 Welcome back to the New World Podcast. I'm your host, Aries Khaki, and I'm your host, Akhil Samji. Today's guest is going to be a good one. Yaron Brooke is the head of the Ayn Rand Institute, the world's leading objectivist philosopher, and the host of the Yaron Brooke Show, which you can catch on YouTube. The link will be placed in the description. He is also the author of many books, most notably Free Market Revolution and Equal is Unfair. Yaron spent his early years growing up in Israel and was a believer in many left-wing principles until he was introduced to the philosophy of objectivism. Since then, Yaron is passionate about growing the objectivist movement from an academic philosophy to a more mainstream ideology. With that all said and done, we would like to welcome to the show Mr. Yaron Brooke. Thank you, and thank you very much, but I do want to make a correction to the bio. I'm not a philosopher, and I'm certainly not the leading philosopher of objectivism. There are lots of other philosophers who are much more knowledgeable about the philosophy, qua philosophy than I am. My strength is the application of these ideas to people's lives and to the world in which we live. And I'm a finance guy. Yes, finance background, yes. What to us as a PR leader? Yes, so we'll just start getting ready with the questions. Cool. So Yaron, before we jump into talking about high learning and objectivism, I wanted to ask you in particular about maybe framing some historical context for our Gen Z listeners. The society which we live in today, not necessarily some of the more modern problems, but the way our systems have been built. Could you relate that back to the Enlightenment? Maybe just talk to us about certain values, key values of the Enlightenment period. Why they matter? Why was it so significant? And why I think for at least my high school academic circles in terms of where I've studied history or philosophy, I've never even been taught in Canada at least about the Enlightenment, although I've heard of John Locke, but I didn't know that this was an entire gathering of some of the most intellectual minds at the time where they came together, they concluded certain rational beliefs and solidified these beliefs as being the leading way to live your life. Could you talk to us about why it took place and where it took place in particular and how that historical context has meaning to us today? Sure. I mean, I think it's a real crime the way history is taught today. It is truly tragic that Gen Zs, I guess you are, don't really know kind of the historical causality, the path in which humanity has really taken. One of the astounding facts is that for tens of thousands of years, if that's even imaginable, that kind of scale, humanity pretty much was in a state of static existence. Most human beings on planet Earth were subsistence farmers. They got up in the morning when the sun rose, they went out into the fields, they worked physical labor all day. They came back, they ate something and they went to sleep because there was no light. Soon as it got dark, life was over. And we romanticize that today and their movies romanticize it and I think some literature romanticize it. But life was short. Life expectancy before 1800 was under 40, 39. I would be long dead. You guys would be approaching middle age, I guess. And it was brutish and it was really horrific. Violence was everywhere. People were murdered. There were wars constantly. People were being killed and slaughtered. And this is the history of the human race. This is forever with a few exceptions, maybe Greece, Rome and certainly civilizations in some other places around the world. But those didn't last for very long. And almost none of them had what we take for granted, running water, electricity, just basic things that we all today take for granted. So we are today like a million times richer in terms of the quality and standard of living that we have today, richer than our ancestors, than people were three, four, five hundred years ago, never mind 10,000 years ago. And why is that? What happened in the last 250 years that made us so much more comfortable, rich, easier to live and of course has doubled and more life expectancy. And my life expectancy in Canada and the United States is over 80. Child mortality is, you know, as close to zero as one can imagine. It used to be 50% of children didn't make age 10. 50% of kids died before the age of 10. I mean, that's unimaginable today to a modern Western audience. So really, you know, if you look at Western history, the cause of this amazing progress has its roots in ancient Greece, in the ideas of the Greeks, in the fact that they cherished human life and they started thinking about the issues of the world. They started thinking about what we know, how we know it, why we know something, what is the good life, what is not good life, what is moral, what is not moral. And they started, they created a field called philosophy and really it's the ideas of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle that really shaped the world ever since. Many of those ideas, certainly the better of those ideas, the Aristotelian ideas were lost during the rise of Christianity, the destruction of Rome and then the Dark Ages. And they were slowly rediscovered by the Catholic Church, accommodating with Thomas Aquinas who really brought them into the church and made them a reality. And over many decades and centuries following that, these ideas kind of infiltrated Western culture and became more established. But at the same time, religion was a big factor and during the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries, there were massive wars. I mean, on a scale that we can't even imagine today, you know, as a percentage of the population, more people died in the wars of the 16th century than died in the 20th century, even though we had a first or second world war during that period. I mean, and the wars were all religious wars, Protestants and Catholics killing each other on a massive scale. And at the same time, you've got these philosophical ideas bubbling under the surface. And in the 17th century, in the 18th century, what really happens is people are sick of the wars. People come to realize that these religious wars are destructive and horrific and a disaster. And these philosophical ideas are starting to bubble up. And the way they really break through is with the scientific revolution. If you think about the Enlightenment, the first Enlightenment thinker is really Newton, right? Newton's laws, the real first scientist who really explains the world that we see, that we observe in ways that people can understand and becomes very popular. These ideas spread to Europe very quickly. And with that, people start saying to themselves, if you will, huh, I can understand the physical world. I can understand how objects move. I can understand these things. I used to believe, everybody used to tell me the truth was in a book written 2000 years ago, written by God or whatever, right? And then the only way I could know the truth is through the experts, the prophets, the pope, the platonic philosopher kings. But it turns out I can know truth using my own senses and my own mind. And they started questioning, as a consequence of that, this discovery of reason as efficacious, reason as a source of knowledge. They suddenly started questioning everything. And you had John Locke asking these kind of questions. Well, if people, if we can understand the physical world using reason, why can't we understand what's right and wrong using reason? Why can't we decide on a political system using reason? Why can't we decide on who our political leaders should be using reason? And people started questioning, why can't I decide my profession using reason before the Enlightenment? You did what your father did, if you were a man. And if you were a woman, you had babies, you hoped not to die a childbirth and you managed the home. That's it. There was no other options. But men did what their fathers did. There was a guilt system and that was it. So suddenly people started questioning these. And suddenly you got the birth of this idea that the individual matters, that your life isn't ended in itself, that you have rights. This is John Locke's great contribution, that you have rights. All of that politically gets codified in the founding of America in the Declaration of Independence and then a constitution. Suddenly you get entrepreneurs. You get people saying, hey, I've