 So that is, how do you stay positive in bad times? One thing is to think about some of what makes it bad is the amount of uncertainty, the amount of things that could go calamity wrong, but also you just don't know how they're gonna go. If you knew what world we were gonna be in in two months, you can deal with it. But when things are amorphous clouds, you don't know what form the bad thing is gonna take, you know, something bad at some scale is gonna happen, and but you don't know what that's, I mean, that's, you know, what really anxiety is ready to where you have this diffuse thing to worry about and you can't put a shape on it. And we're all in that situation because that's the situation the world is in. Everyone is in that situation. And then, you know, how does one cope with that? I think, you know, sort of going abstract is really helpful. I mean, thinking about like, what is this, you know, how do people survive? What makes for the good? Why is it that human beings have gotten through really horrible things in the past? And then finding, you know, really identifying and making it clear to yourself what those things are, both abstractly and then the concrete that embody it and noticing them in your life, in the world, like, you know, that we're on Zoom and these people have got this platform going incredibly and all the things that go into making that happen but then in your own self, your own ability to think, your own ability to problem solve, the people around you in your life, you see being rational, clear, productive, rising to the occasion, doing their best to overcome the obstacles that there are to thinking clearly to having a good perspective on it and really embracing and cherishing that in yourself and in the people around you and in the people in the world. And recognizing that that is what has always gotten human beings through the worst times and will get us through as best we can this time and exactly what form it'll take, you know, that there will be people and they will be doing great things. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I can't remember what show I said this on, but you know, the very fact that we're experiencing this in the 21st century is something to be, you know, grateful for is the wrong word but happy about because, hey, we can zoom, we can connect with people. I did a, my whole family lives in Israel and they all did this zoom meeting because they can't meet each other for like five day and eight and it was, I haven't seen them in months and months because I don't really communicate that much with my family but it was kind of cool to go on zoom and have this ability to hang out with my family at a distance of thousands of miles and but the fact that we live in this, you know, there's Netflix, you've got a comfortable home with air conditioning. There are doctors out there doing amazing things that, you know, for the most of us for the overwhelming majority of the people who get sick, they're going to be fine. And it's just, it truly is a time to appreciate all the amazing stuff we have around us and the people who created that stuff. And to put it in context, I mean, there's this kind of thing when people talk about a really horrible thing like terrorism, they say fewer people die of it than this so you shouldn't be worried about it. And that's wrong. You should be worried about things that are bad and concerned about them but it also, you shouldn't use it to dismiss them but you can also put it in perspective of how big an impact is this going to have on my life and how big an impact is it historically? And if you think about the really bad projections of how many people might die in America at least, it's worse than some other places from COVID. If we do nothing and everything goes wrong and so forth and you think about what that means in terms of death per capita and mortality rate in the country, it would be something like doubling the mortality rate, twice as many people die this year as in a typical year. And that would put us in par with how many people died in 1920. Now that's not good but it conquered, I mean, it's horrible, but it conquers is how much better our lives are than life in 1920 was 1920 is not remembered as a bad year. And it's after the flu pandemic was over. So if we go back a few years earlier, it'll be, hey, but that was a return to normal better year and twice as many people in America per capita died as die now. So it's horrible to have to go back to that but it, we would have to go back to it just on that level for a year and it's concrete is how good we have it the rest of the time. And it's not acceptable to let ourselves slide back to that. And we're doing so many things that I don't think the death toll and I don't think anybody really thinks the death toll will be that high here in some place like India or somebody it could be staggering. But it's a competition of how well we have it and to think about why we have it that well and how that's saving us from the worst effects of this. Now, despite all the mistakes that are being made and everything that's going wrong and everything that might still go wrong. So that's- Yeah, and the fact that this is the achievements of civilization is what we should, I mean, there's a good time to contemplate them and to think about them and to think about what makes life so much safer. I mean, if you think about the percentage of the population of London that died during the plague, the famous plague where it was the isolation of Isaac Newton that maybe gave us some of the greatest achievements in science in all of history during that period. But he was isolated because London was being rabid, I mean just destroyed by a plague and the percentage of the population that died we're gonna see nothing thankfully close to that. And that is because we understand what a virus is, we understand how it's, how people get it, we understand what we can do in order to prevent it and then we can treat people in ways that they had no clue, people were just dying. They didn't know why they were dying and what to do about it. They kind of understood that you should, if you separate yourself from them, it's a good thing. But they had no real idea of what the process was or how to treat it or how to make their suffering less. So yeah, I mean, we have come so far. Part of with the products like Zoom, this is just a way to have a perspective on the, just how cool the cool ones are. There's the macroscopic, how much better technology makes your life. But every once in a while, the one I really remember is when I was in college, they were the first on a computer mapping programs like MapQuest and so forth. And you'd log in, you were gonna go somewhere and you'd print, you'd give them the directions and they give you turn by turn