clear to her that if she stays in Russia, she won't survive. She has opinions. She cannot stay silent. She voices those opinions. And we all know what happens to people who disagree with the prevailing views of under-communism. So, at the earliest opportunity, there was a small window of opportunity where Lenin allowed people out. You know, under the assumption they would come back to do different projects overseas. She got, for some research project she was working on, she got permission to leave Russia. She had family in Chicago. She left Russia. Everybody who knew her knew she would never come back. So, here's a 22-year-old woman on her own, on the way to the United States. She spends a few weeks in Chicago and then she heads to what she really wants, which is to become a writer in Hollywood. She wants to make movies, but write movies. She always loved going to the theater and seeing the movies, the silent movies in Russia. And she wanted to be part of that. So, she heads to Hollywood and she goes to the Ceasar B. DeMille Studios. You guys probably don't know who Ceasar B. DeMille was. But he was the Steven Spielberg of his time, right? He was the number one director in those days. So, she goes to the studios and they tell her, you know, come back later or whatever, they brush her off. But she walks out. It's a true story. And there's Ceasar B. DeMille sitting in his convertible, big automobile American car. And she stares at him. She had these really penetrating eyes. If you've ever seen pictures of her, she's got these amazing eyes. And he looks at her and he says, why are you staring at me? And she tells him the story. I want to be in the movies. I'm just here from Russia and she had a very thick Russian accent. And he says, you want to be in the movies? Okay, get in the car. And he takes her to where they're filming The King of Kings, which was a silent movie on the story of Jesus Christ. And he says, here's a pass for you to come and see how movies are made for two weeks. And that starts her career in the movies. And she becomes an extra in the movie, you know, part of the crowd. She meets a husband on the set of that movie, whom she marries a little while later. And she then takes on all kinds of odds and ends jobs in Hollywood just to stay connected. In the evening, she's studying English and writing, writing, writing, writing. Remember, English is not her first language. It's Russian. She finally gets a play performed, a play that she writes, performed in Los Angeles and then ultimately off-Broadway in New York. She writes a novel called We The Living, which is the most autobiographical of all her novels. It's about a young woman's life in the Soviet Union in communist Russia. A very, very powerful novel. But nobody's interested in America in novels critiquing communism because in the 1930s in America, almost all the intellectuals are pro-communist. Right? This is an era where communism is viewed as the future. It's viewed as more successful than America. I don't know how much you know of the history there, but the New York Times corresponded in Moscow. Turns out to be a Moscow agent. So he's sending stories to the New York Times about how wonderful Stalin is and how wonderful things are in the Soviet Union. And he's influencing the President of the United States, the established relations with Stalin. The whole perception of the Soviet Union communism in the U.S. was very, very pro-communist, particularly among the intellectuals. So the book doesn't do very well. She then writes a small book called Anthem, which is kind of a dystopian novelette. That doesn't get published initially in the United States, but she gets it published in the land of dystopian short novels, The United Kingdom in England. And there's evidence to suggest that it is read by the author of 1984. So there's a connection there between the various dystopian novels of the time. But the book does fairly well in England. And then she starts working, you know, and at the same time she writes a number of scripts in Hollywood. She becomes somebody who reviews scripts and gives her opinions on them. So she's very successful in Hollywood after all these years. And then she starts writing a book called The Fountainhead. It ultimately is published in 1945 and becomes, you know, 12 publishers. She sends it to 12 publishers. They all turn it down. Nobody will be interested in this book. It's not, you know, it's too idealistic, it's too philosophical. We don't want it. The 12th publisher publishes it, but doesn't really believe in it too much, right? So they make only, I think, 2,000 copies. They do a first run, but the book really takes off. And word of mouth, and it becomes a best-selling book. And they immediately print more copies. And to this day, The Fountainhead sells, you know, tens of thousands of copies in the U.S., potentially hundreds of thousands of copies if you count all global sales, since then it's been translated into pretty much every language on the planet. Only two major languages don't have Ain Rand in them. Anybody want to guess which two languages? No, Russian, they're all translated into Russian. They've sold very well in Russia in spite of, I don't know who's