Dwi'n neb yn ychwanegu'r cyfrydd, a fyddwn yn ymnod Abend. Mae'n cael ei gwerthu a chydoedd o unrhyw fφraswch a chygofnodau bysbun. Mae'r dgofnod o'r prysancau a chygofrwlesau, mae'n trofnod amser ar y glir. Mae'r trofnod o'r trofnod yn cael eu gofynu yn ll-frwles. Mae'n trofnod i'r trofnod o'r trofnod ar ddal. Mae'n trofnodi'n trofnod o'r trofnod o unrhyw, mae'n trofnod o'r trofnod o'r trofnod. nid i bethau am ychydig edrych a'r ll chociażbyn rhai. Eda ni o'n gwneudion ar hyn o'ch gweithio gyda'r clwcle. Mae llyfr gennym ar gyfer i'r fath o'r blwg, mae'n bwysig sgol gyda'r fath. Ond yna'r popeth, rhywbeth enwedig, ddim yn iawn. Mae'r brif, yn ni'n gwneud. So nid o'r blwg, mae'n alygu mae'n gwneud. Maen nhw'n dechrau ein prif yn y rhai fath o'r llach, mae'n eich cyfan yn cael cael rhaid i gael'r brif. mae'n meddwl ybawd, dwi fydd iawn, chi fod cyd-ddiogel iawn, felly mae cyd-ddiogel iawn o amser. Mae'n meddwl, ac mae'n meddwl sydd wedi cael meddwl sy'n gofynnig. Yn oedd oedd y niferstwyff pan mae'n meddwl y ffyrdd i'r hyn ymlaen o'r ddrwng yn ei wneud, oedd yn ei cael mwyaf oherwydd mae meddwl. Ra, mae'n meddwl ychydig o'u meddwl oherwydd mae'n meddwl ac mae'n meddwl o'r dweud, I was working in the stair office and I left out a zero, so I had a zero zero two instead of a zero zero zero zero two. I obviously never found that, so that was there since maybe 2000 or 2001. And I discovered that last year, so that's a 30 year old, 40 year old book that was discovered by Diverty. So yes, so Diverty does find read problems and often find lots of other things that are not problems, so you get a huge amount of noise, and especially for us in the office that time we would factor something that we'd mapped as being a false positive would return because the code changed sufficiently that it was no longer seen as being a copy or a duplicate of the previously mapped as a false positive book. So generally, our tubing noise must have been good. So basically we set off to try and get rid of all of our Diverty warnings, mostly so that when we got new warnings we could know that they actually were new warnings and not old warnings returned again.  So this is the, yeah, this is contemporary results. Yes, last year's density was 0.08, this year's density is 0.00, and we have it at 0.00 for about six months or plus. We had it statistically 0 for that length of time in practice. For instance, today we have four bugs in Diverty. We've had a run which found four bugs or four warnings. We fixed those four warnings and the next Diverty warning is still pending to come back to see if it lets you get an actual zero or whether it's found more stuff. But I would expect it to be statistically 0. This then compares to projects of our size, and we're obviously in this large bracket. These are the amount of defects that are in our Diverty database over time. That is 2012, 2013, and then that's obviously now. The warnings from Diverty in this chart include the ones that belong to the projects that we are set to be ignored and all of the things we've mapped as possible. So this is your floor here. You can't go below that unless you go and fix our third party dependencies. For the most part, it's been a downward slope. You get these upward spikes every now and then, especially when exceptions, listifications are modified a little bit. That's what the large jump there is.  How we integrated Diverty gives projects, or open source projects, of our size. Currently it gives us two slots a week, so you can do two bills a week, and then you can build again until a week later. So the way I do it is I don't easily space them out. I do one build for Diverty. I get back to results, I fix those warnings, and then I do a lot of build regions. We are trying to get this case where we had generally actually zero warnings, and I can use a second slot to verify that the results of the first slot are actually fixed. If you get it wrong, then you have to wait an entire week. So that's what I do, two back-to-back instead of evening space there during the week. The way it is now is that because there's such a small amount of warnings generally, I have the results mailed to the email list, so you get your Diverty email once a week, and at least in the email, generally the lines of the code that have been affected that have caused the new warnings. So you generally don't have to visit the website or to scare your screenshots of the website July for getting down into the book. I generally send an email out from Diverty to everybody that has committed access for a couple of days, a week or two I've sent out an invitation from Diverty. So if you have committed access and you'd like to use the Diverty website, and if I haven't sent you an email, just let me or Norbert know, and we just urge you to be invited. I generally don't give access to people outside a project that has to observe the books, or why not, because there's a lot of historic stuff in there that might have some significance that I don't want to have people digging through three or four-year-old warnings, looking for stuff to see to them yet what a minority of fun course is there. But yeah, all the new stuff is in the list that doesn't matter so much to them. So it takes about four-six hours on this laptop right here to build on our site that you uploaded to the Diverty website, and then it takes about 12 plus hours to try and write it. I'm on their side of things, up to a date. Yeah, the Diverty we're using is 7.6.0, dyslocated to 7.7.0, and the Diverty servers are now claiming that it fails on their site, so either we've broken 7.7, or we have some other problems, trying to get in contact with Diverty means to either see if there's a problem that they can fix, or I might have to revert back to 7.6. So that's the key part of this stuff, pretty much on chain status wise in last year, except now we email those to the list and our numbers are far smaller, they're smaller than last year. It's kind of intuitive to our process. Crash testing then was the follow-up project. So this is basically Mark's got this over running. What we're actually doing is we're loading a whole pile of documents and then we're saving a subset of those documents and see if any crashes. And by crashing this case, we build a Diverty utility build, so we're getting certs as being a failure as well. So when I talk about crashes, I'm talking about crashes are certs. So, for example, the existing crashes that we have are all certs that don't crash in a release build. So it's a higher order of quality that we're holding ourselves here to. So when I say that we have this many crashes, we actually get a real-world version of a linear office that's a release build that's not going to crash any previous launch as we play here. So, on the input side of things, we have 118 columns in our output and each column is either a file format or a location where we get documents from. Somebody's a kind of pointless now, we have a whole pile of Staraff's binary formats that we were loading, but now we're loading and there's just no ops, it's being loaded. It's been typed, then, and it's missed or loaded as text. So, see if anything crashes. See if anything will trip us and start to... Outside of the loading, then, we save a whole pile of these documents, We load up all the ones from the compatible formats for output to the column soaf gofyn, EODI T, ODS, ODI T, DWPGX, RTFX and SXXX. So, we export out those larger office formats. So, we don't load up all the image formats, and we save them to other image formats. We just do it for this. So, if we load up an ODIt, we save that out into all of the Compassion5 format. So one import of a dot or one import of an ODIt turns into three exports. So, we multiply those there. a ein bod o ffordd sydd o'r lleif, o'r ffordd yr oeddgoedd. Rydym yn ddiwylliant gwasanaeth fel hefyd, yw'r cyllid o'r hanfod o'r cefwng lleif. Ac yna'r deithio 64 cofau, eich cofau o'r 4 gigau o brannus, eu bod yn dda i dweud. A mywch dŵl allu cwmfyrdd, Cymrwyntgyrchu ar gyfer byw, y cyfr northfiydd yn gyfr dudiau, o'r dweud, o'r disbyn. maen nhw'n rhoe ddau sydd yn ymwyno o'r 80,000 yddorach iawn. Gyd yn ymwneud y yrhaf yr hyn sydd oedd yn cywbeth. Dyma'r hyn o'n gwneudio'r mynd i, ac mae gofynig a'r byd yn ymwneud a'r gwybeth, i'n gwybeth, â'r dyfodol bwyd i fyflaidr honno, ac mae ymwneud ti'n gwybeth, ac mae'n fofio'n gwneudio'r mynd i sydd oedd, sy'n 180—olaw'r 180 mwy, o'n 5 oed. mae'n deallweddio. Mae'n mirau yna, mae hefyd yn unrhyw. Mae'n加油wyr Roedd ddechrau clywodol am gwybod ar gyfer ein bod hyn Byddedigoedd Clawdeddon, a'r cyfeirio ym strongest ar gyfer ei dweudio. Yn holl hyn o hwn i'r cyfeirio cyfeirio cyfeirio cyfeirio cyfeirio cyfeirio Cyfeirio Cyfeirio Clawdeddon, ac nopech yna hyn o'n ym如果你wyr mawr. ac felly dyna i gwellwch eich ddechiwnau ac yn llwyddofyn â'r ddechrau hyn ar y dy๗ ymgyrch. I ddim ynエrydu'r byw yw'r peth yn oall, ac mae gweld, yn eich ddechrau, yn ei ddechrau.  