0:00 - Introduction
0:09 - Objectifying Women
3:22 - Rand's Philosophy & Psychology
9:13 - Incompleteness in Rand's View of Life
13:25 - Biological Basis of Talents
19:00 - The Biological Basis of Personality
23:36 - Ayn Rand's Innate Ideas
27:07 - The False Self & Virtue
28:14 - Ayn Rand's Abilities & Virtue
32:16 - Rationality in an Irrational Environment
35:56 - Exploring the Link to Rape
42:16 - Subjugating the Mind to the Body's Wisdom
In this insightful lecture, we delve into the complexities of Objectivism, examining Ayn Rand's philosophical contributions while also acknowledging areas open to criticism. We explore the psychological dimensions of Rand's philosophy, speculating on where she may have encountered challenges in realizing her objectives. Moreover, we discuss the intriguing concept of the physical basis of personality, drawing comparisons between religious beliefs in the soul and a more materialistic viewpoint.
The speaker underlines the biological underpinnings of talent and skill development, utilizing examples from renowned singers like Celine Dion and Paul Potts to elucidate the idea. We reflect on the accidental nature of innate abilities, with the speaker sharing personal anecdotes to shed light on how various factors shape one's capacity for intellectual discourse and creative endeavors. Additionally, the role of intelligence, creativity, and technical skills in the speaker's philosophical work is highlighted, alongside the influence of personal relationships, such as marriage, on one's confidence and credibility.
Throughout the lecture, we explore the notion of virtue in decision-making and self-improvement, stressing the significance of long-term values over short-term gratification. The complexity of human abilities and the multifaceted influences contributing to individual achievements are also discussed, prompting listeners to contemplate the interplay between innate talents, personal choices, and external circumstances in shaping life trajectories.
The discussion delves further into human biology, particularly emphasizing notable brain differences seen in individuals like Einstein and Ayn Rand. We examine the distinctions between innate talents and virtues earned through effort, underlining the importance of humility in acknowledging the limitations of the conscious self and the profound impact of the body's instincts and unconscious wisdom. The lecture delves into the dangers of equating beauty and talent with virtue, cautioning against romanticism in art and the tendency to conflate physical attributes with moral worth.
As we reflect on Ayn Rand's life and philosophy, we analyze the intricate balance between rational thought and a deeper understanding of bodily instincts and unconscious cues. We touch upon the role of dreams in uncovering hidden truths and the complexities of human consciousness, advocating for a holistic approach that integrates conscious thought with the body's wisdom and the unconscious mind. By exploring the interplay between conscious reasoning, physiological instincts, and deep-seated beliefs, we gain fresh insights into the complexities of human nature and the journey toward self-realization.
In dissecting Rand's novels, we examine characters' philosophical transformations juxtaposed with unresolved issues, questioning the implications of her emphasis on philosophical explanations in overlooking the nuances of human experience. The discourse extends beyond philosophy and economics to encompass psychological, personal, and historical dimensions, offering a comprehensive perspective on the body's role in shaping personalities and decision-making processes. Ultimately, the lecture encourages embracing the body's wisdom, humility in acknowledging its influence, and a more integrated approach to navigating the complexities of human consciousness for a fulfilling existence.
[0:00] Good afternoon, everybody. Actually, good morning. It's Steph. I hope you're doing well. It's July the 2nd, 2007, and this is Objectivism, Part 3.
[0:10] Objectifying women. Anyway, let's have another look at, and I'm sort of fully aware that there are aspects of what it is that I'm talking about that may seem overcritical. And as somebody who puts some ideas out into to the public mainstream, well, the public stream. Myself, I am sort of aware that it can get a little bit depressing to have people nitpick at your ideas. So just to reiterate Ryan's achievements in so many philosophical levels were fantastic. Her understanding of the relationship between values and action, values and psychology, fantastic. I don't think that her understanding of psychology was that great, but she herself admitted as such that she knew very little about psychology.
[1:01] And so, in metaphysics and epistemology, fantastic. So, again, these are just minor things that I'd like to talk about with regards to the Randian philosophy, because however brilliant she was, and my God, was she brilliant, she failed, right? I mean, that's sort of important. That's something that I think is worth having a look at. So, So, certainly, if what it is that I'm trying to do, with your help and participation, oh, beautiful donating listeners, by the way, this is for Gold Plus donators, so if you've gotten this from someone, tell me who it is. I'd appreciate it. And you haven't donated 100 bucks or more to Free Domain Radio, I would really appreciate it knowing it, because that's kind of cheating. This is property just for those who have donated. So, of course, if I fail in what it is that I'm trying to do, which is basically to privatize the family, then, and by that I mean not have automatic or unchosen positive obligations in the realm of family, in the realm of personal relationships. If I fail, then some subsequent thinker will look back upon me and say, well, he failed because clearly he used the word dude too much and got involved in too many petty rankles.
[2:12] There's some, what's his name? There's some economist from the 19th century, and I remember reading Mark Skousen's book, The History of Economic Thought, I think it is, something like that, talks about this guy, and I can't remember who it is just for the moment, but says that he wasted the last 20 years of his life, the last 10 years of his life, getting involved in petty wrangles with his contemporaries. And so I'm always sort of aware of that and try to make sure that I remember to pull up from these before they drag me completely down into the subatomic warren of pettiness. That's something that I'm trying to be particularly aware of because it is a dangerous thing. I think that I try to stay on these things insofar as I want to show how values translate into personal decisions and that you have to make personal decisions. And of course, if I make mistakes.
[2:57] With regards to the moral decisions that I make, that I will just undo those mistakes through apologies and through restitution as best as I can. But you can't, everybody's going to always criticize and you can't be paralyzed, because you may do something wrong at some point, right? Certainly our enemies are not paralyzed.
[3:15] So I think that we should stride forward, nonetheless. But I'm sort of aware that I don't want to get dragged into these subatomic debates about inflection and tone and sarcasm.
[3:23] So that's all behind us now. And let us move on with this look at objectivism and certain aspects of Rand's philosophy and Rand's, not just her philosophy, but her psychology, which I think are important. And I'm going to put forward a tentative theory that, since we can't interview the ghost of the great Rand, will remain a theory. I don't know that it will ever be proven, but I think it It helps us understand the facts as they are.
