 So thank you. It's a real pleasure to be back in Zurich. This I think is my third, I think it's my third, maybe my fourth event with the liberal institutes. So thank you for inviting me back. It's always a privilege and a pleasure to be here. All right. So one of the things, as we've just heard, you know, Europeans, I think, not so much Israelis, but Europeans, war is a distant memory. War is something Europeans have not had to think about, deal with in a very long time. You've had some, in a sense, skirmishers. The Bake Up to the Balkans is one major example in the 1990s, where, you know, different tribes were fighting each other. They still want to fight each other so far. So far it's kind of peaceful. But that was the extent of war from the perspective of the Europeans. You saw it in the Middle East, and to some extent you had to deal with it with the migration crisis in the mid-2000s. But it wasn't, it didn't involve actual European forces. And indeed, I think this idea of unity through trade seemed to very much apply in Europe, and Union, of course, created a system where you could, where there's a free movement of labor, capital, and goods, and resulted, has resulted in 80 years of peace. In spite of the fact, and I don't want to offend anybody, but in spite of the fact that Germany is right over there, right, we still have peace. So it seemed like this trade worked. And indeed, a lot of the logic behind the idea of increasing trade with Russia was to further integrate Russia into the system, into the European system, and the idea that if we just traded with Russia, then Russia would be peaceful. Because at the end of the day, it's all about material well-being, at least that's what the leftists and the Marxists believe, that that's what drives history, right? Material well-being, what drives history, is economics. And if we can connect the economy of Russia to the economies of the rest of the world, we have nothing to worry about. Indeed, if that were the case, then we have nothing to worry about China, because China is super integrated into the world economy. We depend on China, most of the goods you buy, I'm sure, in Switzerland, are made in China, and indeed China cannot survive without American, without European and American expertise, capital, investment, and many sophisticated goods as they're discovering now with a ban on chip technologies going to China, they're suddenly discovering that they can't survive without good relationships with the West. If that was the only factor, if trade was the factor that determined peace or war, we thought there would be no war in Ukraine, between Ukraine and Russia, and there will never be war between China and Taiwan. But indeed, I don't think that the world is determined by economic forces. I don't think the world is determined by trade relationships. I don't think that that is ultimately the determining factor. And we'll talk about it, trade certainly helps, but there's something much more important than trade. And I don't think it's democracy. Because, I mean, Germany was democratic before Hitler was elected. Russia arguably had a period of democracy before Putin has established his authoritarian rule. Democracies often turn bad. Maybe they don't go to war as democracies, but democracy is not necessarily a stable form of government. Democracies change. The will of the people changes. So I think if we're going to look for cause for war, it has to be maybe something deeper. Now, capitalism was mentioned. Now, I don't think capitalism is either trade or democracy. I think capitalism is something more substantial and something more fundamental and substantial. We'll talk about that. I do think capitalism prevents wars. But what is capitalism? What generates capitalism? What is the cause of capitalism? Maybe if we understood the cause of capitalism, we can understand the cause of war. I think at the end of the day what drives history and therefore what drives the kind of political system we have, the kind of economic system we have, and whether we have wars or not, what drives all these events are ideas. Fundamental basic ideas. Things that people believe. And where we really need to explore what are the ideas of peace and what are the ideas of war? Ideas lead to these outcomes. And I think particularly right now, because I think this could be a real turning point in European and potentially global history, it is super important for us to understand what ideas cause the war in Ukraine. Are those ideas more generalizable? Is the war in Ukraine just the beginning of something bigger? Is something shifting? Is something changing? And the peace, the period of peace that we have had, what are the ideas that brought it about? And is there a way for us to bolster the good ideas, the ideas that drive peace and a way to condemn and minimize the ideas that bring us war? So I think to look at the ideas that bring peace and war, it's important to look at history and to think about errors of war and errors of relative peace. We've never had complete peace. There's never been no violence. But there have been periods, particularly in Europe, where there's been less violence and periods where there's been more violence. And it's interesting to look and dig a little deeper into what led to the violence in particular errors and what led to the elimination, to the peace of others. And I think what, if you're looking at history, what really jumps out at one, and I don't know if you're familiar with the books of Stephen Pinker. In particular, he's got a book called Better Angels of Our Nature, which is a study of violence