got ideas. I've got an idea how to take the science and turn it into a product. And I don't need permission of a king. I don't need the permission of a pope. I can just do it. So you get the Industrial Revolution. You get a continuation of the Scientific Revolution into the 19th century, where people are continuously asking themselves and pushing the envelope. And you get these massive advances in science in the 18th and 19th and into the 20th century. So the enlightenment is when all this happens. It's when this Aristotelian idea of reason, of individualism, of human happiness, the importance of human happiness, all become a reality for a vast number of people. They take it seriously and they start applying it to their lives and they change the world. And the world we live in today, the good parts of it are all products of the Enlightenment. The bad parts of it are all products of reactionary forces continuously fighting against the Enlightenment. But that's the battle that we live today in. It's enlightenment versus everybody who's lying against it. That was a great answer. You basically summed up my history class in like five minutes. Well, it would be great if you had that class. I wish you had it. But it would be great if we actually went to school and studied this in detail and actually studied each period. And from the perspective of what caused the good stuff and what caused the bad stuff, and what are these clashes of ideas and philosophies and how did these shape the events that happened? Because I believe, I in Rand believe, I learned this from my in Rand and Lena Peacock that ideas shape history. They shape the future. They shape human events. They shape your life as an individual. And they shape our lives as a culture and as a historical phenomenon. And now we want to move on to the main topic. But I just wanted to give a comment. Honestly speaking, I never even heard of in Rand or yourself or even philosophy of objectivism until I started prepping for this interview. And doing a Google search only yields bias and inaccurate data of different things. And even to I feel our listeners probably don't even know who in Rand is considering they're born way past her timeline. And the most significant history event was either the 2008 Great Recession or 9 11. And so, you know, as the head of the in Rand Institute, I'm pretty sure you know a lot about in Rand, her life, her philosophies. So could you tell our listeners who was in Rand? So I do. I need to make one more correction of my bio. I'm not technically the head of the island Institute in terms of CEO I was for 17 years. I'm now the chairman of the board. So, you know, talks funny is the is the CEO of the island Institute. But so just with that, I don't want to get into trouble. So just with that. Sure. I mean, I'm Rand was a was a writer novelist and a and a philosopher. And for most Genziers, but really for anybody, the thing you want to really read is is the fountain head. And out shrug, you know, hopefully, some of your viewers will have read the books because the books are out there. They're in the culture that part of the culture and even some in some schools, particularly in the United States, at least I'm not sure how much in Canada, but also in Canada from at least during my years as head of the island Institute. It was certainly the case in Canada. Fountain head and anthem and out of shrug were books being read in high schools in Canada. We get a lot of Canadian kids writing into our high school essay contests. We did that in the US and UK, in a lot of English speaking countries, even even in non English speaking countries, we were the largest we have the largest high school essay contest in the world. We get thousands and thousands of essays. And that's how partially how we keep Ireland alive and for the younger generations, you know, people go online and look for scholarships. And they find they find the essay contest and they apply and a lot of people want a lot of money from us. So I was a novelist primarily and a philosopher. She was born in 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia. She was born to a her father was a pharmacist. He owned a pharmacy at the bottom of the building in which they lived. So he had a reasonable, a nice business, a reasonable income. And then of course, in 1914, you had the Russian Revolution. You had the rise of communism. Literally the square where this revolution starts is in St. Petersburg right outside of the pharmacy, right outside of their home. She witnessed it. So she lived through the Civil War in Russia during the Revolution. And of course, when the revolution was won by the communists, the pharmacy was taken away nationalized. Their apartment was taken away. They had to share it with other families. So she witnessed, was a real witness to life under communism and what that meant as a teenager. She went to university, but it was quite clear that she stayed in the Soviet Union. They would kill her. I mean, she was an independent thinker from very young and she could not hold her tongue. I mean, she expressed her views and she was going to get into trouble and there's no question about that. So in a small window of opportunity in the 1920s, when Leonard allowed people to leave in the late 1920s for study abroad type things, she managed to get a visa to the United States to come and research film. She was studying film. And she got, she had a cousin in the U.S. who owned a movie theater in Chicago and he wrote a letter and she got out. Her family knew she would never come back. So she got a train left. They knew they would never see her again. And she came to the United States, came to Chicago with nothing. Then went to Hollywood because her dream was to be a writer and she loved movies. So she wanted to be a screenwriter. She wanted to write for the movies. And on her first day in Hollywood, true story, she goes to CISA B. DeMille Studios. You guys probably don't know who CISA B. DeMille was, but one of the great pioneers of the movie industry and one of the most famous directors in movie history. And she goes to the studio and, you know, she has a letter of introduction. They say, you know, don't call us, we'll call you. And she walks out of the studio and this CISA B. DeMille driving by in this massive convertible. And this is, you know, the late 1920s and she stares at him. She's this little Russian girl. She stares at him and he stops the car and he says, you know, why are you staring at me? What are you doing here? And she tells him, you know, I'm from Russia and she has this thick Russian accent. I want to get into the movies. I want to learn everything there is about the industry. I want to write for the movies. And he says, OK, well, get in the car. Let me show you. So he takes her to where they're filming. The King of Kings is a silent movie about Jesus Christ. He says, here's a weak pass to the lot so you can learn about the movies. He becomes an extra on the movie. And for years, she has all kinds of odds and ends jobs in the movie business, trying to learn. And ultimately she writes scripts. She gets movies made. She reviews scripts. So she becomes part of the industry. She also writes plays and some of them are ultimately performed on Broadway and in LA. She writes her first novel, We the Living, which is a close to an autobiographical novel that she ever wrote. It's about growing up in a communism in the Soviet Union and what life is like. It's a powerful novel. I recommend it to everybody. It's a fairly easy read and it's beautiful. And it's heart wrenching because you see what communism really is about. She then writes a little novel, a novel called Anthem, which is published in the UK first and only then in the United States, a dystopian type novel. Take you about a couple of hours to read. Definitely worth reading. It's very short, but again, very powerful. And here you can already start seeing the themes. Individualism versus collectivism comes out of this. What is the purpose of life? Is it to live for others or to live for yourself that comes out of this novel? Then she writes a book called The Fountainhead. The Fountainhead is rejected by 12 publishers. But when it comes out, finally the publisher brings it out and they don't quite believe in it. They don't print a lot of copies, but it becomes a bestseller and word of mouth. And they have to go back into the printing presses and read print and it's still a bestseller. It still sells tens of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of copies a year around the world. Today it's being translated into almost every language out there. There are more copies of Fountainhead that sell in other languages than in English. It's a huge international bestseller. And I think if you want to understand, I mean, I think it's the American novel. I think it's THE American novel. Forget Scott F. Fitzgerald. That doesn't come close. The Fountainhead represents America in its deepest sense and what it means and what America represents. And then after Fountainhead, she wrote what is a Magnus Opus, Atlas Shrugged. It took her 12 years to write. By the time she published this, every publisher wanted it. They bid for it and when it came out, it was an instant bestseller. And again, it sells hundreds of thousands of copies, tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of copies every single year in every language out there. And everybody should read Atlas Shrugged. It's a profound book where she really summarizes her entire philosophy. And then the rest of her life, so this was Fountainhead was published in 45. Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957. I know ancient history for you guys. And then she spent the 60s and 70s really writing philosophical commentary on the culture. Real philosophical original work, but then a lot of what she wrote was commentary on the culture and what was going on. She died in 1982. And the Einman Institute was founded in 1885 to kind of continue promoting her work and make sure that her philosophy stays in the public eye and in the debate and in the discussion. And it's still true that many young people read her book, many young people are influenced by her. And now with the internet, it's an opportunity to get these ideas to even a broader bigger audience. So that's how we can talk about her ideas if you like next. Yeah, that was just my next question. I wanted to segue into objectivism and really what is that? So, I mean, the quick answer, I mean, there's a long answer and a short answer, the long answer, you can take hours and hours and hours and hours of seminars and lectures and they're all up online and you can go to something called Einwand University. There's an app, you can download it. And there is, you know, hundreds of hours of content on objectivism and what the philosophy is as a philosophy. The short version is that in metaphysics, metaphysics is the science of what is, it's the study of what is. Einwand held that reality is what it is. Sounds obvious, but a lot of philosophers think that reality is in a sense a creation of our own consciousness. Or it's a creation of somebody else's consciousness, God or whatever, right? But for Rand, reality is what it is. A is A to quote Aristotle. The law of identity holds, the law of causality holds, things act according to their own identity and the identity is firm. And that, you know, so that's metaphysics and epistemology, the study of knowledge. She held that reality is knowable. It's knowable through reason, through our senses and through our reasoning faculty, our faculty of reason. It's not knowable through your emotions. It's not knowable through revelation. And it's not as modern philosophy would teach us unknowable, right? Most modern philosophers believe we don't know what reality really is. We just know what we pretend reality is or we make up reality. And so she was a huge advocate of reason, right? Of the ability of human beings to understand no reality, abstract form it, you know, form concepts from it, and ultimately manipulate nature for our own means. And then of course the question is, who reasons? Just like we don't have a collective stomach so nobody else can eat for you. We don't have a collective brain. There's no collective consciousness. Nobody can eat for you. And it's also true that nobody can think for you. You have to do your own thinking. Indeed, she argues that their life depends on you doing your own thinking. So for Rand, the individual is the unit that matters because it is the unit that thinks it is the unit that's alive. And so her morality, her ethical code is an ethics of it's an ethics of egoism. It's an ethics of self interest. The purpose of your life is your life. It's your flourishing. It's your survival. It's ultimately your happiness. Indeed, your moral purpose of your life is your own happiness. To contrast with the common view, which the ethical purpose of your life is to sacrifice for others, particularly if they're needy, particularly if they're weak. So everybody else is important. You're not. For Rand, you're important. Your relationship with everybody else is dictated by you, by your life, by your values. Other people are value because they contribute to your life. So she was not a believer in sacrificing to others, but she was also not a believer in sacrificing other people to you. Every individual is an end in himself. Every individual is striving to happiness. Sacrifice is not appropriate in terms of human interaction. The way human beings should interact is through the process of trade with a spiritual material. And then the question is, okay, the next kind of issue in philosophy is politics. Well, if the purpose of your life is your happiness, what political system is most appropriate for individuals seeking the happiness? Well, here you have to answer the question, well, how do you seek your happiness? The appropriate way for human beings to seek happiness is by using their mind, by using their reason. It is their means of survival. It is their faculty of knowing the world. Every value that we have is a product of human reason. Somebody's reasoning. Somebody's thinking. Everything we have around us, somebody thought and produced. So what is the enemy of reasoning, of thinking, of using your mind? Well, force, coercion, authority. So how do we create a political system where we don't have force, coercion, authority? That's, we have to have the concept of individual rights, which basically bridges morality to politics. So what Jessica says, your life is yours. You have the freedom to pursue the values that you deem necessary for your survival, rationally using reason. Nobody can use force against you. That's the meaning of rights. The right to life is the right to pursue your values, free of coercion. And of course, the political system that institutionalizes individual rights is capitalism, the system in which the government's only job is the protection of individual rights. So she rejects socialism or any kind of statism where the state is more important than the individual, where the state imposes its will individual. So fascism, the mixed economy, statism, the world is where we have today. All those political systems she rejects, she believes in a pure form of capitalism, the only kind of form of capitalism, capitalism, where the only role of government is to protect your rights and your life. And on top of that, she also has a theory of aesthetics of art, why it's important for your life, why art is crucial, why you shouldn't live without art and what is good art, what is bad art, and how does art fulfill the need. But in that sense, she's one of the few philosophers in human history that has a view on all the key questions in philosophy. She's a system builder. She's not just a like Locke who's primarily a political philosopher, but she has a view and an original view and a new view on pretty much every key question that philosophers have been asking for the last 3,000 years. So I wanted to quickly pause and just take a detour because I know you mentioned an idea right now where you said the famous word socialism, which has been kind of in the news recently as we see down south over the border. But I want to reflect because I think sometimes we misunderstand history. And by misunderstanding history, it's often that, I believe it was Plato that said those who control stories, control society, the idea that like you have to be a good storyteller, or the idea that stories are the ones that control the narrative by which we function in everyday life. So I know that collectively we all agreed in school, or I guess if you don't then maybe you're part of a very marginal case, but we agreed that after the events of 1945, we understood that Nazi Germany, like never again, we understood as a collective, as a consensus of the world, after we saw those photographs of the concentration camps and never again, this will never happen again. But it seems as though, even though it's been like 