 So, hi everyone, and welcome to another web meetup of ARI Europe. So today we have with us again, Yaron Bruk, you probably already know Yaron, he's a chairman of the board of ARI, he's the host of the Yaron Bruk show. He has co-authored some books that I encourage everyone to read such as Equalities Unfairth and the latest one in pursuit of wealth, the moral case for finance. So the character of these meetups is mostly for us to get the skills and to get the know-how to become better activists or public intellectuals or better in our career in general. So I think today's event is going to be on the same theme. So Yaron is going to talk about his journey as a public intellectual, his journey as a thinker, and he's going to talk about things such as how you can be a better communicator, how you can build an audience. So Yaron, thanks so much for being with us, the stage is yours. Sure, thank you. So I'll talk a little bit about my journey, I'll talk about things that I have learned. A lot of what, you know, a lot of the I think value added that I had I presented when we talked about the public speaking seminar that I did with you guys or with the meetup in COVID era. I mean, my, you know, maybe my path to where I am today is I don't know how helpful it is because I never set out to be a public intellectual, I never had any expectation or intention of being a public intellectual or being in the public light as a defender of or argue for objectivism. I really started out my path in objectivism and really my first 23 years on that path were really dedicated just understanding objectivism and just, just applying it to my life and applying it to my career, which was not a public career, it was a career as both a professor and an investment professional. And just, well, I mean, it ended up being that. And so I spent 23 years studying objectivism, not full time obviously, on the side where if I could in whatever circumstance I could to the best of my ability. I always, I guess, I always dabbled with the public side of things. So, Boz is on here. We'll remember that in the 1980s, Boz and I ran a lot of, you know, public events, private events, meetups, a lot of meetups, a lot of meetups at the time where the focus was on objectivism. So I always dabbled in it, but never as a career and never as, I never did I imagine that it would turn into my career. So in many respects, I didn't find my purpose in life until I was 39, right? So until I was really 40 and to some extent by accident, because I was, I was approached to take over the Institute, not something I really expected to ever do. But I always had a foot in the door, if you will, right? I was always running conferences, doing seminars. So the first lesson I would say from that is, is a simple straightforward one is know your stuff, right? If you're going to be an influencer, then you've got to know your stuff well. And so you've got to devote a significant amount of time to whatever it is you're trying to influence people on to really knowing that. And in that sense, it's very difficult, in my view, to be young and a significant public intellectual influencer in objectivism. I don't know that it's impossible, but it's hard because objectivism is hard. It's not hard because there's anything inherent in the ideas that are hard. It's hard because we live in a culture that's the opposite of objectivism and we will grow up in a culture that is opposite of objectivism. And therefore, what we bring to the table is a whole set of experiences and ideas and emotions and that are not consistent with objectivism. So a lot of the time that I spent and I think a lot of us spend when we discover objectivism is undoing the garbage that we were programmed with growing up and that we have to combat all the time because it's everywhere in the culture. And recognizing the true radical nature of objectivism takes a while. And then once you realize how radical it is and how it should affect every aspect of your life, it takes a while to undo all the damage done. And so it's hard. And in philosophy and particularly, the more you're dealing with philosophy, the harder it is, the more it takes time. I heard the story from Leonard Peacock. Take it for, you know, there's the musical, not the musical, there's this phenomena that every time a story is told, it changes a little bit. So take it for what it's worth. This is a second hand, third hand story. But the story is that Einwand gave Leonard a significant gift on his 40th birthday. And basically said, now I can take, start taking you seriously because I can't take anybody in philosophy seriously under the age of 40, right? And I think it's for these reasons. A philosophy acquires massive amounts of integration. And when you're young, you just don't have stuff to integrate. You don't know enough. You haven't lived enough. You haven't experienced enough. Now, again, that's an over, to some extent, an oversimplification. I'm sure there's some really, really bright people out there and brilliant people out there. And I know that Leonard did significant positive work before he was 40, and he had a lot of contributed before he was 40. So I don't want to, I don't want to make it thus that, but by accident, it turned out that I took over the Institute basically when I was almost 40. So I was 39. And maybe it takes that long to be prepared or maybe it took me that long to be ready for that. And I'm not sure I was ready. So it took me, it took me a few years to master a lot of the skills involved in that. So first is be prepared to vote the time, study, understand, integrate and really think about these ideas, try them out. So I'm not saying you have to, I'm saying the opposite of lock yourself up in a room and study objectivism, because the point of objectivism is to live and you can't understand objectivism unless you live it, unless you try to live it, unless you make mistakes in living it, and that includes trying to influence people and making mistakes in influencing people and making mistakes and conveying the ideas and over time getting it right and learning from those mistakes and learning from those experiences. So the idea of getting really understanding the philosophy is not a book understanding, although that's necessary too. It's a life understanding of it. You're not going to influence people unless you're living it. So understand it and then live it, be a exemplar of the philosophy, right? So that people look at you and say, all right, he's not just talking it, he's walking, you know, he's walks the walk. He's, I don't know if that's a term in English English, but it's, you know, he's happy and the philosophy works. You know, if you're miserable, then it's hard and you convey misery, then it's hard to be an advocate for a philosophy of happiness, a philosophy where we argue that the model is the practical and the practical is the model. Well, you have to be a success at something to be able to argue that your philosophy works. So to be an influencer, you have to know it, you have to live it, you have to be successful at something so that you can illustrate that it works for you and this is why people should listen to you because there's a gazillion voices out there. You're competing against, you know, thousands, really millions of voices. Just look at YouTube. And it's not just having something distinct to say, it's not just but it has to be, it has to be perceived by other people as authentic, as real, and as you living it and you having benefited from it. So you have to convey in the way you speak, in the way you convey ideas, in the way you interact with other people, the benevolence and the confidence and the successful implementation of these ideas in your own life. And I see too many young people and I did this when I was young, so I'm not, you know, when you're young, you've done nothing with your life, you believe you're going to be successful but you haven't really proved that to yourself or to anybody else and what you come across primarily is just obnoxious and you haven't learned how to communicate benevolently. So you're mainly just hitting people over the head with a 10 pound hammer, whatever size hammer and, you know, different people use different size hammers to hit people over the head but you're hitting them over the head. You're not trying to influence, you're not trying to convey anything, you're not trying to, you're just trying to, in a sense, which is good. You're trying to practice your own, you're trying to, you're practicing your own ability to communicate and hopefully you're learning that you're not very good at it and that you have to keep trying because the very fact that you're being obnoxious and aggressive and I know there's, there being some young objectivist intellectuals that have gone out and said, no, no, on YouTube and other places. No, no, the way to communicate ideas is with the 10 pound hammer. We, we've got to be obnoxious. Otherwise we're not living up to who we really are. I don't, you know, I think, I think that is a recipe for failure. Um, and, and of course they use as a model, um, Ayn Rand's, um, Q and A's. And I don't know if Ayn Rand's Q and A's is the model for becoming an influence of ideas. I think of writings are, I think of lectures are, I think the content is, and certainly a novel zone, but whether you should learn how to communicate from those Q and A's, I'm not sure that's a strong suit in terms of, you know, bringing people to, to influencing people. So, you know, you've got to think about what really works on people and, and what works for Ayn Rand. Well, what, what works for Ayn Rand, what brought almost all of us and what brings most people to Ayn Rand? It's the novels. It's, it's stories. It's, it's a concretization of the ideas. It's, um, it's something that's not conveyed with a, you