Dwi'n sgwmpio brydwch â'r rhaid o'r clywedau ei wneud. Mae'r wneud wedi'i gyrddwch ei ddaeth, ni'n sefydlu gweld eげf gofio ar gernegol o waith hoffi'r bwysig o ddaeth Cymru oherwydd i fynd i'n sgwmpio'r gwneud, o wneud i weithio i'r enghrefan? FellyByddon ni'r hunain i gweld yn y dweud cyfeidio'n ddyn nhw. Bwrwaf, yn y ddyn nhw, yn ddyn nhw ddyn nhw'n ddyn nhw'n ddyn oherwydd mae'n nghefn o. Mae hi'n meddwl i'r rhaid i commanderau a lamedig. A roedden nhw ni wedi gewch y bodRIm am terfodol ar y bodys. Mae'n ddyn nhw ddyn nhw wedi'n ddyn nhw'n ddyn nhw yddy'n ddyn nhw. Mae'r hanes hwn yn lwybr wedi ar gael i'r rhagl. Ond ar��, ac yn gymryd ar flog o'r gwleidio, Y proses d为u'r bucheg ynghylch yn gweithio'r buchig yn gweithio'r bwchig am hyn. Adeg ddod fel clyw, a'r bydd yn ddod o gweithio'r lleig, mae'r ddod o'n gweithio'r boll ynghylch yn tuadol o'll bydd yn elau! Mae'r ddod o'r bydd y Chwyddoedd cynnig yn gweithio'r boll, ac yn ddod i'r boll yng Nghych yn ddod o'r boll, ac yn ddod o gweithio'r boll ddod o'r boll eithaf, y dyfodol yn ysgol. Mae'r proses wedi bod yn ychydig yn dŵr, ac mae oeddwn i ddodd y ddau'r ddau'r ddau oedd, yn ymdweithio'r ddau. Mae'n ddau'r ddau'r ddau'r ddau'r ddau, a rhai'r ddau'r ddau'r ddau, reidio'n oedda'r ddau'r ddau'r ddau. A we ddweud o'r ddau o'r ddau'r ddau yw ddau'r ddau'r ddau'r ddau'r ddau'r ddau. Nid ymddangos ni do jobio i butfyn y llun, ac mae'n wnaeth i'r ddawn ni'n gweithio'r ddawn yn gweithio'r ddawn i'ch wnaeth, roeddwn i'n gweithio'r ddawn i'n gymerwyd iddyn nhw'n brerach a'r d winners i ddylo'r unig across o bobl yn unrhyw o bobl yn gweithio'r ddawn. Rwy'n pennoch yn fwyaf, felly mae'n gweithio'r ddawn i'n ddweud, ac mae'n lle wedi peirio'n diolio'r arfer o'r uwch. That category wouldn't be put in too. Not mummy, but it would take it at all. All it just means, like that would be look at the historically data, it'd say that there are a lot of darkue And lot of those darkue and actually RTF crushes, some of these are not There were different files from it. So you tend to look at the collins and see if this bit was You know, absolutely useless. It's one of the other ones is really important. So there's lots in this categorised stuff in Mo wordszilla and lots of archive files a'n cael cyfnod arbennig chwarae. Dych chi ddim yn fyd, ac dych chi'n ddim yn ymwneud yn gofal. Ond mae'n debyg i'r ddechrau mendigol oherwydd i fynd i'n dwylo cymaint o ysgriffau dysbwythio'n erbyn i cael bod yr ysgriffau sydd wedi'u gwneud y dydyddai'n gofio, fydd yma os ydych chi'n trefwn o'n mynd ymgweithio. Ac mae'n gweithio'n typ i ddwylo i'r 12wyr. Mae gweithio ond sy'n mynd i ddefnyddio. Roeddwn i'n dweud o dros dros gyflawni, dyma yw'r ddweud yn cael eu ddweud, bobl yn edrych ar y ddalun, a ni'n dweud o'r ddaf yn cyfrifol yn cael eu ddweud. Felly mae'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud, ac mae'n ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Mae'r ffawr y gallwn ar y dyfodd i ddweud o'r ddweud am 13 o'r ddweud. Geni yw'r ddweud yma'r ddweud o'r ddweud? again getting very serious to just getting these numbers down. They had two and a committee between them as a week. But now for the last two or three months you're down to one minute a week. So they're not evenly spaced. Yeah, so like you take a few peaks from this diorama in order to actually fit things in. Cos otherwise if you just left the original peak you'd have one gigantic peak and then just a straight line and you wouldn't be able to see any of the local ones. Felly, dweud hynny y gallwn hoff cyfan, er fyddai hynny'n hynny'n hynny dweud bod gennym o'r documentau sydd yw mewn hwn. Onw'r dweud ydych chi'n gweithio gweithio ddim yn ddod yn gweithio ar y gyfer hyn yn eithaf hynny'n hynny yng nghymru gyda yn yw. Felly diodel ar gyfer hynny yw y gyrfa oherwydd hynny'n hoff i ddweud hoff a gilydd thoseiol yw'r documentau sy'n hal ei fod yn bobl yw ddim yn arfer. Or, if somebody added in the search to catch things that previously would have silently been ignored so all these documents that were always working continue to actually really work or not, there's no actual crashing, a difference in their crashing in the real world to be detected in the whole pile of stuff. So, you can use the import testing to find real world examples of something that you take as a problem as well. So, if you have like a legacy assert that just warns, you must get it closer, you realise that it's a real assert, it should be a real assert because this problem should never actually exist, you toggle it on and if there is a document out there somewhere in the horde that comes through that bad case then you can keep writing the results and then come through. It's pretty standard, pretty common thing to happen in writer, especially in layout asserts for the SW index assert that warns about pens that have lived beyond, that lived after the stuff that they pointed to has gone away. So, that's the importing, there's a lot more documents involved in import as an export, you've got 80,000 documents in import but for export then you only have to subset for that export out to the common office file performance. It is multiplied by about three from the input, has generally each document exports out to about three export file performance but the numbers should be that tomorrow. So, even though the numbers of documents we're talking about are a lot smaller, we can see that initially we've got a huge amount of failures in some of those product spikes, there's like 3,500 failures versus the worst that ever happened on this chart is about 400. So, it doesn't make a difference initially in the quality of import and export. So, relatively speaking, our import was never that bad when it comes to crashing, but when it comes to asserts and crashing on export, there's a whole different story there. A lot of doggings, failures especially, a lot of dogg failures, a lot of crashes on the export to those file performance. Again, this game is the same from about October 2020 to now as well and again. The overall trend in this world goes from big to small and that's how it really matters and you can get these places where lots of documents share the same flow. We like those ones. Yeah, so, last year was what we were doing during the last year, last year we had looked at export crashes at all, but we had made some progress on the import crashes. So, the three things of our severity stuff, our import side of crash testing and then once that was finished we basically moved over to export crash testing. We also wanted to get the numbers down. So, there was one week this year where we had a converting report came back in zero. It was zero import failures and it was zero export failures. We hit deal. We hit the triple zero buying point of water or whatnot. Yeah, and I thought it was kind of interesting because that happened on the week of 20th of 27th of August and I put an awful lot of people on their holidays. So, I guess that what we need to do for better quality is just go on longer holidays and then we'll have them go away. So, yeah, so that's, you know, obviously it's not a static project and a lot of the reason we were doing this was to convert the ones so we could get rid of legacy warnings. So, when there was new warnings we would see them straight away so that you could tell them that an actual new change had been made that triggered that and not to do with the old ones. Similarly for the import and export stuff here as well, what's also important not to crash and import and export, what you're really hoping to do is use the whole thing as an early warning system so that anything that goes wrong, that creates a converting warning, import crash and export crash, can be detected pretty much in that week so that the person who made the change that found that trigger it is still interested in being fixed in it and not maybe six months later. So, this is what you get typical for a typical run. Like, this week we have four clarity warnings pending the next build because four warnings are fixed. This week there's zero import failures and this week there's four lines in the export