Thank you, and are you guys ready to go home? No. No, that's what I want to hear. Good. Good. Well, we've decided to extend the conference, right, Anu? We're going to do another couple of days. So what can one do? Well, the first question one has to ask when you hear something like that is about what, right? Now we've heard a lot at this conference on what you can do to improve your life. We just heard a fantastic panel about what you can do to apply the objective's values to your business life, to your career. We heard Tara Smith earlier about what you can do to make your life a happy life. So just to create the context here, what I'm talking about today is what one can do about the horrible state of the world in which we live.  We live in a world where I think we all understand that the real problem's out there. The real challenge is they want to take our freedom away. They want to take our property away. They want to take our lives. Not a joke. That's what's happening out there. We have a real enemy in the culture, in the political world, at the universities across our entire culture. So what I want to talk about today is what you can do to fight back. And this is about fighting back. But there's still another question we have to ask ourselves before we decide, before I tell you what I think you should do to fight back. And that's the question of should you do anything? Why fight? Why fight? And I hear this a lot when I go around meeting people, you know, why fight? Why get involved in this? Now, start with why should you care about the future? And I think we've heard a lot in the conference about why you should care about the future. You heard it from Terence Smith. Because it's your future. It's your life. It's your values. You should care about the future because it's yours. It's part of what your life is. When we talk about rational self-interest, when we talk about living the best life that you can live for yourself, we're talking about over the span of your life.  And you know, for some of you, that's another 50 years. Maybe 100 years if there wasn't an FDA. Not funny. Sad. Because I'm serious. And for some of us, maybe it's less than that. Maybe it's 10 years. Maybe it's 20 years. Maybe it's 30 years. But that's a future. And it's our lives. And they're coming after us.  Let stuff happen is absurd for anybody who values their own life. For anybody who's really selfish. Now I meet a lot of people who have different views about fighting for the future. And you can categorize them as kind of, there's a certain determinism that some people have. And the two types of determinism that I see out there, optimistic determinism and a pessimistic determinism. So I meet a lot of people, particularly in Silicon Valley. This is true. But it's also true outside of Silicon Valley. And it's particularly true of people in the technology world. Stop, stop this, Iran. What are you talking about? First of all, life is good. And I'll get to life is good in a minute, because it is pretty good. We're going to change it through technology. Technology is that life always gets better. If you look, if you look at the last hundred years, every decade, standard of living has gone up, quality of life has gone up, wealth has gone, yeah, they're cutting away at our freedoms. But look at the internet, right? You can be anonymous on the internet today. You can do financial transactions that I know they're listening right now. But the iOS can't track, if you really wanted to. There are things you can do in the future is even bigger, right? Blockchain and Bitcoin and all this stuff. And they're going to shut down the service and they're not going to be able to monitor us because we're going to encrypt everything. So yeah, the NSA can try, but look at what just happened with this iPhone. Now they did break through, break into it in the end, but that's because it's not the latest iPhone. If it was the 6S, it's not clear they would have been able to break into it. So we can protect ourselves. Most of our values will be out there in cyberspace and I always say, but they'll shut down the servers and they say, what servers, they're not going to be servers. You know, every light bulb is going to have a chip in it and it's going to be distributed and it's going to be, and that's just going to happen and we're just going to be free. So don't worry about it. Forget about the fight. Now, once in a while, they'll actually admit that we live in a physical world and we own homes and we actually have to eat and we drive to work and stuff. So there is a real risk because in the physical world, there are guns and the guns can be pointed at us. Once in a while, they'll admit that maybe there are real threats and certainly I believe that, yeah, I believe in technological progress. Again, I'll talk about it in a minute, but that can be shut down. We know it can and it can be used against us. That same technology that potentially can liberate us can be easily turned against us. The world is not deterministic. The world is determined by the free will of the people in it. The world does not have to get better. If you study history, you know this. The world can get worse. It can get a lot worse. Now granted, you have to study really history a long, long time ago, right? The fall of Rome or something like that. Of course, unless you live in Venezuela, which was not that long ago, the richest country in Latin America and today is by far the poorest country in Latin America where there's no freedom, nothing. All the technology in the world has not helped the poor people of Venezuela who are being devastated right now. That's one form of kind of deterministic optimism. It's optimism. Everything's going to be fine. Don't worry about it. The second form is the opposite, right?  