throughout history. I highly recommend it. It's, I think, an amazing book. The things you're going to disagree with, I disagreed with. But it's still just the data that he presents is incredibly valuable. But one of the things you will note is that Europe has always been an extraordinarily violent place. If you go back a thousand years, if you go back 500 years, you know, violence was the way of life. City-states were fighting each other. Little countries were fighting each other. Big empires were fighting each other. But war was a constant phenomenon, where there's a 100-year war. Imagine a 100-year war. A war that lasts 100 years suggests something about the consistency of violence. That means people were killing each other all the time. Or a 30-year war, maybe. Maybe the most violent war at least in the West in history, in terms of the number of people killed per capita, given the proportion of the people killed in the population. Maybe the 30-year war, Catholics and Protestants slaughtering each other, in Europe was maybe the most violent, probably more violent than World War I or World War II. And then it kind of really slowed down. Wars became rare phenomenas. And when did this happen? When did wars kind of really slow down, particularly big wars, particularly wars between big, powerful empires and countries in Europe? When did that slow down? And almost go away. Curious. Yeah, after Napoleonic Wars. So Napoleonic Wars, 1812, 1814, I'm not good with exact dates, but somewhere around there, after Napoleonic Wars, Europe goes through a period until World War I where there are very few wars in Europe. What is characteristic of that period in Europe as compared to the period before that? The period going back maybe 500 years. What changed in 1812, 1814, other than Napoleon losing? What changed in Europe between the 19th century and centuries before that? Well, suddenly we had a massive increase in economic production. We had industrialization. But one could ask the question, what caused industrialization at that point in time? It's not clear. I don't think industrialization may be brought peace. Maybe what brought peace is the same thing that brought industrialization. Something magical happened in Europe and in the West around the turn of the century, around 1800. Something amazing. Economically, the West took off. Just took off. Industrialization and everything else. But also peace came. And what characterized that period? What were the ideas that drove it? Enlightenment, just the situation. This is the era that comes after which era? The Enlightenment, the age of reason. And the age of reason is characterized by two things, I think, two important ideas. First, it's a fact that as human beings our means of knowledge is not revelation. We don't discover the truth through revelation. We discover truth through reason and science. Thinking is what is necessary. Now this is important because I'm going to argue that most wars are caused by a different view of how we discover truth. That most wars are motivated by mystical, otherworldly motivation. And certainly that is an element in the war right now. Reason rejects that, rejects mysticism, rejects the whole idea of reveal truth and says each one of us, each human beings, each individual human being can think for himself. Each individual human being has the capacity for the reason and therefore each individual human being has the capacity to discover truth for himself. He doesn't need the philosophy of kings. He doesn't need the pope. He doesn't need some superior leader to tell us what the truth is and what the truth is means. We don't need a superior leader to tell us how to live our lives. Who determined what profession you would be in before the Enlightenment? Place you were born in a social class? Not really, it's what your father did. You belonged to the guild your father belonged to. You did what your father did, even if you hated it, even if you didn't want it, even if you didn't have talent, you were funneled into that profession. What did women? Women didn't get any choices. There were no careers, there were no professions involved. Did you choose who to marry? Not really. Did you choose who governed you? Not really, but think about it. If you believe the truth is revealed, if you believe that people do not have the capacity to take care of themselves because they cannot discover the truth for themselves, then we need guidance. We need philosopher kings to tell us how to live. We need authorities. So, one thing that liberated the individual, liberated all of us is the idea that we have the capacity to think for ourselves and choose for ourselves. And indeed, the difference between the 18th century and the 19th century in terms of individual choice, in terms of what you could do as an individual, what you're allowed to do as an individual is dramatic. 