on the bottom which has four documents. They are talking about two different issues. We have two asserts that have two problems that have appeared in the export this week. That's a fairly typical thing and that's pretty much where we are. As far as I'm concerned I think that the whole thing is a success in that you have very, very small amount of numbers. They do change over time a little bit but you can use them to determine that a single individual has made a change that he needs to examine to see if it's something he needs to revisit within the week of him doing that. Right, so the reason I cared a lot about the security warnings and the important the export stuff was so that I started because I was interested in just the quality of the important the export from the sense of hitting off any security issues around five months. I didn't think it was all at a point getting into document fuzzing and document filter analysis while you had all these actual real world crashing test documents. There's no reason to go search for difficult crashing test cases when you had a pile of 80,000 documents that created 400 or 500 crashes in the first place. So now that we're kind of finished I suppose the easy real world case of import testing crash documents and the theoretical world from any of the security stuff that comes to T to data and things like that. We've made an effort there to validate data and we've used security to tell us where some of this data might be data that's coming in from the outside that we haven't done any bounds checking on. I'm starting to move on to generating troublesome documents and finding other crashes like that aggressively by going out and creating them myself. So I've played a couple of fuzzers over the time. The search for a fifth is not bad. You get some good results out of that but it was not super fast. The best one I've had so far is the AFL, the Merit Fuzziwp, and that's a lot of fun if you enjoy that kind of thing. So the best approach we have to use that is that you build your project with the replacement compilers of AFL-CAN and AFL-CAN campus. And I think it's a coverage-assisted fuzz testing tool that instruments your project that finds all the branch points and it's a keystack of what data that's read calls your project to go down one core branch of the other branch and then it goes back and it generates input to try and get you to go down the other part. So it maximises the coverage that your buyer uses. And it's pretty good because it also has a lot of smart bits into it and it knows how things go wrong and knows the kind of mistakes people make. So you turn it on pretty fast. It's giving you documents that are causing your interest to overflow and giving you zeros and all sorts of places. So, you know, you turn it on and just things start breaking. And it's got a really great user interface. I don't really know how much it works. I just write the read me and things like that, but what I do know is that it's obviously grey up there in the top corner and it's got cycles done. When you make quite a bit of progress, it goes yellow and I'm told that when you're coming close to exhausting all the possibilities of your programme that you're coming to the end of the process that goes blue. So one of the days I see it go blue. It doesn't go blue yet. I give you some numbers on that as well. The crux of this, for all these closing things, is that they give you a document engine, start your application, report your documentation, your application ends, and the crash testing, or in this case, the photos crash testing, monitor and see if your application crashes or not and then restart it again with different inputs. It starts and starts and starts and starts. Again, because Beckham is user interface, there's a number for cycles. I won't show that screenshot because I want to. But there's a number that says how many executions it is per second. And if it's under 100 executions per second, the user interface goes red. So obviously the message you're getting there is that if you can't execute 100 times a second, your applications will be too slow to be fuzzed effectively in this manner. So yes, our office itself, the office being the fat one, is really slow. So I was getting 0.18 executions a second just to go with the PNG. So that wasn't really where I wanted to be. So I found out that for just starting and stopping, that one of the big things we had was configuration loading. And practicing it is pretty expensive. Normally we just overfet a binary load at once and then, you know, it doesn't matter too much. But for these little really tight loops, then the configuration is too expensive. So we were rather going to use the fat half as well than use a much thinner custom written by the FF tester. That has no user interface and no configuration and so on.  That's 200 times faster, but it's still pretty slow. So yeah, about five minutes or about one minute on this field. So yeah, so I hope I get to the story of the situation which is that there's a special mode where you don't start the stuff.  And that way then you lose all of the start up time you have. And when you do it that way, you get up to 3,000 or 4,000 executions per second. So that's 20,000 times faster to work on the document from 0.18 to 4,000. So that's a pretty big number. So you see here back at this, you've got like 2,000 separate minutes. That's not an execution per second. You generally want to get those speeds with the simple documents. I have to say when you get to the more complicated ones like Doc and Powerpumped, then you're talking like 50 or 60 executions per second. And in lots of cases, as you go over time, you're going to these long deep valleys for many couple of hours, but things are very slow. So as I said, 64 power blocks for that. I've got currently about 20 plus instances running for the last month or so, and lots of documents are failed. But typically what I'm finding is that crashes are very rare, but hangs are really common, very, very common. So what I've done is I started on the crash testing corpus. The following documents we have for crash testing have taken that. I run into this minimizer that's fine with the minimum set of documents from the input that basically exercises the maximum of co-pents. And I use that as the initial input. So those are clear to date. And we've seen the results in co-pents work that actually makes some hope to progress. And I hope to see eventually that it can glue now that it shows up in the market and operate. OK, Dan Fish. Yes? Yeah, I wanted to ask you, so you can just terminate the process for a while. Yeah, we'll restart in two days. Yeah, so exactly. So I've run for a couple of days between crash testing runs. I do the ffuzzing runs.  Fix the hangings. Build the source again. Do the crash testing for a day or two. Then go back and fuzz. And you can restart, or at least use the intra-linguals at your head at the time you exit. And go to your state and continue from there. Any other questions, targets? We haven't done it for a while, but we did do it for a bit. And yeah, that's the thing. We were just talking about it yesterday that we haven't done it in a while. But we have done it in the past, and we have little results for that as well. But that does need to be updated. And it's the unifying behaviour one. We just sanitise it. And then there was a memory sanitiser as well. I think it made sense. Any other questions, sir? OK, that's it. Thank you.


