 Okay, let me start with an apology. I can't speak French. I don't understand a word. I don't know what Alain just said. Other than he mentioned Donald Trump a few times, and egoist, that's about it. That's my vocabulary, friends. So I apologize, and if I repeat or contradict, I hope not, but anything Alain said, then I apologize, and hopefully we'll have some time afterwards for some questions. So I was asked to speak about why France needs Ayn Rand. Now, I don't know that I know enough specifically about France to say why France needs Ayn Rand, but I will talk about why Western civilization needs Ayn Rand and France being, I think, a core member of what Western civilization is, and from where Western civilization came, I think the implication is obvious in terms of the specific context of France. I think that Ayn Rand believed, and I agree, that Western civilization is an incomplete project. It is not being finalized, indeed, and indeed as a consequence. It is today in decline and in real danger in the world out there. And when I talk about Western civilization is to be clear, I'm not talking about a race or geography or a place. I'm talking about a set of ideas that I will get to. So I think Western civilization is under threat. It has been under threat before. It seems to survive the threats in the past, but I'm not sure that it is up to surviving today. And this is why I think Western civilization needs Ayn Rand. I think Ayn Rand completes the project that is Western civilization, that began during the Enlightenment, or just before the Enlightenment, really reached its flourishing, if you will, during the Enlightenment. A project that we have been living the benefits of for the last 200 years, but a project that has been under attack, the Enlightenment has been under attack. And to me, the Western civilization is the Enlightenment under attack constantly, consistently, systematically, really since the beginning of the 19th century, the end of the 18th century. One Frenchman and one German are primarily responsible. And I'd say the two people most responsible for the attacks on the Enlightenment were Uso and Kant. So what is the Enlightenment? What is Western civilization? What is the core of Western civilization? And ultimately, what can Ayn Rand add to these ideas? Why do we so desperately need her? Western civilization, in my view, is basically two ideas. The first being the efficacy of reason. The idea that reason is our means of knowing the world. The idea that reason is efficacious. It is possible to know the world through our senses and through our ability to form concepts, to understand the world out there, to integrate it and to integrate it to discover new knowledge. I think the first great thinker in a sense of the Enlightenment was Isaac Newton. He wasn't a philosopher, of course, but he was the first man to really, in a real way, show us, human beings, that we can understand the world. The material world is knowable. It is based on certain laws. And we can understand the laws. Almost everybody can understand Newton's laws. I mean, if you don't understand Newton's laws, it's because you had a bad physics teacher. They're not that hard. And what people realized suddenly, and it took Newton a long time to explain and to go out there into the world and say, look, people, we can get it. Things move based on certain laws and you can model this mathematically. And look, it's do-able. You can use your reason to understand the world around you. Because before that, before that, where did knowledge come from? Well, dominantly in the world, knowledge people assumed came from revelation of one form or another, where the religious revelation through the Pope and then maybe the Protestants said, no, no, no, the Pope doesn't have a unique relation to God, we all have. So each one of us had a relation to God and therefore each one of us could get the revealed truth, but the truth was revealed. It wasn't known. It wasn't induced from the facts of reality. It wasn't based on reason. Or it was a platonic form, a secular form of revelation where only the philosopher kings knew the real truth. We all live in a cave. We see shadows, if you know Plato's metaphor of the cave. We see shadows, only the philosophers can see the light, can see real truth. Newton says in a sense, practically, no, all of us can discover truth. All of us have the tools to understand the real world. All of us can look at the sun and know the world. Now that idea is profound. It's a resurrection. It's not a new discovery. It's an idea discovered by the Greeks. It's an Aristotelian idea. It's in a sense, the reapplication of Aristotle to philosophy into our lives that happens in the early part of the 18th century. They don't always identify this Aristotle because they think Aristotle is the church, but it is Aristotle come back. That idea is at the core of everything. Everything falls apart if you give up on reason. And I think we today, in the cultural out there, have given up on reason, have abandoned reason. Today, we go on university campuses in America and what we observe is the primacy of emotion, the primacy of revelation in a sense. People know things because they know them. They don't need facts. They don't need evidence. They don't need science. They just know. I talked to, just to bring it to economics or politics. I talked to socialists all the time. And it's stunning to me, like 100% of the evidence in the world suggests that socialism fails always, whenever applied and to the extent that it is applied. On the other hand, everywhere and anytime, capitalism is applied in whatever dose it is applied to whatever extent it is respected, property rights are respected. To that extent, wealth is creation and people become successful and wealthy and flourish. Nobody cares. Facts don't matter. Socialism just is good. It's good. Just, they somehow know it. And they don't present counterfact. It's not like they give you a counterfact. Oh, there's this one country where socialism really worked. You know, they use Scandinavia, which is of course, cheating. Because it's not socialist and it's not that successful, right? But they use Scandinavia, that's the best they can get. And of course, when you tell them Venezuela, communism, East Europe, all that, oh, that wasn't real socialism. We haven't reached the platonic ideal yet. Facts don't matter. Reality doesn't matter. They have preconceived ideas that shape all other ideas. Emotions in America today are at the primary again socialism, I think appeals to emotion because it appeals to certain morality. It's a moral emotional appeal. It's not a factual, it's not a reason-based appeal. I mean, the old socialists a long time ago were advocates of reason and maybe they pretended to be scientific. And partially they didn't yet have all the evidence. We have the evidence. It's done, right? There is no debate about socialism. There's one party that evades reality and another party pointing at facts that nobody cares about. So we are losing the battle for reason. And we have been losing for a long time. I mean, Kant challenges reason. It's really the first philosophy to challenge it. He basically says he's saving, you know, he's saving faith from reason. That is his big mission in life. He tells us that what we see in the world is not reality. Very similar to Plato, if you will, that our very fact that we have senses and we have a brain distorts what we actually see and if what we're seeing is not reality and if what we reason is just the game we're playing inside our heads, it has nothing to do with actual reality. And since then, that has just developed and evolved through multiple philosophers. Whether it's Hegel, who tells us the contradictions, embrace contradictions. Contradictions are wonderful, really? Contradictions exactly the opposite of what I think you said, A is A. Aristotle's principle in metaphysics that contradictions don't exist. There is no reason if you believe in contradictions. Reason depends on logic. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. It's about using your mind to solve contradictions to get rid of seeming contradictions to see what really is, where A is A. It's not B, it's not C, it's A. It can be A and B at the same time. So this attack on reason, starting from Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer and Marx and Nietzsche and Nietzsche, it's all about the will. It's all about emotion, right? It's not about thinking. He doesn't write anything about reasoning. This attack on reason has been sustained and today the post-moderns have no shame. I don't know if post-modernism is after all a French idea, but it seems to have really been anchored solidly in the United States, but it is your philosophers that set it loose on the world and they have no shame, they tell you. There is no such thing as truth. Well, if there's no such thing as truth, why are we even discussing what we shouldn't be, right? Just when you don't discuss what is left, follow orders, do what you're told or do what the authority tells you because you don't know. Who knows what's right, wrong, what's true, what's false. So they reject the whole notion of truth, the whole notion of reality, the whole notion of objectivity and the whole notion of reason is out the window. And all you're left with when you don't have reason is emotion because the fact is, I hope most of you agree with me on this, that there is no God to send us messages and therefore anything we hear that God says is just us projecting our emotions onto the world. At the end of the day, all there is is either reason or emotion, nothing else. When we abandon reason, we're left with emotion. Can you see that in the gangs that roam around campuses beating people up? Not for anything, but just because they're angry and just because they don't like you. And they're all in the name, by the way, of there's no truth. We're beating you up because there's no truth. So how dare you claim to have a truth? Now there's an implication of this idea of reason, which the Enlightenment, I think, recognized very early. Who reasons is the next question? Who can reason? Well, all of us can reason. Every human being has the capacity to reason. This is what Newton, to some extent, taught us. We can all understand the world, but we as individuals must understand it. There is no collective consciousness, just like there's no collective stomach so that you can eat for me. There is no collective brain where you can think for me, where you can reason for me. Only I can use my faculty of reason, just like only I can eat for me. So reason is an attribute of the individual, not of the group, not of the collective, not of the tribe of the individual. And every individual has this faculty, has this ability. So when people started to think in the early 18th century, well, wait a minute. If I can understand the physical world, if I have reason, if I can know reality, then why can't I make choices about my life? Why can't I know what the right profession is for me? We're talking about a feudal era still, the remnants of feudalism. Why can't I choose my own profession? Why can I choose my own government? Why can I choose how to live my life for me? And this is again the second concept on which the Enlightenment and the Western civilization rest, which is the concept of individualism. It's the idea that my life belongs to me. It's an idea that John Locke talks about individual rights politically. You are autonomous and entity. The role of the state, the role of government is only to protect you as an individual. Only you can be responsible for your own life. Only you can be responsible for your own happiness. And you should be striving towards happiness, at least according to the Declaration of Independence, right? You have an inevitable right that nobody can take away from you to pursue happiness, which the founders of America understood. So there are two fundamental ideas. Reason and individualism, the primacy of the individual, which is what Western civilization is about. Without these ideas, there is no industrial revolution. There is no America. If you read the American Declaration of Independence, it is an ode to individualism. And ultimately, to reason, if you read the founding document, the founding fathers, they talk about reason constantly. They are renaissance men in the sense that they dabble in science, and as flawed as the founding of America is, and it certainly is flawed because they keep the institution of slavery, it is the most magnificent political event in human history, in my view. I apologize for it. Your revolution wasn't quite that good. Because I think it was more whistle than it was enlightenment. It was more ultimately egalitarianism, but not in the political sense, but in the broader sense than it was individualism. So these are the two ideas. Now, reason has been attacked constantly. And of course, as a consequence of that, so has individualism. Individualism don't matter. We were told during the nationalist revolutions of the 19th century, what matters is the tribe, what matters is the group, what matters is the state. And how, where the borders are of this state is the most important thing in the world. And if we have to sacrifice millions of kids, individuals in order to define and defend those particular borders rather than other borders, so be it, you don't matter anyway. And of course, individualism was massively attacked in the 20th century by communism and by fascism. The ultimate in collectivism, the ultimate in the idea that the group is what matters. And of course, the ultimate attack on reason. Individuals don't matter. Individuals don't think. Truth is revealed. It's revealed to somehow to this collective consciousness, which is the Poleterian, or the collective consciousness that is the Aryan race. Now, since there isn't a collective consciousness, we know that, but don't tell anybody, right? We need a leader to be able to have a philosopher king to be able to commune with this collective consciousness and tell us what it thinks. And that's how you get authoritarianism. But authoritarianists always say, I'm not doing it for me. I'm doing it for you. I'm just, I'm just discovering the truth and communicating to you. And it turns out that we have to sacrifice a huge number of people in the world in order to satisfy the will of the Poleterian or the will of the Aryan race. 20 million, 100 million, 200 million, the sky's the limit when it comes to sacrificing individuals. But that is the rejection of the Enlightenment. Communism and Nazism are the rejection of the ideas of individualism and of reason. They are the rejection of the ideas of Western civilization. They are not bad parts of Western civilization. They are the enemy of Western civilization. Nazism and Communism are not part of. They're the rejection of, as is the whole string of German philosophers that I mentioned, of which Communism and Nazism, in my view, is the logical outcome, the necessary outcome. Collectivism always leads to destruction and death. Now, we survived the Nazis, we survived the Fascists, and ultimately we survived the Communists. But we're badly wounded. We've lost, well, we know what we reject. We reject this particular form of collectivism, and we reject murder and slaughter for the most part. What do we fault? Nobody in the West today knows. We live a life for the most part based on reason and individualism. We love technology, we love science still. We have a spectrum of technology and science. We try to be happy. If you go to any bookstore, I assume in France it's the same. You have aisles of self-help book. We all want to be better. We all want to achieve happiness somehow. But we can't name it. And indeed, remnants of the anti-enlightenment mentality, both from German philosophy, but also from Christianity, are still strongly embedded in this culture. It's still true that we hold as moral, not the pursuit of happiness, not the pursuit of individual fulfillment, flourishing of a statillion, you demineur, or iron, egoism. What we value still morally, what we say we value, we might not live this way, is altruism, sacrifice, giving our father people. Other people are more important than myself. And altruism, I don't mean altruism as being nice to people and opening a door and being polite, egos do that. I'm talking about altruism as viewing the purpose of your life to serve others. Mother Teresa, that's my image. She hated her life. She did it out of duty. She did it because she believed it was moral and just. That sense, which we all have deep inside, if we grew up in this world, that was brought to us, I