 All right, so it's time for the big reveal, right? Is your aunt still optimistic? And if he is, why? And I've kind of been wondering that myself. What did I get myself into? So I look back at the emails and kind of what I proposed and how I got into giving a talk on being optimistic in 2022. And I look back and I had proposed a pretty depressing talk. Something about the new rights and the rise of whatever. And the Institute came back to me and said, no, no, no, no, no, you got to do something inspiring and positive. And I said, okay, I'll do something, something reviving my talk from four years ago about optimism. And that was January 28th. And since January 28th, the NASDAQ and the S&P are down over 20%. If you're an investor in Bitcoin or crypto, that's down like 60%. And in some cases, it's down 100%. Inflation is at 8.6. And if you measure it the way we measured in the 1970s, it's at the highest. It's being, it's as high as it was in the mid-1970s, late-1970s. Interest rates are going up, recession fears are going up. Not to mention, Russia invaded Ukraine, largest ground war in Europe since World War II, something I don't think most of us imagined would happen. And the January 6th commission has shown that Donald Trump was even worse than I thought he was, which if you know me, you know how bad I thought he was already, it's pretty depressing. And yet, how can you still be optimistic? And to remind myself, I listened to my talk from four years ago, right? What were the things I was optimistic back then? And of course, I'm not gonna tell you all the bad things that have happened over the last four years, you can recount those yourself. All the things that you could argue I was wrong about. But my optimism has never been about the short run. My optimism has never been about what's gonna happen politically tomorrow or in the next five years or even in the next 10 years. That would be Pollyannish, given the state of the culture, given the ideas in the culture, given the world in which we live. And looking back at that talk four years ago, much of what I said back then holds, and I'm not gonna repeat it, although some of it will parallel. So I encourage you, if you're down one of these days, just turn it on and hopefully it'll give you a little bit of energy. It was at the Ocon four years ago. So what do I mean by optimism? I mean a positive view of what is possible in the future, of what will happen in the future. And I think, as I said four years ago, that the most important place in which to have that optimism, the most important thing in which to apply this attitude towards the future is in your own life. It's very difficult to pursue values, to be ambitious about your life, about your happiness, if you're consumed with dread, if you're afraid about what's happening in the future. Gaining self-esteem is partly that confidence, that self-assertiveness that you can be successful. That success is possible in your life pursuing your values. Now to achieve this, partially many of you have to start listening to the news a lot less. It's just most of it, while relevant, there's nothing you can do about it. There just isn't. And there's so many things in life that you can do stuff about. You can plan. You can think. You can figure out how to make the best future for you. How you can live the best life for you within the constraints of the system. And let's again not ignore the fact that everything is harder than it should be. It is harder than it should be, but that's just the reality. It's not quite metaphysical, but it's almost from the perspective of this very little you can do. Now we'll get to what you can do in a bit. Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you, forget about everything and just... But from the perspective of your life, of your values, of your personal ambition, that should be what you spend your time, your focus, your energy on. And don't let the world bring you down. You only have one life. You've heard me say this many times. Every second you live, you'll never get again. Make the most of it. And for that, you have to have that confidence that you can achieve, that the future is possible, that your ambitions are realizable. And we still live in spite of everything. We still live in a world in which most of our ambitions, or vast majority of our ambitions, are indeed possible. We're not yet in the world of We The Living, as bad as things are. We're still mostly free. And we can still plan and we can still execute. You can still start businesses. You can still be ambitious. Again, it's all going to be harder than it should be. I know. It's still possible. There are plenty of people in this room who are proof of that, who are incredibly successful at their endeavors in life, whether it's in business, intellectual endeavors, educational endeavors, many other endeavors. Success is possible. Again, don't let the bitons and trumps and fill in the blanks of the world discourage you from pursuing your values, your dreams, your ambitions. So, be optimistic primarily about your life. And if you can't be, then think about why you can't be. Figure out how to attain that self-esteem, that self-confidence that will allow you to achieve your values. So, what about the culture? So if we look out there, as I said, the world is still, you know, quite free. There's a lot of freedom for most of us. And part of that, I talked about this last time, part of that is, in America at least, there's a product of the fact that America is so oriented towards business, so oriented towards work, and we still have that. And that work generally is something that oriented toward reality, towards success, towards profit. You might come out of school with all kinds of crazy ideas. I think almost anybody today, given what they're teaching at our universities, comes out of those universities with crazy ideas. And then you have a boss, and you have a bottom line, and you have deadlines, and you have schedules, and you have a paycheck. And that improves almost everybody, just their reality. It teaches them to think differently about the world. And that still exists. And by the way, it's one of the most depressing things in our culture right now, is the impact that Woken ESG and all these things are having on the workplace. And why that might be one of the most important battles to fight is to keep