directions. I got a piece of paper you had to print out. And if you wanted to drag the map like a little bit to the left or zoom out, you click a thing and it would take minutes for the thing to rearrange. And you just thought, well, that's how maps on computers have to be. And then Google, which was at that point only known for being like a pretty good search engine, made Google Maps. And it was just like incredible, the thing just works. And you can drag around, it's like you're in the world like, who are these guys? That they just, they fix search and they fix this. And the thing is just wonderful. And the difference between MapQuest and Google Maps is like a mine suddenly grasped this, tackled this problem and there was light. And if you look at conferencing call application, we've had them for a long time. There's been Adobe connect and Skype and this and that. But zoom just works and everyone's adopted it. It's so much simpler to use. And maybe the other ones have improved since, but now the whole world is on this thing. This company just started up, I don't know, a couple of years ago. I'm not sure how. I've been using it for a couple of years. It's probably three, four years now. But yeah, it's a young company. But I remember when we started doing the Atlas project, we were trying to do video connection Zoom already existed, but for whatever reason we couldn't use it. But this is just so much easier than that was. And it's effortless and it just works in incredibly difficult. I mean, imagine the traffic that's happening now with every business meeting having gone online, every school having gone online. And the thing is just shockingly good. And of course it's not just that particular company Zoom, but all the people who provide the backend servers, Amazon web services and things like that. Yeah, and the fact that we have fiber in the ground and we have high speed connections and things that just 10 years ago were very difficult to conceive of. Today we just take it for granted. And of course on maps, then you get mobile, maps on mobile. And then, I mean, that experience of not even thinking about a map and just sitting in a car and just typing in an address and connecting it. And it appears on your dashboard and that whole, it's just magic. I don't know any of the place, how to get anywhere in any of the place, last three or four places I've lived. Like I've totally outsourced knowing my way around. I mean, you pick up after a while, but you don't have to think about it. You just do the things that tells you where to go when you do it. It's great that it's led to that level of ability, just feel comfortable anywhere in the world. And then some of the things that are most depressing about where we are now, or I mean, not really most depressing because the most depressing is the death toll, the economic toll, but the things that really bring it home to me in a day-to-day, minute-by-minute way is the disruptions in some of these things. But when you think about how small those are relative to what was the norm, you know, like now, I can't get something on Amazon for two weeks or a week or something rather than it'll come tomorrow. That's a pain in the ass for some things, but I mean, when I was a kid, and I'm not that old, you'd write away for something and six to eight weeks later it would come to you, you order a tape from someplace. That it's an inconvenience that I won't get a new pair of socks for two weeks or a week or something. Is our standards of what normal is are so high and it's worth noticing that, noticing that they'll be restored, I think they will be. And who's responsible for it? And there are people in the world like that. Yep. And yes, people made this. I mean, that is so crucial to it all is that somebody's mind is responsible for all this. There's a scene in Atlas Shrugged that always I think about when I am down. Dagny Taggart suffered a real particular defeat. She's at kind of her lowest moment. And it seems like everything's going bad in the world and that there's all the decisions are being made wrong and she's disgusted with the state of things, the state of people around her and he points her to the skyscrapers. Someone made that, that is in the world. That's part of human beings. It's somewhere in the world. There are reasons why she doesn't have access to it at that moment, but that thought is what brings her through and it's what should because that's true. It's human beings who make all those things and the human beings who made them and are making them are in the world now doing their best to make everything good. And what they have that enables them to do that is in each of us and we can each do that to whatever extent we're capable in our own life and be that bright point for the people around us. And that's what being a human being is about. And every day you see inspiring stories about entrepreneurs creating new ventilators. I saw Dyson, the vacuum cleaning company. It's just basically invented a whole new ventilator and they're building tens of thousands of them. You see drug companies, biotech companies, vaccine companies, testing companies, this Abbott Labs test that takes five minutes to get a positive result. I mean, it's stunning. The once you free the human mind and you let it go, every day I see stories about somebody doing something exceptional in this country. And some of them are more modest than that but still really striking. So every business in the world now is reeling, doesn't know what to do, they're displaced, they're customer. But there was both of us shared, I think on Facebook, a story about some company that makes linens for cruise ships and they thought we could make medical masks. And they're gearing up on a dime and changing. I have friends who run an education company, Higher Ground that runs the chain of Montessori's. On a dime they're figuring out how to do things online, how to get emergency childcare for medical people. Just mobilizing a whole company overnight to do something different. And so many businesses around the world are doing this, are shifting who they're supplying, what they're supplying. There was H-E-B, a grocery store in Texas. There's all these people and there must be so many that nobody knows to profile. Three-star Michelin restaurants that are doing takeouts. That have figured out how to cook stuff that's easy to eat, either to freeze, easy to get into the hands of consumers and they're doing takeouts. And people applying their minds to solving problems that people have. You know, whenever I go, I get takeouts here because we eat out a lot. So for us it's a big, so we're taking out and we go to all our favorite restaurants and the ones that are open. We're saying, you know, what more than we need? Just stay open. We want to support