Hello, everybody. Today, we have with us Mr. Yaren Brooke. He is an Israeli-American entrepreneur, writer and activist, an objectivist and the current chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute where he's been executive director from 2000 to 2017. Also the founder of BHZ Capital Management LP. How are you doing this afternoon, Mr. Brooke? I'm doing well. Thank you. Call me Yaron. I've had several people sort of in the libertarian circles and beyond on my channel for interviews. I felt like I had an objectivist on and I feel like you're the leading objectivist today. Well, I appreciate that. I'm glad to be on. Looking forward to our discussion. Glad to have you. Do you think you could start by telling me a little bit about your background, what you do, and the history of the Ayn Rand Institute? Sure. I was born and raised in Israel, served in Israeli military, got my undergraduate at the Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology. In engineering, went on to get an MBA and PhD in finance at the University of Texas. I was a finance professor from 1993 to 2000, then joined the Ayn Rand Institute in 2000 and I think you told the rest of that story. I first read Ayn Rand when I was 16 in Israel. I read Atlas Shrugged and at the time when I read it, I was pretty much opposed to every idea that was in the book or almost every idea in the book. You were raised a socialist originally, correct? Pretty much. My parents, when they originally came to Israel, had the dream of living on a kibbutz. They never actually made it. Israel was very socialist back then. Everybody was a socialist. I didn't know anybody who was not a socialist, basically. It was very unusual, at least among my friends, for anybody to express a different point of view. When did that change? I know right now there's been a sort of, they say, a rightward swing with Nihonyahu. Israel was an interesting country. In 1977, actually the same year I read Atlas Shrugged, it was the first year a non-labor party won an election. That was Begin. For those of you who might remember, he was part of what today is that he could, the same party that Nihonyahu is at the head of. That was the first election Israel was founded in 1948. This was the first election that a non-labor party, non-social democratic party was voted in. That was the beginning of the change. Israel today basically has no left. There is no left in Israel, certainly not socialist left. Everybody in Israel pretty much is a centrist. There's center left, there's center right, and there's far right. The far right is primarily religious, dominated by religious parties. I say the Likudnitanyahu Party is a center-right party, even though it sometimes wants to play on the far right. It's basically a center-right party. Its vote is a center-right. The opposition is center-left, but the center-left opposition parties are pretty center. The more radical leftist ideas have very little representation in Israeli politics today. Almost everything is tilted to the right. By right, I mean here, just to be clear, I don't consider myself right. I don't consider myself left. Right to me is nationalist, usually religious, powerful central government, particularly interfering in our social lives. Usually right today means a government that interferes in our economics as well. You see that in the US, and you certainly see that elsewhere. I don't consider myself anywhere on that political spectrum. I think we need to reconceive the spectrum. I 100% agree with that. If I go back to the story, I read out the shrug that same year, 1977, as it happened. Again, Israel is a very nationalistic country, almost by definition, because of the way it was founded. I was raised very collectivist, very nationalist, very socialist. I read, of course, rejects all that. I was already an atheist at that point, so that wasn't a big deal. I read as an atheist, so that was no big deal for me, but everything else was shattering. After that book tried to consume everything she'd written, and it dedicated the rest of my life to understanding it, applying it, studying it. As part of that, I got involved with the INRAN movement, if you will, in the United States when I moved here. That's how I got ultimately to be CEO and now Chairman of the Board of the Institute. I took classes from the leading philosophers in INRAN's thinking in the 1990s, and ran a conference business around that. That's my story. The Institute was founded in 1985, three years after INRAN had died. She died in 1982. It basically dedicated to preserving and promoting her ideas, to keep them alive. A lot of that the Institute did through promoting her novels and trying to get her novels read by young people. The Institute runs today the largest high school essay contest in the world. It provides free books to teachers who want to teach INRAN, Fountainhead, Alashwagd, Anthem, predominantly in high schools. We provide them books for free. We provide curricula. We try to get people exposure to their ideas. Then we also have today something called the INRAN University, which is within the INRAN Institute. It is dedicated to really training people in the philosophy, primarily future intellectuals, primarily people who will then teach, or become speakers, or do media, write up ads, write articles, books, whatever. You are, of course, leading proponent of the philosophy of Objectivism, which, of course, devised by Russian-American author and philosopher Ida Rand. Firstly, do you think you could explain what exactly Objectivism is, its moral foundations, and what distinguishes it from Libertarians? Because I know INRAN did not consider herself a Libertarian, called them the hippies of the right, quote-unquote. Yeah, let me start with the distinguishing, because that is relatively easy at that kind of big picture level. And then as Objectivism is the philosophy. It has positions in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and in politics, and in even aesthetics. Libertarianism, at best, is a political philosophy. But it's not even really an integrated, coherent political philosophy, because there's a whole variety of different views within it. But Libertarianism has no philosophical foundation. It has no metaphysics. No true Libertarians are going to agree on metaphysics, or epistemology, or morality. You can be a Christian. You can be pretty fundamentalist. You can be an atheist. You can be a subjectivist. You can be an intrinsicist. You can be pretty much anything, and then have political views that somehow are, quote, Libertarian. Objectivism is an integrated philosophy. It has clear views on every aspect, every big branch in philosophy. And while it doesn't have answers to every question in philosophy, it tries to have answers to all the big questions in philosophy. And again, Libertarianism is more eclectic and not really philosophical, primarily focused on politics and economics, almost exclusively, I'd say. It's like, do you think you could define Objectivism? Yeah, so Objectivism, first, is a philosophy of Ayn Rand. So it's a name for philosophy. It's a name for a particular set of ideas as defined by their author, who is Ayn Rand. But what is it? So now this is going to be superficial and quick and kind of Objectivism philosophy on one leg or on a few toes. In metaphysics, Rand holds that reality is what it is. It isn't created by consciousness. It isn't created by emotions. It facts a fact. Reality is what it is. A is A, and the laws of causality apply to reality. You know, we have, in epistemology, we have the tool to know reality, to discover it, to understand it, and that is our faculty of reason. We don't gain knowledge through our emotions. We don't gain knowledge through revelation. Knowledge doesn't just imprint itself on us. Our emotions and our tools are cognition. The only way to discover knowledge is to use our rational faculty to observe reality, facts, and integrate those facts logically by the use of logic. Only individuals can reason. Groups don't reason. There's no group consciousness. Nobody can reason for you any more than anybody can eat for you. We can contribute to one another's cognitive development by stimulating and asking questions and conveying information, which you can't do somebody else's thinking for them. So the unit of thinking is the individual, and in morality, Rand advocates for, you know, the individual is the unit that is alive. The individual is the unit that must act. The individual is the unit that must live and think. Was she the one who said civilization is the process of setting man free from men? Yeah, civilization. I think that was something like that, yeah. Yes, and basically it's not free from men in the sense of other men are not of value to you. Of course they are, but free from them in the sense of various levels and forms of enslavement, right? So throughout history, man have been subjugated in one way or another to other men, and civilization is the process of freeing the individual from that subjugation and only dealing with other men in a voluntary process, a voluntary process of trade. So in morality, your moral responsibility in life is to survive, to thrive, to flourish, and ultimately to be happy. That is your moral purpose, and you are not there to sacrifice your life for other people. Other people are not the standard of morality, so you don't give up your life for them and your values for them. But you don't also expect them to give up their values and their life for you. So you're not sacrificed to them or you don't expect them to sacrifice to