30, almost three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the fall of the Berlin Wall, and how we've understood that sort of communism is unlike the archives of history, there is still this flirtation with the bigger umbrella term of socialism. The idea that, well, pure capitalism in its innate form is, as you mentioned, from the altruistic perspective, oh, it's unequal. Therefore, it causes division from an elite to a bourgeoisie to proletariat. Do you see, I know you've mentioned in previous podcasts and appearances, can you describe the similarities? Because I think you've juxtaposed both Nazism and communism in the same way, in the sense that you would, I presume, and I believe the same way, particularly from our family history, considering that our parents came from a part of Africa, whereby socialism was rampant, however, it wasn't branded as Marxism. Like, oh, we're not the Marxist guys, we're socialists, but we're like in an African sense, like this idea of why it's still there, and particularly in Western circles. Yeah, I mean, there's no question. For example, the communism and Nazism are the same. There's no fundamental difference, there's certainly no difference in morality. They're both evil ideologies, evil ideologies that lead to death and destruction on a massive scale. Indeed, communism has killed more people than fascism in its history. But socialism, which is just kind of a toned-down, moderate version of communism, has, and indeed communism itself, all have much better public relations than fascism, right? Nobody wants to be a Nazi, nobody wants to associate with Nazis. Everybody walks out of a room if a Nazi walks in. But if somebody walks into a room and says, I'm a communist, everybody goes, oh, hi, you know, that's kind of interesting. And the reason is that socialism and Nazism, socialism and communism are very consistent with the prevailing moral code. And the prevailing moral code is a morality of altruism, of sacrifice, of self-sacrifice, of collectivism, but a kind of collectivism that's different than the fascist collectivism and more similar than the communist collectivism. The thing that people hate about the fascist collectivism is not the collectivism. What they hate about it is that it was racist. What they hate about it is that it established some people as opposed to be better genetically than other people. That's what they hate about it. The collectivism in and of itself, they don't mind. They hate, they share the anti-individualism of the fascists. They just don't like that some groups are better than others. Now, in a sense, that exists in communism too, because if you read Karl Marx, the proletarians get rid of all the other classes. And even some peoples who don't fit or not fit to be proletarian, you get rid of. So communism has built into it the same kind of conflict as Nazism and fascism does, but people ignore that. People view communism and socialism as egalitarian. Egalitarian is treating everybody the same based on race and other issues, and ultimately leading to some kind of equality of outcome or equality of opportunity and a reduction in inequality of outcome. But they all disregard the individual. They're all anti-individualist. What matters is the group, what matters is society. What matters is however you want to create this association, this group that you created, whether it's the proletarian, whether it's society, whether it's your country, whatever it happens to be. They all should be equal. And the job of the individual in such a society is to sacrifice for the sake of the collective. Now, if you think about it, that's consistent with Christianity. It's consistent with almost every moral code that exists in the West. There's no opposition to that idea. Nobody stands up and says, no, we don't think that's right, that's just, that's moral. People might say, we don't think that works. We think you'll all be poor. You think it hasn't worked in history. But nobody says, and the idea is immoral. The idea is evil. Indeed, you see the opposite. You see a lot of conservatives, a lot of people on the right say, even Jordan Peterson, right, University of Toronto, you mentioned, so Jordan Peterson says things like, no, no, you know, socialism and communism, wonderful ideas, beautiful ideas. It's not practical. People want to be inspired. People want to have an ideal. So they're much more interested in the ideal than in the practicality. And that's why generation after generation, young people who are idealistic, who want to believe in something, become socialist because it's all this presented to them. And people, the people who oppose socialism, what they need to do is rally around an alternative ideal. I believe that ideal is individualism, that ideal is objectivism, that ideal is an ideal of individual happiness. The ideal is making the most of your life, living a great life, living a fantastic life. But for whatever reason, because of education and because of religion and because of everything else, we're conditioned to be in a group, we're conditioned to be in a collective. And most people are much more attracted, unfortunately, to the ideal of collectivism and therefore socialism, then they are to the ideal of individualism and therefore capitalism. But as you said, a lot of people have never heard of it, right? Because who stood for the ideal of individualism and a morality of individualism? I ran and pretty much nobody else. I want to segue quickly into capitalism, but also I want to relate what you just mentioned with regards to this ideal of young people being idealistic. As someone who's during this whole crisis that we've been in, kind of taken an interest in how the modern shaped world is today. I can think back to studying counterculture in the 60s and how much of a role today's progressive. So for example, people that espouse certain similar things that you're mentioning, like I think of like AOC, I think of left-leaning parties here in Canada like the NDP. These ideas, whether they were formed in the academy, in the university systems, how much did the 60s and counterculture have to do with it? Was it, which I'm sort of on the edge of in terms of my observation and my hypothesis of just studying this, but is it the collapse of the importance of the church and the importance of the religious institutions in the 60s, kind of? Young people began to look towards idealistic, they looked for somewhere else for that ideal. And so they thought that the Marxist or the collective principles of me fighting for something greater than myself in the same realm of the Christian, Judeo-Christian value system. Do you think that contributed? And then the university professors were just like pumping all the way along the fire, basically. Well, I think all of that is true, but I think that the issue really is that the 1960s were a new phenomena that what I'm going to call the new left, and you're seeing that today, but that the shift was happening for decades before that. So the shift away from capitalism really started in the 1880s and 90s with the progressive movement. And the progressive movement was already taking Marxist ideas, taking Hegel's ideas, undermining American individualism, bringing out the ideas of collectivism. But they still had this respect for ideas, respect for reason, respect for science. They were Marxists, much more fundamentally Marxists, but there was clearly undercutting American capitalism. And of course, American capitalism didn't die 10 years ago. It didn't die in the financial crisis. American capitalism died in 1890 when antitrust laws were passed for the first time. And in the 1910s, 1914, when income tax and the Federal Reserve was established in the 1930s with the great New Deal. So with the New Deal, capitalism has been dying, being murdered really, slowly for a long, long time. But what happened in the 1960s is a new generation came about who was reading the existentialist, who was reading the postmodernist, who was writing their own ideas. And they were now rejecting what's called the old left. They rejected Marx to a large extent. They rejected the old philosophers. They didn't know they were channeling them in some ways, but their view is reason is impotent. Science is impotent. Remember, Marx argues for scientific socialism. The 60s are anti-scientific socialism. They don't want science in socialism. They just want their feelings. Go to Woodstock. It's not about Marx. It's about hedonism, emotion, self-expression without a