think, primarily by Christianity, but also by a great French, another French philosopher, Augustine Comte, who encourages us to eliminate self for the sake of others. These ideas are deep inside of us. And we struggle with the ideas of the Enlightenment and these anti-Enlightenment ideas, these ideas that undercut Enlightenment thinking. Now, in my view, INRAND gives us the tools to finish the Enlightenment project. I think the Enlightenment was weakened. You could argue, failed, but I don't think it failed because we're still living in an enlightened world, even if it's in decline. INRAND gives us the tools to fully understand and justify reason. So I think that Locke and the rest of the French Enlightenment and the Scottish Enlightenment, while incredible people, and it created enormous value, they didn't get to the heart, philosophical heart of reason. They couldn't completely articulate the case for reason. They didn't have a solid theory of concept and concept formation and how we understand the world and how we abstract and what it means to abstract and how we induce and they didn't have a complete theory of inducing knowledge from reality. INRAND does. At least she has the beginnings of one. She calls it introduction to Objectivist Epistemology because she still realized there was still a lot of work to do, but at least she gives us the tools to develop epistemology fully for full complete defense of reason, which is what I think is the most important thing that needs to happen today as the attack on reason is again intensifying in the West. She gives us an understanding of individualism that never existed. Again, because I think even the Enlightenment figures, particularly the Scottish Enlightenment, the French less, so were so imbued with Christianity that they couldn't give up on Christian morality. They couldn't give up on sacrifices and ideal. They couldn't give up the idea that sacrifice was noble, that living for others was good, that the meek shall inherit the earth. They couldn't quite, even the founding fathers, couldn't quite give all that up. You know, Thomas Jefferson took the Bible, the New Testament and cut it up and he threw away all the parts he didn't like, which is all the mysticism he didn't like. So he was a man of reason, but he kept the summit on the mount because he viewed that as a moral philosophy. That is a really, really bad moral philosophy if you take it seriously. And it's a moral philosophy that imbues the West today and it's a moral philosophy that needs to be rejected. And there is no moral thinker that presents an alternative to the summit on the mount other than Ayn Rand. I mean Aristotle and then Ayn Rand. Spinoza may be a little bit in between. But there is no alternative in the world today other than Rand's to the idea of sacrifice. Ayn Rand presents a moral theory, not just a little bit here and there, but a moral theory for living life. A moral theory for living life for oneself because who else should you live it for? It doesn't mean you treat other people like garbage. Other people are huge value to you. But it means that your standard by which you make decisions is your own life, is your own flourishing, is your own value. It means that each one of us as individuals needs to strive to be the best that we can be as individuals as human beings, as complete human beings, as reasoning animals, as rational animals. This small code I think is, you know since I don't really understand epistemology that much, this to me is what the heart of what Ayn Rand's ideas are. This to me is why I fell in love with Ayn Rand. I fell in love with Ayn Rand because for the first time somebody said, to me, it's okay to live for you, for yourself. It's okay to aspire to be happy. It's okay to live a complete and fulfilling life. The moral ideal is not Christ on a cross, dying a painful, excruciating death, for sins he did not commit, for sins other people committed. I can't think of anything more unjust than putting Jesus on the cross. No, life is to be enjoyed. Life is to be embraced. Life is to be lived fully. That's Ayn Rand's morality in a superficial, quick way. I encourage you all to read The Virtue of Selfishness, her book isn't in French, which is in French, because I think that's a revelation. Now all of the morality is in Atlas Shrug because Ayn Rand, the moral ideal, is not Christ on a cross. It's John Galt. It's the man who felt no guilt, no unearned guilt, no original sin. The man who lives, lives for himself, asks no other man to live for him, but will not live for anybody else, but for himself. For the fulfillment of his own values that nobody's expects, but as a trader in win-win relationships with other human beings, with other people. So these to me are the foundational ideas. These two ideas of reason and individualism are the foundational ideas of Ayn Rand's philosophy. I believe she completes the Enlightenment project or at least adds significantly to it, for us maybe to fully complete, to the extent that there's still philosophical work to fill in the defense of reason and defense of individualism, but Ayn Rand takes us a long way. Ayn Rand is primarily a philosopher, primarily has something to say about reason and individualism or egoism. Capitalism as a political and economic system, I think are outcomes of that. If you are an individualist, that is you care about your own life and you are capable of knowing the world through your reason, you don't need mother government sitting on your shoulder telling you how much to pay your employees or how much to take as an employee, what soda you're allowed to drink and what foods you're not allowed to drink, what drugs you're allowed to consume and what drugs you're not. Now I'm talking about the healthy ones, but anyway, it's none of anybody's business. And if you, a real individualist, if you're an egoist, you don't want anybody telling you what to do. You want to discover truth by yourself. You want to go out there and try and experiment and learn and fail and succeed and learn from your failures and move in life. You don't need government regulations and controls and you certainly don't want government taking 50% of your money, which represents 50% of your time, which represents 50% of your life. It's yours, because you're an egoist and you care about what your stuff is. Put aside all the economic theory and all that. At the end of the day, that's not what's important. I mean, it's all consistent, right? But at the end of the day, it's not about maximizing some utility function or maximizing the GDP of France. Who cares? It's about maximizing my freedom to live as I see fit so that I can pursue the values necessary from my life, from my happiness. And yeah, it turns out that GDP is maximized when you do that. But that's not a starting point. And it's not, this is the big difference objectives have with libertarians. We don't start with economics. We end with economics. We end with politics. We don't start there. We start with reason and individualism. We start with the foundation, the philosophical foundations, I believe of liberty. I believe of the enlightenment of any successful society. So, France needs INRAN because the whole of Western civilization needs INRAN because we're in decline. These ideas are under attack. INRAN has the best answers out there for the attack. She is the best defense of Western civilization that exists in the world today. The rise of collectivism, the rise of tribalism, the rise of emotionalism can only be dealt with through philosophy, through a philosophical attack on them. And INRAN gives us the best tools to do that. But more than that, and I'll just end with this note. The most important thing in my view about INRAN's philosophy is not what it done for France. It's not what it does for Western civilization. It's not what it does for any country or place or anything like that. It's what it can do for you as an individual and what it can do for them as individuals out there. At the end of the day, a life of unreason, a life filled with unearned guilt, a life filled with collectivistic ideas that you don't actually live or some people do live but that are constantly tugging at you is an unhappy, miserable, pathetic life. It's a life filled with angst, with anxiety. INRAN is the ultimate self-help. INRAN is the ultimate