18th century and everything before that, you could call a permission society. You had to ask for permission for everything. The 19th century is a permissionless society. Suddenly, it's up to you. You get to make a decision. We were free, relatively speaking. It was a revolution towards freedom. So, first idea is reason, big deal, rejection of mysticism as a standard of knowledge. The second idea is who reasons, who makes choices. The individual does. So, the unit that matters in society is not the tribe. It's not the group. It's not the state. It's not any of those things. It's not the king. It's the individual. The individual's life is his own. I mean, this is the key political idea that comes out of the Enlightenment. It's the idea that the individual's role, moral purpose, is the pursuit of his own happiness and that he has a right to live his life based on what? Based on his own judgment in pursuit of his own values. Not the values of the king, not the values of the government, not the values of the state, however you want to define it, not the values of his parents, not the values of anybody else, or the church, his own values. Sometimes they'll be good, sometimes they'll be bad, but that's his problem, not ours. We leave individuals free. We leave them alone. And again, it's connected to the idea of reason. We leave them free and alone because we know he can reason for himself and discover these things for himself. He doesn't need guidance. He doesn't need this hand. Each one of us is capable of living our lives. That is a powerful idea. Again, coming out of a period of tribalism, of what matters is not the individual, what matters is the tribe. And when the tribe matters, when the tribe is everything, when your purpose in life is the well-being of the tribe, a war is more likely or less likely. If we don't care about the individual, are we likely to go to war? Yes. Look at Bakhmut right now, where Putin is sending thousands of soldiers in wave after wave after wave to be slaughtered and to slaughter Ukrainians. Does Putin respect individual life? Forget the Ukrainians. Does he respect individual life of Russians? You can see that even in the way they design their tanks, the way the Russians design their tanks. If you look at American tanks and German tanks, and Israeli tanks and British tanks, you'll notice that the tanks have a huge amount of investment of money, effort, thinking, processes that have gone into securing the lives of the people inside the tank. They have this double armor. They have explosive armor. They have all kinds of technology to do what? Not to kill the enemy, but to preserve your own troops. As somebody who was in the tank corps a long, long time ago in Israeli military, I can tell you it feels good to know that whoever is running your military at least cares about you enough to invest a little bit in protecting that tank, because otherwise it's very easy for you to burn a life. That comes from caring about individuals. That comes from caring about human life. Russian tanks don't have it. Or if they do, it's plastered together quickly and is not effective. And you can see that again in Ukraine with the torrents of the tanks flying out into the sky as they're being hit. That doesn't happen to American tanks. It doesn't happen to British tanks. It doesn't happen to Israeli tanks. Because the Russians don't care about human life. They don't care about individual human life. They don't care about the individual. So if you ask me what causes war, I would say it's a negation of reason in favor of some mysticism, mystical cause, and it's the negation of the individual in favor of some collective. Call that collective whatever you want, but in favor of something else, something, what do they say? Greater than you. Anytime somebody tells you you should go sacrifice yourself for a cause greater than yourself, run for the hills. They don't care about you. They care about that cause. Greater than you. You're just sacrificial fodder. And that cause greater than you is almost always, again, the state, the tribe, the collective of one form or another. So I believe those are the two causes of war. Lack of respect for individualism, i.e. collectivism, lack of respect for reason, i.e. mysticism, but add one more because I know many of you are big, you know, economics is very important to you and economic principles are very important to you. What is war? You know, what is trade? Let's see the positive first. What's trade? What's the relationship between two traders? You know, I gain you lose, right? Mutual benefits. Yeah, mutual benefit. Traders win-win. Traders are win-win relationship. And this is maybe the fundamental principle in economics. That when we trade, at least the intention is for both of us to gain. Sometimes we make mistakes and we land up losing. But hopefully, for smart, most of our trades are win-win relationships. What is war? I mean Europe, right? What is war? Is it win-win? Is it win-lose? It's lose-lose. It's lose-lose big time. You could argue the weapons industry is the only winner in a war. And even there, you know, we can discuss what winning means in that context. But clearly, for almost everybody, war is lose-lose. Now, sometimes you still have to go to war maybe to defend yourself. But generally, you're going to lose something. You're going to lose a lot. You're going to gain more by preserving your liberty or everything, but materially, it's a massive loss. And again, just look at these Ukrainian cities. Look at the number of lives lost. We'll do questions at the end if you don't mind. Just remember what you wanted to ask. I promise I'll answer. Massive destruction throughout. And the only reason there's not massive destruction right now in Russia is because the Russians have nukes and nobody wants to attack Russia proper. But the destruction is total. And think about, there's probably in excess of 200,000 young men who have died on just the Russian side. Probably over 100, we're not died, died and injured, right? But injured so that they can't fight anymore. Serious injuries. 