reading them there. Putin actually has a copy of Atlas Shrugged in his bookcase. We know that, because Ilanayov, I don't know Ilanayov, who used to be in the late 90s, Putin's economic advisor was a huge Ain Rand fan, and he gave Putin a copy of Atlas Shrugged. Probably never read it, or if he read it, he thought the villains were the heroes. The heroes were the villains, something like that. But no, the two languages it has not been translated in unfortunately are Arabic and Farsi. So Iran in the Middle East is where it hasn't expanded. But every other language you can think of, including Hungarian, the books do exist. So she published The Found Head, became a great bestseller. She starts on her next novel, which is Atlas Shrugged. It takes about 12 years to write the novel. It's published in 1957, and of course at this point everybody's competing to publish it, and she's done so well in The Found Head. She publishes it, it becomes an immediate bestseller. It today sells hundreds of thousands of copies. It is translated to every language. And so it's become, you know, she's been dead, and she died in 1982. And the books still sell, which is almost unheard of, that a dead author's books sell, particularly when the books are not taught in schools, right, because they're not part of the curriculum. So a lot of old authors still are alive today in their books because schools teach them. But how many ordinary people go out and buy a book by a dead author? It doesn't happen much. Iran is unique there. Sales have only increased over the years. From 1957 on, after Atlas Shrugged, Iran basically starts writing philosophy. And it's interesting why she wrote philosophy. Why she became interested in philosophy. Iran's goal from the beginning in her fictional writing was to portray the ideal man, so the perfect human being. And so when she was researching for The Found Head and for Atlas Shrugged, she started reading about people's perceptions, people's views on what the ideal human being was like, what values, what virtues, what character did this human being, what did philosopher think did this human being have? And everything she read, she was disappointed. This isn't ideal. This isn't right. This is no good. It didn't fit her sense of what a hero could actually be. So she started, in a sense, create her own philosophy in order for her to be able to create her ideal character so that she could write her novels. And her novels indeed project an idealized vision of men and women. Her heroes are amazing once you accept certain tenets of her philosophy. So she became a philosopher in order to be able to write her novels, in order to achieve her artistic goal in the novels, which was to portray an ideal. But after she published Atlas Shrugged, she realized that while she had this philosophy that was being portrayed in the books, in order to get the philosophy out there into the culture, she would actually have to deal with the issues that people cared about philosophically and politically and even aesthetically. And she started writing books about ideas. She particularly wrote a lot of essays and then made the essays into books. And, you know, books again are all in print. You can find them in a lot of different languages, but books like capitalism, the unknown ideal, the virtue of selfishness, which has a purposefully very, very controversial title. Of course, selfishness is not usually associated with virtue, but for Rand it is, and that's a big deal. And philosophy, who needs it? She has a book on epistemology, which is the theory of knowledge called Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. And she called her philosophical ideas. So all these philosophical ideas projected in her novels and in all these philosophical essays that she put together, she called this philosophy Objectivism. She spent the rest of her life writing. She at some point actually wrote the film, a script for The Fountainhead, and The Fountainhead was turned into a movie. You can still find the movie, I think it streams once in a while. It's with Gary Cooper playing Howard Work in The Fountainhead. So it's a pretty good, it's a pretty good production. Don't go and see The Atlas Shrugged Movies. They're terrible. They were made just a few years ago and they're really horrible. But the movie she made, The Fountainhead, is pretty good. She wrote philosophy, she wrote commentary, she wrote a lot about politics. She was very involved in political engagement during the 60s and 1970s. She had something to say about almost every major event during that period, about every political, cultural event during the period including she commented on major philosophical debates. For example, there's a famous essay she wrote about John Rawls, the famous American political philosopher who's been unbelievably influential over the last 30, 40 years in spite of the fact that Iron Man trashed him completely and thought his philosophy was horrible. So what is objectivism? What is Iron Man's view here? And of course what she's most known for is her defense of capitalism. She's most known for this idea that the optimal social, political, economic system and she viewed capitalism not just as an economic system