you. And sacrifice here means giving up something important without expectation of anything in return or something less valuable in return. So her morality is an egoistic morality. It's a morality of self-interest. It's a morality of individuals pursuing their own rational, long-term self-interest. The tool by which we do that is our mind, is our reasoning faculty. So if you had a boiled-down Rand's morality to one word, I'd say think. Think before you act, act based on thought. So individuals need the ability to think in order to pursue their happiness. The enemy of thought is force, coercion. And therefore when we're in a society with other people, the one rule needs to be no coercion, no force. The concept that captures that is the concept of individual rights. The idea that every individual has an inalienable right to live his life free of coercion based on his own judgment in pursuit of his own values. And the political system that manifests rights is capitalism. It's the system that basically leaves people free to pursue their judgment in pursuit of their values. Free of coercion. She rejects all forms of statism. But she also rejects, and this is a difference with libertarianism. She also rejects anarchism of all forms. She believes in a government, a strong government that does one thing and one thing only. And that is protect you.  It's there to protect you. We can get into the aesthetics if you're interested. Yeah, maybe if we have time towards the end, perhaps we can do that. So objectivism has faced both controversy and scrutiny over the years from both people on the religious right, mainstream Democrats, most notably. And even other libertarians like Robert Nozick, who argued that it doesn't explain why people couldn't rationally prefer having no values as a means of furthering a particular principle or set of values. It's been accused of promoting selfishness. What would you have to say in response to this? Do you believe that this is primarily a misinterpretation of Rand's ideas? And additionally, what criticisms of objectivism would you theoretically find the most valid, if any? Well, I think most of the criticism, sadly, and I wish this wasn't true, but most of the criticisms of Rand, a strong man who positioned, you know, a lot of the people critical, if I never read her, or at least if they've read her, they didn't understand. And a lot of that, you know, some of that, and we'll get to kind of Nozick, but a lot of that has to do with, you know, the emotionalist gut response reaction to a philosophy that's egoistic, that's selfish. People can think about selfishness as meaning exploiting other people, as meaning being a line-cheating SOB and doing whatever it takes to get your way and your way meaning whatever you feel like. And Ayn Rand is clearly not for that. She calls her philosophy selfish, her morality selfish, but she doesn't mean that by the word. What she means by selfish is pursuing what is objectively good for you in the long run and doing so rationally. And I've not seen a critique of that. It just seems that people always fall back on the straw manning anywhere from Ben Shapiro arguing that, you know, what's the stop somebody from just hitting on the girl at the bar? You know, he's married. He's got kids at home that there's an effort involved in maintaining a marriage and taking care of kids. Why not just go sleep with a woman at the bar?  And the reality is that if you're rational and if you think long term, there are lots of reasons not to sleep with a woman at the bar. Part of them is that you're just not attracted to her as good-looking she may be because you have a, you know, a more wholesome perspective on what is attractive. And that comes from being rational and having a long-term perspective on life.   So that kind of understanding of what self-interest means and linking it to reason and rationality is something people really resist. It's interesting just to think about why that is, but people really do resist it.  I think there are other criticisms, Nozick, who try to deal with Rand, but I think it's just wrong. I just think Nozick is wrong. I think he, to some extent, he doesn't understand it, but I think more deeply, I think he just makes logical mistakes in trying to refute her. You know, and for example, the way you phrased it before illustrates one, have no values in order to achieve a value. Well, but that's a contradiction in terms right there.  If you have no values, why even live? There's nothing.  So you're not striving towards anything.  And then the question is, is the value good for you? Or isn't it a good for you? And you want to avoid things that are bad for you because they're bad for you. And life is the standard. And if life is not the standard, then what is? So I think there's just some logical mistakes there. Look, when it comes to the philosophy itself, the philosophy, I have not found any critique that is convincing. I've not found any critique that is, that really is deeply challenging, you know, to Rand. You know, at best on a bad day, you could get me to say, given how people behave, it's hard to conceive of man as the rational being, because there's so much irrationality out there.  And I think that's what's Ayn Rand is arguing, is she's not arguing that people all like this, it's what people can be, and what we should be, and what we should strive to be, and what it means to be a moral human being. And that I think every human being has the potential to do. It's sad that very few people choose to do it. So moving on to religion, Rand was highly critical of it, believing that organized religion and even belief in God itself was actually an insult to man. Do you think you could elaborate further on what she meant by this, and is there a direct link between this idea in Nietzsche's notion of slave morality? And moreover, did she ever draw a direct link between this and communism? Okay, a lot there. Alright, let's break it down. So first with regard to religion, or let's start with just the belief in God. I mean, the problem with the belief in God is that it's based on, by definition, faith. There is no evidence for God, there are no logical arguments for God, in spite of the attempts of some people to present some. They're not real arguments and philosophers have refuted them over and over again. And at that of the day, nobody believes in God because there's a logical argument for God. At the end of the day, people believe in God because they believe in God, because they've taken it on faith. And Rand would say anything taken on faith is bad. You know, the standard for human cognition, the standard for discovering the truth, the standard by which one should live, is reason, facts, evidence, logic. That's what we should pursue in order to achieve success at living. That's what human life means. That's what progresses human life. Faith in God is the negation of that, whether some people want to say, well, it's a negation only as one little part of me. It's almost never just one little part, because that faith has implications, particularly when you get to organize religion. But beyond that, if reason is really our means of survival, whose reason is really our tool, why have an exclusion clause? Why have some parts of your life not guided by reason? So she rejects the whole idea of faith in God, leprechauns, many of the conspiracy theories going on right now. Anything that's based on faith and not evidence and facts. I mean, QAnon, you could argue is basically a Gnostic religion. Yeah, and I think there are a lot of religions out there in some form or another that basically take a lot of the principles of Christianity and just change them and morph them into something different. But it's all based on faith, and she rejects faith. So that's, and then once you get into organized religion, I would say particularly Christianity, I know the supplies to Islam as well and to some extent to Judaism, but I think Christianity is the model in the West. She then has a lot of critique of Christianity as a philosophy, if you will. Generally, she viewed religion as a primitive form of philosophy. You know, man has a real need for answers. Answers kind of the big questions about life. Where did this world come from? What is the nature of reality? What's the nature of my consciousness? How do I know reality? What is right and what is wrong? And religion provided some primitive answers to it, because everything else science and everything else was pretty primitive back then. So religion was as good as it got. As a philosophy, she was very critical, particularly Christianity because of its altruism, because of its morality. I mean, obviously the epistemology is an epistemology of revelation. You know things because somebody, it was revealed to somebody and then they told you about it, that revelation is to the prophets or to the Pope or to Jesus or whoever. So she rejects that epistemology and she rejects the whole metaphysics of a world created by a God. But I think a lot of the criticism is around the morality.  