them out of the workplace, because the workplace is the one thing that re-orients Americans back to reality, that saves this country from its educational institutions. It's a secondary educational institution, but I think it's most important. And to shape this country for decades, centuries. So work is still a value in this country. Corporate life still promotes these ideas. And I don't see that going away. Again, these threats exist. But in most corporations, as far as I can tell, you have to do all these things, but everybody is like, yeah, you have to do the training, and you have to do the ESG, and you have to do this. You have to really change behavior that much. Most people just shrug it off. And that's healthy. It would be good if we could just eliminate that. Because again, everything is harder than it needs to be, but it's still doable. And, you know, last time I talked about technology, and I talked about the iPhone and all of that, and the Internet, which I think is just a marvel. And I think it's a marvel primarily because for the first time in human history, the beings on planet Earth are now connected. In other words, we have now eight billion brains working to solve problems, all kinds of problems. But you can access all the information known to man at a click of a button on the Internet. And that's, the productive potential of that is mind-boggling. The ability to communicate, to share ideas, to try new things. I mean, those of you in the tech industry know how dynamic that industry is, how fast it moves. And how you can share ideas and work with people all over the globe. All over the globe. And that creates opportunities that one imaginable fifteen years ago, even ten years ago. So the Internet is a true wonder, and it creates opportunities and think about how you can benefit from those opportunities. There's a lot of talking down about big tech and talking down about social media. But what's ignored is the upside. What's ignored are the benefits. What's ignored is the potential, and the potential is enormous. And we've only started just beginning to see the products of that potential, the upside of that potential. And, you know, I don't know much, I don't know much about crypto and Bitcoin and so on, and, you know, I'm often skeptical about a lot of this. But I've learned that when really, really smart people invest a lot of their own money into something, even when I don't understand it, maybe I should step back, and maybe there's something there. And I'm excited about the little I know about the potential of crypto. Not crypto, blockchain, you know, not as money, Bitcoin's not going to replace the dollar and all that stuff that are being sold. But there is real technology there that we're just starting to see the beginnings of what it is capable of. The beginnings of, again, how we can collaborate across the planet, how we can build new business models that I don't think people have imagined before. This is a real technological evolution somewhere down there. And the fact that it's all down now is great because it means a bunch of stuff is going to be washed out. The junk is going to be washed out. But remember 2000 in the dot com, right? It was good that everything collapsed because the junk got washed away and who survived? No, Amazon and Google and a lot of the big companies that we today know on the internet, they weren't even around in 2000, 2001, when everything collapsed. They only showed up later. So who knows where this, now I might be wrong on this, maybe it's all air. But this is too much smart money, at least it seems to me, going after this Web 3 crypto, all this stuff. Younger people here in the audience probably know what I'm talking about more than I know what I'm talking about. But it excites me. It excites me to know that there are areas where people are really pushing the boundaries. And again, I think the fact of interconnectedness, the fact that we're global because of the internet is going to make these future technologies and future industries so much more robust and so much bigger and so much easier to develop. So I'm still excited about technology. I'm still excited about billions of people working on solutions. And maybe one of the things that I've become more excited about partially because of COVID and partially because I read a book, you know, books have their power on you. I read a book, which is the biography, it's by Walter Isaacson, the biography of Jennifer Doudner. Jennifer Doudner is one of the inventors of CRISPR gene editing technology. And wow. I mean, it's a complete revolution what's going on in biology. We saw that a little bit with the COVID vaccines and how quickly they developed and what would happen there. And how this is going to be a platform now for all these other technologies and all these other vaccines and all these other cures. You know, there was a study, I think Amish mentioned this. There was somebody in the Q&A asking about it. There was a trial now, a cancer trial. It granted a small number, treated for rectal cancer, and it was an immunotherapy treatment. Immunotherapy is basically a way where you don't use chemo, you don't use radiation, so no poison, no destruction, right? Instead, you stimulate your own defense mechanisms, your own body's defense mechanism to fight the cancer. Every single patient in this trial saw a complete disappearance of the cancer with no chemo, no radiation. Now, who knows if we could extrapolate this to other cancers and whether it apply in big samples, but wow, as I get older, I appreciate these healthcare stuff more and more, right? That is so exciting that we've, you know, for decades now we've been promised cures for cancer, but now it looks like they're on the cusp of actually having treatments, again, that are not invasive and are not poison, which is what chemo is, right? But that actually have the potential to solve one of the most horrible things about getting older, which is disease, a disease that is crippling, and if you've ever had anybody with cancer, you know how awful it is. And this gene-splicing stuff, the gene editing is truly amazing. I mean, not only will we be able to go into fetuses and change the genetic makeup so that they don't have certain diseases that we know are genetic. I mean, we can take that out. They now have gene therapy for adults where they go