but also as a social and political system. So she believed that capitalism as a social, political, economic system was the ideal system for human flourishing, for human beings to be successful. That indeed capitalism was the only social, political system that human beings could flourish in and that it was an ideal. That's why she had a book, Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal. Why Unknown? Because we've never actually achieved it. We've come close, maybe parts of the 19th century in America. You could argue maybe Hong Kong in the 20th century came close but never actually achieved total capitalism, never actually achieved this unknown ideal, this ideal. And Unknown, not only because we haven't achieved it but also unknown because even the people who defend capitalism she argued didn't defend it well. Didn't really understand what it was and didn't understand the foundations that it required. The philosophical, moral, ethical foundations that it required. So she rejected socialism, she rejected fascism, she rejected any variation of statism and she advocated for a system where the government was a necessary good, not a necessary evil but the government had only one role, one job and that was the protection of individual rights. And we'll get to what individual rights are in a minute. But the protection of individual rights was the only purpose of government and there was a complete separation between government and the economy. The government had no economic role. No, you know, in her capitalist world there's no, you know, minister of the economy, there's no minister of trade, there's no, any of these things because it's none of the government's business. The government's business is to protect us and otherwise leave us alone. And what we decide between ourselves how we trade and exchange good and produce and who we want to hire and how much we want to pay them and all of that should be completely left to individuals in the marketplace. So all regulations would be eliminated and all forms of taxation, all forms of course of taxation would be eliminated and you would have to come up with creative ways to raise revenue for the government. And the government would do basically three functions. Military, protect us from foreign invaders. I think maybe Europeans now realize that there are such things as foreign invaders. Maybe Europeans had forgotten that for a little bit. But to protect us from foreign invaders, a police force to protect us from cooks and criminals who are in every society and a judiciary to arbitrate disputes. And other than that you would have a legislature who would be there to pass laws that basically help define and protect property rights. It would almost never meet because you don't need many laws. It would, you know, maybe a couple of months a year it would meet. Not like today where they meet almost every day to control over our lives and regulate everything that we do. And you'd have a government of separation of powers. I think she was a great admirer of the founding fathers and the way they structured the American government and the way they tried in the Constitution to create a government that only protected individual rights. So that was kind of the outcome she saw and that's what she strove to and she was critical of every attempt by the U.S. government to control, to regulate. And, you know, she was a huge opponent of antitrust laws, of laws against monopolies because that just gives the government a huge amount of arbitrary power on which successful businesses to go after and which ones not to go after and that kind of power she objected. She also saw cronyism. Cronyism, the government and the business together as a feature primarily of government. That is, if government is going to regulate your business, what are you going to do? Well, you better defend yourself. And the way business could defend themselves is they go to Washington in America and they lobby and they pay and, you know, they don't directly bribe in Washington usually. Although I think they do a little bit, but they don't directly sweep cases of cash. They don't do that. But they fund campaigns and they fund your charity and you get a big speaking fee after you leave Congress or after you leave. So there are all kinds of ways in which they influence policy. But that all of that starts with government. It starts with the fact that government has power over the economy. That in a world where the government doesn't have power over the economy, there's no reason for businessmen to lobby. There's no reason for businessmen to go out and try to influence policy because policy has no impact on them. So the solution to cronyism is not more control and more regulation and more government. The solution to cronyism is the separation of state from economics. Get politicians out of the lives of businessmen. So capitalism is the most effective means for human organization in terms of production of wealth. And of course we have a history. We can see that to the extent that a country is capitalist, to the extent that it is free, to that extent wealth is created, to the extent that it is unfree, wealth is destroyed. You can see that in the world around