It's really bad. There's nothing you can do. This is just a cycle of history.  What's the point in fighting? I get this all the time, or we've lost. Why even try? What's the point? Again, that's not, that's not an answer. It's your life. They're coming after you. What do you mean I'm just going to sit here and accept it? Life is not determined. History is not determined. The future is not determined. The future is what we make of it. So if you accept free will, if you accept volition, if you accept that we can change our own lives and therefore we can change the world, we can change other people's lives, as Iron Man said one mind at a time, then you can't be a fatalist, a determinist of optimism or pessimism. But then there are the people who accept the free will argument, but you know it's just too late.  I mean, I don't need to say any more than that. It's just terrific. It's never been this bad in America. And it's getting worse. What are we going to do? How can we do it? Can't think about it. I'm just going to, you know, ignore it, not do anything. Get back and let it all happen. And you see that. There are lots of people like that out there. They don't want, they don't want to deal with it. It's too hard, too scary, and they're just pessimistic. Life just looks ugly. Every way they look, they see the bad. Now I'm not like that, and I don't want you to be like that. I think we should be able to see a positive path, and I think we can see a positive path. And to do that, I think you just have to open your eyes and look around the world, because Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are not what even this world is about. In a sense, they are the aberration. You're sitting here in a city, town, beautiful place, right? You're enjoying walking around, seeing the scenery, amazing buildings. Every way you look, there are homes, many of them massive, right? Huge homes on the lake, up in the hills, beautiful place. One guy built this entire place. One guy. This is Bill Gates' country. This is Bill Gates' country. One entrepreneur made this happen. And it's phenomenal. And you got to smile, right? This is amazing. We live in a world in which one guy with a vision, with an idea, with ambition, with hard work has created the world in which we live, the city in which we live. Wow. We live in a world with heroes. Bill Gates is a hero.  Look what he built. Look what he did. He is a hero. I mean, it's sad that he doesn't know he's a hero. But we at least should know he's a hero. And we should celebrate that. We should embrace that. That's fantastic. You know, we live in a world, you know, I love to use my iPhone, right? Every talk. It's become my thing, right? We are all walking around with supercomputers in our pockets. How can you be pessimistic with a supercomputer in your pocket? Never believed this was possible just a few years ago, right? It wasn't possible just a few years ago. It's still somebody, in this case Steve Jobs and Apple, and made it possible. I just read a story about the Zika virus. They now have a vaccine that works on mice. Six months it took them. It used to take 10 years, but there's now new technology to create viruses just like that. They now have gene splicing technology that can, I don't know what they can do. I'll pretend, right? They can do genetic engineering at the fraction of the cost and at an accelerated speed. Amazing things are happening in our world, granted, in certain sectors and not in others. But amazing things are happening in our world, and as long as those amazing things that happen in the world, we cannot give up on mankind. We cannot give up on the human mind. We cannot give up on individuals, on freedom, on everything that makes those wonderful things happen. It's those things that should inspire you to fight. Because that's just a fraction of what is possible if the world was really free. So optimism is this weird word, right? Because what does it mean to be optimistic? What does it mean to be pessimistic? We're realists. We go by the facts, right? We are objectivists. But what are the facts about the future? How do you know? What probability do you have on X happening or Y happening? Now we know ideas drive the future, but do we know the speed in which our ideas will get out there? Do we know which minds will get when? How do we even know that? How do we estimate that? To some extent, we're guessing about the future. Well, if you're going to guess about the future, why not guess more positively? Particularly given that we can see, we can see what people are capable of, what we are capable of. So I'm a realist. I'm a realist. I know the role of ideas. I know how hard it is to get ideas out there. But I'm also an optimist, because I see what human beings are capable of doing. I know, I know we can change minds. And I know that we have reason and reality on our side. So should you want to do something? What can one do? Yeah, you should want to do something. Because we can change the world, and we should change the world, and we are going to change the world together. This is, we need all the resources we can in order to do it. So let's talk about what, what we can do indeed to change the world. So again, the first thing, the first thing we have to recognize is what kind of a war we're engaged in, right? What kind of battle of ideas are we engaged in? Well, first it's about ideas, right? I gave it away