The purpose of your life is some higher goal and indeed in another life, in another dimension, in another world. Your purpose in life is God. You need a sacrifice to God or to the religion or to other people. But you cannot live your own life for your own sake. You know, the symbol of Christianity being Jesus on a cross, suffering the most horrific death possible, not for his sins, not for anything he did, but for sins other people committed. Talk about a massive injustice. And Rand would view it as a massive injustice for somebody to die for other people's sins. Tying into collectivism, I assume. Definitely into collectivism here, sacrificing the individual for the sake of the group, even though the individual is a hero. You know, within the context of Christianity, certainly a hero. So she rejects the morality and the whole system that religion builds in order to justify knowledge, but also to justify what's right and wrong. And her philosophy is a real challenge to conventional philosophy and to religion in terms of all the metaphysics and epistemology, but more than anything in ethics, which is how people live, because it says, no, your purpose in life is not to suffer. It's not to sacrifice. It's not to do what the group demands or what God demands or somebody else demands. Your purpose in life is to pursue your happiness. That's a major revolution in ethics. And, you know, it's not completely out of nowhere because this builds an Aristotle. Aristotle, ethics, is an egoistic ethics. It's an ethics of self-fulfillment, of flourishing, of individual human flourishing. That's the essence. You mentioned communism. Communism, they're very strong parallels between communism, I think, and Christianity. You can replace God or Jesus with the Paulitarian. And they're the elect. I mean, remember I had this conversation with, I don't know if you know Michael Rectonwald, but former Marxist professor became a libertarian. I asked him what he thought about the idea. It was just something that came to mind about how, if you think about it, Marxian eschatology is very similar. Especially when you think of pre-millennial interpretation of the idea that, okay, there's going to be this great time of horror. You're going to have a, eventually, Christ will return. There'll be the reign of a thousand years. It'll pass away. Old heaven and old earth. You'll have a new heaven on earth. Same with that. You'll have a transitional dictatorship of the proletariat. The old, or the state will wither away. And it reminds me of the, there's an old obstacle. What you will need will be taken care of magically. No explanation how, and you'll be able to live in heaven according to communism. And of course, truth is revealed to the dictatorship.  He represents the proletariat. The proletariat doesn't know what's good for it. He has to dictate to them just like in Christianity. And of course, the ethic of sacrifice.  So yes, I think Christianity is the secularization of Christianity. It's, sorry, communism is the secularization of Christianity. And it's why it's so popular. It's so popular because it's not that radical. It's just taking your Christianity seriously, but rejecting God. And that's why I think it latched on, you know, it's not surprising, it latched on in Russia. It latched on where people were more mystical, took the Christianity more seriously. But what was really important to them in the Christianity was not God. What was really important to them in the Christianity was the sacrifice and the revelation and this story of achieving paradise sometime in the distant future. Yeah. Reminds me that there's an old Oswald Spangler quote, which is, it was Christianity as the grandfather of Bolshevism, I remember. Yep. I think that's absolutely right. And then you talked about the slave morality. And while I don't think Einren has ever referred to the morality of altruism or the morality of Christianity as a slave morality, she wouldn't have used those terms. But yes, altruism in the essence is a slave morality, right? It's a morality that says, your life doesn't belong to you. You must sacrifice it to others, you know, to God, to the proletarian, to the group, to the collective in some form, to the weak, to the poor, to the meek in some form. And that, that is I think a slave morality and I think that is certainly Einren rejects that whole idea. I think where Einren disagrees with Nietzsche really, really fundamentally is on the positive, not so much on his critique, but on the positive on what should replace the slave morality and how does one think about it, the world of reason versus emotion. All of that is very different, differentiates Rand from Nietzsche quite dramatically. It's like the Enlightenment versus Romanticism debate that you had. Yes, absolutely. So I consider Einren as a continuation of the Enlightenment in all important philosophical senses. Okay. So although she promoted secular values, Rand was heavily inspired by the writings of philosophies of people like Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, one of whom was the basis of Christianity's metaphysical framework and the other, of course, being a Christian saint. Many would argue that it's impossible to detach the spiritual from their philosophies. So how does Rand, and by extension yourself, also being a secularist, square this with your religion? Well, so first, you know, I don't think Aristotle was certainly not religious and I certainly don't think his metaphysics or his morality aligned necessarily with religion. It is Thomas Aquinas that kind of forced Christianity to embrace Aristotle and kind of created this fusion that I think was unnatural and is unnatural and kind of broke apart with the Reformation, right? I mean, the Reformation rejects all that and is much more based on pure emotion, evangelical movement today rejects that. So I think that fusion of Aristotle with Christianity was never completely natural. It was always unnatural and had to dissolve and it starts dissolving in the Renaissance and it gets more fully dissolved in the Enlightenment. She admired Thomas Aquinas because of his deep respect for reason and because he is the one who brings reason back into Western civilization. In a sense of the fall of Rome and the disappearance of the libraries, the ancient libraries, many of them. Aristotle is lost, the whole idea of reason is lost and we go into what I think was the Dark Ages and the Dark Ages of mysticism and irrationalism. Aquinas brings civilization out of that and he basically sets the conditions for the Renaissance that happens about 100 years after he dies. But without Aquinas, there's no Renaissance and that's why she's such an admirer of Aquinas. Aristotle admires the arguments, specific arguments. She admires what he does to Western civilization and where he takes it. I mean, I consider, you know, I have no problem with the idea that I have a spirit. I just don't consider that spirit mystical. I have a consciousness. I have spiritual experiences when I contemplate art, when I listen to music, when I, you know, see a, you know, look at the Sistine Chapel or Michelangelo. But they have nothing to do with religion. They have nothing to do with God. They have nothing to do with something mystical. They have something to do with the soul, the consciousness that I have, that to some extent I control or I have helped, you know, work to create. So I, you know, Rand also talked about separating religious concept from religion. That is that a lot of these concepts shouldn't have just a religious connotation and it's a shame that they do. So I think spirit is one of those. I don't think one should necessarily view the human spirit as something that is mystical. It is about a character. It's about our mind.  