know, the lectures in the books are, if they were just lectures, they wouldn't have worked on me. It was the characters. It was the, um, you know, I, I am one of those people who skipped much of John Galt's speech in the first reading of Atlas Shrugged. I know that might be blasphemy, but I did that because I, I want to know what happens. You know, I want to know what happens to these characters. I love the characters. And then I went back and read the, read the speech, but, um, you know, I read enough to get, and I, you know, was getting enough on the novel to get the, the basic point, but to delve into the ideas, I had to go back to it and focus on it. So special, I, you know, so, so, you know, again, devote the time to studying it, um, devote the time to making it your own, devote your time to applying these ideas in your own life. So you were successful and happy and, and, and, uh, in a benevolent, you know, you have to be benevolent in order to exude benevolence when you talk to other people. Um, so in that sense, one of the things is take your time. The, you know, it takes time to become the influencer. It's very rare that somebody, it just happens. Um, and it only just happens to people who are usually already in the mainstream or, or, of leveraging some shift in the culture that already exists, right? And then they, they jump on a bandwagon, but if you're really radical, if you're really trying to influence the culture in a new direction, it's going to take time to build an audience. It's going to take time to refine your skills. It's going to take time to get good at what you do and to, uh, and, and, and to, and to be a really good communicator about these things. Now, for most people, I'd say one, and I think I talked about this in the public speaking, um, talk that I gave, one thing that's important is, is to, and it fits into everything we've talked about so far is, is to specialize once you have, once you know objectivism as a philosophy, most people to become good influencers are going to have to specialize in some area within the philosophy, in some application of it, in something specialization is good, not detached from context, not detached from the broad set. Right. There's a, there's this thing about specialization is for, what is it, and so something. No, I mean, you, you, you don't want to be so narrow that that's all you do, but within the context of understanding and knowing, applying and living a whole philosophy in terms of knowledge, specialization is actually crucial. I am not, and I would never go out and give a talk on the objective of epistemology. I don't know it. I mean, I know it enough to apply it to my life. I know it enough to apply it to everything else that I need to talk about, but I don't know it enough to teach it. I can't teach it. And I, and I, and that's true of, of, of a lot of the philosophy called philosophy and not a philosophy. I don't call myself a philosopher as a consequence. So find an area to specialize in. And if you think about when I started to become influential vis-a-vis the culture, started to get a name out there, started to get, I noticed and identified and people became interested in me. It was when I specialized. I wasn't out there talking about objectivism. I was out there talking about font policy. I was talking about the response to 9-11. It's 9-11 is what, you know, gave me, maybe visible in the culture. It was not being the CEO of the Ironman Institute. It was not any of the other issues we discussed. It was the fact that I was, and we'll get to this, that I was out there, I was vocal, I was controversial. I was willing to say things that nobody else was willing to say. And I was, but I knew my stuff, right? I could talk about this. They could throw any question at me. And suddenly you start gaining respect of other public intellectuals within the field. They start inviting you to places. You gain respect among television personalities. And then in my case, it broadened out beyond just font policy. But my first foot in the door, the way I established myself was as an expert in the US, at least in the US response to 9-11. And that, that had a profound impact on my career. I don't know that it would have, I think the path would have been completely different, if not for what we did after 9-11. So, so specialized, no, a particular area really, really, really well and know how to talk about it in depth. I, you know, just to tell you an insight story. You all know Alex Epstein, I assume, and in my case, for fossil fuel. And I hired Alex into the Institute. I guess not a lot of people know we even worked at the Institute, but I had Alex into the Institute, basically out of college. And Alex worked at AOI for, I think, eight years. And I'd say there was a chunk of those years where we fought constantly because I wanted him to specialize. And he wanted to be a generalist because it's Alex. And if I can say so, he knows everything. And he does. He's super smart, right? And he's super smart. Why I had him. But I said, no, Alex, you're never going to know everything. You need to specialize. And he resisted that and he fought that for a long time. And it's only when I finally got him, you know, I was his boss. I could, I could, I could force him, I guess. And he was interested, you know, he was doing stuff on Rockefeller. And it's only when he, in a sense, fell in love with Rockefeller and energy. And he starts seeing a world open up in the whole area of energy. First, it was just he wanted to specialize in industry. He wanted to be the defender of industry broadly. And then he did the thing on Rockefeller and he found this world called energy. And now he's like a world class expert on energy. And so he can go and debate almost anybody on energy. And he can, he knows everything there is to know about the field. And people take him seriously because he now is an expert. And I think he's become much bigger and much more prominent and much more influential because of that than he could ever be if he was just a generalist objectivist. Now he's influencing people with ideas related to objectivism without most of them even knowing that he's an objectivist, although I think most of them discover it ultimately. So he is influential in the Department of Energy. People in the Department of Energy know who he is and have read his books and he's influencing their decisions, although maybe less so lately. He's influential with all companies and all kind of all companies and with employees and CEOs and all over the industry. He is now well known, but that would have never happened. As smart as he is, as good of a writer as he is, as good of a thinker as he is. I don't think without him specializing. And I think Alex would agree with everything I just said about that history. So get to know an area really well, understand how objectivism applies to it, understand how you want to influence people. And then you can broaden from the area of expertise. Now, I never did that. So I'm going to count an example. So I specialized in foreign policy, but I kind of hated it. So as soon as I could, I got away from that and went back to what I previously specialized in, which is finance and economics, and then have gone kind of broader from that. But the foreign policy gave me credibility. The finance gives me credibility. And being the CEO of the Ironman Institute gave me credibility. And then you can expand beyond that from there to broaden into, you know, talking about more things and a wider variety of things. But for most people, and for most people, specialization makes sense. And even with even, you know, I'm a generalist and I worry sometimes going into a debate that somebody will bring up something that I can't answer because I haven't really spent enough time thinking about this particular issue because I'm too spread thin. Now, luckily, my opponents are usually not smart enough or not knowledgeable enough. Luckily, I'm not my own opponent because I've got much better arguments against me than they do. But it's a worry you shouldn't have. And if you're a specialist, you wouldn't have because you would know everything about the topic. And you would never be in a position where you had a fudge or you had to you would be able to answer every single question and you want to get to that point. And then you could convey this complete confidence, this complete certainty, encompass. And the source of that is this philosophy and my expertise. But I know too many people have known my whole life. People who thought that because they knew philosophy, they knew everything. Right. Because philosophy is the most fundamental, right? Philosophy is the the root of everything. Right. And then I, you know, I knew an objectivist economist who thought that because that economics was fundamental to everything and everything was grounded in economics and if you knew economics, you'd know everything. And I knew an objective psychologist who thought the same thing about psychology. They come to view their expertise as the key to everything. That's also dangerous. Right. The fact that you're an expert doesn't mean that that's the only thing that's important. It's a way for you to leverage that expertise, ultimately to show the impact of philosophy on everything through the fact that you can show it through this one. This one vertical, this one area of expertise. So you have to know the philosophy, but then you have to know something specific and you have to be good at it. And then, you know, you have to do what intellectuals have to do. And that means you have to basically engage in two activities, which is to write and to speak. And if I had a prioritize between the two, I would put writing as the highest priority. You have to write and write and write and write. And until you write, it's not always clear that you