self, if you will. So they want a kind of collectivism that's tribal and emotionalist and postmodern. So what you see from the 60s to today is the intellectual, and so their professors were these Marxists who were trying to tell them, oh, you know, no, no, no, we still need the structure. We still need reason. We still need thought. We still need ideas. We still need evidence. And these kids are saying, no, we don't need any of that. We just need our emotions. Reality is meaningless. Reality is unknowable. It's all in our head. You're determined by your race. You're determined by your genes, whatever. All of this is nonsense. And then they become the professors. So what you get over the last 40 years is that the new left, the 60s counter-revolution, are the dominant intellectuals in our culture. And what are they teaching? They're teaching critical race theory, which says that you're determined by your race and it's inherent in you. And therefore, as a white person, you should feel guilty. As a black person, you should feel victim as a victim. And as a brown person, I guess somewhere in the middle. And there's this whole categorization of victimhood, which is this, what do they call it now? Or, you know, they have this whole hierarchies of who's bigger victim. The oppression hierarchy. What's that? The oppression hierarchy. There's a term, which is a slip through our mind, but intersectionality, right? The whole intersectionality movement is about this hierarchy of oppression. And it has to do with your sexuality. And it has to do with your, they've discovered 92 sexes and it has to do with your race. And they've discovered lots of different races. And all of this is completely devout of science. I mean, Marx would be shocked by it. You know, economics, which is Marx's hallmark, right? Economic class is only one of the many, many, many categories of oppression. And what they have done is they've completely made emotions as the most important thing in the world. That's why they view speeches violence because if you offend them, you hurt your emotions. That's like them being punched in the nose. They don't see a difference in that. And they have destroyed, they have the anti-enlightenment forces today. Now, I think they're pretty impotent because they don't have a theory. They don't have anything to stand on. They don't really have ideas. Their ideas are meaningless because at the end of the day, it's all grounded in emotion. But they dominate the intellectual world today and you hear their voices constantly. And this is what people like Jordan Peterson are speaking up against. But again, the challenge there is, you know, do you have a, do you have a set of ideas to replace this? And that's where Peterson and others, I think, fail. They don't have something coherent, idealistic to replace these, what these intellectuals and note, these intellectuals are not idealists. What's the idealism of critical race theory? It's not color blindness. They don't believe in color blindness. That was Martin Luther King. That's the old left. And you left doesn't believe in color blindness. They want us all to be color, you know, conscious, right? Constantly think about color. Is it socialism? Is it some socialist utopia? Not really. The post-modernist critical race theory people are, they just want control. It's not about even socialism. It's about control. They want to run your life. They want to run your life based on some ridiculous hierarchy, but their system falls apart. There's no coherent ideology. Even AOC and to some extent, Bernie Sanders are still to some extent remnants of the old left. They still believe in socialism, right? But the real, the people behind BLM and Tifa, people like that, they don't believe in socialism. They believe in mayhem. They believe in destruction. They believe in hate. They believe in nothing. Iron Man called it, what they really worship is the zero, is nothingness. And it's true that religion plays some role in here in two ways. One, the rejection of religion and the idea of what now, where the values come from. But also I would argue, and Iron Man would argue, that religion conditions them towards emotionalism. Because what is religion? How do we know God exists? Because we feel it. There is no logical explanation. There's no rational explanation. So what religion conditions people is to feel, to have faith, to believe in revelation and to be collectivist. And then these intellectuals capitalize on the fact that these kids are being raised religious to move them towards this nihilistic, you know, anarchistic point of view. But they're not even fighting for an ideal anymore. There's some socialists out there believe in something, but the people in the streets, they don't believe in anything other than hatred. And you know, I just wanted to go back towards objectivism. I know you were talking a little bit about altruism and you were kind of referring to the hierarchy of values. I kind of wanted to touch base on that and just hope you could explain it. So altruism says that your top value is other people. That your purpose in life is to sacrifice other people. Their well-being, other people's well-being is what's important. Augustine Comte, the French 19th century philosopher, basically said, if you help somebody else and while helping them, you think, oh, I'm going to do this because it's going to make me happy. It doesn't count because you thought about yourself. So altruism is about sacrifice. What is sacrifice? Sacrifice means giving up something and not expecting anything in return, spiritual or material. Or it means being worse off after what you did. That's the sign of nobility. Think Jesus on a cross. He's not better off after he's just been brutally moated. He's dead. But he's our saint. He's what Jordan Peterson calls a superhero. He suffered not for his sins, but for our sins. Now, I would say that's an enormous injustice. You should suffer for your sins. I don't want to suffer for your sins. You sin, you should suffer. So altruism basically conditions people to sacrifice and suffer. Most people don't want to be altruistic, but they don't know there's an option. So they cheat. They live most of their lives in pursuit of wealth and happiness and feeling good about themselves and so on. But in the back of their mind, they know that to really be a saint, to really be good with the capital G, they should be Mother Teresa. They should sacrifice. They should give up everything. So what do you feel when you know you should do X, then you actually do Y? You feel guilt? So we live in a society filled with guilt. And of course, politicians and intellectuals use that against us. So we feel guilty about the poor. They say, look, we'll allow you to not feel so guilty about the poor by allowing us to raise your taxes and we'll take care of the poor. And people vote. Yeah. Okay, raise my taxes. No problem. So I can feel less guilty. Objectivism says that's all nonsense. That's all doesn't make any sense. The fundamental is your life. And the fundamental choice that you have to make in life is whether you want to live or not. But once you've made that choice and 99% of us 99.99% of us make the choice to live, then the question morality needs needs to answer. The reason we need morality is, well, how should I live? What should I do? And because we're not animals, like all others, in the sense that we have free will, we have to choose our values. A lion doesn't decide what values to pursue. It just does what it's programmed to do. You as a human being can choose what values to pursue, what ideas to believe in, how, what kind of life to live. So Rand believes that your, the purpose of morality is to teach us how to live a good life, a life appropriate to a reasoning being, to a being with a reasoning mind, to a thinking animal, to a rational animal. So reason is obviously big in Iran's ethics. It's the core principle around ethics. If one principle by which to live based on objectivism is think. So at the top of the hierarchy is think, think for yourself, figure out what's good for you. You don't know automatically your emotions won't necessarily tell you what's good for you. You have to figure it out and you have to devote significantly resources to figuring it out. So figure out what's good for you. And then once you figure out what's good for you, then figure out, okay, life is complex. There's a lot of things that are good for you that you want to do. What's most important? What are the things I should