So you are obviously an advocate for secularism. Yourself, I believe. Would you consider yourself agnostic? Is that your, I don't know. No, I'm an atheist. I've been an atheist since the age of six. So this is, this was the easy part. Why do you believe that a secular society is preferable to one that is religious, particularly when religion, regardless of whether or not God exists, that's a completely different conversation, has actually provided a certain amount of efficacy over the course of civilization. Again, when we go back to the idea of finding meaning. So I challenge all of that. So first, I, you know, I start with the question, is it true or is it false? That to me is what's important and God doesn't exist. So, oh, that's it. So why would I advocate for God? Because people have advocated for him for 2,000 years. Why would I believe in something just because other people do it? I see no evidence for it. I see no reason for it. Therefore, so what's important is the truth. What's important is reality, not what works. And then I challenge if it works, right? To the extent religion is practiced consistently. It is destructive. It is harmful. It leads to dark ages. Dark ages is what Christianity is. Anything better than the dark ages is the victory of secularization over Christianity or over religion. The Renaissance is the rediscovery of ancient ideas, ancient sculpture. I mean, you cannot make Michelangelo's David. You cannot sculpt Michelangelo's David in the dark ages. First of all, you'd be stoned to death. The sculpture would be destroyed. The religionists tried to do that in Florence anyway. They tried to destroy David. And even though Michelangelo was religious and became more and more religious as he aged, that spirit of the David is a secular spirit. That is an individual who is competent, who is able to deal with reality. If you look at the sculpture, there's no God there. There's no religiosity there. There is a David standing up to Goliath by himself alone with his own strength, his own determination. It's all in that sculpture. That is the spirit of enlightenment. The spirit of enlightenment is the beginning of the shrugging off of religion, the beginning of man standing up for himself. They called it humanism, which was the beginning of a secular philosophy. And that is the beginning of the rejection of religion, the beginning of the rejection of Christianity. And I think that only intensifies with the scientific revolution and the enlightenment where men are starting to see that they can understand reality without a God, without a revelation. The Bible actually contradicts science. The things in the Bible that don't make sense. Science can explain the world. Yes, it can explain everything yet, but it can explain more and more and more. And we have the tool for understanding the world. So what do I need religion? And I think the enlightenment is a period in which people start relegating religion even more, shrugging religion off even more and making kind of a personal thing in everything else, science, understanding the world, politics were secular, but only in private life are we religious. And it's trying to shrug off the remnants, the last remnant of it. Morality, right and wrong, undermined by religion, not promoted by it, because they teach a wrong morality. So I think a properly construed secular society, a secular society built on rational principles on the role of reason is a far superior society than a religious society. And the more secular the society has become over time, the better it's become, both materially and I think in every other regard, the life expectancy, material success, but also aesthetics and aesthetic creation, I think to a large extent that the spirit that created all that over the last 250 years is a consequence of the enlightenment, it's a consequence of rejecting religion, not embracing it. So you're Israeli and consider yourself a Zionist, on which you've written extensively. So many libertarians, pardon? Not really. Oh, you don't? I don't consider myself as Zionist unless you're anti-Zionist and then I'll fight you. But I'm neither here nor... I think Zionism is a necessary evil, if you will. So many libertarians being non-interventionists having critical of Israel, with some even considering themselves to be full on anti-Zionists or against the existence of an Israeli state itself, what is your argument as to why you believe it is important to support Israel? How would you approach that if you were trying to convince somebody who is anti-Israel to kind of come over to that perspective? Well, first time you say, I don't know what you mean by support Israel because I want to be clear. I don't think the United States government should be sending Israel money. I don't think American troops should be sent to the Middle East to fight for Israel, you know, any of that. I think what Israel deserves is our moral support and to some extent our military working with Israel as an ally, not giving them, but trading with them as an ally. And why do I think Israel deserves our moral support? Because it's a good country. It's fundamentally a country that is basically free. You know, it's not as free as I would like it to be, but neither is America. But it's basically free. It's a country that basically respect individual rights, the property rights, the religious rights, the individual rights of its citizens. Again, is it perfect? No, it's got flaws, it's got problems, particularly in giving too much respect for Jewish fundamentalists. But it's basically a rights-respecting, free, good, moral country. And as such, it deserves our support, particularly given that it is attacked by everybody. It's been attacked since its founding by its Muslim and Arab neighbors who represent the exact opposite civilization and culture than Israel does. Israel represents a culture and civilization of individualism, of relative free markets, of freedom of speech, of all the things that we associate, I think, with Western civilization. In the Middle East, of course, at its dark ages, essentially. The Middle East isn't the dark age. Especially if you analyze it in the context of civilizational cycles, like after the end of the Ottomans, after that, that lights out. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting... I mean, we can get into the history of that because I think it's interesting. But the reality is that civilization marches with Aristotle. Whoever adopts Aristotle is civilized, and whoever rejects him is not. The Arabs were civilized when they embraced Aristotle, which was from about 900 AD to about 1200 AD. They did phenomenally well. The biggest libraries in the world were in Baghdad and later in places like Córdoba and Toledo in southern Spain. They had scientists, they had mathematicians. They made real progress in the scientists while Europe was still mired in mysticism and witch-burning and craziness. The Muslim world, because of the respect for Aristotle, were doing amazing things. And then a famous Muslim philosopher by the name of Agar-Zali, one of the things that they were trying to do in the Muslim world was trying to reconcile faith with reason. Same thing Thomas Aquinas would later do, right? Christianity. And they couldn't, right? Trying and battling, but they tilted towards reason and that's where they flourished. And then Agar-Zali came it was the greatest philosopher of his time and he went into the desert to contemplate this question of faith versus reason. And he came back one day and he said, I've got the solution. We must abandon reason. Faith isn't. You cannot have both. And literally within 50 years every library is burnt in the photo crescent area between Baghdad and really Egypt. That civilization disappears by the time the Mongols arrive and completely destroy Baghdad. There's no libraries there anymore and there's no science and there's no... The only remnants of that survive in Spain. And those are taken over by the Christians and it's those books that they take when the Christians take some of these cities in Spain. Those are the books that travel to the University of Paris where Thomas Aquinas reads them. He reads the Arabic translations of the original Greek, right? He doesn't read them in Greek. Only later are they translated to Latin and so on. So that's the path. The Arab saved civilization because they saved Aristotle. But Aristotle, the respect for the individual respect for reason that is the civilization of force that moves us forward. And if you think about Israel going back to Israel Israel represents individualism it has a generally individualistic culture and reason. It's a culture that respects science, respects thinking, respects argumentation. Again, not consistently. It's too religious, way too religious for my taste. But it's westernized and the Arab world is a world dominated by mysticism and faith and is still in the dark as retreated into the dark ages as a consequence of kind of El Ghazali's teachings. So yes, we should support Israel because of bastion of civilization. Just like I think we should support Taiwan relative to China just like we should support Ukraine relative to Russia. That's a whole other issue I disagree with many libertarians on, right?  