[3:58] One of the reasons, I think, that Rand failed in her objectives of helping to free the world, and she didn't fail in some areas, of course, right? I mean, certainly helped awaken me to the joys of philosophy and rationality, and has done an enormous amount to help clarify the world for many, many people. But her objective of turning the tide of statism and liberating people in their personal relations doesn't seem to have worked to anywhere close to the degree that she wanted it to. And so the question is why? Well, I think that Rand's view of life is incomplete. And I think that Rand's view of life is incomplete, and I think that shows up in her novels quite consistently. I think Ransu of life is incomplete because she is not humbled before the physical. And what does that mean? Well, I'll try and explain at least what I'm talking about, and you can let me know if it makes any sense to you.
[4:55] Now, in general, and I'm going to broaden this just for the moment to include the religious as well as the objectivist, and I don't mean to say that the two camps are in any way, shape, or form identical, but I'll talk about what I mean by all of this and hopefully make some sense. And religious people, it can be very clearly seen, dislike, in general, anything which reduces the body to matter alone. And you can see this quite consistently in religious approaches to particular social questions.
[5:36] So the fact that the blastocyst or the sort of pre-fetus is a collection of cells is something that religious people don't really like. Because, of course, the question is, where is the soul in the cell? Or for the determinists, where is the free will in the atom, right? In the atoms. So where is the ghost in the machine, right? Where is the soul in the cellular organisms? And so, for religious people, what they do is they say, there is a soul from the beginning. And forget for a moment the fact that twins separate only a number of days after conception. Maybe the soul splits? Anyway, religious people have a very, very great deal of difficulty focusing on the physical dependence of the personality on the flesh, on the cells. And if you remember the Terry Schiavo case, this was also something that was going on as well, that for the religious people, taking Terry Schiavo off life support was killing a soul, because no matter what you do to the flesh, the soul remains.
[6:42] And so when you look at things like stem cell research or the question of the fetus as a human being, this is something that religious It's just people don't like particularly looking at the body as the sole cause of the personality, as the cells, as the neurons, as the brain, as the sole cause of the personality. They love to have the ghost in the machine, the soul, the spirit, and so on, which confuses their thinking in an enormous number of ways, naturally, and creates opposition where there should be approval, and approval where there should be opposition.
[7:19] So, for instance, early life is considered quite sacred to a lot of Christians in terms of the blastocyst and the fetus. However, adult life in the form of soldiers, well, they seem to spend somewhat recklessly, right? And of course, this is due to the eternity of the soul, right? So you can't kill a fetus because a fetus has a soul and is part of God's creation and it's an affront to God, although God, of course, is the biggest abortionist of all insofar as a third of pregnancies end in miscarriage. But there's sacredness on that side. Unfortunately, on the other side, though, soldiers can rush off to their death because they will fundamentally and frankly be rewarded in heaven for what it is that they do. So there is overvalue where there is less value in terms of the blastocyst and less value where there should be more in the form of the soldier. But these kinds of irrational foundations of thought always end up with these kinds of problems. So that's sort of one aspect of things. The purely physical basis of the personality is something that is very fundamental.
[8:22] To understanding the world and to understanding life. Of course, I don't believe in anything like a soul or any sort of... I mean, the personality itself is a concept entirely derived upon the physical, just in the same way as the crowd is a concept entirely derived upon the physical, right? You can't take away the human body and have any aspect of the personality remain, just as you can't take away a crowd and have any aspect of the concept crowd remaining meaning in the square. So, given that we have or I have espoused eternal enmity to all forms of tyrannical concepts, the idea of a soul as an immaterial basis of the personality would be purely foolish, ridiculous, and inconsistent, and wrong, really, for me to, to believe in. So, yes, the body is purely physical. The mystery of free will remains, which we're not going to talk about just now.
[9:14] But the physical aspect of the personality.
[9:22] Is not just, you know, happy, sad, and so on. And, of course, you can see people who've had brain injuries whose personality changes considerably. You can see if you've read any of of, oh, what's his blobby's name? I can't recall. If you have read any of a certain neurologist, Oliver Sacks, any of his stuff, then you can see how brain injuries end up causing particular and significant changes, no problem, in the personality. Go ahead. And that, of course, is another particular issue that people have a great deal of trouble processing. It's the the biological basis of the personality.
[9:59] So, what happens next is that we also have to look at the biological basis of particular talents and skill sets. And it's very, very important, I think, for philosophers, thinkers, ethicists, basically any thinking person, to recognize the degree to which talent is biologically based. Now, we clearly recognize that in the realm of something like being a singer, you need the physical equipment. I mean, that's the sufficient but not necessary component of being a singer. If you don't have the pipes, right, it doesn't really matter. I mean, anybody can improve their singing by taking lessons, but no amount of lessons will turn, you know, a frog-voiced, tone-deaf person into Celine Dion, right? She was born with that kind of voice and, of course, that kind of ability to do the scaly Melinas, funky scale Melinas. And also to be able to have pitch-perfect control over her voice, all of that is innate, right? Again, not to say she hasn't worked for it, but there's lots of people who could perform exactly the same amount of work and not end up with her career.
[11:11] Similarly, there's this Paul Potts fellow who's got a pretty glorious operatic tenor who popped up in one of of the British talent shows, and I think won. And yeah, very, very passionate singer. It's amazing how many beautiful notes he gets through some seriously non-beautiful British teeth. But as it turns out, he spent like $45,000 on private lessons, but was too insecure to take the stage. So again, I mean...
[11:37] The voice is necessary, but not sufficient for you to get where it is that you could get to in terms of your career with these kinds of things. And we recognize that in terms of singers. I think we can also recognize that, again, to return to the great philosopher Farouk Bulsara, Freddie Mercury, you have somebody who has a great voice, great musical ability, the ability to compose songs with relative ease. He came up with a crazy little thing called Laugh While Lounging in a Bubble Bath in Munich. Hard day's work, I know.
[12:08] But, also, he had no capacity to do anything else. As he sort of openly admitted, he said, you know, I don't read books, I can't cook, I can't do anything in particular other than this, right? So, that's why I'm doing this, because I'm really good at this and I suck at everything else, right? So, that is, again, that's biologically based. And also, the fact that he was a relatively handsome fellow with oddly appealing stick legs is also something that is accidental, right? I mean, if the guy had gone bald, I mean, other than Gord Downie and I guess maybe the guy from Dire Straits, what's his name, Mark something or other, not a whole lot of balding rock stars, right? If he'd had a sort of natural tendency towards being overweight or balding or whatever, he certainly did have the teeth challenge. But there's a biological basis for this kind of stuff as well. We all recognize that in order to be a model, you have to have been born with particular features. Now, you also have to do other things with it. You've got to make sure that you drink lots of water, keep your skin hydrated, and don't eat too much.