focus on? And now it's going to change in life concretely right now for you guys going to universities most important. Later it might be career. It might be finding, you know, somebody to share your life with for the rest of your life. So you create a hierarchy of values of what's most important to me. What are the other things? And at the top should be your moral values, things like to think, be independent, be honest. Then I need to go to school. I need to have a career. I need to do all these other things. And you know, somewhere at the bottom there might be, I want a nice house. I want some material goods. But all of this needs to be in a hierarchy. So when you go and decide, what am I going to do tomorrow? You know, well, this is the most important thing. And I'm not going to give this up for something down here. That would be a sacrifice. I'm going to live my life pursuing the things that are most important to me. That's a really mind blowing way to think of how life. Yes. And sadly, very few people live this way. And it's bad because it means that very few people are living a fully expressed fully utilizing the time they have on this earth. You know, fully embracing their lives, maximizing their potential as living beings. And it's sad to contemplate all the wasted life out there. You know, you were talking about free will and I wanted to touch upon that. Why do you think free will and reason are more supreme than willful blindness and letting others rule you? And I know you kind of touched upon that, but like if you could explain a little more. Well, you know, well from blindness, just try crossing the street. I mean, you can be blind and you can walk around pretending to be blind, but you're going to suffer the consequences. Reality doesn't care what you believe. Reality is what it is. That car is coming with you, believe it's coming or not. And if you're willfully blind, you'll get run over. Now, it won't always be so obvious as the car will run over. But, you know, it might be that you take drugs that do harm to your brain and therefore you won't be able to have a fulfilling life. It might be that you decide, I don't want to go to school. I'm going to party all the time. And by the time you realize that you don't have where to feed yourself tomorrow and you're homeless on the street, that's willful blindness. Reality, the necessary things, values that you need in order to live. Don't care about your ideas. Food, your biology, the fact that you need food doesn't care about what you think about food. And the same with other people doing your thinking for you. I mean, why? I mean, that's such a bizarre idea. Again, I said earlier, nobody can do the eating for me. Why would I want anybody to do thinking? Thinking is the most important thing you do in life. The only person I trust to do my thinking for me is me. And if other people do my thinking, I'm nothing. I'm literally nothing. I've declared to the world and to myself that I am a nobody. I'm a zero. I'm a non-entity. And what's the point in living at that point? So both courses of action lead to complete and utter self-destruction. Right now, you mentioned that previously that we did the mixed economy. Most of our countries that we do, whether it be Canada, the United States in particular, which reminds me of another concept that I want to bring up, which is as a pure objectivist, what would be the role forward? I know you've mentioned and you've kind of avoided the use of the term of describing objectivism as utopia, because that's basically exactly what Ayman described as it, not being in terms of a collective sort of hive mind sense. Where would you see the objectivists, like where could the objectivists work from the mixed economy have right now? Let's say, for example, if you were advising the President of the United States right now, the President-elect, hopefully Joe Biden listens to you. But let's say, for example, you have the paper in the pen and you had to write everything down from the beginning in terms of whether, as you mentioned, the establishment of the Federal Reserve or the mixed economy they're working on or the cronyism that takes place on Wall Street when it comes to some government doing insider favors with Wall Street. Where do you see the objectivist point of view? How do I tackle this problem first so I can return back to the ideal world that Ayman was talking about? Yeah, so first, let me just say that you're asking about politics. You're asking about how do we impact the world and how would we impact the world to move? But first and most important thing you should do with these ideas is live, is improve your own life. Even in a mixed economy, we have enough choices and enough freedom to be able to live our lives. So first thing you do is live your life and make the most of your life. That's the most important thing. Now, politically, how do we move from where we are today to a mixed economy? Well, first, you have to convince people to a capitalist economy. You have to convince people that capitalism matters. That capitalism is what they want because you can't force capitalism on people. It's a contradiction in term. You can't force people to be free. So they have to want to be free. So the most important thing we as objectivists could do is educate, educate, educate. Educate people about the value of capitalism, value of individualism. And then in terms of how do you bring it about politically? Well, I mean, you've got to roll back the states in every aspect. You've got to get the state out of education, privatize the schools, and all kinds of ideas on how to do that so that poor people don't suffer too much and how you bridge the gap, how you move slowly towards a system of completely private schools. Get rid of government-run healthcare, certainly in Canada, but also in the United States. Get rid of all the cronyism, all the things. So one of the things I would do very early on if I were president and if the people supported this, I would create a separation of state from economics. Just roll back all the ways in which the state is involved in economics. The cronyism, the regulations, the controls, the subsidies, the taxes. Get rid of those too. So that the state has no business in your business. Zero. That's the only way to solve these problems. Now, that is going to take a long time. That's not easy to do tomorrow. But that's the movement that has to happen. It has to happen towards more freedom. Limited government. Government-limited to just protecting our rights and not interfering in how we live our lives. I know you just mentioned something that we're both passionate about, which is the idea of, as you mentioned previously, we're hellbent on stressing the idea of individuality, particularly within Gen Z. Maybe it's just our inherent bias, but do you see a cultural shift? Maybe it might seem kind of pessimistic now. Maybe if you're watching on mainstream media or social media, do you see a pendulum shift happening with Gen Z? I think we face it here on the ground because the reason is, for example, that, as we mentioned, since the 60s, the boomers, Gen X, the millennials, and then us, I remember talking to my parents as them being immigrants from East Africa. They came during the Reagan administration, 1981, Pierre Trudeau here in Canada, Justin's father. There were these sort of sense of conservative values being brought from back home, where they'd be conservative in the idea of a faith base. My parents, for example, are from a Muslim background, but at the same time, the values of hard work and the ideas of getting off your butt and basically working and not relying on the state to take care of you because that's basically what they ran away from, right? The idea that this was being manufactured on a national scale. Do you see that this pendulum is shifting now with Gen Z? Do you see a sense of a rise of less altruism and more kind of a push towards this need to problem solve? I see more people of my generation, particularly myself and Akhil, being motivated by people like Elon Musk, right? Like trailblazing and moving and using the resources of actually the free market to hunt down some smart people and put people who are smarter than you together in a room to solve some of the world's biggest problems. And I see this trend rising, whether it not be from the millennials but the Gen Zers themselves who are leaving the university now or creating startups and projects that we are in our first year, second year. I see this