 Make it quick. Otherwise Anu is going to come out. So good morning and thank you. I'm really really happy that you are more optimistic. I think about ten years ago you said that there was a full idea about going to Estonia or forming something and then New Hampshire and all that. There was a friend of mine who actually contributed to the institute, a very wealthy individual who about ten years ago when I think I told you this story was said, you know, let's buy Estonia. It was like there's one and a half million people there. How much could it cost? And when I told him I'm moving to Puerto Rico, he said, huh, those Puerto Rican bonds, they're really cheap. What if I bought them all up and forced them to put you as governor? I said, cool, let's do it. He's a character, a great guy, but yes, that's how he thinks. I would have never thought of buying Estonia. Not in my wealth scope. But you are more optimistic. What changed? What facts did you learn? Did you change your mental way of integrating it? I mean, maybe I'm more optimistic. I don't know if I'm more optimistic than I was ten years ago. You think I am, right? If you listen to my podcast, I don't come across as that optimistic, so I don't know. I really think it's expecting doom and gloom and it not happening. Expecting the financial crisis to be much worse than it was. Seeing the phenomenal advancements that technology has made over the last 10, 20 years and seemingly unstoppable. Reading a little bit about Moore's Law and the potential for Moore's Law and other areas in technology. I think Truro Gamboa gave me a book called Abundance at some point which was inspiring about what is possible together. Now I think it's a little too much, but the trend and what's going on. And just living another 10 years and hey, life's good. And starting to think about why is it, right? It shouldn't be. If at least my superficial rationalistic view, granted this is a wrong view, it shouldn't look at all the bad stuff and why is there good stuff? How does the good stuff live with the bad stuff? So I think it's a combination of those things. Maybe because I'm not CEO of the Iron Man Institute anymore. Tal starts out optimistic. I don't know, it's just looking at the world, thinking about it more, engaging with it more and seeing what's out there. And I do think seeing what we've done over the last 20 years and where Objectivism has gone in 20 years and starting to realize the ways in which Iron Man has affected the world I think inspires me. You know what part of it is? And I've said this before. It's going global. It's going to other countries and seeing. Okay, I'll end with this. In 2004, my wife and I went to China. And I had the typical Objectivist view of China. It's a bubble. There's nothing there. Because they're too authoritarian. They can't be any real progress. It's all pretend. It's all fictitious. And I remember I was going to Thailand and a friend of mine said, you should go to Shanghai. I said, who has time for Shanghai? I've got to be at this other place. I'm giving election Dongguan. And I don't want to go to Shanghai. He said, no, no, no. You've got to go to Shanghai. I said, okay, go to Shanghai. So I went for literally for 24 hours. I flew in and flew out. And we're driving in to Shanghai. And I got goosebumps. I get goosebumps now thinking about it. I mean, it was unbelievable what I saw. And I don't know how many of you have been to Shanghai but it's even more so today than it was in 2004. The skyscrapers, the lights, the billboards. The first thought that went through my mind is, there's not a single communist here. You can't have communism and billboards the size of Times Square, Times Square is small as compared to what they have there, right? And suddenly, and then from there we went to Dongguan. And I thought, Dongguan, what's Dongguan? It's nothing, right? Dongguan was a city of 8 million people that 20 years before did not exist. It was a city in which 50% of all the shoes were manufactured in the world. It's a city that had a huge tech sector. It's a city in which not a single human being sat down because they were so busy. People were busy moving skyscrapers, cranes. They took my wife on a tour of the largest mall, shopping mall in the world. With one side there was the Venetian misspelled so they wouldn't have to pay royalties to the Venetian. But literally, it looked exactly like the Venetian from Las Vegas. I mean, this grandeur and I'm going, I have this strange feeling that history, history happened here and we missed it. Something happened here that was huge. And I was thinking, in 100 years nobody would care if George Bush or Kerry won the election. But what happened in China in the 1990s and 2000s is profound. It freed up. Not completely, they're far from free. But it freed up 1.4 billion people. It gave productive energy and productive sanction to hundreds of millions of Chinese. And they did something with it. They created something with it. And it wasn't because objectivism appeared in China. It was because they adopted some good ideas that they emulated from