200,000. And that doesn't include the Ukrainians where it's over 100,000 on their side probably. We don't have accurate numbers. But you know, by the time this conflict is over, I wouldn't be surprised if a million young men are either maimed or dead because of this. That's lose-lose. No matter what benefit you might gain, that's lose-lose. And it takes a certain mentality and attitude towards economics that is oriented towards zero-sum thinking that gets you into lose-lose transactions. Because if you're engaged in life to win and really understand that in order to win, how do you win in the game of life? You win in the game of life among other things by creating as many win-win relationships as you can. Materially and spiritually. You become a billionaire by creating millions, hundreds of millions win-win relationships with your customers. You become just somebody who has friends and enjoys social life by creating win-win relationships with people. And people engaged in that kind of activity motivated by that kind of... They're not interested in war. They're interested in creating more win-win relationships. They don't want to lose lose. But think about the Russian economy. The economy of Russia is based on not quite a zero-sum view of the world but close to zero-sum view of the world. The Russian economy is not an economy that thrives on entrepreneurship and innovation and small business and business creation. Under Putin in particular, the Russian economy has been oriented towards one thing and really one thing only. What is that? Natural resources of one kind or another, primarily oil and gas. Everything else has been suppressed. Everything else has been rejected even though Russia has great engineers and great software people and that hasn't been what you think of when you think of Russia's quiet economy. The entire state has oriented that economy towards oil, gas and certain minerals, maybe agriculture. But it's all about taking stuff out of the ground and shipping it somewhere else. Which is not zero-sum. We know it's not zero-sum, zero-sum thinking. There's no reason Russia had to have this kind of economy. The reason is the state decided on it and one has to think about what is it about Putin that oriented him towards just wanting stuff out of the ground. Lack of respect for the human mind, lack of respect for entrepreneurs. Maybe he didn't want too many independent thinkers, independent doers, independent wealthy people. All the billionaires in Russia are who? His buddies. We call them oligarchs, but at the end of the day it's just another name for Putin's buddies. And he can control them. He's not going to control a bunch of Elon Musk's. So the easiest thing is to create an economy where we don't get Elon Musk's. And where there isn't an Elon Musk, they leave. Because you don't want them. You want a bunch of oligarchs who'll do what you tell them to do, and at the end of the day who holds the power in that circumstance. So in my view, war comes about when we have zero-sum thinking, when we have a collectivistic mindset, and we reject reason as our tool of knowing the world. And I think that's what happened at the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, because philosophers constantly chipped away at the idea of reason as efficacious, as reason as valuable. You know, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. Reason doesn't matter. Reason is not efficacious. Reason doesn't teach us about the world out there. We create reality in our minds. All the variations of secularized mysticism, which is what I consider it. I mean, what is Marx if not a secularized mystical philosophy? You replace God with a Paulitarian and it's just all the same. You as an individual don't matter. You have to sacrifice, too. Not God, you have to sacrifice through the Paulitarian. But you don't matter. Your mind doesn't matter. How do we discover truth? Well, you have to be born a Paulitarian to know the truth. You have to discover truth because there is no universal standard of reason. And if ever there was a philosophy, there was zero sum, Marxism is zero sum. So with the rise of Marxism, with the rise of other zero sum, anti-reason, anti-individualism ideas in Europe, it's no surprise we got a World War I, a World War I in the name of what? Nobody really knows what the war was fought for, basically a war of collectives fighting each other for power with the idea that power is to be gained not through win-win relationship but through control, through war, through controlling other people. And World War II, again, mystical ideologies associated with race instead of class, but the same thing. The individual doesn't matter. Reason doesn't matter. How do we know what the truth is? Well, you have to be an Aryan to know what the truth is. Us Jews don't know the truth. We're just a different type of human beings. Inferior. There's no difference. It's just a different way to categorize people, but it's always about categorizing people and your genes are what determine who and what you are. But it's about the individual doesn't matter. The collective matters. Reason doesn't matter. Revelation matters. And it's a zero sum mentality. I need more land, Hitler told me. We need more land, Hitler told the Germans. It's not more trade, not more entrepreneurs, not more innovation. We need more land. We need more gas. We need more natural resources. It's all the same thing. It's all the same mentality. And we got a World War II as a consequence. And for 80 years, to some extent that mentality is being held back partially by the fact that the Soviet Union clearly was a failure and partially by the fact that fascism clearly was a failure. And Europe at least was not going back to religion. So there was this void, a void that was filled mainly by people living their lives based on their own reason, caring about