[13:13] But you have to be born with particular features, right? No one who is a supermodel who gains weight stays a supermodel, but not everyone who loses weight becomes a supermodel, right? So there's a lot of biological bases.
[13:25] And certainly looking at my own abilities, this bizarre ability to freeform jazz some fairly rigorous philosophical concepts while walking or driving or working out or doing my groceries is not something that I I could teach, right? And sort of say, oh, what you do is, right? Because this is not the result of me doing a lot of work to be able to do this, right? I couldn't put up a school of podcasting and say, here's what you do. This doesn't mean that I haven't worked to be able to do this, right? The fact that I've written six or seven fairly lengthy books, the fact that I've read a lot and I've been educated fairly rigorously and so on, all of that has made this much more accessible, as I mentioned on Sunday's show. The fact that I took voice training and acting training gave me a connection between the voice and the physical that I think helps with the emotional energy of the show. There's all these kinds of things. But...
[14:27] Somebody else could do exactly the same thing and not get to where I am, right? There are people who are natural polyglots, right? They have multilingual capacities that a babblefish could envy, right? And what that, of course, is, is just an incredibly developed language center, which I think I have. Obviously, my language skills are pretty good, but not in a polyglot center. I can't learn a foreign language to save my life. I had to learn French for my master's. and oh, mon dieu, c'est terrible. It was really, really rough, and I just managed to be able to grind through the translation of a single paragraph in about an hour with a dictionary, and that was my best shot. I can learn computer languages, and I can wield English like a Jedi lightsaber, but I can't. Other people sit down and can just learn language. Sir Richard Burton, not the actor, but the explorer, he spoke like 18 or 20 languages, picked them up, you know, just sitting around.
[15:23] And that's a particular ability. Now, you wouldn't want to say, well, maybe you would, but you wouldn't want to logically say, if you're Richard Burton, look, the sole determiner of intelligence is one's ability to learn languages, therefore I am the most intelligent, therefore I am the best and wisest of men. I mean, that would be like Michael Jordan saying that the way that value as a human being is based on your ability to play basketball or Tiger Woods with golf or Placido Domingo with singing or whatever, right? Stuff where there's a real physiological basis to what it is that people are doing, it's very hard to translate that into virtue and not just come across as a pompous self-praiser, right? So what I try to do is not to say that talking eloquently about philosophy is virtue.
[16:15] I sort of try and communicate virtue to others, so that you can sort of act in a more rational, consistent way, I hope, within your own life. So, you really want to make sure that things like creativity and eloquence and other kinds of language abilities like metaphorical capacities and on-the-fly thinking and so on. And let's not forget that I just happened to be born with a relatively pleasant speaking voice which was I think extended and expanded and made sort of richer to whatever degree it is by vocal training which I went into because I had some skill as an actor and got into the I got through the one percent of people who apply to that theater school and got in and got trained so, if I had been born with a voice like this it would have been a little tougher, to listen to the podcast. This is how accidental it all is, right? This is how accidental it all is.
[17:12] So if you happen to be a brilliant nutritionist, you don't say that the health is in being a brilliant nutritionist, right? The health and your value as a nutritionist really is convincing other people to eat well. Not being so brilliant in your formulation of what you should eat or whatever, having great verbal skills in communicating it. I mean, that will help. But your value as a nutritionist is in getting other people to eat better, I think. So my value as a philosopher is kind of dependent upon my ability to get other people, not to be moral, but to think. I mean, that's all I'm trying to do, right, is to get people to think. And it's a struggle, just as it was for me to learn how to think. It's a real challenge.
[18:01] And so my value as a philosopher is based upon my ability to get other people to think. Now, how is it that I can do that? Well, first of all, I have to be able to think myself, which requires a certain amount of intelligence, and that is innate. Intelligence, mostly innate, right? IQ is one of the things that stays the most stable throughout your life, and it has to do with, the number of neural connections within your brain, which you can certainly expand understand by working on them, but your latent or manifested ability to process information rapidly and accurately, and to be, well, and that's sort of one aspect. The other aspect is creativity, or as a spontaneous, or as it feels spontaneous, though not, I hope, random, creation of relationships between sort of formally disparate pieces of information, like, say, like, say, the state and the family. So that is not something that I can claim any particular value to him personally from.
[19:00] All right, so I sit here and I want to do a podcast on.
[19:06] Subjectivism and rape. And what I do is I sort of close my eyes, I sit back, I meditate a little, I relax, and it all just sort of comes to me. It's bizarre. I'm just the guy who gets to hear the podcasts first. And sometimes I figure out my own motivations weeks or months after the event, and it turns out that they're pretty accurate, I think, relative to my values and so on. So can I claim to have any great particular virtue for just some innate ability?
[19:36] No, no, of course not. It doesn't make me a better person or a worse person to have this ability. It's just innate. It's just something that a large number of circumstances and innate abilities have brought together to bring to the world, not to mention technical skills, not to mention just having met the right woman. Of course, my marriage is a core part of both my confidence in terms of how these values play out in a relationship and my credibility, right? So, I mean, really happy marriages are not the most common things in the world. And to have one is, I think, certainly gives me some confidence and some credibility and so on. So the other question is, if I had never gone into business with my brother, would I have ended up defuming? I mean, there's also many things that end up creating what it is that I'm communicating, a lot of which were accidental and so on. So from that aspect, there's just so much accidental stuff that goes into the production of something like this podcast series, that I certainly can't claim any virtue in... I can claim virtue in the decisions that I struggle with and implement with reference to my values. I can claim virtue in making myself think and confront things that are uncomfortable or difficult and deciding to go for long-term value over short-term value of just pain avoidance. To me, that's what free will really is.
[20:53] Are you going to choose to focus on longer-term values with shorter-term pains rather than the immediate short-term values of pain avoidance and pleasure pursuit, which, in other words, is just addiction. So, I can claim some virtues in that, but not in the raw abilities, the processing, the language skills, and so on. Similarly, one more example, and I promise, and then I'll move on with the actual topic.