know what you're talking about. You know, until you put it in in paper, you actually have forced to write it and edit it and get the formulation right. You often realize you don't know it very well until you have to put it in writing. You know, this is why if you if you take the OEC, I think it's great because they even if you take it as an auditor, you do the writing assignments, it'll force you to put your thoughts into writing. And suddenly discover, do I really know this? They really understand this. Could I give a real example in writing that's really logically you know, a concretization of this point? And it's and you discover it's not as easy as just doing it in conversation. That's because conversation is loose and writing is rigorous. The teaching has a very similar impact when you have to teach a class, but public speaking is not public speaking is much easier in that sense. It's much looser. It's much more femoral. So right, right, right. And and and if you can, you know, write articles, get them published, get them distributed, get them out there. If you write long pieces, then publish the long pieces, but then write short pieces that advertise the long piece, right? Because nobody reads long pieces and like they've got good reason to read the long piece. So write up ads, write little blobs, write Twitter sentences, right? You know, market the stuff that you write, get it out there. And the way to market it is to write the same thing in more and more and more condensed format to get it out through all these different channels so that people find you. If you have access to the media, you know, write press releases and get them out to the media, you know, or the equivalent of press releases these days is probably Twitter. It's probably you tweet and you and you and you send them to particular journalists you want, the particular producers you want. And then you try to get you try to get on the news. By the way, Nicos, I was supposed to be this morning. I was supposed to be in the BBC for an hour long interview. And they decided to cancel because they were basically on a Donald Trump death watch, so they decided to cancel me. I was supposed to be debating some leftist on the future of global economy post COVID on one of the BBC's main shows. So hopefully they'll reschedule and I'll be back on it. I mean, writing is how serious people find out about you. I mean, I hate to say it, but serious people don't watch. They don't get introduced to you through YouTube, typically. I think most other public intellectuals read, most intellectuals read and they do podcast, they do YouTube as well, but they primarily read and they get their primary knowledge from reading. And so if you want other influences to read your stuff, then you have to write. And I guess I didn't say this, but a main way to become an influencer and a main way to grow your audience is to find other influences who like to get you involved with them. That is to get other influences that like you to respect you. You know, in the post 9-11 world, you know, I got to do events, many events with Daniel Pipes, who was a big shot on this issue, right? And Daniel and I developed a real good relationship, a very friendly relationship. I got to do events with Fleming Rose, the guy who published the Danish cartoons, who also became a friend and we did a lot of events together. And again, you grow the audience and you gain credibility because they have their own audiences. I, you know, what's her name? I forget. But anyway, there was a whole world out there, a farm policy radicals at the time, many of whom were pretty good. And we got to use there the fact that they were already influencers to leverage that to be more influential, to be more influential, they institute to be more influential, me to be more influential. Ilan Juno today has a lot of context because he's leveraged that in the farm policy world. He knows a lot of influences. They know him. And it's partially because he wrote a lot of books. He wrote he's written articles and he wrote books. And it's and it's partially because he's participating in events where they've participated in. So you've got to write, write, write, and then you've got to get yourself out there. You've got to be places where other people are. You again, you can't lock yourself in a room. You can't be an influencer from the basement. You've, you know, although, I guess, Biden's trying to win an election from the basement, so maybe it's possible. But you've got to you've got to get out there. You've got to be engaged with the world. You've got to go places where you might not typically go. You've got to engage with people. You've got to you've got to shake hands. You've got to be on a stage. You've got to be on panels, be on debates. You've you've got to be on TV. You've got to be on social media. You've got to be out there expressing your views and engage with the world. And and the results, you know, often you don't know what the results are going to be, right? Often you don't know who you're reaching and how many people you're reaching and in what way you're reaching them. To this day, I don't know the extent of my reach. I mean, maybe it's less than what I think. Maybe it's more. It's almost impossible to actually tell them out of the influence you actually have. I mean, some positive on the positive side, you know, the first time I don't know if it was Razi or Niko's approach, Douglas Murray to do an event with me, Douglas's response was, oh, yeah, I know you're on book. I've read his stuff. I like, I like him or I like it or something like that. That's why I didn't know Douglas Murray knew anything about me. Didn't know who I was could could, you know, so that was that was cool because he was a big shot and the fact that he had read my stuff or knew who I was was cool. It was cool. I just can't. I just got contacted a few days ago by a very large YouTube channel, a guy who runs a very large YouTube channel. I know 500,000 subscribers who does these long interviews. So I like two, three hour long every interview. And I never heard of the guy, but he's got this massive influence, massive thing. And he wants to do an interview. And in one of the emails, he says, you know, I've been a fan of yours for years. What the hell? Right. So I'm taping a three hour interview with him on Thursday. So it's it's stuff like that that you don't know. But the only reason that happened is the one thing I have done certainly over the last, you know, over the last 17 years is put myself out there. Go to the gone to the conferences gone to give presentations. Sometimes five people show up. I mean, some of my talks have been very depressing because nobody, but you've got to be out there and you've got to do stuff. And, you know, the ups and downs of a podcast or a YouTube channel, you know, it's it's misery. I can understand now all the, you know, when, when, you know, when Leonard always used to complain and and now I, the older I get, the most sympathetic I get to Leonard in a bad mood, right? Because, yeah, it's all the stuff you do stuff and you don't know. And then once in a while, something good really happens. But the rest of the time, you just don't know. So, you know, there's a there's something in the New Testament. The only passage in New Testament I like, I guess, is if you got to you got to set your bread upon the water and you just don't know what results are going to come. You don't know how it's going to come back to you. Now, Jesus uses that in the altruistic sense. You got to sacrifice because it'll come around. But you've got to put yourself out there. And and you've got to risk saying wrong stuff. You've got to take risks. You've got to risk not knowing what you're doing. You've got to risk debating. You've got to I think I've told the story about my first media appearance. My first television appearance ever was in nineteen ninety nine, I think. So about a few months before I was going to become the executive director of the Admin Institute, it was up in San Francisco. And I did it with one of the objectivists, Gary Hall. Some of you might remember Gary and Gary and me and two leftists on this panel on television at a local TV station. And basically when Leonard saw that, he said, you want hopeless, you'll never be able to, you know, media is out for him. He'll never be able to do media. He'll never be, you know, he was it was it was just so bad. Everything on that show, I did wrong and I had no idea what I was doing. And, you know, what I said was wrong. The way I sat was wrong. There were every everything was just it was just awful. It was just awful. But, you know, you got to you got to start somewhere. And and then you keep you keep getting better and you keep improving. And the key to that is is you got to you got to consciously work at getting better at whatever it is that you do. I remember the first time I taught. I mean, I know the number of teachers here. But first time I taught, I barely knew what I was teaching. I barely knew the material I was teaching. I barely understood it myself. And I was pathetic. And it was not it's not a fun experience standing in front of a classroom and realizing you don't really know what you're talking about. And the way to deal with that is to go back to your office and figure it out quickly and get better at it and just can't and make sure that you know everything you're about to talk about. So that you never have to experience that embarrassment of I'm winging it. And it's the students don't know, right? The students almost never know, right? It's you know, that's what's really bad. You know, you're winging it. And if you have any pride, then you don't you won't tolerate it. You tolerate that in yourself and therefore you'll constantly try to improve and you'll constantly try to make yourself