in and they change the genes in your DNA, and so you're not susceptible to certain diseases. But, you know, the scary, the thing that people find scary is we'll have designer babies. I mean, how cool is that? I mean, isn't what reason is about taking chance in all of that out of the equation and gaining more and more and more control over our lives, and isn't this the ultimate way in which we can gain control, at least over biology? I mean, this is fantastic, and if you read the book, you'll also discover that scientists are not these monsters, right? Because what was taught, oh, you know, if you give them these tools, what would they do? That they're unbelievably responsible and they are thoughtful about the ethical considerations and when you should use these treatments or when not, and how to do it in a slow process so we can think through the consequences of these breakthrough technologies. But it is, biology right now is, I think, where the internet was 20, 30 years ago. It's exciting and amazing things in our future when it comes to the biological sciences. FDA willing, of course. That was there. I mean, instead of God willing, that's the FDA willing. I have to explain my jokes. I know I'm not doing well. So I'm excited about science. I'm excited about technology. I'm excited about the potential of human beings. I'm excited about the fact that everything is now globalized. Okay, I know there's a big trend to anti-globalization particularly in the United States and a little bit in Europe, but the rest of the world doesn't seem to care much about what we think. They're signing trade agreements. There's a lot of free trade going on and the world is globalized because the internet is globalized and there's nothing anybody can do about it. I mean, there is, but it would be pretty radical to trust, start shutting this down. We are, from an information perspective, a global economy. And this brings me, I guess, to politics. And there's not a lot I can say that's positive about politics. So I'll just say a couple of things. One is, Trump lost. No, this is... The American people are rejecting the nuttiness. They're rejecting the crazy on the left and on the right. Trump lost. He was lost by as big of a margin as I would have liked to send a clear message about him and his agenda, but he lost. And wokeism in all its variations is losing right now. You know, two school board members in San Francisco, San Francisco, the most leftist place on planet Earth. What we called voted out because they were worried during COVID. You know what the main concern of the school board in San Francisco was during COVID? Not getting kids back to school. Not making sure that their online education was good. Not any of those things. What were they concerned about? School names. They were worried about, you know, having schools named after George Washington or even Feinstein was not acceptable. You know, Senator Feinstein, there's a school named after that was not acceptable to these leftists, right? Those of you who don't know who she is, she was a pretty left senator from California. So they got kicked out because it was absurd and ridiculous. The November elections in Virginia, you know, I'm sure they mixed elements to that, but the main driving thing there was enough of the propaganda of the woke-ism. You saw it in the recall now in San Francisco again, leading the way, of the district attorney. Why? Because he wasn't prosecuting anybody. Like shoplifting was okay. And we saw it in the election of the mayor of New York. Again, it's not great, but he's not one of these crazies. And the conflict between him and the district attorney who said he didn't want to prosecute mugging, he didn't want to prosecute theft, he didn't want to prosecute only murder. He wouldn't ask for jail terms other than really violent crimes. And the mayor said no, and they fought it out and it looks like the mayor's won. And you see it in the fact that in Minneapolis they turned down their whole idea of defund the police and now the district attorney, Philadelphia, and the district attorney of Los Angeles are both, again Los Angeles, right? Are both going to face recall elections because they're too permissive when it comes to crime. And Americans are not there. Americans are not with the nutty left. And so far they're not with the nutty right. And what we have today, what we have today is this void, this intellectual political void. Most of the American people, I don't think feel represented by what's up there, but most of the American people don't know what they want. They have no clue. And they don't have a solid set of ideas. And into this void have risen some interesting voices, not objectivists, not our allies on everything, but allies in various areas. Whether it's, as Peter Schwartz mentioned earlier, some of the voices, was it Peter? I think it was Peter, about issues of race, McWhorther and others, whether it's Barry Weiss bringing up all the crazy woke stuff and actually proposing interesting solutions and a rational kind of voice where I might disagree with her, but you have a sense at least from her column that you could have a debate. You could have a discussion. You could actually sit down and talk about ideas. And there were others. And part of this has to do with what I think is happening is kind of the breakdown of the mainstream media and the mainstream media actually falling apart, for another talk. But I think the model of the way we structured mainstream media was a model that was appropriate for the 20th century and maybe not appropriate for modern technology where we got bombarded with news directly from direct sources over the internet and maybe we need some new models of media and new models of reporting, new models of delivering the news and maybe some of that is already happening on Substack, if you follow Substack, there's some really fascinating things happening where people are actually doing reporting. Barry Weiss herself has now a reporter who goes out and actually finds the news, not just reports what other people are writing but actually reports on events that are happening. So interesting things are happening out there in this, I think void between the two nutty political parties or the elements within the two political parties that tend to be nutty. I don't know, I don't know if nutty is a technical term