us pretty well. There's a reason Russia is much poorer than Germany. Russia is a lot less free than Germany. There's a reason the United States is much richer than pretty much anywhere else in the world because the United States generally has been freer than other countries around the world. There's a reason why Hong Kong, on a per capita basis, actually became richer than the United States in a lot less time because it was freer during the 20th century than the United States of America. There's a high correlation, we know this, between wealth and freedom. And Rand completely understands that and explains it. Why is that? Why is it that freedom leads to wealth creation? Indeed, I think you'll see that in China, China became much wealthier than it was because it allowed for some freedom. And as now Xi is shutting down and oppressing and reducing freedom, as he's taking control over the economy in ways that the government in China did not in the past, as he is doing that, you will see economic growth go down, you will see less wealth creation, you will see less entrepreneurs, less jobs and more economic problems in China. So the wall today is a testament to the fact that capitalism and wealth are highly correlated, that freedom and wealth are highly correlated. So capitalism is an incredible system for producing and creating wealth. And yet, what's interesting is, in spite of that, we don't like it. We don't like capitalism. Nobody likes capitalism. No one in the world likes capitalism. I mean, you look around, every country in the world is moving away from capitalism. Every political party, left or right, it doesn't really matter anymore, they're all moving away from capitalism. Conservatives used to be a little bit for capitalism, a little bit, they're not anymore. The left has never been pro-capitalism, it's always been a slippery slope all the way to socialism. There's just no political force in the world today that is pro-freedom, that has any kind of say in any country that I'm familiar with. Almost everything is against capitalism. And the question really has to be why? Why is this, if it's so successful, why is it so unpopular and why is it in decline? And Rand would say, well, the reason is that capitalism, that people are not primarily motivated by their material well-being, that people are not primarily motivated by success economically, people are primarily motivated by what is good and what is right, what is just. People are motivated by ethics, it's hard to believe that people want to be good, people want to be good. They're willing to be poor as long as they're good, and they're not willing to be rich if they view themselves as not good. It's hard to believe that because it seems like people are motivated by money and they want to be richer and so on, but that's the reality we see all around us. People do not embrace the system that actually will generate wealth for them. They embrace the system that they believe will make them feel good about themselves. So Rand understood that capitalism wasn't the starting point, that in a sense capitalism was the end point, and that you had to have a moral justification for capitalism. You had to have a system of ethics, and you had to figure out what was right and what was wrong, what was good and what was evil. That these were crucial for life and for understanding our political system and our political environment. So for Rand, capitalism is the result of a particular philosophy, a particular view of mankind. And one of the biggest mistakes she thinks that libertarians and conservatives have made, kind of the right typically have made, is that they have fought for capitalism but their morality and their other philosophy, their philosophy actually clashed with capitalism, was actually the opposite of capitalism, and therefore they could never make progress. They always hit a brick wall and always ultimately helped the enemies of capitalism to destroy whatever freedom that existed. So what is the philosophy that is consistent with capitalism and why does she view every other philosophy really as inconsistent with capitalism, not able to support capitalism? So let's start at the basic foundation. Rand believed that reality is what it is. So this is a metaphysics, if you will. Metaphysics is a study of reality. Reality is what it is. It's not our wishes that make it. There's no other consciousness up there that makes it. It just is. The world is as it is, and things are what they are. It seems pretty simplistic in a sense. But if you think about what other philosophies think, you can see the contrast. Things are what they are. They function based on laws of causality. They function based on, you know, the laws of nature, the laws of physics. And we don't make reality up. So existence exists before we are conscious of it. Our consciousness being conscious of it doesn't change it. And there is no other consciousness manipulating things counter to the laws of physics or the laws of nature. I think it's broader than the laws of physics, the laws of nature. So you don't make it up. You can't just make it up. And of course this is counter to all the different varieties of mysticism. It's counter to a Platonic