better. And you know, so I became a good teacher by focusing on what I identified as I was doing wrong and then constantly working and fixing it and constantly trying to improve it and getting better at it. So so I think those are, you know, a lot of the kind of the key principles. I'd say that the one thing today is that the social media plays a disproportionate disproportionate role today than I mean, obviously it's new. So in the past, there was no social media and it seems to be increasing in the influence, not decreasing. And it's a major way in which people discover you and discover what you're about and and and everything. So you can't ignore it. It's there's no way, I think, today to become an influencer in a broad sense. I'm not, you know, you could certainly in a narrow sense in academia or in a in a particular expertise where you know the influencers and you know exactly who you're going after. But if you're if you're looking for more broad influence, even in the area of expertise, if you're trying to reach larger numbers of people, there's just no way to get away from social media. And and you have to figure out how it works and you have to figure out how to master it and be good at it. And and social media and YouTube and Facebook and all this stuff, you have to be to some extent sensationalist. You have to be willing to you have to be willing to say outrageous things where you know the full context, but the audience is not necessarily going to know it. Right. And it's really hard for me. I find it very difficult because to say something that I know the audience doesn't have the context for what exactly I mean, but it just as a hook to get them to read something or as a hook to get them to do something else. And I have marketing consultants who keep telling me that I'm way too moderate. I'm way too, you know, too, you know, like my my titles of my my podcast should be much more aggressive and much more, you know, upsetting and much more, you know, I, I, I'm going to talk about one, this, you know, two, this, three, this, right? No, you can't do that. Yeah, you have to say, you know, the example that's coming into my head is not one I want to repeat. So what would be outrageous? Maybe tell us that example. No, I don't, I'm really in trouble enough. So, I mean, we, you know, I wanted, you know, the last show I did, it was like Katie Porter, Representative Katie Porter is wrong about, I don't know, the farmer industry, right? And the marketing guy says, no, you got to say Katie Porter wants to wants people to die of lack of medication, you know, something like that, right? Because that'll catch attention. Well, what's he talking about? Katie, you know, Katie Porter is a US Congresswoman who's doing, who's become famous doing these interrogating former executives. And she's got a little blackboard and she writes stuff down. And she's, she's just dishonest and horrible and, and, and, and malicious. But she comes across as very rational because she's got a white board and she write numbers down, you know, which is, which is pseudo rationality. So you've got to provoke in social media, which has not come natural to me. I mean, I provoke when I'm in a, in a Q&A and somebody pisses me off with an answer, and then I can get, you know, pretty provocative. But it's not the first thing that jumps into my mind. How can I trigger somebody? How can I get them upset? How can I, you know, that, but that's what works in social media. The other thing you have to be conscious of that, they're all kind of gimmicks, the tricks, the ways in which to get people's attention. I'm not good at that. How to get other influences, attention, how to get other people to retweet you out of all of this. And I was just saying before the show, Facebook has become a complete black box to me. I kind of understood Facebook like a few weeks ago, but they've changed everything. And now I don't have any idea what's going on in Facebook. I have no clue how it works. I don't know anything. So I'm completely blind at Facebook, which maybe is not a bad thing. So so my solution to that is basically hire people to do it. So my goal is to basically hire social media people to do the social media stuff. So I don't have to deal with it because it's it's getting so hard. So I've already got somebody who's, you know, who who does Tik Tok and Instagram for me. So I don't know if you know, but I have a Tik Tok account because in one of my videos went like semi vital on Tik Tok. I had 70,000 views on a video on Tik Tok on Instagram. And then I've got an account of Paula. I've never done anything on Paula, but, you know, YouTube and Facebook and Twitter. And there's no end to it. So but you have to do it because it's that's where people engage. It's where people engage with quote ideas. But the thing to remember is what you do on social media is not intellectual work. Don't pretend what you do in social media is marketing. That's it. It's marketing. No intellectual work gets done in social media. Social media is the way to market the intellectual work that you do. You still have to write. You still have to give a talk. You still have to present a lecture seminar, something with substance. And social media is just to provoke people to discover that content. No intellectual work is done in 144 characters. No intellectual work. It's done in the common section of Facebook. People delude them. So I know influence happens. The only influence you can do there is to get people to somewhere where they can be influenced. And that's where your work is, your books, your articles, your, your talks, your lectures, your classes. And you can see if you look at a really influential public intellectuals, we have today, right? What's influential about Jordan Peterson or was is not. I don't know. You know, he's kind of disappeared over the last year or so because of illness is not Twitter or even Facebook or even YouTube. It's YouTube, but it's the long content on YouTube. It's the fact that when he became famous, people discovered all these old videos of him teaching classes in psychology and then and then created videos of the old videos and got them out there. But it is the and then he did those lectures on the Bible. And these are long lectures. They're like two hours each and people went to listen to them. So once you can create this viral thing, then you've got to have content. Otherwise, people lose interest in you like that. Ben Shapiro does a two hour show every day on politics. You know, whatever you think of the quality of it, the little stuff that he does is just to feed that substantial content. He writes books, Ben Shapiro says, what, 10, 12 books or something? It's insane how many books that guy writes. Maybe as other people writing for them, I don't know. And of course, Jordan Peterson became even bigger when to get a book out. So there's no shortcuts in terms of doing the actual substantive, intense work that has to be done, the intellectual work and presenting it in a format that other people can consume it, which is which is books and long lectures and articles and courses and things like that. That there's no there's no replacing that social media. Again, is marketing is marketing. It's not influenced. Just like an argument with your body is not influenced. It's it's just to stimulate. It's just they have to read a book. They have to read out the show. Well, they're going to have to, you know, watch a several lectures by a man or read essays or something. All right. All right, let's let's take some questions questions. So let's start with Maria Lin. How many people actually set out to be public intellectuals? Because, you know, I'm Rand at nine knew she was going to be a novelist. I don't think anybody at nine says I'm going to be a public intellectual. So how did you know when either you'd become one or you aspired to be one? And who are some other like I would say there are other Tara Smith, I think, is a public intellectual, maybe by default. Greg Salmiere and do you consider Paul Krugman a public intellectual? Yeah, Paul Krugman is definitely a public intellectual of great influence. He's an evil bastard, but it doesn't change the fact that he's an unbelievably influential public intellectual. Look, I don't know that anybody at age nine decides they want to be a public intellectual, but suddenly Leonard Peacock, once he read The Fountainhead, wanted to be a public intellectual. Remember Leonard's story that he read Atlas Shrug and he said and one of his responses was there were many positive. But one response was there goes my career. There's nothing to say anymore. She it's all in the book. The world is going to change. It's going to be it's going to be the right world. There's no there's no work to be done. She's written it all. But he he knew at the age of 17, 18, when he read The Fountainhead, that he wanted to be this is the fight that he wanted to engage in. This is what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. This is what what he was going to be. Suddenly on car got a many of the intellectuals that came to the Institute as intellectuals. This is their career. This is what they want to be. This is what they want to do. Most people I don't think most people go into academia think in terms of public intellectual. They want to teach. They want to have influence within the realm of academia. They want to do research. Some of them while they're in academia say they want to branch out wider than that. And they want to have an influence on a but you know, you'd have to ask them at what point does that happen? It's some it never does. Some of them stay, you know, focused and narrow and that's it. So I think it happens to different people in different places. I mean, I was was never on that path. I mean, I'm an engineer who got an MBA and got a PhD in finance