but it's the one I like to use. So, you know, I don't think globalization is going away. Russia is losing and if you want to know why I think Russia is losing in spite of the fact that it's making territorial gains, you can ask me, but Russia is losing. I think China, ultimately my view is in decline. Authoritarianism doesn't work. We know this. Evil is impotent. And you can see this in Russia. I mean the Russian economy and the Russian state is being held up by our sanction. And we will draw even a little bit of that sanction. Much collapses. Now, the bankruptcy of the left and right, if you can still use those terms, the bankruptcy of the left and right, I believe, is left an opportunity for us. An opportunity for new ideas. So, if you ask me what am I most optimistic about right now, I'm most optimistic about you. I'm most optimistic about the objective movement. I'm most optimistic about what we can do and what we are doing. Now, I know aren't there conflicts and schisms and fights and disagreements and didn't COVID show that half the objectives community can't think and all of that is true, right? So what? That's not important. As we grow, there's going to be more disagreement. There's going to be more schisms. There's going to be more of this stuff. And the question is not what happens at the edges. The question is what happens at the heart of the movement. The question is what we do. Those of us committed to objectives and committed to the ideas. So, you know, pay attention to those things because they're important for your life and your attitude towards this philosophy and the various institutions that exist. But as this movement grows, there's going to be a lot of different people arguing for a lot of different positions, fun and claiming to speak for objectivism. And all of us will have to make our minds what is true and what is not, who is right and who is wrong. And sometimes you'll just go, I don't care, this is my life, I don't have time for this. And that's fine in some cases as well. But what I am extraordinary proud of and I think many people here in the room should be proud of is the INRAN Institute. It's commitment to INRAN's ideas. It's commitment to objectivism. It's commitment to carefully, carefully applying those ideas to complex, difficult issues whether in politics or in any other realm. And, you know, the intellectuals led by Ankar and others, I mean, they have been amazing in terms of how they've approached the issues, how they've dealt with them. And this is what you should be focused on. Now, listen, judge, make your own evaluations. But I am incredibly proud of the work they have done as an institute and as intellectuals. And I'll get back to the institute but before then, think about the movement. Think about how many people, some of them in this room have dedicated themselves, for example, to education, to schools, to apps that provide curriculum. I mean, for years we've been talking about how important education is, particularly early education, and it's happening. Objectivists have entered the field and are doing major things in the field. And it's not, they're not doing it just with objectivist money or objectivists. They're doing it as a business and they're being successful as businesses. And in that sense, we won't see the product of it in five years or 10 years. Maybe in 20 or 30 years you'll start seeing generations of kids coming out of these schools, having studied with the curriculum, you know, that is being delivered out to millions of kids. Think about what Alex Epstein is doing. Think about the potential that has. If we had 100 Alex Epstein's, Alex is defending one industry alone. Imagine if we were defending 100 industries. And if they collaborated and if people started seeing a movement here defending business, innovation, science, reality, life, and they start seeing the connection between this Alex and that, you know, all these people doing what seemingly is independent work, united by a set of ideas, by a philosophy. And I asked him, huh, I wonder where they get that from. And you can see what's happening in academia. You can see the work Tara and Greg and Adam was just up here on the stage and I'm sure I'm going to miss out names, I apologize in advance to all the people doing. I mean, Adam is one of the authorities on intellectual property rights in the world. It just is. And he's an objectivist and everybody knows that. And it's that, that success in intellectual fields which is ultimately when we gain mass, when we gain numbers, is going to start having a real impact on the world out there. The progress movement. You heard, maybe you heard from Jason Crawford earlier. It's a movement that is involved with bringing, in a sense, as I see it, maybe not as they see it, bringing enlightenment ideas to the present and caring about progress, where we're going to go from here as a species, right? As economic progress, technological progress, scientific progress, how we're going to do, how we're going to perform. And they really care about this. And they're studying it and researching it and advocating for it. It's a beautiful thing. It didn't exist that long ago. And who better than Ayn Rand ultimately to provide a backbone for such a movement? It'll take time. It's not going to happen quickly. But all of these things will take time. Think about what's going on internationally. You know, Bois in Israel, Maria in Latin America, Razi in the UK and everything else that's going on in Europe. I had the statistics of how many countries I spoke at recently. It's a lot, put it that way. And there's demand and they're interested and they're engaged. And, you know, I think Tal mentioned that the number of ARU students who are internationals, the number of our junior fellows who come from other countries is amazing. This is not anymore an American movement. This is an international global movement and that has power. And again, the fact that the internet exists makes that possible. The fact that the internet exists makes it possible to coordinate. It makes it possible for Nikos, who's a junior fellow at the Institute, to live in Athens and be a full blown teacher, junior fellow, the whole thing, even though he is in Athens. I met a first weekend here. There was a girl. You might have met her young girl from China. She's studying at Claremont McKenna