philosophy for living a life free of unungult, a life that makes possible, makes it possible to flourish and to be truly happy, to truly achieve happiness in life. So at the end of the day, it's the individuals who need INRAN more than it is any civilization or any country or anything like that because INRAN is primarily a philosopher of and for the individual. Thank you. Sorry for my English and for my accent. It's fine. Sorry for my English. The accent is kind of cute. Thank you. Have you read a biography by Anne-Marie Rouhan of INRAN? And if no, I explain why. I have not. I have not. I ask the question because if you are French, there is not a lot of book translated in French about INRAN. Sure. You have some of her novels and maybe the only one book about INRAN is Anne-Marie Rouhan's book. And in the last chapter, and Anne-Marie Rouhan will correct me if I say something wrong, what you learn about Anne-Marie Rouhan that she's not a real philosopher, that she has never written or Nietzsche or Plato, and that the influence of Aristotle is maybe a fraud and all stuff like that and stuff like that about her personality that she's like almost hysterical or stuff like that. And this is the image, the only image you can have in French when you read. So I agree with all these statements that I don't have a word in this book. So I am respectfully going to disagree. Certainly she read Kant, certainly she read all of those philosophers. I don't think there's any evidence she didn't read them. And there is evidence she did. Evidence of people who knew her personally and who knew philosophy, because they studied it, they got PhDs in philosophy and who had conversations with her directly. So I disagree with that. I disagree with the idea of, I don't understand, I guess the idea of Aristotle's influence as a fraud. She had a temperament. She was a passionate person. I think most geniuses are. I don't think she was, I don't make a big deal out of that. I don't think it's that significant. She had a temper, yeah. When she saw an injustice, she saw something once, she had a temper. She certainly didn't like certain people and she lets you know when she didn't like them. But I don't know, I mean, I have not seen anybody say I meant wrong about Kant. Here's the reference. What she said about Kant and again verified by philosophers who studied with her and studied philosophy as well. I think it's legitimate. I also don't buy this notion and I know a lot of the biographies even in English present this of her being miserable and depressed and so on. Again, based on people who knew her, I just don't think that's true. Again, was she angry? Sure. Was she depressed when Atlas Shrug didn't succeed the way she thought it would succeed? The people didn't respond to it the way she thought, yeah. But she got back in her feet and started writing in on fiction, right? And she spent all the 60s and 70s writing and working into the and to the day she died, she was working, you know, on the week that she died, she was still writing. She was writing a television adaptation of Atlas Shrug. From what I know, she was a happy person. She was a difficult person. She was a principled person. She was a passionate person, but she was not a miserable, the depressed or nasty person as so many of other people's biographies. Again, I haven't read a long, so I can't comment, but other people's biographies have presented to us. And I'm hoping there'll be a definitive biography coming out which will document what courses she took in college, what books she read. I mean, part of the thing is you can go to her library. We have the library in there. I mean, archives. And you can see the books you read and you can see her annotations on the books. Yes, but most French- No, I know. ...speak only in French and they have the only book I suggest- And even in English, these views are- ...of the two last chapters because it's very interesting, the image that we can have in France. And also, the fact that Alain Laurent just said that we have the virtue of selfishness in French, it's important to precise that it's just some chapter, just seven chapters and then 19 chapters. Yep. Does it have to mean I say the objective is ethics? Yes. Good. Well, that's the most important one. Did you want to comment? I would just, I would just encourage you to make your own judgment at the end of the day. You have to judge for yourself and I encourage you to the extent you can read in English, but what's available in French is great. I can't read English. And then, and then, you know, read the rest in English because there's a lot to read. And there's a new book that came out called The Companion. Companion's Iron Man's Ideas. It just came out about a year ago by a number of scholars. Well, that's a hundred voices. But the real, this is good for her personality and for her life. It's a hundred different interviews with a hundred different people who knew her. But I think for the philosophy, The Companion's Iron Man is written by philosophers, each one writing an essay from a different perspective on her philosophy and explaining it but also analyzing it. So I think it's the most valuable book out there written by, about her available today. I also recommend Leonard Peacock's philosophy, Objectivism to Philosophy, of Ayn Rand, which I think is the definitive philosophical statement of her ideas, integrated into one book. It might be out there. Any other questions, yeah? Yeah, thanks for your speech. In the light of what you said about the embedded Christianity in all of us and the attacks on reason, it made me think about my becoming a libertarian. Two things come to mind after what you said. It's when I discovered a pyrrhonism, it's like discrediting solo medsines and things like that and arguing about the reason in medicine and in medical things. So that was one of the first things in my life that was a defined reason for me. And the second thing was when I became an atheist, I was a hardcore, passionate believer. I wanted to be a priest at one point and then I flipped totally and I became a hardcore atheist because I read something that, and these two transformations, I think paved the way to my becoming a libertarian that came to a few years after. And when I recall these moments, it was incredible because my brain was actually, I felt my brain really working without anchor. I was like lighter and free and happy. And that's why it paved the way to my becoming a libertarian. Yeah, that's a great story. And I think you've identified something really, really important. Now, there'll be a lot of people who tell you a lot of libertarians are Christians, or Jews, or Muslims or whatever. So, and I get into trouble all over the world and because a lot of the lead thinkers today in the libertarian world are Christians. But I'm not a libertarian in that sense. I'm an objectivist. And I share certain political principles with libertarians, but I don't believe in a big tent. And I think we are doomed to lose the case for freedom if we anchored in religion. Religion is mysticism, religion is Christian ethics, and the Christian ethics and mysticism are incompatible with freedom. Nevermind libertarianism, they're incompatible with freedom. This is why when any civilization, at any point in human history that has taken religion seriously and given religious authorities political power has always been a libertarian, whether it's Old Testament Jews or whether it's the communities of Hasidic Jews, which are basically a libertarian in their little communes, or whether it's post Roman Empire or during Roman Empire Christianity once you became political, whether it's a Catholic church, to some extent to this day, or whether it's Calvin and Calvin's Geneva. They were dictatorships, and they have to be dictatorships. There is no other way to handle it. So now again, I get into trouble with this. So my religious libertarian friends will come and talk to you, I'm sure. But I don't, I think those two are incompatible. And at Montpelerin, I don't know if you're familiar with Montpelerin Society, but the last big meeting of the Montpelerin Society, classical liberal society, they had a debate between me and a Catholic, the moderator was a Catholic priest, so it was two against one, about whether religion is compatible with freedom or not. And I strongly