there. This is a war of ideas. This is about philosophy. This is about the fundamental beliefs that people hold. This is not a political battle. This is why at the end, who cares who wins this election? It's not going to matter that much one way or the other. It might matter for concrete here or concrete there, but in the scope of the next 20 years, it's not going to matter. It's much more important, whether we can get our ideas out there into the culture where we can convert minds out there, particularly of young people out there into the culture, in the culture, much more important than who particularly wins this election. At the end of the day, is there that much difference between Republicans and Democrats? And don't, don't give me, you know, I know people are going to argue with me about this, but there isn't. It's not about politics, and even if it was about politics, we lost that one, right? We'll talk about politics in 20 years. We're not going to influence this election. Everybody says, you're on. You have to endorse a candidate. I said, what difference does it make? Nobody listens to me.  You're not going to change the election. We need to think long-term. We need to think about philosophy. We need to think about ideas. What changes history? If you read Inran's theory of history, if you read Leonard Pieckoff, what changes history is philosophy, our ideas. If we're going to win, if we're going to fight, the fight is on the battlefield of ideas. The fight is a philosophical fight. So what does one do? Well first, if you're going to go into a fight, what do you need to have? Great weapons. Great weapons. Right? The other side has nukes, so we better do better than that, right? Now what are the weapons that we have? We have Inran's ideas. We have incredible weapons. We have the best weapons in the world. We have the best philosophy in the world. It's an amazing weapon. And what are we trying to convince people? To be happy, to take care of their own soul, their own life, their own being. That should be easy, right? And we have the tools. We can answer philosophical questions. But to be able to do that, to be able to do that well, to be able to win, to be able to debate people, to be able to argue, to be able to convince, you need to know how to use those weapons. In other words, you need to know the philosophy.  So step one in what you can do to help change the world is study objectivism. Learn it. And you know, you have no excuses because it's all there, right? All the books are available. All Inran's works are available. Many of them are online for free. All these fantastic courses are available. Leonard Peacock's Magnificent Courses, all available for free. And they need to be studied. You can't just listen to them while you drive, sorry. It doesn't work that way. This is philosophy. You wouldn't think of studying any other topic by driving around, right? You go to school to study. You write notes down. You take exams. You do it properly. All the courses there, they're available to you about a life-changing philosophy that you already have accepted. You need to get to become great soldiers, to become great lieutenants, to become great generals. You better know what you're talking about. But to really know what you're talking about. You need to know the philosophy. You need to have it integrated. You need to have it in your mind as a whole. You need the system. And again, it's right there available for you. You know, when I read Atlas Shrugged a long, long time ago, I finished the book, and then what? And you know the cards inside? There were these Box 177 cards, you remember those? I thought nobody's going to answer me, so I never even sent it. Talk about a fatalistic attitude. And then I just crowned you on looking for books. And this was in Israel in 1977, no internet. Nothing really in Hebrew, little books, abused bookstores we used to go. And for three years I thought I was the only person in the world who knew anything about these ideas or cared. And she was still alive, and I didn't know that. And there were lecture series, and there were booklets, and there were pamphlets, and there were newsletters. I didn't know any of that. So I kind of have an excuse, but you don't. You have it all there. On an electronic platter, available to you. Take advantage of it. You don't know objectivism. You can be an objectivist, in my view, but you don't know objectivism just by reading Atlas Shrugged. Unless you really read it a few times and you really study the gold speech. But to know objectivism, it's to study it. So study it. Again, if you want to be, if you want to fight for your values, if you really think your life is under threat, I do. And I need you guys, because I need troops, and generals, and lieutenants.  Cannon fodder. You're not all cannon fodder. I like that. Thank you. And this is where I think Greg Salamieri's talk was so important earlier this week. You've got to be objective about what you know. What you know, and what you don't know. Figure out what you don't know. And fill in the gaps. Now you don't have to know the philosophy as well as Ankar Ghatay to be a soldier. Maybe that's why, you know, he's a general. I don't know the philosophy as well as Ankar does. You don't need to know the philosophy as well as Lenin Pekov does, so certainly as well as Ayn Rand does. But to the extent you want to engage, to that extent you need to know the realm in which you are engaging. If you want to specialize in a certain topic, then know that topic and know how it integrates into the other areas in philosophy. Have a good sense of what it is that you know. And then, in debate with other people, be willing to acknowledge that you don't know. Be willing to acknowledge that you're not sure.  