colleges. She read Atlas Shrugged when she was 13 in Chinese in Shanghai. She then read The Fountain in Chinese because the books are in Chinese, almost all of Ayn Rand's books are in Chinese, in the bookstore, still selling even now. And then she came to the U.S. and read all of Ayn Rand's... She couldn't read the nonfiction in Chinese. She said the translation of the nonfiction is not that good. But the fiction is very good, she says. Then she came to the U.S. and she's read all of Ayn Rand's books in English now. And she was at the conference. So there are people out there all over the world because Ayn Rand's novels are translated into... I think there are only two major languages that are not translated into it. Farsi, Iran, and Arabic. And there's work on that as well. So maybe one day they will be. So to some extent, I think we've got the quality down. We've got high quality intellectuals and when you look around the room at the institute look at the zooms with the intellectuals and the junior fellows. We have got really high quality intellectuals. To a large extent it's now an issue of numbers. We're not going to have an impact, a direct impact, a significant impact that we can all could see until there are many of us, particularly many intellectuals teaching, speaking, writing, engaging with the ideas of the culture, engaging with people. So we need many. And now we have a solution for that too. I think AOU is an amazing project. Super exciting. It's a way to scale and partially made possible by the fact that we have as many intellectuals as we have today because remember it's always... you can't scale until you have the teachers. But now we have the teachers. After decades of working on it, we have them. They didn't just show up out of nowhere. They were a product of all the Einstein Institute's programs for the last 20 years. And now we have the numbers and we always knew we'd get the numbers at some point. We have the numbers not to change the world yet. Now we have the numbers to educate a lot more people who will change the world. So we've got more people we've grown in sophistication in terms of reaching more people globally, not just in the US. We're building a movement, a large movement of intellectuals and people being exposed to their ideas. I mean, think about the content that is being produced right now. I mean, in old days, which is not that long ago because I remember them, I mean, there were actually two objectives to venture here. It was Ocon, the equivalent of Ocon. And there was Fodho Forum. And we all went to Fodho Forum and we all went to Ocon and that was it. And now there's nobody in the room who's consuming all the material that's being produced. You couldn't. There's not enough hours in the day produced by all of us, right? By a lot of us, not all of us, by a lot of us. And old material is now all available. So not only are we producing new material, we're releasing all the old material. So you've got an ever-growing body. Because we have more intellectuals, we can now produce more and more and more and more content. The more content we produce, the more people we appeal to, the more people we get in front of, the more influence we get. And it's truly astounding. I mean, there are days where I'm like scratching my head because I've scheduled the show and it turns out Harry's got something and the Institute's got something at the same time so we all three of us are doing the same thing at the same time and somehow there are people who are listening to all of it. So we've got now the people and we've got now the infrastructure to really build a future, to really change the world. So look, just so it's clear that nobody comes back next year and accuses me of anything. We're heading towards dark times, economically, maybe politically, probably going to have a recession soon. It's going to be ugly. It's not going to be all smooth sailing into the distance. And what for most of us we should do is focus on the things that are in our control and our careers and our lives and our values and our ambitions and make them real, make them happen. You still have a lot of control, career, relationships, friendships, romance, art. These are all things that you can do. You can study objectivism. You can try to consume all the material that's being produced. But recognize, even in the dark times, that we have the antidote. We have the solution. We know how to fix the problems in the world. That's really powerful. No previous generation had it. We're actually sitting on the ideas that can make this world a paradise, can make our lives amazing. That's real power. Make that part of how you think about life, about your life and about the world, in thinking about, am I optimistic? I came to the conclusion that I've always been optimistic. Well, not always. Ever since I read Atlas Shrugged, because even though I didn't really understand it and really didn't really know it, I sensed that they had the most powerful tool in the world in my hands and now in my mind. I had the ideas that could shape my life. They could help me achieve happiness, because that's what it's all about, right? They could, yes, solve the problems of the world and cure all the ills of the world, but more importantly, could make my life the best life that it could be. And the more I read I ran, the more I realized this tool was even more powerful, more important, more substantial than when I thought I first read Atlas Shrugged. And that is what keeps me going. That is what provides me with the energy. That is what provides me with the optimism. This is a great time to be alive. I mean, it might be better in the future, but I'm not sure it's been better in the past. We're going to live longer, healthier lives, and we're the first of a couple of generations that have iron rands of objectivism. We have ideas, true ideas that can make our lives the best that they can be. So to paraphrase iron rands, we've got to be optimistic, because we're fighting for a future. We're fighting for a future for the world and a future for our lives, and by fighting for it, we are living it. Thank you. Yes. So in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand wrote this scene of the train when it's about to crash, and she describes all the types of people that are on the train who are just not good people. And, you know, she