[21:19] Einstein's brain, which is, I think, currently sliced and diced at U of T, University of Toronto, my alma mater. When he died, his brain was dissected, and the spatial reasoning area of his brain was mutant. I mean, it was freakazoid, right? It was elephantine. It was like three times or more the size of a normal human being's spatial reasoning center, right? So it's, you know, man's a freak. You know, productive freak. But that's just biology, right? And it's not like he worked harder. It's not like he worked harder. He worked, and he worked hard because he could.
[21:59] Why do I put out a lot of podcasts? Geez, I thought I just stepped on a stick. But it was just a stick. But, well, because I think that they're of value. And, of course, I know that they're too many for just about anybody to absorb in real time. But I'm sort of laying the brickwork. I'm laying the foundations for the brickwork of the future as well as the present. I think that there's going to be – it's going to take a while for the social body to absorb the canon shots of these podcasts. But I'm willing to put more out there that can pretty much be conceivably consumed by a single human being because I just want to build the library for the future, or build a library for the future where people can slice and dice and pour over these things and give lots of work for grad students. Anyway, so Einstein was just born that way, and Mozart, you know, composing symphonies at the age of five, an accomplished pianist at the age of three or four, and that's just innate. That's just innate. We like pretty people, like height, like great hair, like, you know, it's just born with it, right?
[23:01] So to turn to Ayn Rand, she herself claimed, repeatedly, and with that peculiar Russian emphasis, that she had known exactly all of her ideas by the age of seven or eight years old, that she knew at the age of eight that all she wanted to be was a writer and a chain-smoking go-go dancer, but unfortunately the go-go dancer thing didn't work out. So she knew, right? She was born with these ideas. She knew exactly the full scope of her own philosophy by her admission, and so there was no effort.
[23:36] She didn't earn these ideas. Now, she earned her success as a novelist, and she worked at it, and so on, but she can't claim virtue for her philosophy. She can't. I mean, she can't claim virtue for her philosophy because she didn't earn it. She didn't earn it. So, I mean, if I'm a naturally incredible runner and I just sort of, like Prue, right, just open up my legs and whammo, off I go like a shot, that's one thing, right? If I break my leg and then end up being a runner because I do an incredible amount of painful rehab, it's a little bit more like I've earned it, right, in this sort of second instance. So, Ayn Rand was an accidental biological creature. ABC.
[24:23] Let's get some more acronyms going, shall we? And I'm glad that she was, and I think it's great. You know, I think it's great. But she always faced this challenge or this problem of dependence upon the physical, right? So if you were to crack open Ayn Rand's brain, you would probably find that the language and reasoning centers were grotesquely enlarged. When I say grotesquely, I just mean relative to the average, in the same way that Einstein's brain, certain aspects of it that are related to his specialty were grotesquely enlarged. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's the biological basis of the personality. Now, the great challenge and the great seduction of the false self is to want to be good for being. That's the false self. You want to be good for being. I want to be good for being a good daughter. I just happen to be born into this family, but I'm just going to be good for sticking around this family. There's sort of so many different ways that this can manifest itself. And of course, I've been in the world where talent is considered the good, right? In the theater school world and in the theater world itself and in the writing world, the talent, right? Oh, so talented. Oh, it's great. So great, right? And there's this worship of the accidental, the talent. Marlon Brando took like one acting class his entire life. Other people take thousands of acting classes and still pretty much suck.
[25:52] And so this sort of innate talent Confusing innate talent with virtue, with value that is not just accidental, is a real danger. It takes the enormous blow of humility before UPB, universally preferable behavior, humility in the face of the biological and so on, to break that. I'll do a whole podcast on humility because it's something that's so, so important.
[26:21] But you really have to have your will shattered before you can be truly rational. At least that's sort of been my experience. I think it's something that is more common than people suppose. pose. My will was shattered by insomnia, right? I mean, by 18 months of being unable to sleep or able to sleep only an hour or two a night. And I have a whole book, which has never been published, and I doubt whichever will be, called Crazy Talk, which is my journal of me arguing with all these characters in my personality during this time of, let's just say, significant mental reorganization.
[27:01] Where you just give up the willpower. You give up the willpower. You give up the identification of your value with the accidental.
[27:08] And that is a really, really hard thing to do. That's the confrontation of the false self, right? The false self wants to take every damn thing under the sun except virtue and make it virtue, right? Ooh, look, women are attracted to me. I'm worth something. Ooh, look, I can sing. I'm worth something. Ooh, look, I can speak eloquently. Ooh, look, I'm well-read. Ooh, look, I'm educated. Ooh, look, I'm rich. Ooh, look, I'm successful in my career. All of these damn things. The false self wants to invent every damn category under the sun but actual virtue and try and translate it into virtue, right? Because that's the vanity, right? And of course, that's not UPB, right? That's not UPB. UPB, by definition, would be available to everyone. That's if you have value because you're a singer. But what about all the people who aren't?
[27:52] Now, this apologetically long preamble, which is quite important to an analysis of objectivism and rape, I think, that's my sort of belief or approach, and I hope it works. Let's hope, shall we? Let's hope that the breadcrumbs my unconscious throws out, like one step ahead of me, lead to some path that's valuable, or lead to some destination that's valuable. That's usually the case. Let's keep going, shall we?
[28:15] Ayn Rand's significant and laudable abilities in reasoning and in plot construction and in writing were fantastic. Fantastic.
[28:28] But no more relevant to her virtue than Maria Callas' ability to sing. This is a startling thing to hear, I think. Maybe it's not, but it certainly was when I was sort of first figuring this out. Or I should say it was first figuring me out. but Ayn Rand's abilities to reason and to write, I don't think her speeches were particularly great, but her reasoning and her writing abilities have no more relevance to her virtue than, Wilt Chamberlain's heightened basketball ability, innate basketball ability. Tiger Woods was on the Johnny Carson show at the age of two, sinking really difficult shots in golf. That's the funny thing, right? I mentioned this before, right? All these ads for cheesy-ass insurance companies and other businesses saying, you know, be a tiger, right? Which means be born Tiger Woods, right? Be born with that strange array of neurological characteristics, which allow you to calculate the shots and control your body to achieve those shots and golf, whatever, right? Of course, he practices, for sure, but practice isn't the differentiator, right? It's just not. Freddie Mercury does scales and warm-ups before a show. I do scales and warm-ups before a show. I do not become Freddie Mercury. I mean, that's just the innate thing, right?