America and from Japan. And again, this capitalism reinforces those ideas. Business, work reinforces those ideas. And they were passionate about their own lives. These were not altruistic collectivist sacrifices for the Chinese state. These were individuals trying to make their lives the best lives that they thought they could make. And they felt less guilty than Americans did. And it was exciting. And I think as I've gone through the world and seen more of that and seen the changes, I mean, the Berlin Wall fell. Wow! In 1980, when I ran, it was relatively optimistic. The Berlin Wall was still up. Communism was everywhere. It controlled about a third of the world, or maybe two thirds of the world if you count China and the population. And she was still, and now communism is gone. I mean, these kids who think they're communists, they don't know what communism is. You know, Anu is there. You know why they call themselves social democrats? Because there are no socialists. The number of socialists, real socialists, the state owning the means of production, the proletarian, the dictatorship of the proletarian, they exist, but there are very few of them. So what they want is social democracy. What's social democracy? Is we want, we understand that capitalism produces the goods, and then we want to capture them and redistribute them. I mean, that's awful, evil, bad, horrible. But it sure beats communism. And it sure beats real socialists. At least they recognize now, as Marx did, I think, but many of his followers didn't, that capitalism produces the goods. And we can leverage that, and we can take advantage of that, and we can expand that. So I'll end with this. Our opposition, the left, on the right, they have nothing. They have nothing. I mean, post-modernism is nothing. Socialism is ridiculous. And there are no ideologues on the other side. There's no ideology on the other side. I mean, religion may be, but there's no other ideology to oppose us with it. The rest of pragmatists are various forms. More altruistic, less altruistic, but all pragmatists. There's no systematic ideology in the world today, in opposition. So the world's ours. Go get it. And we must say thank you instead of putting, or proposing to put a tax on them in order to give the money to the government who does nothing. The government doesn't contribute anything except impediments. But if we allow the oil companies to have the power, which you say has come to them, because we need the oil, it's a question of supply and demand. So if we approach this laissez-faire, as I think you would like us to, free of government intervention, free of all the force and the regulation and the controls which you abhor. All right. Now we've got Mr. Gigantic Oil Baron saying $2.50 a gallon. Now, here's what happens. The blue-collar guy who's trying to make a living and feed his kids can't buy gas for his truck, can't possibly survive in the free marketplace, and suddenly he's on welfare and he's got to go for a handout, another feature of government that you abhor. You can't have it both ways. But all this is economic fallacies. To begin with, nobody in a free society, now we're talking about the free market in which the government doesn't interfere, nobody can become a monopolist. All monopolies are created by a special privilege for government. It's only by an act of government that you can keep competitors out of your field. Therefore you couldn't become that kind of monopoly. The power you hold as an industrialist is not the power to use force. It's the power of producing something of value. That people want. And it's the people who literally control you because every purchase is a vote in the favor of some businessman and in a way against others. It's the public who decides what they want to buy and what they pass up. If, using your examples, you became this powerful tycoon economically, but you cannot force anybody to deal with you and you cannot force competitors out of your field, then every smaller man would be in that field because you would have established a price way above the market. You might last months if that. So in other words, if I tried to be Mr. Big and charge out outrageously high prices for gasoline, I would go broke in your view because in your, leave them alone and let competition handle an approach to civilization, somebody with a smarter, with a better mousetrap, pardon my mixed mousetrap. No, that's a very good one. All right. Would come along and undercut me. That's right. Sell at a cheaper price. But it isn't just my view. You know what I'll do? I'll buy him up the minute I see this bird. I'll buy him. I'll own him on Tuesday. And where will you get your money when you're not allowed? I'm already holding them up for $2.50 a gallon. But they're not paying you. You say they're all going out of business. They've got to get to work. We're married to a petroleum civilization. All right. This has been done, you know. It isn't incidentally just my view. That is history. There are people who have tried to corner the market repeatedly and the result was that they went broke.