took the stand that it's not. And in that sense, I think Europe has an advantage over America, because I think America has this too, religion is way too embedded. Not that Americans take their religion really seriously, but the more seriously they take it, the more we move away from freedom. The rise of evangelical Christianity has brought about the destruction of the Republican Party and the move away from freedom. And it's no accident the evangelicals, and I don't know what Elin said about Donald Trump, but I view Donald Trump as a big step backwards, away from freedom. And it's no accident the evangelicals support Trump. They support an element, the element of authoritarianism in Trump. So for Asians, and we shall talk into our bigger reader or? Well, the problem with Christopher Hissons and Dawkins, as much as I respect their views on atheism, is that they are Christians when it comes to morality. So they have internalized Christian morality and adopted and secularized it and accepted. And as a consequence of accepting that morality, they have accepted socialism basically, so they've accepted statism. But it's not that they start with statism, they start with morality. They start with the idea that the individual doesn't matter and Dawkins even has a genetic theory about why the collective matters and altruism is genetically coded and all this nonsense. So he starts with the morality and then derives his socialism from that. Unfortunately, Sam Harris is tinged with the same thing, although I think Sam Harris is better than Dawkins and Hissons. Although, you gotta love Hissons sometimes when he goes after certain groups. He can be incredibly articulate and amazing. And Dawkins, I respect this about Hissons. Hissons is one of the few contemporary intellectuals who realized that Einwand was the enemy and spent significant amounts of time in his talks attacking her. And I respect that. Most of them just ignore him. So, you had a question? Yes. You mentioned the case of Scandinavia. I have a friend, a socialist friend who's very passionate and has been born about it. I've been trying to convince him that it wasn't really socialism, that it wasn't that effective, but it's not working. So what do you think I should tell him? Well, I'm not sure you can tell him anything that'll work, but I do have at least one video and maybe a couple of podcasts just on Scandinavia. There's a lot of content out there. But just a quick outline. Scandinavia, Sweden in particular, from 1870 until 1955-60, was the most capitalist country in Europe and maybe in the world. And certainly, and as a consequence, went from being the poorest country in Europe in 1870 to the richest country in Europe in the early years after World War II. Partially, it was the richest because World War II destroyed the rest of Europe and Sweden remained relatively unscathed. But also, before World War II, it was a very rich country. Many of the biggest industries in Europe were based in Sweden as a consequence of the freedom that was allowed there. In 1960, they decided to go to socialism. They took all their wealth that they had built up over 90 years or so and started redistributing it. And they redistributed and redistributed and became poorer and poorer and poorer. Until in 1979, what was the largest income producing industry in Sweden? ABBA. ABBA, the rock group. Number two, Johan Borg, the tennis player. So industry was gone. Big business was gone out of Sweden because it was too regulated. It was too taxes, too much. And then by 1994, Sweden was Greece of today. Sweden was bankrupt. Sweden couldn't pay their debts. And since 1994, the government of Sweden has been reducing government spending, reducing redistribution of wealth, and dramatically reducing regulation. So indeed, Sweden today has less regulated, business-wise, than the United States of America's. And so Sweden today is not more socialist in any significant way than the United States of America's. It's just got a different set of mixed economy. All economies in the West are mixed. Some with more statism and less freedom. Some with more freedom and less statism, but they're all mixed. And most of them are mixed about the same place, right? We all tend to spend on a total about between 40% to 60% of GDP. We're right in the middle. The United States is close to 40. If you add up federal, state, and local governments, it's close to 40. Sweden is like close to 50. I don't know where France is. I think it's close to 60 in France. So they're all, but they're all between 40 and 60, right? So, I mean, they're all statist. They're all government run, basically. Gone are the days where the federal government in the United States in the 19th century spent 3.5% of GDP. Today, the federal government spends 20%. 3.5%. You could cut government spending at the federal level by 80% and get back to the wonderful, in my view, economy of the 19th century. So, I mean, that's just the beginning, but you could go on in detail about the fact that Swedes are always happy. When you survey Swedes, they're happy, right? And also happiness studies. Swedes are very happy. Because when you go to Sweden and you ask Swedes, are you happy? You're supposed to say yes. You know, I'm Jewish in origin, right? When you ask a Jew if you're happy, nobody says yes. So it goes against everything you believe in to say yes. You're happy? How can you be happy? Look at all the problems in life and everything. So these studies are silly. And by the way, Swedes in America are just as happy as Swedes in Sweden. Swedes in America live longer or just as long as Swedes in Sweden. Swedes in America live in bigger houses, drive bigger cars, have more wealth than Swedes in Sweden. So when you control for variables, suddenly you discover that all the Sweden is good effect go away. They go away. Now, there's a selection bias, you could argue, because the best Swedes went to America. Yes? Nowadays, what the statutes of the works of Nathaniel and the Einstein Institute are his works promoted or ignored or criticized. I'm asking this question because I'm a big fan of Einstein. And at the same time, I like his works. He deserves autobiography, psychology of self-esteem, psychology of romantic love, which I found really interesting. I know that he was very criticized when he broke up with Einstein by Einstein's friends. So what do you think about him? So he is cited in his works of promoted from the period where he worked with Einstein. So from the psychology of self-esteem, which she edited it, but was published after they split, but she was involved in writing it, all through all the books of essays, virtue of selfishness, capitalism, all have essays by Nathaniel Brandon and included in it. And she wanted them to stay in the books and to continue to be promoted in the existing work. We do not promote the work that he did after. For a couple of reasons. One is, I don't wanna get into a big debate about this, but I consider him a bad guy. He might have been a good psychologist, but I consider him a bad human being. I think he did significant damage to the objective of his movement. I think he led the objective of his movement. Unfortunately, under Einstein's guidance, in a negative direction, he was dogmatic, he was a nasty person. He treated people. I mean, he writes about psychology, but it's weird how people who write about psychology tend to be angry, nasty people. But he was a nasty person. He treated people on a one-on-one basis in a horrible way. So, you know, so we don't promote him after that because we don't wanna promote a guy who we consider a bad person. I do think his works written right after the split with Einstein and Rand, particularly the psychology of romantic love, I think are good. So there's good work. I think they're more further away from what Randi got, the worse he got, and he started dabbling in mysticism and in men's rights and all kinds of weird things. Later on in life, he did seances, he all kinds of strange stuff. So that is later in life. I think in the late 70s and going into the 80s. So I'd say the early worker is best work and is good. And I'm sure that in the future, objectives of psychologists, psychologists who study in Iran will also study his work and refer to it. I'm not a psychologist, I'm a finance guy. Is there any other famous Randian