philosophy. Platonic philosophy would, you know, Plato would argue that you guys, right, you know, we're all in this cave, right? We don't really see the world as it is. We don't know what the world is. The world isn't really what we see. There's a world of forms up there. That's real reality. This is fake reality. And the goal is to achieve some supernatural or some mystical goal above us. But no, Rand puts us squarely in this reality right here right now. We, according to Rand, have the capacity to know reality. How do we know the world around us? By the use of our senses and by the use of our reason. That is our means of knowledge. We don't, again, we don't know reality based on feelings, emotions. We don't know reality because we get some kind of revelation from above, from either Plato or from world of forms or from God or from something else. We as individuals have the capacity to know reality, understand reality, and then even to make discoveries and figure stuff out about the world around us. Indeed, what is the way in which human beings survive? What is the tool that allows human beings to survive in this world? We're not like other animals. Other animals survive by use of what? How do animals survive in the world? They're pre-programmed. They come with the programming. Evolution is giving them the programming to survive. And if the programming is no good because the environment has changed, what happens? They die out. Exactly. And that's natural selection, right? As the environment changes, some species die out because their programming is not fit for the new environment that exists. Human beings are not like that. We don't have the programming. We got something really cool from evolution that's better than programming. We got the ability to self-program, to program ourselves. So while the reality is what it is, we can then reshape it. We can change it. So we don't just don't wait for the environment to change. We go out and change the environment to fit our needs. So we don't just go and find a cave to live in. That's what an animal would do. And when human beings were more like animals, that's what we did. But because we're not quite that kind of animal, what did we do after we lived in caves? We figured out how to build homes, huts. We figured out how to chop down trees or blow up mountains and cut off the rocks or make concrete and build amazing buildings. And you steal, all figured out. People had to figure that out. I mean, even a simple thing like hunting is not genetically programmed into us. We don't know how to hunt. Just put me in a, I don't know, a bison. And what am I supposed to do? I can't run down and chase it and catch it and bite into it. You're not going to achieve anything with that. We don't have fangs. We don't have claws. We don't have the physical capabilities of dealing with food. We have to build traps. We have to build weapons. And that's what we do. We build weapons and traps. We cooperate in order to catch the animal, skin it, cook it. We specialize. I mean, these are amazing things. One animal does it, right? And they are all features of human reason. They're all features of human rationality. They're all features of human beings being able to change their environment. To change what fate has installed, if you will. To change what's deterministic. We're an amazing species. Because we have the capacity to reason. So reason, rationality, our means of knowing the world is also our means of shaping the world to fit our needs. It's the way in which we survive. Human beings survive by using their minds. Without the mind, we're finished. If I put you into the Amazon with nothing, unless you figure it out, what's poison, what's not, what's safe, what's not, all the animals, how not, you will die out very quickly. Our means of survival is our reason. And only individuals can reason. We don't have a collective consciousness. I know some people think we do, but there's no collective consciousness here anymore than we have a collective stomach. You can't eat for me, and you certainly can't think for me. So I need to eat for myself. I need to think for myself. I have to think. I have to do the things necessary for my own survival. So the individual is the unit that survives, and the individual is the unit that must act in order to survive. The standard for all of our lives is our ability to survive, to thrive, to flourish, and ultimately to be happy. And the purpose of morality, according to Rand, is your own happiness. Happiness is the achievement of your happiness. An achievement of human flourishing, your ability to live the best life that you can live, to live a great life. I like to say, live with a capital L, big life, not a little life. And because otherwise, why live? What would be the point? The point is, get one shot at this, one attempt at life, right? Every second you live, you'll never get back. Make the most of it. And to make the most of it, for what? For the state, for the tribe, for somebody else, which is what we're always taught, live for something greater than yourself. Why? Simple question. Why is the state more important than me? Why is the tribe more important than me? Why are the poor more important than