you. We want to find ways to keep this going. And all the restaurants that we're dealing with in their own little ways, innovating in order to make the takeout type, you know, to make it work. Which is not always easy for them. Yeah. So how does this fit with this? There's a concept in objectivism that I think this is often misunderstood or badly explained, which is the idea of a benevolent universe, the benevolent universe. How does trying to stay positive in the environment we live in today? How does that fit in with the benevolent universe principle? Yeah. So there's a way you can take this premise, the idea of the universe is benevolent. It's a good universe. The universe is hospitable to human life. Where you can be kind of Pollyanna about it. Oh, everything's fine. You're, you know, Dr. Pangloss, who thinks he lives in the best of all possible worlds and you're not judgmental or moralistic. But this is, I mean, coming from Ayn Rand, who grew up in Soviet Russia and was full of rage rightfully about what had made that happen and what had made that possible and its effects. So it's not a, you know, oh, everything's fine and hunky-dory or we shouldn't do anything about things to fix them or make them good. But there's an understanding that of the points we were talking about before that when things go badly, human beings have the ability to fix them. Human beings have the ability to make a life for ourselves. Human beings have reason and reason is powerful. And that is what makes life possible and worth living. And it's a universe that's intelligible, that it's capable to, that it's possible to succeed in. And when you understand that you see a part of what's angering is that how much of what's bad is due to people failing to be rational, people being irrational, people being evil, they could do better. And we could have done so much better and been so much safer from this miserable little bug if a whole lot of people had been just been honest and other things. But the reason is, those things, that badness is sort of like a deficit of goodness. What's powerful is the mind and goodness and evil is weak and sniveling. And once one understands that, that you can hold on to a core conviction that you will be able to make something of your life. You will be able to make something good and the good people will be able to succeed. And that if there's some case where they don't, it's the exception. It's not something to hold against the world. And I think for Rand, this was something that she struggled with. It wasn't that she was effortlessly held this perspective. I think it's a hard one perspective from somebody who was through hell in a lot of different ways. But there was a real conviction that she I think worked to hold on to in herself. And you could see this in her characters working to hold on to it in themselves. But it's, I think an important truth to hold on to that. And you can really know that it's true. It's not like an article of faith. It's an important thing that you can grasp and understand why it's true. That what enables us, everything that we have and everything that we are and everything that we value comes from our minds and our minds are potent. Yes. And as long as there are people who are willing to use those minds or people engaged in that universe, good things will happen. They won't necessarily always dominate bad things happen out there, but we can overcome them by using the methodology, by using, including fighting the bad people and figuring out how to do that. That conflicts, badness, evil, disaster, catastrophe are not inevitable. And so long as you know that and you know what's essential involved in fighting them, there's a way to keep on. Yes. And that does not negate the fact that bad things happen and that evil people do do evil things and horrific things like is happening today and arguably made worse by evil people that they are happening, that they will happen, but that they in and of themselves have no power. That is, the power to the extent that they have any comes from good people staying silent. It comes from the good not standing up to evil. And indeed lending their power to the evil in some way. And you can think of all the concrete of that here. The Chinese Communist Party having covered up this virus and let it become such a contagion and get so out of control. It might have been a problem anyway, but not to the extent. That government supported by so many fantastic, ambitious, entrepreneurial, just people who let their work get used to support this bad government and they can change that. And it's their mistake, but it's the mistake of the good. It's not some nipping in evil that China's government. And then the similar problems with our own government, both locally in time, that is the Trump administration in particular and globally that for decades and decades our medical systems been crippled and socialized. And it was just this story that came out today I was reading about an attempt to make tens of thousands of ventilators for the emergency stockpile and why it failed over the last 12 years, just incompetent management done by a senseless bureaucracy. But all of that is something that we are supporting and we can learn to be better. And you can appeal to the, it's the good in people that gives them the money, the productiveness, the resources that we can have in American and American government. And if you can appeal to people based on those features of themselves you can get them to withdraw that sanction and it might take a long time. But even if you don't succeed concretely, understanding that that's what's happening makes the world intelligible and makes you able to find what course is possible to you through it, insofar as you have enough freedom and to lead a life. Yeah, and there's enough good going on in the world right now, there's enough good that's accessible to us and in spite of the horrors around us, it's possible to stay positive and sane and preserve the energy to fight the bastards, to fight the fight because the fight is only gonna get more intense. It's not gonna get... What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the stare, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist, bro. Using the super chat and I noticed yesterday when I appealed for support for the show, many of you stepped forward and actually supported the show for the first time. So I'll do it again, maybe we'll get some more today. If you like what you're hearing, if you appreciate what I'm doing, then I appreciate your support. Those of you who don't yet support the show, please take this opportunity, go to Iranbrooksshow.com slash support or go to subscribestar.com, you're on book show and make a kind of a monthly contribution to keep this going. I'm not sure when the next...