 And we're back! Hey everyone, welcome back to the 21 convention. Please give him a welcoming round of applause. Stand up if you feel like it and work on your posture for him. James Steele the second, ladies and gentlemen. Here he comes. Cheers. Mike, am I good? Cool. Okay guys, the first talk I'm gonna do for you today, I'm gonna do a talk tomorrow as well. Going into a bit of specifics around my research and my kind of area of expertise. But one thing that Anthony's asked me to talk about is specifically philosophy and more specifically, I'm Rand's philosophy, which is objectivism. I'm a big proponent of I'm Rand's philosophies. I first got introduced to Atlas Shrugged through reading kind of Mike Mensa's work. So then if any of you are familiar with Mike Mensa, heavy duty, high intensity training. Coming from an exercise physiology background, I first got involved with that after getting involved with Arthur Jones, moving through all that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And realized that he applied a very sort of philosophical approach to his pursuit of knowledge in that specific area. And I kind of got more involved, learned the name I'm Rand, found her works, read Atlas Shrugged for the first time a year and a half or so ago. And it really kind of resounded with me, the message in it and the underlying philosophy. Maybe wanna learn more about it and learn about how to apply it in my life and essentially how to live my life. So what I'm gonna do today is kind of go through if you can see the slides hopefully, if not then just have to rely on me speaking and hopefully it will all go through fine. I ended up writing a bit of an essay for my notes because I didn't wanna leave any kind of stone unturned. I felt that there was so much depth that needs to kind of be gone into with the specifics of the philosophy and learning how the fundamentals all affect each other that I needed quite a lot of detail in it. So I apologize if it looks like I'm kind of relying on my notes a lot. I was kind of hoping for a podium or something to kind of maybe speak from but I'm gonna have to kind of rely on just holding it here now. So excuse that anyway. James, you're welcome. Yeah, is that working? Cool. I don't know. I'll hold it and see how I go actually. I'll try not to wave it around too much. I think I have been already. Okay, so like I said, I'm a PhD student. My specific area is exercise physiology, lower back pain and how the two are related. But philosophy for me is a big interest. So this talk is just clarify, I have no academic training in philosophy at all. Everything I've learned is self-taught. So that's why I've kind of made the clarification. This is an armchair's philosophers perspective. I'm self-taught in this and I've went out and sought the information much like you guys are comes to this convention learning about the various topics that the speakers are talking on. So I wanna kind of share that with you. Okay, so just to kind of give you a brief outline, I tend to do academic conferences just because of PhD stuff. So everything has an outline. So excuse the formatting if it's a bit sort of like bland. Okay, so first of all, we're gonna clarify like what is philosophy and why is it even important? Why do we need to know about philosophy? Is it self-evident or is it kind of subconscious or do we need a conscious awareness of it and how it pertains to our lives? Then we're gonna go through and actually introduce objectivism as a philosophy in itself. And we're gonna go through all the various different areas of objectivism through a kind of logical approach and we're gonna discuss what logic is and how it kind of like works into the philosophy as well. So we're gonna go through the main sort of areas metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics. And we're gonna see how they kind of all interrelate and build what I'm round called a philosophy for life on earth. And like Anthony said, life on earth as a man is what this conference is about. I'm just gonna quickly sit my glasses on because I'm short-sighted, I can't read the screen. And I like to be able to sit. That's not gonna affect the lights at all. Is it gonna reflect too much? That's better, I can see it. And I can see, you know, everything was blurry before. And then we're gonna kind of conclude just by looking at the kind of simple choices that we face in our lives and the very sort of like prominent conflicts that have a philosophical origin and how we can use this structure of philosophy to kind of figure out what choices we need to make when it comes to these conflicts and what choices are most appropriate. Okay, so first of all, what is philosophy and why is it important? Philosophy pertains to everything and this quote from I and Rand sums it up very well. Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence and of man and of man's relationship to existence. So fundamentally, philosophy deals with how you live your life and how you relate to the world around you as a man or as an individual. You know, if you wish to live your life, you can't avoid the necessity of philosophy. Philosophy underpins everything. Man's life relies upon philosophy if he's to know how he should live it. You know, everything you do, every action you take assumes some underlying principles by which you take those actions. Some fundamental principles. And that's what philosophy predominantly deals with. Fundamentals. The basic, irreducible primary concepts that kind of dictate how we live our lives. Like I said, the choices we make, what we do, how we think, how we act, how we live. You know, some examples could pertain to you guys coming to this conference here. You want to learn something. You want to learn something about the nature of reality. You want to learn something about particular subjects, particular topics. You want to know how to apply it. You know, it could be anything, success with women, starting a successful business, entrepreneurship, exercise, nutrition. What philosophy deals with is what that subject is, how it relates to you and how you actually find out that information and know what's true and what actually works. You know, how reality works. Essentially, it's how to live. Yeah, briefly then, what I'm round is, predominantly an author and she had this vision of, like Anthony said, of man as a hero, man as an individual, man living his life as he deems by his own standards and for his own pursuit of happiness. And she wrote several novels, including Atlas Shrugged, which is my personal favorite, and I was so, you know, I've got such a conviction about the philosophy that I went as far as having the tattoo of Atlas on my arm. Fountainhead, which I know is Anthony's personal favorite. There's actually a film about it. I haven't seen it, but it's supposed to be really good. And other various novels, which she wrote, before then delving into, people saw, read her novels and they were aware that the heroes she kind of had in her novels at the end of the businessmen, the successful people, were different to what predominant sort of like doctrine and dogma and conventional wisdom, whatever that is, that we all kind of like try and combat by coming to this thing. She kind of like showed this kind of like completely, power, completely independent hero. And people wanted to know what philosophy, you know, can you explain it in more detail what philosophy underlies your stories and what philosophy underlies your heroes? What philosophy underlies man in your vision? So that's what I'm around in. And she built upon that by writing more philosophical texts to explain her philosophy. And that's what I'm going to try and do justice to today. So there'll be a few quotes by Amran, some of them from her novels and some of them from her philosophical works.