themselves, i.e. individualists. And because I think of economists' understanding of win-win relationship, the establishment of win-win relationships on a global scale. I mean, I think the European Union is a massive achievement in the sense of it's a regional intent, free trade, money, capital, goods. That's fantastic. And that's a recognition of non-zero some nature of the world. And you saw that. All over the West, trade opened up everywhere globally. There's a recognition of the value of the individual. You can go to any village, anywhere in the world, pretty much. Not everywhere, but most places in the world. And you ask the audience, whose life, your life, who does it belong to? And I have a feeling that two, three hundred years ago, most people would say the church, the king, the state. Nobody says that today. There's an implicit sense of individualism. Maybe it doesn't manifest itself politically as we would like. There's a lot of work to do there, but there's a real implicit sense of individualism. There's an implicit sense of my mind is capable. I'm not looking for the philosopher king. There's a real implicit notion of that these ideas are true. But it's implicit. And for a long time, you can survive on these implicit ideas. Our philosophers, the people who teach here at the university and teach at universities in the United States and all over the world, don't believe in any of that. They don't believe the individual matters. They don't believe in human reason. And they have a really hard time with win-win relationships as with regard to trade. Almost all of them are statists when it comes to economics. So we have this populist that's kind of with us on the ideas that lead to peace an intellectual class that has no clue that is exactly opposed to it. And the result is, yes, we have peace, but it's weak. We are weak as countries. We don't know what we stand for. We don't know what identity is. We don't know what the West is. We talk about the West and civilization, but we have no clue what it is. We let it be challenged from the left and from the right and from the middle. And we have no way to defend it. One of the great challenges of liberalism today is to defend it. It's being attacked from every direction because our intellectuals are not liberals, not in the sense that we mean liberal. And I think Putin is a manifestation of those dark forces, those ancient dark forces that lead us to war. And he could be an ominous sign of what is to come. Putin is a mystic. Listen to his talks. He is filled with this longing for some glorious, mystical, ancient Russian empire, Russian people, Russian land. I mean, there's clearly a mystical notion to almost everything that he says and how he inspires his audience. So this is not uniquely to Putin. This is cultural in Russia. There's a Russian spirit, a Russian destiny, a Russian exceptionalism that's built into being Russian. We can argue about American exceptionalism, but American exceptionalism almost always is about ideas. Russian exceptionalism is almost always about genes, about heritage, about being part of this Russian-speaking world. They don't talk about ethnicity because Russia, of course, is multi-ethnic, but they talk about the spirit of the Russian language and the spirit of being Russian. And it's a dominant force in Russia. The individual doesn't matter for Putin or for Russia. What matters for the individual and for Russia is Russia. Sacrifice hundreds of thousands of young men on the, you know, on the ground. Nobody cares. I mean, their mothers care. Their fathers care. Putin, people in charge, don't care. It's for greater cause. Russia. And you can see how he's built his economy. It's an authoritarian economy, which you'd expect from an economy, from a regime that does not respect individualism and does not respect human individual reason. And he is committed to this zero sum. Let me say that, well, and this is why he went to war. People could say that he went to war because he felt threatened by NATO. That's a joke. NATO's the last threatening thing in the world. There's nothing threatening about NATO. It's not threatening. It hasn't gone to war. It's not going to go to war. NATO members barely agree on anything. There's no consensus. I mean, it's unique now that there is one because of this war. But before that, I mean, one of the reasons Putin went to war is because he believed NATO was fragmented and they'd never agree on anything. They would never threaten him. And indeed, if that was the standard, if the standard was NATO expansion, well, Putin's lost the war already and the value of the Ukraine to NATO much more valuable than Ukraine. It's Finland and Sweden. They have much longer border with Russia. They have much better soldiers than Ukraine. I'm sorry, they're much longer border than Ukraine has with Russia. Finland and Sweden do in the north. They have much better armies. And they actually manufacture their own weapons. They have very sophisticated weapons systems built in Sweden and Finland. The fact that they were not part of NATO was a relief to Putin. Now they are. He's lost this war. If that was the goal, the goal was to keep NATO away. NATO's just got much closer to Moscow, even closer to St. Petersburg and really close to, I forget the name of the port, in the Baltic Sea there, that is this far from Estonia and not that far from Finland and Sweden. So if NATO was the issue, I think the issue was his desire for empire, for the Russian people, for a legacy. He wants to have statues built, you know, constructed for him. He wants to be considered not Putin, but Putin the Great. There