[29:48] So, with Ayn Rand, as she said very openly, and this should have been a clue, I think, to people who were close to her, but maybe it was. We just never heard about it because she would have banished them. Or she would have removed them from her orbit, I guess. Or when When she says, since the age of eight, I've known everything about my philosophy and exactly what I wanted to do. And I've learned nothing new since then. I've refined stuff, but it's all pretty much as it was when I was eight. That, of course, is the unconscious true self cry a plea for, so don't praise me for it, right? Don't praise me for it. Don't give me value for it. This girl on Grey's Anatomy or something, she's tall and blonde and big boobs, nice figure and so on. And pretty, a very pretty girl. And of course, she didn't earn that, right? Yeah, yeah, she probably diets or exercises. So does a lot of people. They don't end up looking like that.
[30:46] And the beauty, of course, is really kind of a plea for don't judge me for the accidental. Don't consider that I have value for the accidental. Like, if you just inherit money. Oh, but even if you earn the money, a lot of people work very hard and so on, right? I mean, I happened to co-found a company during the height of the internet boom where we made a lot of money and so on, but it was accidental. As I say in The God of Atheists, vanity is the natural enemy of statistics. Right? Vanity is the natural enemy of statistics. So, lots of people with far more experience started companies and worked as hard as I did, just not at the right time, and they didn't happen to be in the right field, environmental.
[31:35] I didn't plan the field. We didn't do research or anything like that. It's just that the field my brother was in. So, that's what we did. That's what we built. That's the software we built. But that's not, I mean, this is accidental. So, Ayn Rand's, syllogism, which I've mentioned before. I ran syllogism, which is whoever is the most rational is the most virtuous. We can only love virtue. We must always love the most virtuous the most. I am the most rational. Therefore, everybody must love me the most. Sorry, I could probably cut that down a little, but hey, that would be sort of against the whole philosophy we have here of endless windy bagging. Well, that kind of misses a key component.
[32:16] Which is one's capacity to be rational in an irrational environment, is genetic. By her own admission, she was eight. I mean, maybe she thought this was like, well, look how extraordinary I was, what an amazing focused child I was. But please, if you're a philosopher by the time you're eight, you didn't earn it. It's just born. It's just the way your brain is.
[32:41] Now, in a rational culture, which is sort of what we're trying to build, which I guess is the opposite of culture, right? Take the cult out of culture and you get philosophy. But in a sort of rational environment, it's relatively easier to think rationally, to be rational. Relatively easier. Not because the cues all come in and so on, right? It's relatively easy to be eloquent in a language with 100,000 or 200,000 words like English. If you invent some language with 12 words, a little tougher to be eloquent. The wolf children with their growls don't tend to be particularly eloquent. The Inuit with their 27 words for snow tend to be more eloquent about snow than, say, people living in the Kalahari. And the fact that I happen to be born in a situation where I can podcast in English, in a relatively free society, at least free for these ideas, I didn't earn that. I didn't earn that. So, Ayn Rand's vanity is based on what I think is the rejection of accidental biology. It's based on a rejection of the accidentalism of biology.
[33:52] Was partly translated into her physical vanity, right? I mean, so she always wanted to be prettier and she used to beg Nathaniel Brandon to call her pretty and she made all of her heroines pretty and all the men are slim. And this is the great danger of romanticism in art, which we'll talk about another time, that you conflate physical characteristics, which to some degree are accidental with virtue, right? So all the women are beautiful, and John Galt is madly handsome and slender, and Howard Rourke's slightly less handsome, but certainly slender. So this conflation of beauty with virtue, beauty is innate, virtue is earned. This conflation of beauty and virtue, of the accidental with the earned, is the great danger of romanticism. And some of the kitchen NSYNC stuff that came out in the post-war period, the sort of the look back in anger, the John Osborne's and stuff, was a desire to try and break this tyranny of the unity of aesthetics and virtue. What is true is beautiful. What is beautiful is true, blah, blah, blah, not true at all, pure nonsense, right? It's true that sewers exist. It's true that they are necessary, but it is not true that sewers are beautiful, unless you are bacteria, right?
[35:13] Or you're a nice-to-use sewage worker, who knows? us. But this equation of the accidental with the virtuous is a grave, grave error in philosophy. And of course, this is the challenge that Ayn Rand particularly faced as a novelist, right? As a novelist. And of course, why was Ayn Rand successful? Because she just happened to get out of Russia, as lots of people didn't. I mean, so many accidents that occur. She happened to meet Meet Louis B. DeMille. She happened to have all these abilities, right? I mean, great abilities, no question, but not earned. As she herself said, with this repeated story, that I was exactly who I am when I was eight.
[35:57] How does this show up? What does this have to do with rape? Rape in the novels and so on. Well, it's been my experience and I think that there's some pretty good empirical validation for this kind of stuff as well as just sort of my experience and my theories and the experience of other people on the boards. That's why I do the dream analyses as I want to show, that the ego the conscious thinking selves great value, fantastic let's use it as much as humanly possible, but let's recognize its limitations.
[36:29] There is a second brain in the gut. We're like dinosaurs. They're two brains. The second brain in the gut, which there's actually a book recently out about, which I'm going to try and get a hold of and read. But the ego, our conscious selves, we are participants in an ecosystem called the body. We are participants.
[36:47] The conscious self, the part of me that is conscious and deliberative and makes decisions positions based on available information. The available information is not just the empirical observations of reality through the conscious self, but also the instincts of the body, the instincts of the body. And that is the humility that the ego needs to recognize, just rationally, right? And we all know this, and we all experience this, and we all have dreams where if you sit down and take the time to analyze them, and of course, somebody asked recently, why are they so cryptic? Well, they're cryptic because of our defenses. The true self has to speak in code because of the defenses of the false self.
[37:28] I mean, that's why dreams are cryptic, right? Because as you become more self-knowledgeable, your dreams become less cryptic. And in fact, you get fewer dreams because you don't need as much warning, right? In the same way that if you are not in a very stressful situation, you probably won't flop sweat quite as much. Your body just reacts differently when you're out of a stressful situation. So when you start acting with more integrity, your dreams become less volatile and you dream less. And I miss that a little bit, just by the by. I mean, some of the vivid, amazing dreams that I had when I was going through my greatest psychological crises and changes. When I was learning to accept the wisdom of the body, when I was learning to accept that I needed more than conscious, rational processing in order to live richly and well. Because, of course, once you get at a fundamental level, and this occurs also with aging a little, though I'd like to pass this down a little bit more. I'm certainly, prior to any of the failures of the body, I'm in excellent health. But that's going to happen, right? For sure. Liver's going to give out. Kidney's going to give out. I'm going to die like everybody does through lack of oxygen, one form or another. It's always the cause of death.