describes the lawyers and the teachers and the journalists. And so my question is, does knowing that the types of people that the technology of this world is going to be provided to change your optimism about the technology in any way? See, you can't, you can't... No, it's a great question. Yes and no, right? So sure, you're giving them a powerful tool, and you're giving a tool that they can abuse. But at the end of the day, it's the good guys who are going to determine how and what happens. And again, I go back to the fundamental impotence of evil, even in using bad tools. And again, it's going to be hard. They're going to be dark times. They're going to be difficulties. But if we embrace the right attitude, if we, you know, embrace the right attitude towards these tools and towards reality and towards life and towards fighting for the future, then, you know, I don't think the enemy is that powerful. I don't think the enemy is that significant. You know, there was this risk during the 50s and 60s that the Soviet Union and the U.S. would go to a nuclear war and the whole world would be blown to smithereens. And it didn't happen. And I think there's good reason why it didn't happen. And I don't think it's going to happen. I think the good will ultimately win those battles and stop that kind of destructive mist. Again, not to say the bad things won't happen in the meantime. They won't. Thank you so much. So I want to preface this by saying I agree with the assessment you presented so far, but I'm curious, what do you imagine the world would have to look like for you not to be optimistic? Well, I'm really trying here, guys. I don't know if Trump would win again. I think if we descend very quickly here into authoritarianism, if we descend very quickly into a state where those choices are taken away from you, all your choices, where freedom of speech is really restricted. It's taken away from us. Right now, the courts are still protecting freedom of speech. And maybe in some regards, you could argue that now is the freest time in terms of freedom of speech. Remember that Lenny Bruce sat in jail because of words he said on a comedy stage. And that wasn't that long ago. So as long as we have the freedom to speak, and as long as we're just, Ayn Rand's kind of list, as long as we still have political choices, and as long as you get a sense that individuals can still make a difference. They can still go out there and do stuff with their lives, make and produce a life that is of high quality and pursue happiness, then I'm going to be optimistic. Now, yes, again, if you saw the movie We The Living, which you all should, then yes, I mean under those circumstances. And then, remember, Ayn Rand portrays Kira as what? At the end, she's always fighting. She's always striving. She's always moving forward. And she doesn't give up. And so, you know, I'm getting a little old for the fight if we descend into dictatorship, but we'll keep fighting for as long as we can. We'll keep moving forward for as long as we can and I'll keep being optimistic even then that at the other side of it, the good and truth went out. Thank you. So it's going to be hard to get me to be pessimistic. Hello, Yaron. Thank you for the talk. I liked your talk, but I had a few disagreements. One of the things you said was that the objectivism now needs numbers. But I think it's minorities that change the world. You said we should live as best as we can, despite the problems of the world. I say why when we can build a new one. Changing the world through ideas is noble, but it's slow. And I don't want to achieve freedom in future generations. I want to achieve it in mine. So with that being said, would you and the INRAN Institute think of charter cities and sea-studding as a platform to one day build the objectivist city-state? How did you start? You started that with something I want to comment on, but now I've lost it. Numbers. Yeah, minorities change the world, but not the tiniest of tiniest. I mean, it's rare that the tiniest of tiniest minorities, not in terms of the ultimate ideology, but even in terms of just the basic premise that society has, so the communists were the tiniest of tiniest, but they shared the premise with almost everybody else, which is altruism and collectivism. We are the tiniest of tiniest of tiniest. We're not going to change the world with our numbers. Doesn't mean numbers don't mean majorities. It just means instead of, I don't know, 10,000 objectivists, a couple of hundred thousand would be good, you know, maybe a million, would still be one million out of 300 million, but a million would be a good beginning, right? Still a tiny minority, and in intellectual world, still small. Okay, charter cities. So, look, I get it. I want Gulch Gulch too. I want to escape there and figure out how to do that. I don't believe it. I don't believe it's possible. You're just going to have to take, not take my word, but when I was probably your age, maybe a little older, but in the late 90s, I investigated this. I really looked into it, right? Somebody paid me to really look into it. Could we start a country? International waters, build a platform off the Cayman Islands in international waters, seasteading, whatever. And we looked at all of that. I even, I don't think I've ever said this publicly, I even went to the Bahamas and talked to government officials about whether not only would they sell an island, but would they give us autonomy. And offered a lot of money. And the answer, of course, for them, was no. And I wrote up a whole report on this and the conclusion was it's not doable. Your charter cities in Honduras are not going to survive. They're just not, the Hondurans are not going to let it survive. You know, there's already massive conflict around the charter city on the island off of Honduras and that's only going to increase. And of course the leftist have just taken over the Honduras government they want to find a way to reverse this and if they don't do it this time they'll do it next time. You want to build an island in the middle of Uruguay. Imagine. Imagine that on this island you provide free banking. Freedom. Privacy. Complete exchange. The way we imagine banking to be might as mulligan banking. How long before the US Navy stops you? Is it worth it to find out? No. It's a waste of resources. It's a waste of time