psychologist? Unfortunately, no. Although I think that she and Nathaniel Brandon had a significant influence on psychology, the whole rise today of the cognitive psychology movement and even elements within the positive thinking movement, although I think some of that's primacy of consciousness, but the whole idea of cognitive psychology, the idea that emotions are derived from ideas and what we think and the conclusions we come to, all of that comes from the work of Ian Rand and comes from the work of Nathaniel Brandon. So I think she's had a profound impact on the field of psychology, even though I can't say that this particular psychologist read Ian Rand and what the links are. But you can see that the whole discussion of self-esteem really starts, I mean, with Ian Rand, and Ian Rand makes it a cardinal value, right? It's one of the three cardinal values, self-esteem. And self-esteem was not a psychological term until really the 1960s, until Nathaniel Brandon, Ian Rand and then Nathaniel Brandon bring it in and then it becomes, and then gets distorted and today it's nonsense. But at least the discussion of the concept was Ian Rand. I mean, I'll say this just generally. I believe Ian Rand's had a profound impact on the culture already. I think concept like self-esteem, concept like capitalism. Capitalism in the 50s and 60s was a dirty word. And the only two people who spoke up for capitalism in a popular way, in a way that affected the culture are Ian Rand and Milton Friedman. And by the 1980, capitalism is okay word. By the time Reagan and Thatcher are elected, they can talk about capitalism. That's because of the work Ian Rand. So I think in many ways, subtle ways, not embracing the entire philosophy, Ian Rand has already had a substantial impact. There's good evidence to suggest that the draft was eliminated in the United States because of people who are associated with Ian Rand and who brought her ideas in front of Nixon and got rid of the draft. An important pro-liberty moment. So there's a lot of things I think that have happened. We tend to be too pessimistic about the influence. Yeah, in the back. Thank you for your talk. What was the core of your talk, I think, was this idea of renaissance and enlightenment not being achieved. Fully, fully manifest, yeah. Yeah, and being under attack. Yeah. I agree with this idea and I'm questioning the why. And you say that what is under attack is individualism and nationalism. And my personal feeling is that at some point in the process of enlightenment, there was an idea which was really in the core of the right at that time was restubica. Restubica. No? No, translate. Somebody? In Latin, rest is the thing. Publica is the common thing. Yeah. Okay? So this is the origin of republic. Yes. Rest, publica. Many, one. Okay? This is the idea of general interest as a goal. Yes. And the only non-negotiable thing being the well-being governed for the general interest. Yes. And at some points, at least in France, we stopped making any distinction between restubica and demos kratos. Yes. Democracy. Yeah. Okay? Which is absolutely not the same. Restubica was a goal to achieve. The focus point, if requires an analysis, if requires rationalism, maybe if requires as a step to think individualism as well. But once you start confusing restubica and demos kratos, demos kratos, what is it? What is democracy? Democracy. The rule of the mob. It's not an objective, it's a methodology. So as soon as you start confusing the objective, the side, the focus point, and methodology, an idea of methodology, you're losing your way. And then you cannot achieve enlightenment. That's not a question, it's something I share with you to have your opinion on that. And we do not have a system, we have a religion. Because democracy is a religion with its own kind of Bible, which is human rights. So as soon as you are in a religion with a Bible, you're not in analysis, individualism, science, you're in believing. Yes. That's why I want to suggest. I think we did not achieve. I agree with you. I agree with you, but I would suggest that the points I made are more fundamental. That what you're identifying, which is true, is the consequence of abandoning reason and abandoning individualism. That the consequence of abandoning those things, we abandon the idea of a republic and the meaning of laws and the meaning of a rule of law. And we embraced, because we lost what that means. Because we lost, I think we lost the concept of individual rights as law-understood. We lost that. It may be France never had it. I mean, there's a possibility France never had it completely. And Britain ultimately, you know, Bentham says, individual rights are nonsense on stilts. Super nonsense. So already in the 19th century, they're chipping away at the idea of individual rights. I think once you lose that, then what's left? What's left is whatever the majority wants. And what does the majority want, whatever they feel? And that's emotion and that's a loss of individuals. And the whole idea of an inalienable individual rights is the idea that the majority can't take it away from you. And that's what the American Republic has built on. It's the idea of the individual sovereignty and that the government is not there to, you see, and this is partially the understanding of a republic. Common good. I think there is no such thing as the common good. All there is is the good of the individual. What is in the common good, in the proper sense, is to protect the individual. And not to think, oh, when we aggregate individuals, what good do we get? That thinking is a wrong thing. It leads to collectivism and leads ultimately to democracy. So I think even the concept of republic was perverted. Yeah, that's why as soon as we stop thinking in terms of the rest of the country. But you see, I think we stop thinking in terms of individuals and in terms of reason. And then as a consequence, we stop thinking in terms of republics. Yes, if you lose the word, you lose the idea, instead of that word, instead of the idea, you replace it by an idea which is collectivism. Yes. It's just, that process is nothing else. Then you lose the way and you cannot achieve this enlightenment process. I agree with you, I agree with your characterization of democracy as a religion. I think it certainly is today. I mean, you could criticize almost anything today, but if you criticize democracy, people flip out. They think you're either the devil and it's the worst thing in the world. They don't realize there's an alternative. They think democracy is authoritarianism. Those are the options. And they don't realize there's a third alternative. I did not realize that there are countries in the world or organization where you are pursuing general interest that are not democracies. Yes. Like Singapore or like a family. Yeah, a family is not... Or a corporation or many others. But she is not a democracy. What is moral or honor? I mean, how will a test, an interim test, decide what is moral or honor? The moral is that which supports human life, which that is good for human life. The immoral is that which threatens human life. It's that which is bad for human life. And then she says, now it's a scientific question. Let's look at the world and see what things support human life and what things threaten human life. And if you read the Objective Ethics and the Virtue of Selfishness, and that essay is in French in the book, she then articulates what she thinks is the most important thing that supports human life. And for her, the most important thing that supports human life is to use your mind, is to think that all human values are the creation of human thought, of human reason, everything. And therefore to her, the number one value, the thing to act to gain or keep, the thing you want is reason. And the number one virtue the action to take is to be rational. And then she articulates a whole system of what she believes are the principles that are consistent with life, are consistent with success in life, and those which are consistent with failure. Those would be vices, failures, vices, and those who are successful are virtues. So to her it's a science. What's good for human life? Just like nutrition, right? A doctor in nutrition says these foods are good for you, these foods are bad for you. And it's hard to tell. And