me? Why is anybody more important than me? To me, to me, I'm the most important thing. It's my life. What else is there? There is nothing else. Everything has to be as an individual, measured in the context of my life. So Rand is an egoist when it comes to morality. The purpose of morality is to help you as an individual live the best life you can. And what does life require of an individual to live well? What does life require you to do? Use your mind. Think. So for Rand, the number one value is reason. The number one virtue, virtue as an action you take, is to be rational. The most important thing, the number one virtue, the number one moral virtue, moral activity that you can engage with, is thinking. You can boil down all of Indra's morality into one thing. Think. Think for yourself for the purpose of your own success as a human being. That's all kind of boils down. If you boil down her morality, think for yourself for the purpose of being a successful human being, being successful at living. And human beings, if they are pursuing their own happiness, using their own reason, using their own mind. When they come in touch with other human beings, what is the one thing that can stop them from pursuing their values, from pursuing their happiness, their life, what's good for them? What's the thing that can, what's the thing that prevents you from using your reason, using your mind? How can I stop you from thinking and suddenly acting on your thoughts? What would I have to do to stop you from thinking and acting? Even if you give me anything, I'll probably want more. Right? Because, you know, I've got ideas, I want to experiment, I want to try things out, I want to go and achieve even more. But what can I do to you that prevents you from doing all of that? Fear, fear is a very powerful emotion, but you know, some of us can overcome fear. We can be courageous, we can overcome that. But what's even worse than fear? What's that? Feeling guilty. So yes, absolutely feeling guilty is one thing that will suppress my ability, but it won't stop me again feeling guilty. I can overcome, I can change my mind, and we can talk about guilt. Guilt is a very powerful thing that other moralities will teach you. But what does a human being, what can I do to you to stop you from doing? Think about history, I don't know. What's, you know, what stops scientists in the 15th century from discovering new inventions and doing new things? What stopped entrepreneurs before the industrial revolution from inventing things and going and producing and creating and building? What stops us? Even today, if I want to start a company to, I don't know, to explore life extension in the United States, what's going to stop me? Ideas can't stop you, because ideas can be overcome, but a gun will stop you. I'll put a gun to the back of your head, you do what I tell you. You don't do what you want. If you need permission for me to start your company, I can say no. And as long as I have a gun and if you start your company, I put you behind bars, I stopped you. The only way to stop a thinking human being is to use force, coercion, to have authority. I mean, think of what happened to Galileo, right? And think of all the other scientists who never became scientists because they didn't want to land up and house arrest or even worse, you know, 100 years earlier than Galileo, they were burnt at the stake. So you stop thinking. I can't think in that direction because that might get me burnt at the stake, so I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to start a life extension company because the FDA will never allow my drug and no venture capitalist will ever give me money because the FDA stops me. Control, regulations, force, coercion, coercion is the enemy of reason, the enemy of thinking, the enemy of action, the enemy of mankind. So when we come into a group, since we can indeed curse one another, since there are going to be always people who are going to steal, lie, cheat, commit fraud, use power over another by use of a gun or by use of force, we must stop that from happening because individuals should be able to pursue their own happiness. This is what morality demands of us, to pursue our happiness. This is what individuals, this is what we live for. So if we want to be able to pursue a happiness, what we need is a society in which force, coercion, authority with a gun are not allowed. And the concept that captures that is individual rights. Individual rights is the recognition that force is not allowed in society. It is the recognition that each one of us, your light belongs to you and you should be able to pursue your own life based on your own rational judgment in pursuit of your own values, free of force and coercion. And the political system that protects individual rights is the political system of capitalism. And the political system of capitalism is the political system that protects all of our ability to pursue our happiness, to live our lives based on our own judgment in pursuit of our own values. The alternative morality is a morality that says don't live for yourself, live for what? The community, others, the state, the tribe, your neighbor, the poor and if you don't live for