[38:30] So, our dependence upon the body, and this means not just upon the kidneys and the pancreas and the legs and so on, And the heart, of course, particularly. Our dependence upon the body. Also is our dependence upon the gut instincts, our dependence, if we want, we can certainly reject all of these, but at great peril and cost to ourselves, I think. Great peril and cost to our wisdom. Is, of course, the wisdom of the body is one of the roots of religion, right? God is in the gut, right? When people pray to God, they're actually asking their unconscious for answers. And you can get these kinds of things. You really can. You can have dialogues with your unconscious, sit down and write a script, talk to your unconscious, talk to your fears. I mean, you will get amazing information back that you can't anticipate. And I know this because of hundreds of pages of this, of the most incredible wisdom coming out of things, right? And as I've talked about before, my decision to defoo from my brother, which was really the turning point of the disintegration of the false self for me did not occur as a result of conscious thought, but came as a result of a meditative state that had occurred for hours. The answer just came to me, just arose in me, as these podcasts do, to a large degree.
[39:44] So, this is why, of course, people are... I mean, not to, God heavens, reopen the board debates, but this is why it's hard to explain some of these sorts of things. You know, when you're in a conversation with your ecosystem of knowledge, which is your brain, your gut, your body, your unconscious, your dreams, all of the different aspects of knowledge that occur. And we know, of course, all of this is... I mean, how much knowledge would you be able to glean from these podcasts if your ears didn't work, right? I mean, the body is the foundation of knowledge. And the brain, this is, of course, why we use the scientific method about rationality and the evidence of the senses. As the mind is in error, the senses, when functioning correctly, are not. And so this is the challenge, is learning to subjugate the mind, not just to the evidence of the senses, but to the impulses of the body, of the unconscious, of the true self, of the deep self, which we all have, and which is the seat of our strength, right? Not just the seed of our truth. A lot of what Ayn Rand said was true, and amazingly and fantastically and blazingly true.
[40:53] But without integrity with the deeper instincts, the body, the dreams, the unconscious, what she said lacked force in a lot of ways, because there was too much insistence in it. I mean, if you can sort of try and sort of summarize what I'm saying in something more accessible, Can you imagine what kind of novel Atlas Shrugged would be if one of the wavering characters like Dagny or Hank was warned by a dream and went to a psychologist? I mean, that is an amazingly different kind of book, rather than just beating their heads against the wall until somebody explains something philosophically, which doesn't work. Ayn Rand didn't have the benefit of Ayn Rand, right, as I do.
[41:39] In Ayn Rand's novels, the characters keep beating their heads against the wall until somebody explains their situation philosophically to them, and then it's like, ah, excellent, now I change. And the reason that that's not believable is that Ayn Rand did the same thing to the world, and it didn't work. It didn't even come close to working. Government's bigger now. Religion is stronger now, at least in America, which was her zanity, right? So clearly, something's missing. Philosophical explanations are not enough, because they don't take into account the whole being. And confidence comes from subjugation to the ecosystem of knowledge that is our entire being.
[42:17] The senses, the gut, the rationality, the unconscious, everything. That's why I deal with all these topics outside of mere philosophy or economics, but the psychological, the personal, the historical, the dream-based. We have incredible knowledge capacities within us that make us unbelievably powerful and deep.
[42:36] And we don't access them. And I think that philosophers such as Ayn Rand have done an excellent job of helping us not, right, by calling all of these impulses irrational and so on, which I think is a real shame. So with all of that, and I'm so, so sorry, appallingly long introduction in place. Look, 47 minutes and 22 seconds of an introduction. With all of that in place, I can polish off, I hope at least, the problem or the seeming paradox of the Randian rapes relatively easily, right? Relatively easily. So, with Ayn Rand's characters, notably, not so much Kira, but Dagny and Dominique, the Dominique-trix, they are pretty much raped. And Ayn Rand said, you know, well, about Dominique, if it is rape, it's rape with an engraved invitation. And that's certainly true, that they needed to be raped. This was her drama. And, of course, there is a kind of cheesy 50s drama to some of the stuff that Ayn Rand writes about. And I'm not certainly putting myself outside of that category as a novelist. I certainly have a habit for cheesy drama, at least when I was younger. And Just Poor has a scene where Mary shoots. Anyway, don't feel bad about that.
[43:45] But this violation or vengeance of the physical, again, this is like, I'm not going to claim this is proven, right? But I think it kind of works. So let's keep our fingers crossed, shall we? Let's see if the bridge holds up as we cross it. And in these scenes of physical rape, and it's more than just rough sex, but even rough sex, to me, has a psychological component. There is a vengeance of the physical, for sure, right? So there's the defenses of the intellect, which both Dominique and Dagny have in spades as defenses of the intellect. Where they reject the truth and so on based on the intellect. And there is a vengeance of the physical. And in my experience, the vengeance of the physical is pretty significant. And this is when you ignore the wisdom that's in the body that is your personality, the wisdom that is in the unconscious, the wisdom that is in the instincts, the gut, the wisdom that is in dreams, all the stuff that your body is trying to tell you, because it knows. I mean, this isn't just mysticism in any way, shape, or form. The body has been designed and developed, not designed, but has evolved and developed for millions and millions and billions of years. Well, in single-celled organisms upwards, 1.5 billion, 2 billion years onwards.
[45:10] Our conscious selves have been around for, like in my case, I don't know, 30, 35 years or so. But the body, the instincts, the gut, the emotions, these are all apparatuses that we... Like, I didn't invent my eyeballs. I inherited my eyeballs from evolution. So the foundation of our knowledge as conscious beings, our wisdoms, is the body. And there's a particular aspect of the body called the conscious mind, which is very important and a strong differentiator, of course, between us and all other creatures. But it is still only part of the ecosystem of knowledge and wisdom that we have access to. Nothing mystical, nothing collective unconscious-y about it. But it's just a fact, right, that I don't know how my liver works fundamentally, but it works. I don't know what's going on down there. But we're taught to reject all of our instincts and our gut, right? As I say, we know everything about someone in the first five minutes, in the first five seconds, ten seconds. But we reject all of that knowledge, which leaves us open to being preyed upon by a variety of people. And, of course, the entire purpose of corrupt authority is to help us reject our instincts and live purely intellectually. actually. But the body gets its revenge. The body gets its revenge.