rising. Do you see maybe a pendulum shift back in the direction of looking at things from first principles and saying, okay, let's apply rationality and think from first principles. Stop thinking with emotion. Think with first principles. I mean, you guys would know this better than I would. I don't know, right? I mean, you're Gen Zers, so you're right in the midst of it. So I'm a little skeptical because what I see among Gen Zers, at least some Gen Zers at least, is a rise in individuality in the sense of a perverse individuality focused on emotion rather than on reason. Now it could be that both out there, it could be that there is the kids who are going into engineering and science and want to be entrepreneurs and want to be successful are the ones that are more motivated about changing the world through markets and through science and through engineering and through the use of the mind and through reason. And there are others who are more of the nihilists and the hedonists and who are motivated really by sheer emotion. It's really hard to tell what the numbers are and where your generation falls in terms of what's the dominant. I don't know. I hope you're right. I hope we have an influence. This is why I love doing interviews with young people, is I hope to get to your audience. Your audience is the future. And I think the younger you're exposed to these ideas, to these ideas of individualism, but really rational egoism, a morality, a morality, not to do whatever the hell you feel like, but a morality that says to be successful in life, not just in business, in life. These are the principles you have to follow. The younger you'll get exposed to that, the younger you start applying these ideas, the better. So I hope there are a lot of people out there open to these ideas and open to the ideas of changing the world through markets and entrepreneurship and so on. I guess we'll see where Gen Z ultimately lands up in this trajectory. It also changes as you grow older in terms of people's attitudes. But let's hope that this is a generation that brings back a respect for individualism and capitalism. I think you, I just want to quickly mention something. Maybe this could be, as you mentioned, maybe from my bias or just my narrow kind of field of influence. Do you think as the years went by, as a decade and by those, a sense of, I think you've talked about this prior, which is the idea like instant gratification as being the sole source. I can think back to, I bring up counterculture for this very reason because there was this idea that all of a sudden with the collapse of the church and the importance of that in the family, sex as a subject was transactional at this point, as a bodily function and with the contraceptive pill being introduced. And so it wasn't a worry anymore of shotgun marriages. It was more like it's just a transaction. Over time with the rise of technology and smartphones and sort of the need for instant gratification to satisfy a dopamine level, do you see, I think more and more people are bringing their attention to the fact that the modern day like social media scene could be the equivalent of our generation. Maybe the counterbalance, the counteract comes from what we're seeing now with people recognizing their problems with social media. Do you think maybe that could be the forefront? Do you see anything happening within that region? It could be, but at the end of the day, and I think, you know, Jordan Peterson's success with Gen Z's is to a large extent kind of the backlash against the instant gratification and the emotionalism of the culture. But the problem is Jordan Peterson doesn't offer solutions. He offers identification of a lot of problems. His solutions are the conservative solutions. The solutions have failed for previous generations and it doesn't take you any way. Solutions are religion, which I think is a dead end as a solution. So, and yeah, I think people are coming to realization social media and being obsessed and being online all the time and all of that is probably damaging, although hard to tell coming out of COVID, how people are going to respond because they've now lived on social media and Zoom and stuff like that. So whether people will go start going out again will be interesting. I hope so. But the flip side of that is, as I said earlier, individual lives and history shaped by ideas, by philosophy. Unless people are willing to embrace a new set of ideas, unless they're willing not just identify the problems, but go out and seek ideas as solutions. Ideas as ways of living and ideas that are consistent with, you know, so for example, sex, take sex. So I am opposed to the conservative view of sex, probably even the Jordan Peterson's view of sex. I think it's immoral to wait until you're married to have sex. I think that's immoral. I think you should experience it beforehand. Otherwise you'll be a bad husband and a bad wife and you want to have sex with the person you're going to marry before you marry them, before you commit, and make sure it's good because it's an important part of marriage. But I'm also against sleeping with anybody anytime, just, you know, a series of one night stands, whenever. So sex has this important crucial spiritual value, but it's also not this mystical, prohibited thing that needs to be shunned and you can't talk about, it should be in the closet and you can only do when you're married, right? So, you know, can people find that right balance between the two? I worry that they go from have sex with anybody to the conservative view, the religious view of sex, and I worry that they do that on a lot of topics and what I'd like them to do is discover a new path, a path that looks at all these things from a rational perspective and from a self-interested perspective. The fact that sex is so enjoyable should give you a hint that it's good and shouldn't be saved up for some, you know, special event. It's good, so do it, right? Again, but it's so good that it has a spiritual element, you can't do it with anybody, otherwise it loses its meaning. And that perspective, that egoistic perspective, that pro-pleasure perspective or pleasure in the context of a life, not in the context of a moment, is what your generation really needs. And again, I think they find that in Ayn Rand. And you'll find, for example, that Ayn Rand was a pathbreaker with regard to sex in her novels, not only with regard to the act of sex, but Atlas Shrugged, the heroine of Atlas Shrugged is a woman who was running a railroad in 1957, who broke the glass ceiling way ahead of her time, right? So, you know, I think people will find a lot of real values in Ayn Rand that can really help shape exactly this, this rejection of the counterculture, the nihilistic left and the hedonistic left, but also the conservatism of the right. Yeah, you know, it's great that you brought up that because it segues into another question I had. I know there's a controversial sort of break scene in The Fountainhead, and I wanted to talk about Ayn Rand's relationship between women and positions of power, whether they'd be elected or in society. I mean, sure. I mean, Ayn Rand, I think, believed that women were capable of doing anything, that they could do anything, that they had the capacity to do anything. I mean, again, her heroine is running a railroad and clearly the most competent person and giving orders, and she's the boss. But Ayn Rand has this controversial essay that she wrote about the fact that she would never support a woman being president. And she has a controversial view of what femininity in its essence mean and what masculinity in essence mean. Her view is that masculinity in its essence is an orientation towards nature and reality and solving the existential problem that nature presents to human beings. It's much more material and physical. Of course, reason is involved, but it's dealing with the world out there. And that the essence of femininity is what she called hero worship. It's idealizing the male. It's idealizing the hero. And so it's oriented towards the male, not ignoring reality. It's still coping reality. And of course, she ran a railroad dealing with reality. But that the essence of the feminine within you, that part that is the feminine, is oriented towards the male. And if you think psychologically about how men behave and how women behave, I think there's a lot of truth to that. Now, I'm not a psychologist. I think that's not philosophy. I think that's psychology. And I'm not an expert