nutritionists disagree. But they agree on the standard, all nutritionists agree that the standard is human health. The difference is that in ethics we don't agree. Some people think the standard should be other people, and Ayn Rand says the standard should be you, your well-being as a human being. Now we can have different philosophers disagree about what constitutes human well-being. Aristotle and Ayn Rand would disagree about what constitutes human well-being. But the standard of virtue, the standard of morality is your well-being, your life, your survival, your ability to flourish as a human being in life. Your feet are jumping, Avin. Well I have a question, it may sound stupid, but I like YouTube. You won't be the first one. I would like you to explain the trend paradox because she says to be very influenced by Ayn Rand and she seems to be very collectivist although it's very difficult to understand this paradox. So there is no way where Trump claims to be influenced by Ayn Rand. There's not a single place where he claims that. What he said, the only quote I know that he mentions Ayn Rand, he said that Fountainhead was one of his favorite novels. So what, right? Victor, you know, Levin's Rables or 93 is one of my favorite novels. Doesn't mean I agree with Hugo about everything and doesn't agree with Hugo as a socialist. I'm not a socialist, but I love his novels. So Trump, Red Fountainhead, maybe it's because it's about architecture and he's a developer. Who knows what he got out of it? I mean, I have a very low view of Trump. I don't think he's very smart. And I doubt that he finished the Fountainhead and I really doubt he understood it, philosophically. I think very few people understand the Fountainhead and I certainly don't think Trump is one of them. Nothing he says, no policy he holds, no belief that he has is consistent with Ayn Rand. He generally wants a deregulate economy fine, but he doesn't really. He wants, he doesn't know what he wants. He has no philosophy, he has no ideas, he has no beliefs, he has no system. So he absorbs. You know, somebody said, somebody did a little research project on how he came up with Drain the Swamp. Somebody suggested, you know, Drain the Swamp sounds good. Trump said, yeah, let me try that. And he went on speech and he said, Drain the Swamp. And everybody went, yeah, we wanna drain the Swamp. And he said, okay, that works. I'm gonna keep saying it, right? He is a marketer. He is good at marketing. He has his name on all his hotels, Trump everywhere. He is good at marketing. And that's what he did. He looked at the election and he said, what can I say that'll get people to vote for him? Does Trump really believe trade is bad? I don't know. I don't think he cares. But he knows that at this moment in history, Americans are suspicious, are anxious, are afraid of China and of trade. So he goes after trade. Does he really hate immigrants? His wife is an immigrant. He's married to an immigrant. But everything he does suggests he hates immigrants. No, again, there's a moment in American history right now. Sad, all these are sad, right? I'm not, people hate immigrants. Not just the illegal ones. They say they hate illegal immigrants and they love legal immigrants. But when you push them, they hate immigrants, period. So he capitalized on that and he used that as a marketing campaign. He saw that before everybody else that there's a real frustration and anger in America. And that these are ways to, and look, he acted. And if you, again, I've done some podcasts on this and we had really analyzed Trump, but he acted like an authoritarian. This is what authoritarians do. Step one, tell people the world is ending. It's falling apart. They should be really, really afraid, right? Easy because there's some element of truth, but exaggerated, right? He would say there's carnage in the streets of America. Do you know what carnage is? Really? I mean, not in my streets. I mean, if you look at crime statistics in America, there are some, we live in some, one of the most peaceful periods in all of American history. Crime is up a little bit significantly in Chicago. Crime, but that's it. In, you know, I live, for all intents and purposes, there's no crime. I remember in the 70s and 80s going to New York City and being afraid to leave my hotel at night. Today, you're gonna walk in the streets of New York City at 2 a.m., nobody's afraid. And yet, you know, carnage in the streets. So we start, oh, and you're losing your jobs. Everybody's losing, the factories are empty all over America, really? Unemployment is 4%, which is not bad, you know? We produce in America more stuff than ever in history. Double what we produced when people, when the maximum amount of people working production, we have less people working, we produce more. Not surprising, technology. But when more, producing more stuff, more real things than ever in American history, but oh, America's producing nothing, it's all gone to China. It's nonsense. Every single one of these things he said to scare us has an element of truth, which he blows up out of proportion. So part one, you scare people. Part two, who do you blame? It's not your fault. No, Americans are good people, hard-working people. They believe in God and country and everything's gonna be fine, right? Whose fault is it? It's the other, fill in the blank. If you're a European or a Ferratarian, it's Jews. Or maybe today it's Muslims, right? Again, element of truth, but blown out of all proportion, right? It's Jews. Now in America, you can't say that, particularly if you want to win an election. So you say it's the Chinese. It's the Mexicans. It's the South Koreans. It's the Germans. It's anybody we trade with. And of course, it's immigrants because they are the ultimate other, right? They're closer to being the Jews of Europe, because they're in your country and they look different, oh my God, right? So it's immigrants and it's foreigners. And then how do you solve the problem, right? There's a problem. Life is terrible. It's other people's fault. Non-Americans, how do you solve the problem? You build a wall. And the ultimate authoritarian, trust me. I ran a business. I know how to fix things. Don't worry, trust me. That's the playbook of every authoritarian in history. Scare them, find a scapegoat and then tell them to trust you. And that's what Trump did. Is he an authoritarian? No, because the system in America is robust and won't let him be an authoritarian. But is he in his blood an authoritarian? Absolutely. He says to the Republicans, do away with the filibuster, right? There's a reason there's a filibuster because the founders didn't like democracy. So they wanted 60 votes. They didn't want 51 for everything. They wanted people to really believe in something before they passed the law, right? So he wants to undo all that because he doesn't care. He's a pragmatist. He wants to win at any cost. So that's my quick analysis of Trump. Yes? Yes, in your opinion, at what extent after you met with the fact that she lived in Korean revolutionary Russia, that she lived through the revolution, she came from an upper class family? Middle class, yeah. Middle class. She was an upper class. She was middle class. She was Jewish, owned a pharmacy. That's an upper class. So this is a question that's broader than I read. What makes us who we are? The environment in which we raised, option one. Our genes, option two. And then psychologists say it's a mixture of both. And of course they ignore option three which I think is the most important. Which is the choices we make, the free will that we all have over our own lives, the decision and choices we make. And people ignore that completely. It's as if we're automatons dictated by environment and genes which is ridiculous in my view. And all you have to do to discover how ridiculous it is is look inside yourself introspect a little bit and you can discover your own will. I think Ivan is mostly the third part. And I think all of us are mostly the third part. I think we are mostly creations of ourselves. I think she was, I mean, 150 million Russians, probably more than that, lived under communism. There's only one Iron Man. So 150 million were exposed to those ideas. Only one Iron Man. Millions and millions and millions lived before Russia with the great 19th century and none