So be objective about what you know and convey that sense of objectivity. Okay, so study the ideas. Know what you know. Learn, learn, learn. Lifetime learning we heard earlier today? Absolutely. And in objectivism, it really is lifetime learning. This philosophy, objectivism, Ayn Rand's ideas is one thing, and then all its applications and how to apply it and where to apply it and the best methodology to apply it. This is endless. I'm learning all the time. Learning all the time. And it's fun to learn, right? So this isn't a duty. It's not a burden. This is something you should be enjoying. All right, so what should one do? Learn, learn, learn. Study the ideas. Second, live, live. And I mean live, like Tara, live, you know? She did it much better than I did earlier. Live the best life that you can live. Make the most of what you have. Be a successful businessman like Carl Barney and John Allison. Be a model in whatever it is that you do. Be a model so that people look at you and say, what's their secret? Oh, Ayn Rand's something, objectivism something.  So I'm not saying live in order to show off other people. Live because you should live. But by the way, that is a great tool in this fight. Maybe the most important tool. And if, if you have the ability and if you have achieved the kind of level of success that we saw in this previous panel, then the scale that you get, think of how many people John has talked to or think of all of Carl's students and employees and the people he's touched or what she, all the students she has and her colleagues who admire her and kind of go, wait a minute, how could she be an objectivist and she's good? But it's being good that's important. You need to be good to be an effective soldier out there in this war. You have to be good. You have to live up to the, and I mean live up to the philosophy you are advocating for to the philosophy you believe in. And the world is hard out there and in some professions it's becoming harder and harder. But I see too many people in objectivism, too many people in objectivism. Using objectivism as an excuse for their failure. Watch for this. Don't let yourself get caught up in this. We still live in a world in which success is possible. We still live in a world in which we can thrive and we still can flourish. So don't let objectivism become an excuse. Objectivism is a tool to be successful. If you can be successful here and that's your prime, your number one value in gold then go to number two. I mean that's the world we live in. We're realists, right? We have to be real in terms of what's possible. If the government has blocked you off in one path then go to the second path. But there are no excuses not to live. You only have one shot. Make the most of it. To live the best life that you can live. That is, that will have more impact on the people around you. Help us in this fight more than anything else that you do. Be successful. So we got learn, we got live. Then you got to speak. You got to speak up. You got to take a stand. You got to say I disagree. You got to be able to present the ideas and present an alternative and be positive, present a positive alternative to what's going on in the world. Speak, speak, speak. This is an intellectual war and as an intellectual war it is ideas that matter. So express those ideas. If they're just in here it doesn't help. To find all the different ways in which you can express yourselves from little things like just saying to a bunch of colleagues who are talking about, I don't know, the world is going to come to an end because of man-made global warming, I disagree. And be ready to defend that. You can't just say I disagree and walk away. But that doesn't mean you have to give everybody a speech. That doesn't mean you have to give everybody, you have to go with everybody to metaphysics. It means you have to defend that idea to the extent that they're interested in listening. They don't want to listen. That's okay. But you said what you had to say. You planted a seed of doubt in their mind. They know there's an alternative. There's no this, they know there's something else out there. You know, Reed Einran's small essay, What One Can Do, which this talk is named after, she has a lot to say about speaking up. Think about the way you're presenting the ideas. Think about the way you're coming across. If you're going to be obnoxious and a jerk, which some objectivists have been known to be, I'm not going to mention names, don't worry, nobody's going to take you seriously. Nobody wants to talk to a jerk, even if you happen to be a truth teller. You have to know how to convey ideas. They have to perceive that there's a trade here and the trade is not just the words. It's how you say them. It's how you conduct yourself. It's what kind of person you are. All you somebody they want to engage with. And look, everybody else in the world is wrong. We know that. You don't have to pound it on them because that's not going to help again. I see so much of this on Facebook and Twitter and social media where, you know, somebody says, you know, there's a conversation going on, somebody says something that's wrong. Somebody just says, oh, well, if you think that, then you must be a SOB or whatever and walks away. Well, but the whole point of the conversation is you knew they were wrong and you want to deal with it. You're trying to argue against it. You're trying to make a presentation