Yeah, I feel like a lot of people, especially the people who are critical of Israel, forget what is the country where Arabs have the most rights?  That'll basically, it's like, don't you care about rights? It's like fine, criticism of the Israel government completely understand that as you and I both discussed earlier. But I mean, if you support the creation of like giving it back to Palestine not only does that completely revert all that progress, but then also you risk it becoming a vassal state of Iran. I mean, absolutely. And look, the Palestinian authority has some autonomy on the West Bank. They have Gaza. Gaza is completely independent and yet Gaza is a religious theocracy. It is brutal. It is horrible. They throw gaze off of buildings. They execute people with no rule of law. It is barbaric and primitive and it is a vassal of you on to a large extent. The West Bank is terrible. There's no free speech on the West Bank. Try criticizing Mahmoud Abbas who is the president. Last elections were, I don't know, 20 years ago, yet he's still president. This term expired a long time ago. Doesn't matter. Nobody cares. There's no democracy or semblance of elections. So absolutely I used to, when I lived in Israel, I actually worked as a construction manager and all of my contractors were Arabs. And they was to tell me and I think this has changed because of them becoming more religious unfortunately over the last 20 years. But this is back in the 80s they would say thank Allah that I was, every morning I think Allah that I was born in Israel. They say I go see my relatives in Syria and Jordan or in Egypt. Life here is so much better than over there. And it is. They're richer, they're freer, they're right to more respected and many of them, or at least I think most of them understood and knew that. Okay, so final question. You will be hosted by the Soho forum for debate between you and Brian Kaplan regarding Minarchism versus Anarchism. You argue in favor of the former, of course, I assume that goes back to the hands of criticism of Anarchism and pro-Minarchism. But so that said, what is your specific argument in favor of Minarchism? How does that differ from other Minarchist libertarians such as Robert Nozick? And moreover what are your criticisms of Anarchism itself specifically? Do you want to give us a little sample of what your argument is going to be? Sure, well I don't want to give Brian heads up here but I think he knows. First, I don't consider myself a Minarchist. I don't like that term. I consider myself an advocate for limited government, limited to the protection of individual rights. That's its own thing. Not classical liberal, is that a term you do? Maybe, but again, I consider myself I think I like the term capitalist because I think that captures it. But at the end of the day, limited government limited by the principle of individual rights. I don't like I don't think Minarchism I find the whole construct of that word problematic. But the essence of my argument is that individuals as I said earlier in order to be able to pursue their reason and pursue their own values and pursue their own happiness, to pursue their life, must be free to use their mind and free of coercion. Coercion fundamentally is the enemy of society. So in order to create a civilized society, the first step one must make is eliminate coercion from society. And the only way to do that is by creating some kind of monopoly over the use of force. Limiting that monopoly over the use of force to only use it as retaliation in defense, but extracting force for society so we can all start interacting with one another knowing force is not allowed. Force is not an option. Force is off the table because we have this entity that is basically outlawed. It is eradicated and is maintaining the peace maintaining that that is followed. And then I believe that there are objective rules that need to be determined in terms of both what are the laws, what are the ways in which we restrict force, and then what are the procedures by which we go about enforcing it, right? I mean, how do we know somebody is a criminal? How do we know somebody initiated force? Rules of evidence. I mean, there's a massive amount of things that one has to determine in order to figure out how to objectively have a justice system that enforces laws that are properly defending individual rights. All of that requires real thinking and that needs to be done by, in a sense, a centralized authority where they you know people can really think it through and figure this out. Anarchy is in my view the legitimization of force. He says look, force is just one other thing we human beings do. Let's have a market in it. Let's negotiate around it. Let's compete over it. And some you know different agencies will have different laws, different rules. It will all be in the same geographic area. You might have your system of government in a sense running you and I have my system of government and will somehow negotiate and all these security forces, all these private governments, private militaries, private police forces will all negotiate deals between them. And I said first that's a rejection of the objectivity of law. The fact that there are objective values, there are objective laws, there's an objective good law and objective bad law. It leaves it up to you know socially determined in a sense marketplace determined. And second that it basically reverts to violence. It basically reverts to if what we're trading on is force then if I can build the strongest of those militaries I'm going to do a hostile takeover of my competitors and that hostile takeover will always engage in force will always involve violence. Why not? I mean there's no authority that says that's not okay. It's already being legitimized by the very acceptance of anarchy. So I think anarchy by definition has to evolve to some form of authoritarianism some form of might makes rights and with one dominant security agency creates a government and rules over that territory. But now I agree this is actually when I was the first time I had Walter block on I asked him in the absence of the state what is to stop another state from forming particularly one that's like undemocratic. It has to. Over any particular geographic area you cannot have multiple legal systems. You cannot have multiple police authorities. That only devolves into violence and ultimately of one over the others. It's not a stable equilibrium. We have competition of governance. The competition of governance is different geographic area having different governments and they can offer different things and therefore people can move from one to the other and that's where you get the competition. But over a particular geographic area it's just a recipe for violence. Okay so to that end thank you so much for coming on before we go. Are there any particular books or writings of yours that you would like to share for the audience? Well first I'd like people to go to the INRAN Institute website INRAN.org You can find a lot of information there. You can also hopefully those of you have not read INRAN pick up a copy of Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. I think you'll really enjoy those books whether they change your mind or not the books that are worth engaging with ideas worth engaging with and then for me I would say you know I've got a channel on YouTube INRAN book I'm on Twitter so look me up. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel. That'll be fantastic and just google my name and everything is right there available. I've also got a few books Equal is Unfair that deals with inequality and free market revolution that deals with kind of the capitalism and free markets and then finally a book in a model defense of finance and you can find all those books on Amazon. Again thank you so much for coming on. It was a pleasure talking to you. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Fantastic rest of your summer and good luck on the Soho debate. Thank you. I'm looking forward to that. Bye.