is a real desire here for a great Russian mystical state. He sees the West weakness. The West is weak. He sees they're not weak, militarily weak, intellectually weak, philosophically weak, in our commitment to our ideas. He sees that weakness. He's exploiting it. He's been plotting us for years, invading Georgia just to test it out. What did the West do when he invaded Georgia? Nothing, basically. Nothing. You know, they said don't go to Tbilisi. George Bush, I think, told him that, but clearly nothing. He plotted them in 2014 with Crimea and Donbas. What did the West do? Nothing. So what did he figure the West would do this time? Nothing. And this time he was going to Kiev and it was going to be over in a week for a variety of reasons. He was that delusional. So he believes in this greater destiny of Russia. The West is weak. That is a sign. This is the time to, he's probably sick as well, so this is a good time for him to implement this destiny and bring it to the reality. Ukraine was goal number one. Georgia was going to be number two. If we're not going to stand up to him in Ukraine, we certainly wouldn't stand up to him in Georgia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, why not? This oil is natural resources. He is oriented towards oil and natural resources. Guess what exists in the southeast of Ukraine? Oil and natural gas, huge reserves, largest in Europe, exist right there under the Ukrainian land, on the border with Russia, the land that he now is occupying. He has that mentality of zero sum, natural resources. That's what he wants, not trade. And there's one other thing that I think really scared Putin. Putin knows, deep down, he'll never admit it and he can't maybe even admit it even to himself. But Putin knows way deep down that he is an illegitimate leader. He knows enough about the world that legitimacy at the end of the day comes from the governed, comes from the people. He has stolen election after election. He is not a legitimate leader of a country. And he fears his own people. He's afraid of them. And he needs to give them a cause to focus on, not to focus on their own poverty. Russia is very poor. I think GDP per capita is a third of Germany's, something like that, half to a third of Germany's. That's pretty poor, given natural resources and given what they have. He wants them to focus a way of that. There have been demonstrations in Russia over the last 20 years, repeatedly. People unhappy. War is a great tonic, a uniter, something to divert attention to the way from the flaws of the regime, of his own flaws. And Ukraine is a real threat. And the threat that Ukraine constitutes for Russia is the fact that it's corrupt and horrible a government that Ukraine has. The Ukrainian people have been slowly moving west intellectually. The spirit of the Ukrainians, the culture of the Ukrainians has been over the last 10, 15 years moving to the west. The 2014 revolution was a revolution to establish what the people hoped would be western values. They didn't quite get it, but they're working in that direction. And that's a real threat. I visited Russia. I've spoken in Russia in Moscow and St. Petersburg and I've been to Kiev several times. And there's a palpable difference in the air between the two places. Russia is an oppressive place. It's a scary place. And it's a place where if you say something not so good, particularly about Putin, people look at you like, you should be careful not to walk next to people with umbrellas or what you drink or what you eat. Kiev has that sense of you could say anything you wanted. You could do anything you wanted. It's corrupt. There are problems, but it was moving in the right direction and that posed a real threat to Putin. It's not that NATO was going to be a neighbor. The West was getting closer to Moscow. And that's scary to a dictator of an authoritarian regime. The real danger, I think, long term here is that we don't find and we don't discover the ideas that allowed us to live in peace. And that does not be the last conflict. I think Putin's going to lose this one. I think that will establish peaceful little while, at least in Europe. But our ideas, we hold our ideas so weakly. We don't believe in ourselves. We don't believe in the ideas that made the West as rich as it is and as peaceful as it is. And if it's not Russia, maybe it's China, maybe it's something inside Europe, maybe it's a change in America, who knows, but there are many, many enemies of liberty, of liberal governance, of peace in the world right now. And unless we stand up to them, I think beginning with Putin, but stand up with them inside our own countries, then we are indeed destined to lose that peace and ultimately to lose that prosperity that has made life in the West over the last, certainly since World War II, pretty amazing. In spite of all our complaints about our governments, in spite of all our complaints about the modern world, in spite of all our complaints about left, woke, whatever, and crazy right, life's pretty good. But that is not necessary. That is not determined. That does not always have to be the case. When Franklin left the Constitutional Convention in America, somebody asked him, what kind of government did you give us? And he said, a republic, if you can keep it, it's upon us to be vigilant in the cause of liberty. It's upon us to understand the causes of liberty and to fight for them, and those causes are intellectual, those causes are philosophical, and if we don't defend them, I think we risk everything, all the beauty that we have built in what we call Western civilization. Thank you.