and was a finance professor and during the years of finance professor, I wanted to branch a bit out. But so I ran Lyceum, but never never thought of that until really I joined the Institute and really started giving lectures on 9 11 that really became a bigger idea. And even then the concept of public intellectual didn't probably didn't arise until about 10 years ago in my mind and what that meant and who was a public intellectual who wasn't and all of that. So I think some people do when they're young, but and usually they view academia as a path or academic studies as a path to achieving that. But there are others. I see them on YouTube trying to be public intellectuals to varying degrees of success. Jack. Yes, I'm a little confused, your own. Now, I thought you were going to find out how to be a public influencer in objectivism and I don't know what the other people thought, but maybe that's what they want. And yet you are an influencer in objectivism and yet you claim that you don't know objectivism all that well to teach it and your specialty is finance. So I'm a little confused. Well, I mean, I think you were paying attention, Jack, because I addressed all that first. I said I spent the first 23 years of my life studying objectivism, right, and and and making myself getting to know the philosophy as much as I can. What I said was I'm not an expert in objective epistemology and I couldn't teach objectivist epistemology. I can't. I could teach aspects of the ethics. I can teach the politics. I can teach a lot of it, but I'm not an expert in every aspect of objectivism and I don't claim to be. And I don't think in order to be an influencer of objectivism, you need to be. It's why I don't present myself as a philosopher. If I was a philosopher, the level of understanding, the depth, kind of issues I would be dealing with and the kind of engagement I would be looking at would be different. I don't think any of you are philosophers. Now, I haven't seen everybody. Maybe there are some philosophers here, but I don't know none of you are philosophers. I don't consider anybody here. And again, I don't can't see everybody here. So if I'm misspeaking, I apologize and expert on the objective epistemology, don't present yourself as such. And if you haven't taught it, you're not an expert on it because unless you teach it or write it, you don't become an expert on it. But I know objectivism and I apply objectivism and everything I do is about objectivism. But what I said was I think you have to have an expertise in a particular field like Alex applying objectivism to energy to a particular area, me finance economics, right? Or foreign policy, but I'm not a foreign policy expert I'm a divorce of objectivism. I'm an objectivist applying their philosophy to a particular area called foreign policy or to a particular area called politics at a particular area. And I am relatively speaking a generalist. So I am less of a specialist than most people, but I encourage people to be specialist because it's hard to be a generalist and be good at it. And it's not, I don't think it's the most effective way to do it. It just happened to be the way my life evolved, but I don't recommend it to others. So here's a relevant question, which is Jack wanted to follow up. So I don't know, but I should thank you. Thank you, Jack. So a relevant question. By the way, I've copy pasted the question. I'm not sure who asked what, but anyway, how do you learn to practice objectivism and applies to your life? So you said, okay, you you read it, but then what's the level of practicing and to add one extra level? What's then is the path towards advocating it successfully? So that's a big topic and how to practice it, but it's very similar to what I said about teaching. So you teach something and sometimes you have this feeling. I don't really understand this and I'm faking it. Well, in life, it's the same thing, right? You make a decision and you say and and and usually, you know, you know, you get this vague notion of did I really did I really practice independence when I made that decision? To what extent was I really influenced by other people? I need to think about that, right? And it's not about beating yourself over the head. Oh my God, I wasn't independent and I'm a bad person, right? I'm not exercising the objective as much as it's about learning from it. Was I independent or wasn't it? In what way did I allow person X to influence my thinking? Am I letting my emotions interfere with my rational thinking? I need to pay more attention to this. I need to get better at this. That's what I mean by practicing it. It's monitor your own life just like you monitor your teaching just like you monitor your anything you do professionally monitor your own life in the context of am I practicing the virtues? I lied. Why did I do that? That's I know it's wrong, but why did I do it? How do I how do I automatize so that I don't do it again? How do I better integrate this idea of honesty into my life so that it never happens again, right? I have this weird relationship with this person. What's going on here? So it's about thinking about your own life. It's about introspecting about why you make the decision that you make, why you have the relationships that you have, why you interact with some people in one way and with other people in another way. It's about constant monitoring of your own life, particularly when you're young, particularly when you've just read the ideas when you have it in a sense, automatize some of the virtues so that it's just second nature. It's still a principle that you're trying to apply. Well, constantly question. Am I applying it? Am I doing it right? Am I to be aware of that and don't don't bash yourself and are doing it because for not being perfect because perfection is something you work towards. It's something you're attaining. It's not something you can read out with shrug and then just be. It doesn't work like that. Life doesn't work like that. Objectivism doesn't work like that. It requires massive amounts of integration. In that sense, it requires massive amounts of practice. You have to practice being independent, which means notice when you're not and focus on being in the next situation where you have an opportunity. So the monitoring is really, really, really important and it involves introspection. Introspection is hard for most of us. Most of us just want to act. We want to go out there and do stuff. We want to go out there and be productive or be argumentative or be whatever it is. But to sit and think about am I doing the right thing? What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Some people are good at it. Some people are not. I'm not particularly good at it. In my life, I'm much better at it in my profession. So the challenge is to apply it to your life and do it in your life constantly. By the way, was there a woman you were looking for by any chance, Wafa Sultan? Wafa Sultan. Thank you. Yes. So Maria Len solved the riddle. Wafa Sultan, very, very courageous woman. Bob, I'm getting to you in one second. Let's go to one more written question. So you mentioned being open. So you mentioned, for example, that Alex Epstein is not like in your face nowadays that he's an objective. So the question is, how does being open or closeted affect influence? What would be different if Alex Epstein's was more open regarding his objectives? So I don't think Alex is closeted, right? So I don't think he hides it. I just don't think he puts it out there in the forefront. And I think he'd have a lot less influence. So I think a lot fewer doors would have opened. I think a lot more people would have resisted him right off the bat, and wouldn't have given him an opportunity to show his value. And only then said, oh, he's an objectivist, a man thing. That's interesting. I didn't expect somebody to be an objectivist in this competent, this nice, this professional, this whatever, fill in the blank. Oh, wow. He can be an atheist and a decent human being. That's a shock to a lot of people. A lot of people are shocked by that idea, particularly in the South. And a lot of these CEOs of all companies are religious. All the ones I've met are being religious. And they, like Atlas Shrugged, and they'll engage with me and then somebody will whisper in the ear, you know, he's an atheist. And then it's like a big steel door comes shutting down, right? And they want to have nothing to do with you because they have this very negative view of atheists. So the fact that he could get in and show his value and talk to them and for them only then to discover makes a huge difference. Now, it doesn't work for everybody, right? I can't hide the fact that I'm an objectivist. So it won't work for me. And you know, so it depends on what you're doing and where you are. And you know, some people have to stay closeted for a real closet for a long time. Because for example, in academia, you might want to stay closeted until you have tenure. And you might want to stay closeted a little bit longer than that until you have the kind of real respect of your colleagues before they would be willing to accept the fact, oh my God, and he's an objectivist. But at least if they respect you and they see that, you know, and that would open a lot of doors. So I don't think there's one answer to how closeted you should be and for how long. It depends on your particular circumstances. It depends on what you're doing. The one thing I would warn you of that staying too closeted does something to your own psychopistemology and to your own mind. And it makes it hard to then come out and have the philosophy because you're not integrating with the philosophy. So the philosophy becomes harder. The more you try to shun it to the side, the harder it becomes to fully integrate. And it might take a