because I can tell you exactly what's going to happen. They're not going to let you do it. You think, I mean here I'm going to sound very anti-government because I am anti these governments they won't let you. They don't want it. You're a threat to them and a threat to them in a way that will bring out the worst elements of them and every attempt that is being made has failed. Now I proposed one solution for this problem. I have one. I'm going to offer it here. You get it for free on how you can do a seasteading or starter-owned thing and be safe. But you're not going to like it. Nukes. You've got to have nukes. Mutually assured destruction is the only way they'll leave you alone. Otherwise they will never leave you alone. And then who are you doing this with? And who are the people that are going to be involved in it? It's just look at the end of the day the world is the turn by ideas. Whether we like it or not. And sometimes ideas aren't enough to change it. You need action. Yeah, I mean have you ever read The Moon as a harsh mistress by Robert Henlein? Yeah, we've all read The Moon. They're in The Moon and they're starting a free colony and there's a randist. There's an objectivist there involved in starting this new and how does the book end? It's not going to be successful. So he's on a spaceship to the next planet to try it over there. Why? Because the ideas have not been changed. And unless you only change the ideas unless you only fight for those ideas you're not going to be successful. So look, bottom line. Go do it. You don't need Diamond Institute for this. It's not our job. It's not what we do. It's not what our supporters provide us with. But go do it. I mean I'm all four. Charter cities and sea-steading and if one of them is successful maybe I'll move there. That's it. Allow me to be super skeptical. Thank you. We have a question from the chat. Erykolas asks, how can I influence my teenage son who would rather read another Thomas metaphysics book rather than a abstract? What is Thomas metaphysics? I don't know. Like Thomas Aquinas. Oh. Thomas. Well maybe it's better. Maybe it's better for him to read some non-fiction. Maybe it's the fiction that is a barrier. It sounds like it's a pretty intelligent kid who's used to reading philosophical treaties. So maybe rather than starting with Atlas Shrugged like most of us I think did or Fountainhead maybe start with one of the philosophical non-fiction books to get them into it and maybe Atlas Shrugged will come later. So why are the Russians losing in Ukraine? And do you have any guess on how it's going to end? I can speculate on how it's going to end. I mean the Russians have already lost in Ukraine. They lost the day that Sweden and Finland announced that they were going to join NATO. So if the whole purpose of Putin's I mean theoretically the most benevolent reason the Putin did this was to protect Russia from NATO didn't want Ukraine to become a part of NATO. Well he's now added two incredibly powerful countries much richer than Ukraine with militaries that are much better than Ukraine's with an industrial complex that produces weapons. Sweden is a manufacturer of high sophisticated high-tech weaponry. At borderline just Finland has this massive border with Russia. He's just turned these two countries so quote neutral to NATO. So just if that was his goal then he's lost. If his goal is some kind of mystical Russian empire which I think it is ultimately then he's also lost because there is no such thing. You know he's going to get these two provinces he might unite them, he might annex them to Russia and then what? Their poor, he just destroyed them. Have you seen the cities? Mariupol and these other cities are just flat. There's no productive capacity there. There's no capital he can extract from them. There's nothing there. War is lose, lose, lose, right? And Russia's economy is a disaster. So he has lost economically. He can never have this empire because it's a mystical fantasy anyway. It's not real. And he's unified Europe. Who ever thought Europe would be unified? He's actually unified them. They actually have a common goal, a common enemy which they didn't have before and the two countries he least wanted to join NATO much more important than Ukraine have now joined NATO. So even if he succeeds in annexing the two eastern provinces he's basically lost the war. Now of course he lost the war when he tried to take Kiev when he thought he would be able to do a six day war and take the whole of Ukraine in just a few days because he would decapitate the country by taking Kiev and destroying its government. They failed, militarily they failed. I think they will ultimately fail in the east as well. I think ultimately Ukraine will win the war but that's more speculation. I think the Russian economy cannot sustain the war. They can't build enough cannon, whatever. You know, the weapon systems, a lot of the weapon systems that they need have parts that they import from places like Germany. Those imports are not coming. Whereas Ukraine is getting unbelievably sophisticated western weapon systems that are late years better than the Russian weapons systems. I predicted Russia was going to have a hard time day one on the basis of just one thing, the quality of their weapons. Authoritarians don't build good stuff. It's not good stuff. In Israel we fought against these weapons systems. They're not good. They're really, you know, they're bad. They fall apart. The soldiers are not motivated. They're not built for the soldiers and to protect them. So how quickly over what period of time will they take all of the east back? I don't know. If Putin's going to survive or not, I don't know and I don't want to speculate on all that. But Ukraine has a real chance of literally defeating the Russians in terms of pushing them back to the original borders. Yeah, Ben. Yaron, you gave us a lot of credit to a lot of people who give us all reason for hope for the future and I agree with you. I noticed there's something that you left out. So as an ARU instructor, one of my jobs is to vet applications for the ARU. And one of the questions that we ask so that we can do basically some market research is how did you first find out about Iran and Objectivism? And the first most popular reason that we get is that a friend or someone we knew or a teacher gave us a