[46:24] There's a line in The God of Atheists, I think I can remember it, that the mind is like Michelangelo with hooks for hands, frantic to complete a vision that it can't complete, but the body shits and fails and listens more deeply. Right, yeah, the body does shit. We all do put our legs in one, we put our pants on one leg at a time. But it does listen more deeply to others, right? It's the unconscious communication, the drumbeat of unconscious communication that I was talking about in July 1st show, I think, 813 or 815. And there is a vengeance of the physical. When we control and repress our instincts, when we control and repress, it doesn't mean the opposite of that is not to just act them out.
[47:06] Opposite of repressing anger is not yelling and beating people up. Actually, that comes from repressing anger. But when we reject the integrative and sensitive and empathetic capacities of the unconscious and the body and the gut instincts, when we repress all of those, the body gets its vengeance. The body gets its revenge. You can repress all you want, but the body will get its revenge.
[47:32] Always, always, always. And it's learning to be humble in the face of the physical. It's learning humility in the face of the physicals. We're all going to die. We're all going to get sick and we're all going to die. And if we trust our gut, we get an incredible amount of knowledge. There's an enormous amount of processing that occurs at the unconscious level. It's older than we are, in the same way that the code for our liver, the DNA code for our liver, is older than our conscious memories. So it's tapping into that long evolutionary second, third, fourth, fifth brain that is so essential, recognizing that our conscious mind, Our purely rational cognitive capacities are only part of the ecosystem of knowledge and wisdom that we have available to us. And so, in Ayn Rand's case, because she, I think, failed to account for the accidental nature of her skills and abilities, because she conflated virtue with ability, which led to unbearable vanity. I am the most rational, you must love the most rational, you must love me the most. No! You're the most rational because you just happen to be born with the big brain rational part. And we can't... It's like Einstein saying, love me because I'm the most mathematical. Well, you're the most mathematical because you've got the freakazoid elephant brain part where your spatial reasoning is. I can't love that any more than I can love someone for having big boobs or being tall or having nice hair.
[49:00] Accidental. It's like saying, I love someone because they were born in England. Well, they just happened to be born in England. Didn't earn that. And so in Rand's novels, there is this vengeance of the physical that occurs. And I think this is why, in my view, in my humble opinion, again, this is just a theory, I'm saying it's proven, but in my opinion, this is why the rape stuff shows up pretty continually. The angry sex, let's say, right? The vengeance of the body, right? Where sexuality is aggression, right? So there's this fear of the power of the body, of the rape of the body, of the vengeance of the physical, but there's a great desire for it as well. And our merely conscious mind is vastly overtaxed by having to make all these damn decisions and evaluate all this information without any of the input from the gut or the dreams or the instincts of their body or whatever. I mean, you meet somebody who's creepy, you get an uneasy feeling. You meet somebody who's dangerous, they shake your hand and you get uneasy. Well, where's the empiricism in that?
[50:15] Where's the empiricism in that? You don't eat, you get hungry. Even when you're a baby. That's the built-in knowledge. This is the built-in knowledge. And Ayn Rand doesn't like the built-in knowledge very much. At all. Because if she accepts the built-in knowledge, she loses a good deal of the false self vanity that comes out of, I am the most rational. And I have earned it. Right?
[50:39] So, I think that the rape is really around the false self's relationship to the body. Body, and the vengeance of the physical, which occurs in Ayn Rand's novels. That's why there's no children. And this is why the false self has such a great deal of difficulty being a parent, because you are subjugated to the child, to the infant. Infant cries, you get up. Infant wants to be born, well, you go to the hospital. Learning to subjugate the will to the body. And this doesn't mean that the body then becomes the dictatorship, right? But where there is an imperious conscious mind that accepts no wisdom or instincts from the body, the body has its vengeance. And this results in distortions, right? This results in distortions in body image or the repression of the instinct of the physical, of the biological. And the acceptance of humility, that's what we call our personality, is simply an abstraction for a collection of cells that mysteriously have very well, or at least it seems. The humility of just recognizing that we are an abstract perched on a collection of billions and billions of cells.
[51:52] Label called iceberg stuck on the top of an iceberg, right? And we just think that we are the label, entire. The label is just consciousness, personality. There's an enormous amount of knowledge and wisdom and experience and intuition that occurs that saves us a lot of time. And that's rational. I'm not saying you don't verify this stuff, right? I mean, you will get uneasy around a creepy person, but a racist will get uneasy around a black person. Again, Again, you validate, right? It's an ecosystem. It's a back and forth. You validate. You don't just say, well, I feel uneasy and that's knowledge. And you don't just say, I have reason and that's knowledge. So you can think of it this way, if you like, and I'll just finish up here with a metaphor. And I'm sorry that this has been a bit of a stroll fest, but there's a lot to pack in here. You can think of it sort of like this, right? So if you are a boss and you're not particularly creative, and Lord knows the rational faculty alone is not particularly, it's after-the-fact reasoning, a posteriori reasoning. It's not fertile and creative. I mean, the unconscious is, right? Because the great ideas come from the unconscious, have to be validated. It's like the guy who discovered the carbon atom, right? He just dreamt of a snake eating itself, and that's how he got the idea for the atom.
[53:07] Again, having the vision doesn't mean that it's true, but the purely rational mind is empirical. This is where people get the idea, like Larkin to some degree ran, that the mind is born tabula rasa, a blank slate. Well, because to the conscious mind, to the empirical mind, it is. You don't have any experience of the world before you're born, but you have intuitions and you have experience of the pleasure and pain principle, your biology, all of that sort of stuff. And the fact that when you stick a pin in your hand, it hurts. And all of that is inherited. It's inherited knowledge. This is bad for me. This is good for me. And the emotional apparatus which we have is inherited. You can't will that.
[53:44] To go to Borneo. You can't choose to act with no integrity and then be happy. And you can't choose to eat, I don't know, nothing but nettles and gravel and be healthy. And you can't choose to not eat and flourish as a biological being. And so you can think of it this way, right? If you like, think of an advertising company, and there's a boss, and there's a whole bunch of people who write copy or who come up with advertisements, right? And the boss does all the functional things, knows that you have to spend money in advertising, spends that money and runs the leases and deals with troublesome customers, all that kind of stuff. It's all important executive function stuff.