while when you want to come out to have it fully work. But everybody has to make that decision within the context of their own lives in the context of their own career and the kind of influence they want to have and the kind of people they want to have influence on. So today I received an email by one of my students in one of my modules on study skills. I have put a couple of Alex Epstein's podcast and I know that this student is an anti-capital. It's like more social science students. And I got an email that was 10 lines. How much he enjoys the podcast and says I even emailed this Epstein guy. So it's, yeah, at some point maybe he'll be disillusioned but even that's got the idea that you know what having these goals in life and aspiring towards human flourishing is a good first step towards bridging your context with people, as he'd say. Okay, one of the big mistakes people make and I see this all the time is assuming that people who disagree with them are bad people or that everybody's a leftist. I know a lot of people who believe this. Everybody's a leftist is an evil person. It's just a horrible person. It's just off. As if the arguments against leftism are so self-evident that it should just be obvious. And it's just not true. It's just not true. A lot of people are leftist for benevolent reasons and then they need to discover that it's wrong and it's your job to help them do that and you have to do it in an appropriate way. Bob and then Abtim. I want to disagree with you slightly on the value of the social media. And you said that it was, you really couldn't make any intellectual points and with the, as far as the thrust of your talk goes, it's correct. It's not a great intellectual influencer. But in fact, you only can change one mind at a time and you can address particular minds via social media. And I have seen effective intellectual discussions rare, but they do exist. Yeah, I mean, I think in the old days when you were running the forums and where it was more discussions and people were actually there for a period of time and they communicated. And once in a while, I guess you see that on Facebook where people stick with it and they're going through it and there's actually a debate and discussion that you can do it. I don't think you can do it on Twitter. At least I haven't found anything Twitter. But I think, yes, I mean, if you have the right, on my channel, you can't do it on Facebook because my anything I post on Facebook, if there's any kind of discussion deteriorates into name calling and bizarre craziness so quickly that any decent human being would just walk away from it and not engage. So I think the narrower the channel, the more it facilitates one-on-one conversation and where there's not a flood of irrationality coming in to disrupt everything. I think you're probably right. I just think the more social the media is, the less that is possible. In a sense of big groups coming in. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. By point, you can only change one mind at a time. That's right, that's right. Let's go to anything that facilitates a conversation is good. And if you find that you can have a conversation with somebody on Facebook, then that's great. You can do it on Twitter and you can do it on, but Facebook you could probably can because there's no limit to the amount of writing. But it has to be that there's a conversation. Yeah, I've actually had two with two other stubble fields on Facebook. One is very pro pro life, but it was a fruitful discussion. And another one is a lawyer and a cousin actually. But he embodies all that is natural in people who accept religion without thinking that much about it. Yeah. Abtin. Hello. So and so, but let's see how it goes. It's waking up. Maybe turn off the video, Abtin, and then then all the bandwidth is dedicated audio. Maybe that'll be better. No, I think we've lost him. Now we lost you completely. Tell you what Abtin, I'll get back to you. Okay, so let's give it another try. Sorry, Abtin, we can't hear you. So I tell you, we're going to try in a couple of minutes again. I'll take a written question. Okay, can you hear me? See if you can fix. Can hear you better now. Oh, go on. No, go ahead, Nikos. Okay, Abtin, we'll be back to you in five minutes. Let's see. Let's see if it will work. If it will work then. Okay, let's go to another written question. How does knowing your staff comparing importance to knowing the staff, but also the context of your targeted audience? Well, I mean, you have to know it all, right? So I don't, the first thing you have to do is know your stuff because otherwise what are you talking about? Why are you even there, right? So I think the first thing has to be that you know your own stuff and you can't really know the context of the audience. Vis-a-vis your stuff unless you know your stuff. So you have to know first what you're talking about. And then, yes, what the other person knows is crucial. How much they know about your, what you're going to be talking about, what framework are they coming to it with, what myths might they have with regard to it. Yeah, all of that is crucial to get, to get, to be effective with somebody in, in, in conversation or in a, in a large group, you have to appeal to some way to their values, in some way to their life, in some way to something that they're thinking about already. And so you've got to know a lot about their context of knowledge, but it's still true that don't even get on stage if you don't know your stuff. Follow up by Stephanie. How can you really know the audience's context? So to, to elaborate, for example, when you speak to the battle of ideas where it's so many different people from, from all walks of life, how do you use, what's your tactic regarding the context of the audience? Well, there the context is the, the interested intellectual debate, the interested intellectual ideas. Otherwise they wouldn't take a Saturday or Sunday from their life and go and listen to 15 different debates and stuff during the day. You have to assume that they're probably on the left. Well, because I mean, my assumption is that anybody, I mean, this is sad, but it's true that anybody intellectually interested in debates and interesting and why do we have topics is on the left. That's just the reality. The right is much more closed-minded and narrow generally, not exclusively, but generally. So my assumption going into something like that is the context is there, they're interested in ideas, but they're probably from the left and most of the people I'm debating are from the left and they're probably here to listen to them, not to me. And the people who are here to listen to me, it's such a small group. I'm not talking to them anyway because they know what I'm going to say. So that's the context. And then depending on what the topic is, you frame it in that context and it's always a good idea to surprise them in terms of their expectations and what they think you're going to say, it's always good to frame it in a way that that kind of surprises them and shocks them a little bit. But yeah, my experience of going to battle of ideas and I did this in Wales, I did this big festival of philosophy and art. Only in England do they do these things. In America, you would never have a festival of philosophy, intense in the countryside with hundreds of speakers and thousands of people who trek out there just to hear different talks about intellectual topics and philosophy and they had big name philosophers at this thing and it was a big deal and I did, I don't know, three different events, but the fact is 90% of the audience were on the left. It's just the reality and people who think that we should ignore the left and our buddies on the right, we should just interact with them. Supposedly, buddies on the right, I'm missing the point. If you can't get the left, then you can't win. Right. So let's try it. We have some serious of questions about the show and the podcast. Let's try Abdin once more. Abdin, I'm muting you once more. Let's give it another try. Okay. Can you hear me? Yes. Much better. Yes, we can hear you. Trying one more time. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes. Okay, great. Apologies for that earlier. So sort of a two-part question that I think they're related. So where have you seen early intellectuals go wrong? And by early intellectual here, I mean, someone who has a specialization, say even if they're over 40, when they get started, where do they go wrong? And then for you, your own, when you started your podcast four or five years ago, you barely had any listeners when you were starting out. I mean, I remember jokes about why not people giving you a thousand dollars? What would be so crazy about that? And now it's actually happening. So what was the motivation that sustained you when you started? So the first question you're referring to specifically objectivist. Objectivist, we want to go into an intellectual career. Where is it that you've most frequently seen them go wrong as you mentor them? Yeah. It's hard to tell. It's for whatever reason, the ones, they don't have the knack for it. They don't have the knack for communication. You have to love communicating and you have to really want to communicate and you have to be, you have to be willing to invest and develop these skills to communicate. And that includes writing communication. Writing is very hard. There are very few people. I mean, it takes a long time to become a good writer. And a lot of people, I know a lot of people who come into the Institute as a budding intellectuals would think, oh, this could be easy. And then the first time they get a critique on the writing from on car. I just blown away. I just blown away by how they're not quite where they thought they were. And some people learn from that and get