book by Iran. The second most popular reason that we get is I saw Yaron Brook on YouTube. So I just wanted to say thank you for sending us these great students. Well, thank you, Ben. I appreciate that. It's not my job to promote myself or to give myself credit. But yeah, I think I've done a pretty good job over the last 22 years promoting Objectivism and getting the word out there. But thank you. Yeah, I would like to say that I'm one of the people who was convinced by your show, Yaron Brook, so thank you for that. And also, could you give any advice for the people who would like to also put the ideas of liberty and the virtues of business forward like yourself? Like what strategies could we use to be such good speakers for those topics like yourself? So I'd say two main things. One is educate yourself to get really good at it. Practice, but also study. And this is where ARU plays a huge role. Go take some classes. Make sure that when you speak, when you're advocating, you really know the content and you're doing a good job. You know, we're going to be teaching courses on public speaking, on engaging in debate and discussion and all these things, so that'll enhance that. So that I'd say is one. The other which I really think the Objectivist movement is not very good at. As I said, there's a ton of content. There's so much content. You don't have to invent the wheel. And with social media and the internet, the key concept here is share. We're for sharing. You know that? Take the latest video that somebody from the institute has done on, I don't know, abortion or some topic. And instead of yourself engaging and really getting, you know, send somebody, hey, watch this. Let's talk about it afterwards. Use the material. We're really not good at this. And there's a sense in which I know when you're young, you want to invent the wheel, right? You want to make the argument. You want to debate. You want to argue. But people already doing that, you find your niche where you can add the most value. But if we share the content that we have today, we have so much of it that I think we could have a much bigger impact. And again, the internet today is built to share, to get the word out there. So those would be my two suggestions. Thank you. Your Honor, you mentioned the other day that John Stossel invited you to submit ideas on the Constitution. And I wonder where that stands. He didn't use my ideas. So he invited me to do a short video where I proposed changing the Constitution. What I would change in the Constitution if I had an opportunity to do that. And he landed up, you know, putting that video out, but without my two minutes. Next time. He's already asked me for something new, so something to do something else with him. So Stossel is an ongoing positive relationship. Your Honor, you frequently use... You're not being a poker, right? No, no, no. I'm over that. I'll get my revenge next year. And those of you who missed the poker tournament, it was a blast. We had so much fun. And where's Garrett? Yeah, he blew us all the way. He was amazing. So you often, in your talks, will use the iPhone as an example of innovation and how incredible the resources that nowadays we have access to. And I certainly agree with all that and I love my iPhone as well. But I often think of the analogy of fire. And let's just say, when humanity first discovered it, it probably took a while to master it and contain it the way we do now. So I'm curious what your thoughts are over some of the destructive elements of technology like the iPhone in the short term. I see people all the time just focused on their iPhone, wasting time looking at social media, et cetera, hundreds of millions of people. What do you think the worst case is? I mean, I think, look, every technology... You know, television. I remember, some of you probably remember this, most of you don't. All the complaining about, there's too much television. We're glued to the television screen every evening. All we do is watch television. It's going to destroy America. And kids won't be able to think and won't be able to do anything because they're watching television all the time. And yeah, some people abuse television. Still do. Right? How many of you have seen Netflix nonstop? So it's possible. And to some extent, a lot of people maybe do that. But that's where it's your responsibility as an individual to figure out this is a tool, how best to use it, when to use it, how often to use it. Maybe I'm not the best judge when it comes to the iPhone because my wife has a series of photographs from the most beautiful places in the world, all over the world, of Iran doing this. And now it's become a running joke everywhere we go, we do it. But she doesn't have to ask me. It just happens. But yeah, social media can be, quote, addictive, it can be very engaging and entertaining. But you've got to decide how much and how does it fit into your values and how does it fit into your life. It's not anything destructive in the iPhone. It's us. It's how we do it and how we use it. And it takes some maturity to do that and we have to think about, for kids, you really have to think about how much time and what kind of electronic media and what kind of engagement you want them to have and how you can help them build good habits around this. But that was true of television and it'll be true of the technology in the future. This is always going to be a challenge. So I don't blame my iPhone for my misuse of it sometimes. It's me and it's on every one of you and it's people have to take responsibility for how they use these things. But let's not lose sight of the upside and the wonder and I've often, you know, all the different things that something like an iPhone provides to us and there's more to come, right? There's more to come in terms of these kind of products and these kind of innovations that are truly wondrous and that we as believers in progress and personal responsibility, the deeper sense of the term, we should be at the forefront of advocating for them. It's like CRISPR. Yes, you could use CRISPR for bad things but if we don't defend a technology like that, who is going to? So we need to be really enthused in defending these technologies and defending the scientists behind them and maybe helping teach people how to be responsible for their own lives. Thank you. Thank you all.