of them are Iron Man. So she took that. That was all material for her, no question. And she wouldn't have said that being exactly the same person if not for those, right? Her genes, who made her a genius, her environment that gave her the information, the evidence. But it's her choices, her particular mind that did what it did with it that came out. She would have come up with this philosophy, I think, even if she wasn't in the Soviet Union, but it would have been different. It would have been the focus and the orientation probably would have been somewhere different. But she's not a product of, nobody is a product of the environment unless you shut yourself down. If you don't think for yourself, then you become a product of other people. She was obviously not that, she was an original thinker. So I think that's part of it. You know, being born at the beginning of the 20th century or the late 19th century gave you a certain spirit that I don't think being born today you could have. A certain optimism, a sudden joie de vie, you know, you know, love of life, a sudden, you know, life is good, pre-World War I, there was this attitude in Europe that just, you know, think about the music. Nobody could write Tchaikovsky or Chopin or Joachman enough today. It's just not in the psyche, we're cynics. We have punk rock. That's what we love, right? Not me, but you know, I'm still a romantic. But romantic music is impossible today, right? I was at the Dorset Museum today. And nobody can sculpt like that. Not because they don't have the technical skills, but nobody believes in that. Nobody believes in human beings, being heroic and beautiful and magnificent like they did in the 19th century. Just all we think, yeah, human beings scum. So we make them into abstraction so we can't, God forbid, identify that there's a human being there. Now, this was a beautiful, amazing, I mean, particularly for you French, I mean, God, to be in Paris in the 19th century was culturally, I can't think of another era, maybe other than Greece, of cultural vibrancy and optimism and, I mean, you had to go and listen to Chopin and, you know, sitting at the coffee shop together. I mean, that's just blows your mind, blows my mind. Anyway, so that's, I mean, to me, so being born during that period matters to your sense of life. I think the biggest tragedy we have today is, you know, I know libertarians don't think these ways, but this is how I think, is the lack of that kind of art, that kind of view of the world, that kind of beauty. Again, we got punk rock, that's ugly. I mean, whatever you say, you might get into it, but it's ugly. It's not beauty and the heroic man and wonderful, great stuff, right? I don't know, punk rock is stuck to my mind, but, or the abstract art that we have today, which is mostly ugly. And meaningless. It doesn't mean a thing. It's post-modernism on cameras, right? No truth, no reality, nothing. That to me, we're poorer in that regard than anything economically. The economy, yeah, we can still all manage given the socialism that we have, but the lack of great authors, the lack of great novels, the lack of great, you know, maybe you have a few decent movies, but even there, right? Luc Besson is clining dramatically. There was a question. Were you asked? I'm sorry, but last question. Okay, so last question. You haven't asked yet. You must have finished 30 minutes before. Thank you, it was a wonderful speech. I'm one of the few people here that I'm sure I understand my answer, right? But I want to come back to the concept of freedom. Yeah. The whole freedom of the whole system is based on that. Yeah. If we discover that free will doesn't exist, right? No, the whole tower falls on you. Yes. And you mentioned San Paris earlier as well. San what? San Paris. Yes. And I'm sure you know that he's not a huge fan of the concept of free will. He's even an advocate of the illusion of freedom. You have to have a whole book about that. And the whole field of neuroscience today is working actively and making progress about the fact that we start to understand brain better and better. And for now, until now, the evidence seems to suggest that indeed, free will is really hard to locate. Yeah. And so, again, I'm a huge fan of Anne-Marie and her philosophy, but if it appears that free will is indeed. Then who cares? I guess, then who cares? Then this discussion is meaningless. Then why am I here? Then it doesn't, nothing I say matters. I mean, to me, the idea we don't have free will is so bizarre. It's so ridiculous. And with all due respect to the scientific information, we're still at the very, very beginning of understanding how the mind works. To make declaratory statements based on research that suggests that they see something happen before you raise your arm or all the stuff that I've read about, is absurd. It's ridiculous. We're at the beginning of the science. There's still 100 years before we fully understand how the mind works at least. Neuroscientists that I talk to, who are familiar with philosophy, say that the science has almost nothing to say about free will. I, not anything I could do off the hand. If you send me an email, I could ask around. I'm not an expert. But to me, it's ridiculous. Science will never tell us that we don't have free will. Let me make that clear. Science will never tell us that we don't have free will. Any more than science can tell us that reality doesn't exist. That's the level at which free will is at. Depends on how you define free will because it's a difficult concept. It's a difficult concept. Science meant to find free will is the ability. It's the choice to focus your mind, to be in focus, to initiate contact with the world, or to not, right? Focus or not to focus. It's not about whether it is my hand right now or not. It's primarily about the issue of are you in focus or are you not? Are you activating your mind or are you not activating your mind? And you, something, is activating that mind that is not what do you call it? Billion ball causality related. And she defined causality different than David Hume defined causality. She defined causality as the thing acting based upon its nature. Not the thing acting because something else acted on it. And the nature of consciousness, of human consciousness, is to have free will. It acts based on its nature. And you cannot undo a philosophical concept like that with science. Science ultimately will tell us how it all works once free will is there. But it won't explain a way, it cannot explain a way free will. Any way, any different than science can explain a way reality. Science will never explain away the existence of this glass. No, we accept that. But cause I see it. That's why it can't explain. Cause I see it. It's right here. I see it. There's no question. You can see your free will. There's nothing special about your senses that your introspection doesn't have. I know, you know, quantum physics has not made me change my mind about this glass. No science that you come up with will make a question the existence because I see it of my free will. I know that I'm choosing to be here in a sense of to be engaged. And I know that. And that's knowledge. The same kind of knowledge that's seeing this glasses. It's the same philosophically, epistemologically. Those are the same types of knowledge. The problem with science, scientists today, not the problem with science, is that they have a corrupt philosophical and understanding of these concepts. And therefore undermining, you know, the science, the philosophy is undermining the real science. What they're discovering is not correlated with what they think they're discovering philosophically. It's the same problem I think they have with quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is an observable reality. What's going on there is real. But how you interpret it, that's a question of philosophy of science. How you interpret the results, the neurological results is a question for philosophy of science. And the question of whether you have free will is not a scientific question. It is a observational question. It is an axiomatic question. It's something you observe directly, just like this glass. It's the best I can do. Not my expertise, you know, I'm not in epistemology, but that's, I think that's what I would say. Thank you. Thank you.