better at it and some people don't. And the same thing with communicate with teaching. But writing is harder. But teaching as well, it's just for whatever reason and I don't know what the reason is. They don't seem to have it. The other thing is, and this, this is true generally. I don't find that people are very good at one cognitive skill that I think is essential for being an intellectual. And that skill is integration. It's seeing connection between things that's seemingly unrelated. And integrating your knowledge into a whole. So this is the danger with specialization, right? So this is the flip side of what I said earlier. They become very good at the narrow little field, but they don't are not good then at reconnecting it to the philosophy and reconnecting it and integrating it with everything else that they know. So they get stuck on these specialization and they can't take the big picture of you. So I think those are the two things. One is a difficulty developing the skills, the writing and teaching and speaking. And the second cognitive issue, and maybe the two are related now that I think of it, they probably are related because it affects how you write and in a difficulty in practicing the integration that they're getting the big picture level and then zooming in and then zooming out and zooming in going in and out at various levels and at various points of time integration is generally something I don't find objective is a very good at and they should be because it's like that, you know, that's how cognition works. So big factor within cognition is to integrate and ran used to have that game, right? Concepts in a hat where they used to be able to pull two concepts and find the connections between them and that's a powerful practice and a powerful tool. You have to be able to do that. You have to be able to see it as a whole and not everybody has that capacity for whatever reason. Well, maybe we haven't figured out how to teach it well or how to practice it well enough. What was the second question? How do I keep going in times when it's well, when you started, how did you sustain your motivation when the audience was so small? Well, I mean, for me. I just enjoy the process. You have to enjoy what you're doing. I like speaking about these issues. I mean, I'm almost say I speak to an empty room. I wouldn't, but you know, but you know, some of you know that once in a while I'll go and give a talk and nobody shows up or very few people show up. I don't know. It's happened to be in Ukraine. It happened to me at the University of was it Michigan State or something? Very few people show up. Five, 10 people in the room and in the beginning you go, my God, how am I going to get the motivation to speak to five people? I mean, what a waste of my time. I flew here. I drove all the way. It's freaking cold outside because it's Michigan or whatever. And as soon as I get started, it doesn't matter because I love the process and and it's it's engaging and I find it challenging always, even if I'm talking about the same topic. I've talked about a hundred times. There's always a new spin on it is always a new way of expressing it. There's always so you have to love the process. You have to love what you do. I think that's true in any career you follow, you know, they're going to be there's going to be times where it's not going the way you wanted to go. You better love what you're actually doing and not worry just about the effect. Right. So, right. So let's let's take a couple more questions and then at the 30 past probably we're calling it a day. So a Judith Judith mentioned Stoast Master. By the way, let me remind you if you go to the 24th of if you go back to all their videos on the 24th of May, you are on gave a whole a whole speech and then Q&A on public speaking. So that would be useful. But then she mentioned also welcome to sales. Here's a question is in a way communicating idea similar to sales in terms of the methods things that work or funnels. For example, do you consider your social media being funnels to your books or to your show? Yeah, yes. I think there's a certain similarity. I mean, you have to you have to be aware of the differences so that you can get the good stuff and discard the stuff that's not relevant. But yeah, there's some element of sales in it. There's some element. I mean, the other thing is there's a huge amount to learn about these things from non-objectivist from both watching them do it because clearly they've been more influential than I have from watching them do it. And from what they say about how they do it. So there's there's a there's a lot of knowledge out there about public speaking. Toast Master is a good example of that. A lot of knowledge about how to use social media. A lot of knowledge about marketing. A lot of knowledge about writing books. A lot of good writing courses, speaking courses. So I wouldn't limit yourself to only objectivist in terms of trying to gain knowledge about how to how to grow your influence. There are influences out there who are very good at it and you should learn from them what's relevant to you. Right. So a couple of more questions related to the soul. So the first question is how do you come up with constant with content when you have to do it? So basically every other day and you have to talk for two hours. I don't know how do I come up with content? I read the paper. Right. It doesn't take much. It's more. I worry about the content. Is anybody interesting? Does everybody care? Is this going to get me anything? How do I come up with a title that's interesting? I can talk about pretty much anything. We used to do this little exercise at the Institute where we'd open up a Wall Street Journal on any random page and Anka used to do this to illustrate to some of the younger guys. You're on. What do you think about this story? And I just read the headline and I have time to say because I've got the knowledge integrated to a point where I can comment on a lot of different things. The challenge is I need to know it deeper. So do I know this topic deep enough to talk about it? And is it interesting to anybody except me? And that's the challenge. And I don't know if I, you know, I don't know how well I do it because it's hard to tell by the numbers in the show. Right. So Aptin was very generous. Yes. A lot of people are giving me more money. But it's not clear that that's translating to more viewership. The people who are listening are more passionate, more committed and more generous. But I'm not sure there are more people overall. I mean, June, July, August were the best months I've ever had September and October is not starting out particularly well. So I don't know, you know, I know the formula, right? And I try to avoid the formula. The formula is if all I do is attack the left, my numbers get better dramatically. And I find attacking the left boring. I find attacking the right much more interesting. But if I attack the right, my numbers decline. So that's the quandary is do you, you know, who do you cater to your own interests, which audience? And I'm not saying it's bad that the numbers are high when I take the left because I do attract some of those people. So it's the show is very difficult, very frustrating and difficult in terms of figuring out what to do with it in which direction to take it and how to come up with topics and do it. I do four shows a week. That's four topics a week. You know, I have no producers. I have nobody coming to me. Hey, you should do a show on this. I have to, you know, I'm basically doing myself. I don't do the technical side post production myself. But everything in terms of prep is done myself. So if I had, you know, at least somebody, you know, one of my goals ultimately is to have somebody who's scanning the news, looking at short videos I can comment on doing all that and just feeding me content so that I can then talk about it. That, you know, things like that would, would ultimately when, when the show is making enough money would, would, you know, you know, Ben Shapiro has a team of 20 people working on this pre post production, preparing him writing text, getting the news stories ready, getting video to comment on, getting all that constantly being fed. And it's, you know, now he also does it full time. I don't do this full time. So that's, that's another advantage he has. But it's different topics. I mean, again, if I could just, if I just open up the paper, I could talk about stuff, but I'm not sure you guys would be interested. Shout out by the way to Razzie where every day comes up with a topic for a 20 minute Facebook live for the Daily Objective. Don't even be doing it for a year. I've, I've, I've got like a thousand podcasts I've already done. So I have to come up with a thousand on one topic that I haven't already talked about. And it's not that I know my audience thinks of it. It just bores me to talk about something I've talked about before. So one more question related to the show and then something more general and then we're done. So, okay. So what about the danger and then we'll go to Razzie? What about the danger that you talk about many different topics, but at the same time, you are, let's say, whether you want it or not the face of, of objectivity. And so what about the risk that someone will say, oh, Yaron said this about, for example, Migtau or about sex or about something. Therefore, that's objectivity. I mean, my view is that's their problem. Not mine. I mean, that's your problem. Not mine. You, it's your responsibility to figure out what I, what, whether, what I say is true one, whether what I say is consistent with objectivism to whether you agree with it three and none of those need necessarily be all the same response. It's, I can't, I can't monitor that. I don't pretend to monitor that. I