opposite. Now, I'm not saying everybody's worth discussing stuff with because some people very quickly you realize they're not worth talking to, but if you're going to talk to them, you know, did you say be a mensch, you know, be nice, be friendly, be positive. That's the kind of behavior. Now, again, not to everybody. Some people deserve what did Alex Epstein say, the F-O-F, right? Some people deserve that, but the purpose of engaging with somebody is not to tell them to go O-F, right, or F-O or whatever, right? So speak, talk, write letters to editor, just a quick warning about writing. Writing is a profession. Writing is hard. You need to learn how to write. And the longer the piece, the more difficult, the more complex, the more knowledge you have to have in order to do it. Books are not trivial. Books are substantial. So either become a professional or in my view, leave it to the professionals. That doesn't mean you can't write an op-ed or let it to the editor. Shorter pieces. There are lots of things that can be done. There are lots of writing that can be done. Get the word out there. Get ideas out there. And again, you don't have to present everything, even a little bit. Even something that challenges people. And if you can slip in there, you know, go read Ayn Rand. That's great. One of the things, so that's speaking. And together with speaking, I would add kind of activism. A few years ago, Ankhon, I did a series of talks on cultural change, and I still highly recommend those talks for anybody who's really interested in being out there on the battle with us, in the field of battle with us. Because I think there's a lot you can do to help in terms of change. And if you look at other movements, they knew their stuff, they learned, they don't quite live because living doesn't count for them, right? The environmentalists are anti-living, so they can't actually model the behavior. I wish they would, actually. The non-living. But they're very good at speaking, and they're very good at activism.  And this is the way, I don't know, some people interpreted me earlier about not getting involved in politics. Get involved in politics if you find that interesting. Go to the city council and pound on the table. Then for the city council, you know, just don't expect an objective is to be elected president next week, because it ain't happening. But there are lots of other political venues in which you can get engaged, where you will have a forum to discuss ideas, where you present ideas, but make sure what you're presenting are intellectual ideas, a real philosophy, you're not quibbling about little things that don't matter, right? Get involved. I mean, the right, the religious right, has done a great job at taking control of textbooks. Imagine if there were groups of objectivists going out there and getting involved in textbook selection in the state of Texas, which kind of determines textbooks for the rest of the country, because it's so big. It's things like that, but a million different things in which you can be active. Many of you or some of you got involved at the Tea Party originally. That had to be done. Now, I don't know that it turned out very well, because the Tea Party's kind of imploded and we're still too small, and we didn't have enough of an influence. But hey, we took a risk and it was worth a shot, and you know what? We're going to fail sometimes. We're going to try things and they're not going to work. So what? Right? Businesses fail. Nobody gets too excited. Entrepreneurs can be serial entrepreneurs. They fail. They learn from the failure and they go do something else. As long as you learn from your failure, go do stuff. If you fail, try it again. Try to do something else. Try to do the same thing better. So get involved. Get engaged. Go be activists in whatever realm interests you, in your professional realm, in a local community realm, in a local political realm, in whatever it is. Let's start hearing an objectivist voice out there. So we got to learn. We got to live. We got to speak. And then we got to support. Now this is an intellectual war, which means it's going to be waged primarily, not exclusively, primarily by intellectuals. You saw many of those intellectuals up on the stage during this conference. You can become an intellectual. Please become intellectuals. We need more intellectuals. If you want to pursue an intellectual career, we at the Iron Man Institute are here to help you. We want need, desperately need, this war needs thousands of objectivist intellectuals, not dozens as we have today. But we have intellectuals. They need support. And support comes in many forms. Financial support, right, a check to the Iron Man Institute to send a check to help out Alex Epstein or whatever. Right? Lots of intellectuals out there who need your help.  