on this. And it's not a formal part of objectivism because it's more of a psychological identification. But I think if you look around and you look how men behave and how women behave, this has some explanatory power over that. So she thought very highly of the position of president of the United States. Maybe if she'd lived through the last 12 or so years, she wouldn't have such a high opinion of the president of the United States. But the idea that the president of the United States is this pinnacle, that there's nobody that a president can look up to. It is a heroic figure, in a sense. She said a woman wouldn't want to be in that position because she wouldn't want to be in a position where there was nobody to look up to. So that's psychologically a woman, a woman who is feminine, fully feminine, if you will, would not want to put herself in that position. And that's why she objected. But it's not about a capacity. It's not about a brainpower. It's not about matter of being able to be a boss. So even in Alice Strugged, the heroine of Alice Strugged, the woman who runs the railroad, still has somebody she looks up to. And that's really important psychologically in the end in the novel and in how the story unwinds. But I'm going to try not to give away any spoilers. Last question. I know you mentioned briefly in the previous segment that you certainly would not suggest the failed ideas of the conservative right wing, particularly in America and certainly here in the West. What is your critique of the modern day right? And by modern day, let me clarify. We, as I mentioned, subscribe to the idea of individual rights. And so I know you've, I would say I'm a libertarian by fad at Tuesday label. And in terms of the conservative right wing, my problem with something like the neocon movement in the 2000s was these regime change wars in the Middle East. Right. This idea of spending trillions of dollars of taxpayer money, so hardworking individuals who already have a massive size government. And this government's increasing ever so in the right direction and from that all of a sudden the right wing, not the left wing, or the Patriot Act and and the war on terror to kind of increase government, our region to individuals lives. What is your critique on that? Because often you'll hear right wing people talk about the fact that all the left wing just does statism. What is your critique of the of the right wing when they do stuff like regime change wars? And what would an objectivist point of view be when it comes like the libertarian or the conservative kind of region of that? So objectivist and not conservative and not libertarian, not libertarian and libertarianism. It's such a big umbrella that I don't think it means that much to say I'm a libertarian. What do you actually mean? What do you actually stand for? Some libertarians respect rights. Other people don't believe in individual rights. Some want a limited government. Some believe in anarchy. I mean, you have a whole pretty big spectrum of people. Objectivism has a unique view on almost all these political issues, including on foreign policy. But I've got to actually, I've got a book criticizing the New York conservatives. So some of the objectives and rejects new conservative foreign policy, primarily because new conservative foreign policy involves sacrificing Americans for the sake of others. Right. If you think about the Iraq war, it was called Operation Iraqi Freedom. Why should American kids die? Never mind money, but die for Iraqi freedom. Iraqi should fight and die for Iraqi freedom. Right? Why should we spend the money? Why should we spend the lives, spend the lives to do it? And also the New Yorkans have a weird view of the fact that people want freedom. I think most people around the world don't want freedom. That's why they don't have it. So I don't think it's true that freedom is in everybody's heart. Everybody really wants freedom. Most people don't want freedom. They want to be taken care of. They want to be told what to do. It goes back to having somebody tell you what truth is and how to behave. And I think the New York conservatives are anti-individualism and anti-individual rights. They're very much focused on what's good for America, what's good for the state, what's good for the collective. And this is a problem with all kinds of conservatives. What are they trying to conserve? I'm a revolutionary. I'm not trying to conserve anything. I want to change everything. I want a new system. And now I think the founding fathers of America were not conservatives. The conservatives want to own them, but they want conservatives. They were revolutionaries. They created a completely new system of government, completely new than what existed before them. So the problem with the conservatives is they don't know what they want to conserve. They are overly religious. They place too much value in religion, whereas I dismiss religion completely as a system of values. And they are, for the most part, statists and collectivists. Some conservatives are better in the sense that they are less statists and less collectivists and they see some value in individual rights. Others are not. New conservatives are not individualists. They're statists. But so are the paleo-conservatives. So are the Trumpists. So are all of these, right? Unfortunately, the modern conservative movement, the slice within it that is individualist, even in a broad definition of individualism, is tiny. Most of conservatives today is nationalist, you know, statists and collectivists. And you saw that with Trump. And that brings our question prompts to the end. Thank you so much for those answers. But before we wrap things up, we just wanted to move on to a recurring segment on our show where we asked our guests to give us their three takeaways. These three takeaways can be from anything said on the podcast or any advice you want to give our Gen-Z listeners as they enter the new world. So with that being said, what are your three takeaways? Well, one would be read on your end. I mean, you're right. A lot of Gen-Z's don't know who she is and don't know anything about her. Pick up the novels and I know reading is not something Gen-Z's do a lot of, particularly not fiction. But don't miss out on fiction. Fiction is like life-changing. It's so amazing to live in that universe. And reading is different in movies and different than binge-watching a TV series. It requires more of you, but the rewards are much, much higher. So one is read on your end. Second is, you know, live. Take your life seriously. And don't wait to live. Don't wait, oh, one day I'll take my life seriously. No, you know, take your life seriously. And that doesn't mean, you know, be overly serious and, you know, not having fun. It means living. It means doing the things that are going to promote your happiness the best. And then involves having fun sometimes, studying hard, working hard, you know, finding great relationships. It involves, you know, both the hard work and the pleasure that a full life involves. And then finally, if you value your own life, then you should value freedom and liberty and get involved and because it's your future and these politicians and Alberto in, you know, wherever they happen to be in Washington, DC, they shape, they have too much influence on our lives. And if you want to live a happy, successful, long life, reigning them in is a high priority. So get involved. Find ways in which to help change the world in which we live. Well, thank you so much for that. And thank you so much for talking to us today. Joe, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. It's a while to get this set up. I will say that I am now a owner of a copy of The Fountainhead. So I'm definitely going to get right on there reading that one. It was truly a humbling experience. So thank you for being one of our first high-profile guests. And if you're very humbled that you took the time out of your busy schedule, I know this was hard for you to move between California and Puerto Rico, and stuff like that. So thank you so much. No problem. I will say this, that objectivism views humility as a vice. Okay. Fied as a virtue. You should say that we're very proud of having you on. Yes, we're very proud to have had your own heart. All right. Thanks so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. Good luck on all your endeavors. All the best of success with this podcast. So thanks. Thanks everyone for watching. We'll see you next week.