ran did not comment on Trump. I ran did not comment on 9 11. I ran did not comment on questions. I get about sex. I mean, this is your on book, you know, talking about this and I don't, I try to the best of my ability not to contradict the philosophy, but is everything I say true. I'm willing to put all my wealth down. You know, on the case that it's not, I'm sure I make mistakes. I'm sure I'm wrong on some things and some of you call me on it when I am right. I'm sure that, that, that some of the stuff is, is, is, is me speculating. I try to minimize that. I certainly don't say anything. I know is wrong and I try to minimize that, but I am not I ran nobody is and I'm not even Leonard Peacock. I'm no way close to Leonard Peacock, right? I'm just not and I don't even consider myself a philosopher's in that sense. I don't think I can be the voice of objectivism because you would have to be a philosopher. So I'm your on, you know, I happen to be chairman of the Board of the Ironman Institute. I'm a generalist. I'm not a philosopher and you guys need to figure out whether this is consistent with your ideas and remember, most of my audience are not committed objectivist. Most of my audience, I'm trying to get to read Ironman. That's the goal. Once you've read Ironman and once you really delved into Ironman's ideas, how much are you learning from me? I mean, some, I think, but not it's not. I'm not a, I'm not, you know, discovering new ideas in, in anything dramatically new. I'm teaching how to apply it maybe in a different context. I'm reading the news where you don't want to read the news. So I'm giving you a different perspective on it, but my real goal is to try to get as many people as I can to objectivism. And then once they're there, I mean, most committed objectivist that I know, don't listen to my show. And that's fine. You know, that doesn't worry me. It doesn't upset me. It, I don't know that I would listen to my show. I don't listen to any other objectivist show. I listen to Leonard when he's on and I listen to particular topics to other people on particular topics when I happen to be interested. But, you know, but so, so my perspective is, and remember when I'm doing the show, who I'm talking to. I'm not talking to the person who's been on the, you know, an objectivist of 40 years and I don't know everything. Right. Rosie. You are unmuted. Aimen has a question, but can you hear us or does he need to get up? Well, you, Rosie. Aimen, go ahead, speak up. Uh, so you're on, is there anybody who has a show or a podcast, which has a combination of style, content and, you know, success that you really admire? So, like, is there a list of people that you, you look at, maybe you want to emulate or you, you think that's a kind of audience, a kind of style of show that you'd like to have? I mean, I would separate that into two. There are a lot of podcasters who I admire. Right. Who I think have amazing style and an amazing ability to communicate with the audience. And I mean, just like there are writers who I admire core writing, who I don't necessarily agree with the content or like the content, but whose, whose style is, I mean, I can think of the guy who wrote a tipping point, Malcolm Gladwell. I mean, if you've ever listened to his podcast, they're really good. You know, I learned stuff from them. Um, he has this amazing voice and style about him and warmth and bringing everybody in and storytelling and all of that. And he prepares like crazy and it's all scripted and it's organized and he has beautiful production values, but that's not me. Right. I don't want to emulate that. Right. And I couldn't. I don't think I could and I, it's not, it's not who I am. Um, so there's a lot of people like that who I admire what they do. There are a lot of finance podcasts who do a really good job and cover a lot of interesting topics and going depth on issues that I find interesting, but I can emulate them. Is anybody that I would like to emulate? Um, no, I don't think I watch anybody who has, um, I don't think I watch enough people to find, to found somebody. I mean, um, I mean, I'm open to if somebody has any suggestions on anybody who does something similar to what I do, but it's better. Um, that I'm, I'm quite happy to try to, you know, I'm not a good, particularly good interview. Or at least I don't think so because as I've said on my show a number of times, I'm just not that interested in what other people think. Jonathan says the learner peak of podcast. Yeah. Well, the learner pickup podcast was, was, but I can't emulate that and I don't try. That would be. Yeah. I mean, you have no idea how much prep Leonard put into every single one of those podcast, what are those shows? Not the podcast, the radio shows that he did. The podcast was just him answering questions. So, um, I mean, that wasn't a show, but when he did his radio show, the amount of time everything was scripted, everything was ready. I could never put that kind of amount of prep into, into what I do now. And I don't think you should. And Leonard knows that's why he couldn't do it anymore because it was just too much work. It just overwhelmed, it was overwhelming. The amount of prep you had to do, particularly doing it himself with, I guess, one, Andrew, Andrew, um, assisting him. Um, no, I mean, I wish I could interview like Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan's a great interviewer. I'm not. Um, because I'm not interested, right? I'm not interested that much in interviewing people. Um, yeah, I don't know that there's anybody who stands out that I would like to be like. I know the things that I would like to do better on my show. Like I should look at the camera mode. Um, so I know, I know the things that would improve the show and at some point, you know, we'll work on them, but, uh, but it requires a whole other level of, of, um, prep. But yeah, so I don't know. I mean, I'm open to suggestions of people and I don't watch that many people and I don't watch YouTube, uh, other podcasts and stuff. I listen. I dabble in podcasts. I listened to bits and pieces here and there. Um, and, uh, you know, I, I, I, I, I most of them are interviews. I like listening to interviews. I don't like interviewing. Joseph. Yeah, hello. Um, I was contemplating, uh, integration between writing, speaking skills and entrepreneurship. Uh, is it like preferable to just specialize on one side or, or do you think that those can be integrated well? You mean the writing, speaking and entrepreneurship? Yeah. Yeah. I definitely think they can be integrated and I think to some extent to be a public intellectual, you have to be entrepreneurial, right? Because you have to be a self-starter and you have to have newer. You have to be able to put yourself out there. Um, there are some people who are good writers and who find it almost impossible to become good speakers. There's some people are good speakers who find it really difficult to become good writers. The ideal, which I think is possible is to be both. Um, Alex Epstein is a good writer and a good speaker. I think he's a better writer than a speaker and I think he could be a better speaker, but he, but he has the capacity to be both. Don Watkins, I think is a good writer and a good speaker and could become even a better speaker if he worked at it. So I think that people who can do both and it's that's ideal if you can. Um, but not everybody can or not everybody. Maybe everybody can, but some people require much more effort than others in terms of entrepreneurial. I mean, obviously Alex has combined it again. He's a writer, speaker and entrepreneurial, right? Some people are not entrepreneurial, you know, and for them, it's better to be an intellectual within a framework like at the end of an institute and not go off and do your own thing. So I think, yeah, it's ideal. If you can combine all three, but it's not necessary to becoming a successful influencer. So last question, again, a written question. So how can you be both provocative and benevolent? I don't know. Um, I think, look, so I don't know. I mean, I think different people view me, for example, differently. So there's definitely people who think I'm angry and, uh, and, uh, and a little obnoxious and, and so on, but, but I, I, at the end of the day, I think that's a minority. I maybe I'm wrong, but, um, so I try to be, uh, provocative and, but also in the way in which I communicate ideas, try to be, you know, friendly and, and, and, and smile and, and be funny to the extent that I can be funny. Um, and, um, and at the end of the day, focus in on the good, right? Um, and so while what goes viral is the provocative, right? What goes viral is the slack, you know, coming out in favor of sweatshops. But if you even think about my answer about sweatshops, my focus in the answer about sweatshops is on the fact that sweatshops make people lives better. The people working in the sweatshops actually benefit from that's the focus and my anger is that people who want to deny them the ability to make their lives better. So the, the focus in the sweatshops, even though kind of the initial motivation, what captures people is, you know, you spoiled rotten European middle class, whatever that gets that. Oh, what's he talking about? But what hopefully what people get from it is that I want people to live a better life and I want people to live a better life, even if they happen to be born poor in China or in Indonesia and somewhere like that. And that I've used sweatshops as a mechanism by which they can become, they can improve their lives and there is no other. Um, you have to get to that. It has to in the end be that where you're going is something that's pro life, something that's pro flourishing, human flourishing. Otherwise, yes, otherwise you come off as just angry and, you know, negative.