[54:22] But the team of copywriters, which is sort of like the instincts and this and that, the team of copywriters, they're the people who are actually coming up with all the great ideas that make the executive function valuable. Executive function could not work. The boss has nothing to sell if the copywriters aren't coming up with ideas. Now, it certainly is also true that if there's no boss, the copywriters are just coming up with ideas in a vacuum that aren't going to make it to market and aren't going to make money and so on, right? That's why I say it's an ecosystem. And so here's the problem, right? So you have all of these copywriters who are coming up with all these great ads and ideas, and then you've got this executive function, which is the rational ego, which is doing all the stuff necessary to get those to market and so on. Like I come up with these associations in my mind, some of which are pictorial, but I have to translate those into language that at least can be somewhat understood. And I have to translate that into an MP3 file and a feed and a post and a website, all that kind of stuff, right? So I've got the executive function, which says, I think this may be even, I think this would be a good topic to work on because of feedback from the listeners. And then I have the creative part of me, which makes the associations and comes up with certain of the ideas. And then in some sense dictates the podcast. It's not like I think every sentence three ahead. As in this podcast, I'm sure you can tell. So if you are the boss for this creative agency and you keep taking credit for.
[55:47] All of the creativity that your employees are coming up with, right? And you say, I am the only person who is bringing any value to this. And you treat your creative employees as if they were janitors, right? Which is how the imperious, conscious, rational mind sometimes treats the instincts in the body, the intuitions. Oh, you just keep the liver working, and you just digest the food, and I'll take you for a dump when you have to. But I'm in charge here. I am the conscious, imperious mind, and I'm the only one. I'm the executive function, and I'm the only one that has value. But that leads to dictatorial, right? I've said that the state is a mirror of the family, but fundamentally, the state is a mirror of the personality, I believe.
[56:31] So, I mean, there are people who resent the executive function, and those people resent me. They show up on the board and in my inbox and so on. Because they associate me with the executive function, right? But then there are other people who are like, well, we should have no rules at all, the violent anarchists and so on, and they resent cooperation and the ecosystem of knowledge and wisdom that occurs when you have all your faculties working in the pursuit of truth. And of course Ayn Rand, as totally imperious conscious mind that took all of the value of innate characteristics as virtues, ended up as a dictatorial human being, because she was fundamentally dictatorial to herself. And she was taking credit. She was taking credit for accidental characteristics like reasoning and language skills, merely genetic characteristics like these. And that's like the boss taking credit for all of the creative employees' ads and saying, I'm the only one who comes up with this. So he goes to the customer and he says, I came up with all of this. I did the artwork. I did all of this. I did all of that. That, well, how are the employees going to feel, especially if they can't quit and your body can't quit you because your body is you? How are the employees going to feel? They're going to get pissed off, right? And they're going to get passive aggressive and they're going to refuse to cooperate, right?
[57:51] Of people who take their creativity as a virtue, as a value that they have earned, end up without creativity. The life expectancy of most artists, I'm way beyond, not way beyond, I'm beyond where I should be. The life expectancy of most artists is at max 15 years. And I think the humility that I went through, and it wasn't like I chose, is that I had a full body revolt, which we can talk about another time, which was just like, no sleeping for you. Steph, no sleep for you. Because I was treating my creative employees like I was taking credit for it all. I am a good writer. Nonsense. I manage good writing impulses.
[58:37] Right. I mean, that's the humility that you have to get to. Where you no longer take the vanity of the accidental as something that you have personally gained. How terrible. How terrible. And so you get this revolt. And your body simply refuses to give you stuff. I mean, if you keep abusing your employees, and you keep abusing your unconscious and your impulses and your creative centers, it'll just stop providing, which is why Ayn Rand didn't write anything for the last, what, 30 years of her life. Anything creative, right? Because she was taking all this credit for Atlas Shrugged, and her unconscious was like, fine, you know, If you're going to take credit for everything that I do, I'm not going to do anything for you. Just like your employees, you keep stealing credit from them and not paying them, they're going to stop working for you. I mean, that's inevitable. It's completely and totally inevitable.
[59:30] And this vengeance of the physical is something that's so, so important to understand, that we need to be humble in the face of that which we have accidentally inherited. And we need to be participants. Our conscious mind needs to be participants in the play of knowledge and wisdom that results in happiness. And we need to listen to the body. When I say you know everything about someone in the first 10 seconds, I'm saying listen to your instincts, listen to your body. It will give you a certainty that your rational mind will never be able to achieve.
[1:00:01] And that is something I don't think that Ayn Rand did achieve, which is why she became dictatorial in her own life. Her collective was a mirror of her own personality. Intolerant, narcissistic, dictatorial, which was her relationship to her own instincts, which is why they stopped being productive for her. Or why she remained a statist. I mean, if you're a dictator yourself, you can't give up on the state. You can't. Unless it's a mere emotional reaction to any form of authority, which also is where some anarchists end up.
[1:00:29] Ayn Rand's novels, there's this vengeance of the physical, this violation by the body. This is why there's these rape metaphors, right? The body gets its revenge. The body gets its revenge. It always does. This is why when you see her interviewed on the Tom Snyder show and other things, right? There's this harsh, unpleasant voice, this beady, suspicious eyes. I mean, the body wasn't going to cooperate and give her a pleasing aspect when it was dominated and brutalized. It wasn't going to do it. Any more than you'll want to provide great work to a boss who takes all of these.
[1:00:59] Takes credit for everything that you do, right? So I hope that this helps. I really do appreciate you sitting through this. I know it's a challenging topic. I hope I did it some justice. Do let me know what you think. And I look forward to your donations. And I hate to nag those of you who've been really generous, but just remember that you paid for the podcast. This is nothing, you know, I really do appreciate everything that everyone's done for this, but this is not a perpetual, you know, stuff where you can just get all of the podcasts now for free because you donated in the past. So if you could just see a way clear to coughing up a few more bucks as we go along, it's sort of interesting that since I put the premium section in, my donations have diminished because I think people are like, oh, well, I paid for all these podcasts and so on. But that was sort of for the past. The premium stuff is stuff that I would still appreciate some financial feedback on in the long run. And again, I hate to say anything to people who've been so generous. And if you're one of the top donators, don't forget about it. But if it's like 100 bucks for 800 podcasts, you're still a little bit behind if I can be so bold as to say so. So thank you so much for listening. I hope that you're doing excellently. I hope I talked to you soon.
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