Even if we're in our offices, what we're doing is writing and speaking and doing the stuff that we believe needs to be done to fight the fight for ourselves, but also for you. So when we ask at the Iron Man Institute for money, we're not asking for sacrifice. We're not asking for you to do something that goes against your values. Right the contrary, we're asking for a trade. It's a division of labor. We are specialists at this. This is what we do for a living. We're pretty good at it. We can convert and influence more minds. We have leverage. We thought about this. You're paying us to do that work for you. And that's how I hope you think about it. But this is a philosophical battle, an intellectual battle. It's philosophers and intellectuals who are going to win this. That's where their fight is. Culture is changed. History is changed by minorities. Minorities of intellectuals, not by majorities, but minorities. By thinkers, by advocates, by teachers, by writers. But it's not just financial support. More support is incredibly important. Remember, we're out there on the front lines fighting. It's not easy. We get bloodied once in a while. We appreciate any kind of support you guys provide for us. Just a thank you sometimes goes a long, long way, a long way. And this group is pretty good about that. Both in terms of writing checks and in terms of thank yous. So that's great. Thank you for supporting all of us. Other things that you should think about when you're out there fighting. There was a lot of good content produced by good intellectuals. They have a lot of good essays. They're a lot of good op-eds. They're videos. They're lectures. They're courses. They're books. These are the tools. These are the weapons that you take out into the battlefield. Use them. Use them. So I see so many objectivists trying to come up with an original way in which to articulate an idea that Ayn Rand has already done, that we've probably done in five, six, seven different ways at the Institute. Quote us. Link to stuff. I mean, this is the beauty of technology today, right? You can link. You can quote. You can use social media. Get the word out there. We've got the tools today. And I've said this in many, many other lectures, right? At a marginal cost of zero, we can get information, knowledge, philosophy, ideas out to billions and billions of people. And the more people do it, the more people post on Facebook stuff that is important. That cat video is cute, but this is important. The more people will see it, the more people are attracted, the more people will read, the more people will study, the more we win. Use the tools that we have today. Let's use this amazing technology that we have today. Truly amazing technology that we have today. Let's use it, but the thing about the technology today is it's kind of distributive, right? It's like a network effect. If I post something, then X number of people see it. But if everyone in this room shared one of my posts, the number of people who see it is exponential. It's unbelievable the number of people you can get to with just a click of a button. Now, I know once you click that button, you're committed. All your friends see what you've just clicked. There were soldiers on a battlefield fighting a war for a survival. A click is not that big of a cost. Use social media, use technology, use the internet, use the fact that all this content exists. Think about INRAN's articles on INRAN campus. You just heard from Carl how important the objective is ethics is. Yeah, I agree completely. Greatest essay ever written. It's amazing, right? There it is. It's on air. Everybody in the world can go and access it. Everybody in the world can, zero cost to them. All you have to do is share it on Facebook, share it on Twitter, put it on Instagram. I don't know. Snapchat, does that work that way? I don't know. I have no idea. You guys know. See, you guys do it. But think of the networking for it. Think of what's the potential of reach billions of people. So use the fact that there's tons and tons and tons of intellectual knowledge out there. You're supporting the intellectuals. You're supporting your cause. You're speaking and you're getting it out there. So I try to come up with a clever acronym for the four steps of what you can do. But it came out LLSS. It's just the way it's gonna be, right? Learn, right? What was the second one? Live, speak, support. Learn, live, speak, support. That's what you can do. Now, you don't have a duty to do this. It's not something the air-flight police is gonna come and inspect, but it's your life. It's your life. It's your future. Some of us has kids, and our future, when you have kids, your future suddenly gets extended. Because yeah, when you die, it's all gone. But while you're alive, it's not. While you're alive, you're thinking about your kid's future. And part of your happiness, part of what makes you feel good is knowing that they will have a future. If I knew my kids didn't have a future, it would be hard. I think for anybody here who has kids, that would be devastating. That would be devastating now.  So posterity is about now. When Iron Man said fighting for the future is living it today, she meant it. It really is living it today. And living for it today and fighting for it today. Look, 240 years ago, a group of men came together to run an experiment called the United States of America. They created something that had never been seen on the planet, a government organized to protect individual rights. Nobody thought that would ever happen. Nobody knew it could happen. Nobody had the concepts to make it possible for it to happen. And here they made it, they did it. They fought for it, they created it. For 240 years, that vision of what is possible to man has been under attack daily.  But it's been intensifying for the last 100 years. It's been an intense attack on that vision. And today, it's hard to find the remnants of that vision still out there. These bastards wanna take our lives. They wanna take your liberty. They're already taking your property. And they want, they want to make it impossible for you to pursue your happiness. God damn it, we gotta fight them. Not a little bit, not sometimes, not somewhere, but everywhere, all the time. Constantly, not as a duty, but because this is what your life necessitates. I'm in this fight. I hope you are too. Thank you.