them then you're not a good person. And what does it mean to live for them? It means to sacrifice and if you benefit from giving them, if you benefit from your community if I help my community and benefit does that count morally? Do you become a saint by helping your community if you benefit? No. Because who has benefited quote the community more than anybody else in all of human history? Who are the people who have been the biggest benefactors of mankind in all of human history? Politicians Generals? No. What category of people have benefited mankind more than any other category of people? What's that? Entrepreneurs, businessmen. The activity of business taking science and technology and turning it into products for all of us is the thing that has made the world rich. It's the thing that has improved our lives. It's the thing that has extended our life. It's the thing that allows us to live into our 80s, 90s, 100s It's the thing that allows us to live comfortably. Long, comfortable, wealthy, successful life. None of that is possible without the businessmen. And yet morally, how do we view businessmen? Positively or negatively? Negatively. We hate businessmen. We envy them, we resent them, we control them, we regulate them, we tax them. We don't like them. Why? Because they are benefiting when they're helping the community. We don't like that. We don't want you to benefit from anything you do. You have to be self-less according to the popular morality. The morality of altruism, other ism, you are supposed to be self-less. And that's why we hate capitalism. We don't hate capitalism because it doesn't work. We hate capitalism because it encourages self-interested behavior. We hate capitalism because it encourages businessmen to create wealth, which we all enjoy. But they're not doing it for us, they're doing it for themselves. We don't like that. That's morally wrong. That's morally evil. And indeed the businessmen think it's morally wrong and morally evil. So what do they feel as they get older? You said it earlier. Guilt. I know lots of rich entrepreneurs who feel guilty for being rich entrepreneurs. But why? They created jobs. They made everybody's life better. They made everybody richer because they benefited from it. And that's no-no. It's not allowed. That's the morality Einwand rejects. That's the whole morality she turns away from. That's the moral of Christianity. That's the morality of much of secular philosophy. Certainly German philosophy from Kant on is all about sacrifice. But altruism. And she rejects that. And she says, if you believe in capitalism but you still hold this morality it's not going to work. You're not going to convince anybody. Anybody. Because anybody can see businessmen entrepreneurs and most of us as consumers in capitalism. What are we doing? We're pursuing our own self-interest. Out. Morally wrong. Have to control it. Have to regulate it. Have to stop it. So capitalism requires a philosophical foundation. And that philosophical foundation has to be connected to man's right to live his own life using his own mind. And for that you have to say you don't have a mind. Can live by his reason and rationality. So many of our philosophers today say you don't have a mind. You're too stupid to take care of yourself. We need a philosopher king to tell us how to live. We need somebody in government to explain things to us. And this comes right out of Plato. If you've ever heard Plato's Republic the philosopher kings know it all. We don't know anything. They need to tell us how to live. You have to believe in reason. You have to believe in individualism. And only then can you defend capitalism. Only then is capitalism grounded in a proper morality and epistemology. And only then can you convince people and convince the world of the virtues of capitalism. So Rand was an advocate for capitalism. Maybe the greatest defender of capitalism ever. But she said that she was only a defender of capitalism because she was a defender of individual rights. The rights of an individual to pursue his life based on his judgment. She was only a defender of individual rights because she held that the purpose of life was your own well-being because she was a rational egress. And she was a rational egress because she understood that human beings were being of reason. Reason, rationality was our means of survival. And that link you cannot break any one of the chains of the result that you want. So I encourage you to read on your hand. Read the books. I think they're incredibly powerful. The novels are amazing. The philosophy is inspiring. It'll affect your life as an individual. I think more than anything it'll also enhance your defense of a political philosophy of liberty and freedom. But the most important thing about her philosophy is what it does to your life that changes your values and inspires you to live the best life that you can live. That's the real power of her ideas. Thank you. Shall we sit? Thank you very much for the lecture. It was really eye-opening to be honest. Watching you speak about the philosophy a lot of questions came up to my mind but first I'd like to turn to our lovely crowd. If there are any questions feel free to ask them now.